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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I’m a fairly slow reader. I figure I’ve got something like a mild dyslexia, if I read too fast the words get all jumbled up in my head. Never was diagnosed with anything when I was in school, though looking back at it now it seems odd the way I was shadow-banned from the speed reading class in High School.

    So, anyway, I’m all about getting some summaries. Yes, I realize it’s really hard for writers to condense things, and sometimes the journey of a story lifts the point. So, I’m gonna use the tools to help me out.








  • jafo@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldLet the Platforms Burn
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    1 year ago

    Love Doctrow, but this is a loooong article. I’ve used AI to summarize it:

    1. Big tech companies grew explosively due to network effects, but are now too big to govern effectively.
    2. Social media platforms in particular are poorly suited to moderate billions of diverse users and are prone to failure and scandal.
    3. Governments and regulators have failed to rein in big tech, often protecting companies rather than users.
    4. Low switching costs mean that tech companies’ growth could rapidly reverse if people leave the platforms.
    5. However, tech companies use acquisitions, lobbying, and legal threats to lock in users and block competitors.
    6. Instead of trying to fix inherently flawed large platforms, we should make it easy for people to leave them.
    7. If we could export networks of relationships from platforms, people would have the power to migrate based on companies’ practices.
    8. Allowing people to easily leave would force platforms to respect users and address problems to retain them, or else face implosion.
    9. The alternative is an endless cycle of scandal, ineffective reform, and accumulating ‘fire debt’ that eventually erupts in crisis.
    10. It’s time to stop trying to perfect huge tech companies and instead give people the means to choose alternatives.

    “Companies cannot unilaterally mediate the lives of hundreds of millions — or even billions — of people, speaking thousands of languages, living in hundreds of countries.The real problem is that no one should have that job. That job shouldn’t exist. We don’t need to find a better Mark Zuckerberg. We need to abolish Mark Zuckerberg.”

    “Rather than passing laws requiring Threads to prioritize news content, or to limit the kinds of ads the platform accepts, we could order it to turn on this Fediverse gateway and operate it such that any Threads user can leave, join any other Fediverse server, and continue to see posts from the people they follow, and who will also continue to see their posts.”

    "Tech companies are even more concerned with criminalizing the things you want to do to them.

    Frank Wilhoit described conservativism as “exactly one proposition”:

    There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

    This is likewise the project of corporatism. Tech platforms are urgently committed to ensuring that they can do anything they want on their platforms — and they’re even more dedicated to the proposition that you must not do anything they don’t want on their platforms."


  • (Apparently) Unpopular Opinion: I think defederating Threads is the wrong move, because it just locks people into Threads. If people on Twitter had the ability to move to Mastodon AND still interact with all the people they did before, I think we would have seen even more people move. The only reason I still check twitter at all is because I have a few close friends who didn’t move. Meta is likely going to have big adoption of people who aren’t ready to go to Mastodon, but are interested in getting out of the dumpster-on-fire that twitter seems to continue to be. But blocking those people from being able to join the more popular Lemmy instances, given no actual policy violations, just will keep people in Meta that otherwise could leave. With the “however” being: It’s not quite clear to me that Threads users will be interacting with Lemmy as much Mastodon, if Threads were a Reddit replacement, it’s more directly connected.


  • I live in Colorado which is pretty dry, so I don’t have too many problems with wet filament, or at least the problems I have are a much smaller vector than others seem to have. I always try to store my filament in a bag with the drying packet, but I usually don’t even really close it that well. But I’ll also just leave filament on my printer for weeks between uses. I always feel like some of the difficulties I have might go away if I was more fastidious about filament, but I seem to do good enough.

    But, I’ve also done all sorts of upgrades to try to get more reliable, without really being good about keeping my filament happy. Upgrades: Sprite hotend, CRTouch, upgraded steppers (went through a bout of really bad layer shift I couldn’t track to anything else, and the steppers fixed it), Klipper, upgraded mobo.