sbv

Will people start caring for their privacy if most of the links posted were tracking free?

No. Most people won't notice, and the sites they're visiting have other tracking mechanisms.

I advocated for getting news from tracking free websites/ non-profits, people don't seem to change.

Yes. Those sites fill a need/role. Non profits typically don't have the same content factories that for-profit orgs do.

Will people on the long-term change or is it a lost cause?

Legislative change is the only way forward. You have a threat model that involves privacy, but most people don't. Instead of trying to change everybody, focus on legislation that would improve privacy regulations for all.

ngl. Stuff like this makes me want to write a TUI. Is there a UI that I need? No. Are my existing needs met? Yes. But this stuff looks so cool.

Bottom right.

That was an interesting Planet Money episode.

From the interview, it sounds like the DOGE employee (Sahil Lavingia) joined up based on the assumption that government departments weren't already trying to modernize their IT infrastructure and fight fraud. In his case, he discovered that the VA was modernizing and preventing fraud, but it was hard, and time consuming.

It sounds like Dunning-Kruger at work. Musk and co think they know IT, so it should be possible to waltz into a large organization, throw some opensource/AI projects at it, and save a tonne of money. When they get inside, they discover that the systems are really complicated, and that there are existing initiatives to do exactly what they want. It turns out that most of the easy wins have already been won, and it's only the hard tasks that are left.

It's an interesting counterpoint to the modernization program that was started during Bill Clinton's term. They took years to understand the systems they were trying to improve, and built incentives for people inside those systems to propose improvements.

The developers building Lemmy are very different from the folks building bots. I've got a half-assed repost bot working, but there's no way I have the time or inclination to work on Lemmy itself.

Generally speaking, a bot needs to meet a much lower quality/reliability bar than the server does.

I think I'm one of the few users that enjoyed Reddit's random bots. Seeing the Accidental Haiku bot restructure a comment as haiku, or the Consecutive Number bot point out a number progression was fun.

As long as they're polite, and respect community boundaries, I think they're fun.

People can post from anywhere, but need to be physically present to show up to a parade. And it's easy for a single person to post multiple times. FWIW apparently the weather sucked too.

Weirdly, I haven't seen news outlets provide estimates of the number of attendees. The closest I've seen is

attendance appeared to fall far short of early predictions that as many as 200,000 people would attend

from CBC. It sounds like it was low turnout, but I'm not clear how low.

Assuming the photos are legit, the No Kings protests clearly got a lot of people out.

I worry that training myself to be mean will bleed over into other parts of my life.

How you doin? Still got the dot?

Is it orangey yellow? I bet it's orangey yellow.