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misk

@ misk @lemm.ee

Posts
3
Comments
24
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Why do most religious conservatives support capitalist ideology?

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  • Religion is not the goal of conservatives, it's a tool to preserve hierarchy in the society. Capitalism is another tool that achieves that.

    The people that aren't wealthy but are conservative benefit from hierarchy enforced by religion. It ensures that they're not on the bottom of society - that place is intended for various minorities.

  • Austrian leader proposes enshrining the use of cash in his country’s constitution

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  • Building complex systems involving humans is hard because humans are flawed. The best thing we've come up so far are systems involving extensive checks and balances to prevent thing happening too rapidly and without necessary oversight and even then it's a tricky part to balance.

    For the record, I'm not for entirely cashless society but organisations that are cash heavy have proven to be source of many headaches. There is a balance to be found on thresholds and barring some types of businesses from using cash and where digital money transfer is required. Banks and other money transfer entities will have to deal with scenarios where malicious parties will try to obfuscate their intent outside of those thresholds.

  • Austrian leader proposes enshrining the use of cash in his country’s constitution

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  • This is all technically true but cash is not the answer.

    Right now there are so many easily accessible ways for governments to spy on people (cell phone geolocation, call metadata monitoring) that I'm not sure that for the purposes you think of you aren't screwed already anyway. From this perspective fight for cash use becomes a bit theoretical.

    The only people that I know of personally that are strongly for cash are either people that frequently skirt around taxes ("minor" stuff like car repair shops) and unfortunately conspiracy nuts. Genuine privacy oriented people exist but realistically the majority will be there for selfish reasons.

    The societal cost of tax evasion, money laundering and financing organisations that legally require transparency (political orgs, NGOs etc) are massive and immediate.

    What we really need is strong oversight of institutions, government transparency, rule of law and healthy democracy. Those are the things you want to enshrine in your constitution.

  • Austrian leader proposes enshrining the use of cash in his country’s constitution

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  • It's easy - tax evasion, money laundering, secret financing of things you wouldn't want others to know. All perfectly fine reasons to fight for.

  • Europe @feddit.de
    misk @lemm.ee

    Austrian leader proposes enshrining the use of cash in his country’s constitution

    apnews.com /article/austria-cash-constitution-proposal-e63078b1682b375a84d0132857374e43

  • Did anyone have any positive results with CBD products?

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  • That's surprising given how close you are to recreational use legalization. Here in Poland MM is legal but we don't have any producers and get fair chunk from Germany (Aurora Deutschland, 420 Pharma).

    At the same time medical marijuana business got so silly that you basically go to a website, fill out a form, pay ~€20 fee and get an e-prescription in a couple of hours. There's been some ineffective attempts at cracking down on it in the past weeks that resulted in slight fee increase.

  • Did anyone have any positive results with CBD products?

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  • Medical marijuana is legal in Germany. If OP needs it for health reasons he could go through legitimate process.

  • Did anyone have any positive results with CBD products?

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  • THC will cause anxiety and paranoia if your tolerance is low or you use particularly stimulating cannabis strain. This is where CBD is very useful because it decreases psychedelic effect. You can use either a balanced strain (equal or similar THC / CBD content) or supplement CBD in other form.

  • How Threads’ privacy policy compares to Twitter’s (and its rivals’) - Ars Technica

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  • Don't know about Android but on iOS health information is something that an app can request on OS level.

    There are valid uses for this, for example hearing level measurements from third party app can be added to Health app and then used for adjusting equalizer for AirPods via accessibility options. Or your menstrual cycle (although that probably won't make your AirPods sound better) or many other data points. This is what Threads is trying to access.

  • How Threads’ privacy policy compares to Twitter’s (and its rivals’) - Ars Technica

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  • It's not about what you post but what data will Threads/Twitter/FB apps will trick you into sharing on system level (location etc).

  • How many people here have actually used XMPP?

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  • Back in the day, like many people then, I had a couple of different accounts across multiple messaging platforms. 2 domestic ones, couple of international ones. It was a fun mess but people were tired of running multiple apps and so loads of multi-protocol apps were developed.

    Usually messaging protocols were simply reverse engineered and some apps also used plug-ins so that niche protocols could be added by community. Some also did gateways that translated proprietary protocols to XMPP.

    By the end of that era many platforms opened themselves up with XMPP. It was nice because most of those multi-protocol apps didn't have to support as many different platforms explicitly.

    But that's about it. I had a Google Talk account too and found it cute that I can use it to add my friends on other platforms. I was a nerdbut barely knew any other people that were utilizing it. Realistically it didn't make any difference because you still had to use multi-protocol app for the ones that didn't open.

    Soon platforms that were never on or barely on XMPP started to take over. Messenger was the biggest in my country and it was always a PITA on third party apps.

    Google Talk doing a rug pull on XMPP didn't to anything meaningful to XMPP itself. It was never that big and simply remains a niche to this day.

