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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Well it isn’t 6.

    From Wikipedia:

    In 2002, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes crested macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon, England from May 1 to June 22, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website. Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages largely consisting of the letter “S”,the lead male began striking the keyboard with a stone, and other monkeys followed by urinating and defecating on the machine

    Mike Phillips, director of the university’s Institute of Digital Arts and Technology (i-DAT), said that the artist-funded project was primarily performance art, and they had learned “an awful lot” from it. He concluded that monkeys "are not random generators. They’re more complex than that


  • forced into an echo chamber.

    Yes, it does that.

    Using YouTube on a new account or through one of the alternatives will result in a wildly different feed. I was recently shocked by seeing the default non-curated feed on YouTube.

    Absolutely none of the content was interesting to me; most of it was directly anger inducing political crap or just plain brainrot. I would definitely not visit that shit page ever again if the default feed was my first impression. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be a right wing breeding ground by now, but it sure isn’t as balanced as I would have expected.

    My regular YT feed is obviously much more interesting to me, and I can use it to find new content, but since I don’t want to wait for the ads, I now only watch my own subscriptions on a different frontend, which of course will create an even smaller echo chamber.

    I get how a curated feed can benefit the user, but YouTube is just not making it possible. It will only show (rage) engaging content and without the dislike function, you can only decide not to watch the crap or get shown more crap until you do like it.









  • The ads have reached a breaking point.

    If I can’t block them, I’m just not watching the YouTube. I’ll never pay.

    It used to be funny to link a relevant YouTube clip, but it’s not funny if you have to sit through half a minute of ads just to see something silly.

    It’s also not really a long time streaming service like TV channels or netflix etc., because the homemade content sucks in comparison to an actual documentary that I can also watch without ads on other services.

    It’s like Google completely misunderstood the point of the service they initially made. Also following a decade of users attempting to “monitize” their fucking crap, you can be sure that there’s nothing worth watching on YouTube that couldn’t have been better presented in a gif or in text.

    Then the player is also fucking up lately. Usually if I go there, I’ll check the written description while the ads play, just to see if the content is worth the wait, but nooo… you can’t even do that anymore, because the app will start reloading between the multiple ads and the screen scrolls around and minimizes the description and comments. They’re literally hiding any information on the clip except the title until you’ve watched the ads.

    It’s fucking garbage. Enshittified to death.

    Repeating: Google, if you’re listening: I’ll never pay for YouTube, no matter how intrusive you make the ads. Enshittification is not encouraging me to pay.


  • It’s interesting how most of Musk’s wealth is in stock and such, when people start cashing out on it. What’s his liquid wealth?

    I assume he’s been wealthy for long enough that he’s been able to cash out interest and dividends to make him a wealthy man, constantly accruing money simply by having money.

    Seeing him tank on everything he touches( bringing down the value), I have to wonder if there is a limit to his liquid funds. The world’s richest poorest man or something.

    Fuck him and the horse he rode in on.


  • Exactly.

    I’m surprised to see users on Lemmy being this dead set on banning stuff for kids just because "we tried nothing and it doesn’t work*

    Social media is bad, phones are bad, I get it, but banning is not the solution.

    Kids will grow up in a world with both social media and phones. IMO school should prepare them and be a practice ground for it, so they don’t make the same mistakes as we - the parents - did.

    Like posted elsewhere, my kids are better at it than I am. Banning phones is projection all the way.

    I’m perfectly fine with disallowing phones during class, but an outright ban is an extreme reaction completely missing the problematic issues and potentially making it worse.


  • Social media is a problem for sure.

    Also, thank you for asking what schools are supposed to do.

    The problem is schools not managing to encouraging pupils towards learning.

    I know I’ve said this before, but the teachers curse is that nothing is taught until the pupil understands it themselves, and is willing to absorb the material put in front of them. Encouraging pupils to want to learn ought to be top priority for any school. Banning phones is a lost cause, because they’re already lost at that point. They’re bored, so they rock on the chair or fiddle with a phone. I seriously don’t think that social media addiction is the core issue here. It’s an issue for sure, but it’s not what is keeping kids from learning. Boredom is.

    Regardless of technology, paying attention is entirely up to their own willingness to learn. Teachers should be feeding the desire to learn, not in a “fellow kids” kind of way, but by showing them why the curriculum is important to them.

    I totally acknowledge that there’s no reason to have a phone in class and that social media is bad, but it’s relevant not issue in teaching.




  • I have children, including a teen, and they have phones.

    One thing I do notice is that they’re quite a lot better at putting the phone away when they’re with friends doing stuff or at family dinners than their grandparents who keeps checking notifications and answering calls regardless of when and where.

    They grew up with phones and they have a much better understanding of when it’s socially acceptable to use it.

    They know not use the phone during class, so there’s really no good reason to ban it entirely.


  • Before phones, students were distracted by fidget toys, tamagochi, bubble gum, various collectibles, comic books, ordinary books, paper notes, drawing, pen twitching, etc.etc.

    Students always find ways to get distracted. Take away everything and they’ll still be rocking on the chair.

    So if the purpose of banning distractions is to make students more attentive, well… it’s just not going to do that.

    Then there is online bullying. Has bullying actually increased or are we just seeing it more, because it’s now documented? Banning phones in school won’t stop it from happening outside school hours anyway.

    I’m not advocating for allowing phones in schools during lectures or anything, but it’s pretty clear to me that an outright ban is an outdated solution that will only hide the issues instead of solving them.



  • I recognise the waste in waiting time, but I also think we are still increasing productivity more than enough to make up for it.

    Personally I solve it by multitasking harder. Whenever there is a waiting time for a download or other stuff I simply start doing something else. I’m not going to waste my life watching loading bars for a living.

    I don’t think increasing user-friendlyness is a good solution. It’s pretty much what caused the issues to begin with. Every time Windows or the apps make something more user-friendly it always results in more buttons to click and more updates to keep up.

    I also spend an unreasonable amount of time just rearranging the windows in comparison to back when apps had keyboard-only GUIs with functions layered in different pages or tabs. I obviously don’t think that is a good solution today either, but it goes to show that the bloated operating system has a lot of the blame.

    Say you want to do something simple like renaming a file, you’ll need to open an app to show the folders and files and also 100 different functions that are of no use for the specific task, position and scroll it where it’s visible, navigate by mouse or keyboard and then do whatever you wanted. My point is that just operating the operation system is something that requires 10s of seconds over and over again every day. There’s a long way from thought to execution for the simplest task.

    The good thing is that it enables a lot of people to do so without any training at all, so maybe that makes up for it in total.