TikTok gathering data and selling it to whoever is a problem but it’s not the problem.

The problem of TikTok and many other social media is that it drains our energy and motivation. It’s like digital weed, creates the feeling that there’s no reason to change things. We can just consume things.

Oh, there goes that neighborhood.

No, actually…

… but seriously, the Internet is so different from real life that no comparisons make sense. Opinions that would have been uttered by the craziest village idiots in a local gas station 30 years ago are now distributed and magnified by the social media machine. In the past, you could see with your eyes, hear with your ears and even smell with your nose which people you really really should not listen to, but in the internet, those people look exactly like you and me.

And it’s all sapping your energy and time, the most precious resources you have.

That’s why blocking is fine, even whole instances if they are shown to be crazy enough.

Also, I would like to point out that the creators of the clients for the first community platforms (usenet) recognized early on the importance of shutting people up (killfiles).

Save your sanity and do Settings -> Blocks -> Block instance -> lemmy.ml

Also perhaps block me if you strongly disagree with the above.

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Warren Buffett maybe? At least I haven’t heard him be much of an asshole.

Gabe Newell is a billionaire and as far as I know awesome.

That might’ve been the plan all along.

Nor should you. Everything shitty in politics is not due to Trump, but he sure normalized a lot of bad things that weren’t a thing before him. If conservatists from 80s had been dropped into a Trump rally in 2020, they would have been extremely confused.

You should remember that he founded the original CopperheadOS project (from which he was violently ousted by his cofounder) and has been working on it and this for a decade.

I know Daniel somewhat from some years back, and calling him extremely toxic is just wrong. He is and has always been rather bad at communication under stress and is clearly on the spectrum in some way. Technically a genius person, but perhaps doesn’t have the right set of qualities to lead things, except from a strictly technical pov.

Very good decision from him to withdraw from social media. I hope he manages to contribute in the future.

I guess I should a) read the article and b) have a slightly better outlook of the field I’m in.

Is that better or worse than IT and software projects in general? It sounds like it might be better.

The golden age of classical liberalism, when capitalism actually worked, the 1700-1800’s, more closely resembles what we would today call market socialism.

I don’t think that’s a valid historical claim. 1700s and 1800s were largely influenced by Adam Smith, with a limited level of governmental intervention and high amount of private liberties.

What western countries currently have is much more like market socialism than classical liberalism. If we take Elon Musk as an example, a large part of his success comes from governmental corruption: direct financial assistance (multiple billions of dollars), tax breaks and subsidies, and several government contracts. Even fucking Ayn Rand would call him a parasite.

I think the proper fix would be to return to actual classical liberalism and reject or at least limit the amount of market socialism. No idea how that could be done now that the problem has become so bad. A neoliberal revolution? lol.

Twitter isn’t capitalism, nor is Elon Musk. He says “I love capitalism” in the same way as Emperor Palpatine says “I love democracy!”

https://www.tipranks.com/stocks/djt looks a bit pumpy

I wonder how the ethics here work. If I enter the pump phase, leave before the dump, I’m effectively stealing money from the MAGA cult. Is that a good deed?

I wish.

Generally speaking, you shouldn’t do anything on the internet that you absolutely don’t want to become public. If you don’t want people to know your votes, don’t vote.

Aren’t they already practically public, given the federation?