    I too get an impression that a single article on XMPP Gtalk drama made round on Fediverse that many made their opinion solely on it.

  • Meta can rage farm Mastodon without controlling it

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  • I don't think Mastodon allows user blocking instance either but I don't see why that can not change in the future.

    I'm not sure forcing open source on other instances is the right way to go. I imagine that in the future there could be instances that offer more polished experience, maybe a really nice proprietary app, that are commercially funded. As long as we have open alternatives and interoperability then we should be fine. In terms of privacy it's a matter of regulations.

    I also fully respect choice of some instances to defederate from commercial platforms but in a rational environment it would be akin to subset of Linux users opting to use free software only with no binary blobs and things like that. Perfectly reasonable thing to do if that's what your ethics / philosophy dictates. Just don't think it's something that is a net benefit to average person.

  • Meta can rage farm Mastodon without controlling it

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  • Embrace, extend, extinguish.

    Embrace an open standard by using it yourself, start extending it at a pace competitors can't (preferably obfuscating how it works), leave everyone behind.

    A good example is Microsoft Internet Explorer back in the day. Web technologies like HTML and CSS are open standards and at the time fairly straightforward. Once Microsoft hit critical mass by bundling IE with Windows they took leadership from Netscape and started adding more and more proprietary crap like ActiveX which some sites opted to use because everyone was using IE anyway and people using other browsers were forced to use IE. This was also a major issue for Linux users at the time.

    It took years of regulatory / antitrust pressure, tremendous effort from Mozilla and their browsers, as well as big players like Google and removed embracing KHTML (later forked into WebKit and then Blink engines) to unscrew humanity from that depressing era of internet history.

    Web browsers working slightly differently is still an issue without anyone breaking compatibility on purpose. It was just so much worse when someone did it maliciously.

  • Meta can rage farm Mastodon without controlling it

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  • https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-and-open-digital-markets_en

    Examples of the “do’s” - Gatekeeper platforms will have to:

    • allow third parties to inter-operate with the gatekeeper’s own services in certain specific situations

    Example of the “don'ts” - Gatekeeper platforms may no longer:

    • treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform

    • prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms

    • track end users outside of the gatekeepers' core platform service for the purpose of targeted advertising, without effective consent having been granted

  • Meta can rage farm Mastodon without controlling it

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  • So many knee-jerk reactions.

    This is an open protocol with complete freedom to create apps and scripts. If this becomes an issue users could block certain interactions in a granular manner, for example block replies from certain instances.

    XMPP being thrown around as an example makes me think people who do it weren't there to witness it. XMPP by itself wasn't really used by many but there were also many more popular messaging platforms at the time. XMPP wasn't killed because it wasn't ever alive other than short golden era when it was mostly a way to open itself to third party clients (Gaim, Trillian, Adium etc) which was very nice.

    Next year EU is going to make all tech giants open in this way again. Mastodon can EEE Threads too by being a better implementation. It has no commercial pressure and Activity Pub and formatting tweets is not as complex as a web browser engine or a word processor document format which are way better examples of successful EEE.

    If you defederate you'll end up exactly where XMPP is.

  • Will Meta's Threads app federate with other services?

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  • Will Meta try to fuck over Fediverse? Very likely.

    Is it mutually beneficial to be federated? Yes.

    Mastodon will never be the biggest player around for microblogging because too many people nope out when presented with server selection, even with defaults.

    Take whatever users you can now. Threads app has no "following" chronological timeline, probably never will. Show people you can do that from Mastodon and it's clients.

    It's likely that one of the reasons Meta is using Activity Pub is upcoming EU regulations on electronic platform gatekeepers. They will have to open them in some way anyway. It's likely regulators will be checking if Meta is playing nice with Threads.

    Threads can try to EEE Mastodon but so can Mastodon. Mastodon can fuck over Threads in many ways too, mostly by providing better experience and it's better than isolating.

  • What are some fun songs to sing karaoke to?

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  • Big Bottom by Spinal Tap.

  • Thought experiment: could Spez just make reddit speak ActivityPub and turn it into a Lemmy instance?

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  • If Fediverse is successful and reddit continues its descent then I can see it in 5-10 years, similar to how Digg tried to reimagine itself to stay relevant.

  • Thanks, I hate it! (image description inside)

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  • It looks like it was removed by a mod. If a user deleted it it would have

    <deleted>

    in place of comment text rather than

    <removed>

    . This user also deleted his account but that wouldn't delete his posts/comments.

  • What's the story about the Lemmy mouse?

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  • Technology @beehaw.org
    misk @lemm.ee

    Google Says It'll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI

    gizmodo.com /google-says-itll-scrape-everything-you-post-online-for-1850601486
  • Technology @beehaw.org
    misk @lemm.ee

    So where are we all supposed to go now?

    www.theverge.com /2023/7/3/23782607/social-web-public-apps-end-reddit-twitter-mastodon