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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I do.

    I know people who voted for Trump because they’ve always voted Republican. Republican is their team, so they voted Republican. They assume Trump, as a Republican, will continue with standard Republican policies (which is generally true). They don’t like him as a person but just don’t pay too much attention to it.

    If you mostly ignore Trump and just think of him as a generic Republican it makes sense. I was planning on voting for Biden before he dropped out because Democratic policy is generally what I’m voting for. Biden dropping out and Harris stepping in doesn’t really change my voting plan. I’m still voting Democrat, I’m still voting Harris. Is Harris my favorite choice? No. Is the Democratic platform my perfect platform? No. But is it the best choice given the options? Absolutely. (And I don’t say that as horribly negative thing, there are A LOT of positives from Harris/Democrats and I’m glad/excited to vote for her.)

    BUT we know Trump isn’t a generic Republican and people can’t ignore EVERYTHING he’s done. Jan 6 being a big one. If you’re a Republican voter now you’re stuck. You can’t vote for Trump. But you want to vote Republican.

    You’re a generic Republican voter. You see Bush admins, Regan admins, Cheney all say they’re voting for Harris. You voted for them previously. That gives you the opening to vote for Harris. That helps.







  • Yes but PROVE IT. Define what wrong they did. That’s my point.

    Take a look at the recent monopoly trial, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/05/technology/google-antitrust-ruling.html

    They claim that spending $18 billion per year to be the default search engine makes them monopolistic. That’s it? That’s all they got?

    So the result will be Google stops paying $18 billion and device/browser manufacturers have to put up a Browser Choice dot EU type option.

    Go back 10 years and put that law in place. AFAIK Apple has always defaulted to Google. Samsung probably would have sold out to Bing to be the default (although in this case Bing wouldn’t reach a monopoly, so I guess that’s ok for some reason).

    I’m not saying paying to be the default didn’t help, but is that the reason they have 90% of the searches? No.

    Did they do some else? Maybe. Someone should prove it and we can have an actual change.


  • Being a monopoly and engaging in negative monopolistic behaviors are also different things.

    For example if the only two burger joints in the world were McDonalds and Burger King, and Burger King decided to replace their burgers with literal shit, actual human and animal feces, would McDonalds be a (I hope and assume) monopoly? Probably. Are they engaging in negative monopolistic behavior? Not necessarily.

    Obviously, as a quick aside, fuck Google for their shitty software decisions, their cancelling of great products and their enshittification of a majority of their applications.

    However simply having 90% of the market does not technically mean they have done anything wrong. You can’t say they have 90% of the market therefore they have done something illegal or have abused being a monopoly.

    You have to be specific. You have to call out payment to companies to be the default. But even that isn’t quite enough because companies sold access. Can a company be at fault for buying access as the default? It was for sale. It’s a weak argument, or at least an incomplete one. You need to prove they abused their position. Or you need to make a case that the industry they are in requires additional regulation as a whole.

    I say this because although it sounds like I’m defending Google I’m not. There is a difference between something feeling illegal and something being illegal. Technically, although a recent judgement would disagree with me, they haven’t done anything wrong. It feels like they have. I agree it feels like they have. But they haven’t (or there are further pending results which will prove otherwise).



  • To extend this a little further, computers also don’t actually store books, they store blocks.

    For example, you have a computer that can store 50 blocks of information. You store “Moby Dick”, taking up 20 blocks & “Tom Sawyer”, taking another 20 blocks.

    Next you decide you don’t like “Moby Dick”, so you delete it. You also decide you want to store an ice cream menu, taking up just 1 block.

    That menu will be stored based on where the computer thinks the block fits best. So you might have 20 blocks that still contain “Moby Dick”, or you might have only 19 blocks that contain most of “Moby Dick”, but it might be missing the beginning, middle or end.

    If I were doing data recovery I might not be able to provide you with the complete “Moby Dick” story. I might only be able to give you part of it.

    Looking into why blocks, let’s say you’re writing up the first draft of a book report, it might take up 4 blocks. Then later you edit, improve and add to that that book report, and now it takes 5 blocks. The computer took care of making space, even though your report got larger. It didn’t know if you were going to add 1 new block of information, or 1000 new blocks of information, it figured it out and did the rearranging for you.

    However when it comes time for you to look at it, it automatically knows how to put it together. (And usually it does group things together if it can).

    This is important to keep in mind when it comes to data recovery because the more you use your computer the more likely blocks are allocated and data gets moved around.

    If you delete important photos, then spend the weekend surfing the Internet, those photos might be gone. Or if they are available, might only be partially available.


  • Re Concentration I’m not concerned that it is as of yet a problem. However I do think it is also a larger problem for Mastodon and other user-centric platforms than it is to Lemmy and other community-cetric platforms.

    If a Mastodon user wants to leave their server there are migration pains. If your server makes a controversial change, you may have to migrate. As a follower if something goes wrong I have to remember that I was following Ada & Bob, but maybe Bob now goes by Bobby.

    However as a Lemmy user I can just abandon my server and be done with it. If my server makes a controversial change, I can just leave. As a community follower can watch as Star Trek Memes becomes Risa, or Risa becomes Ten Forward. The names changed completely but it’s easy to find my community again.


  • I use flat case most of the time, but I also try to stick to single word files so there is no case to get in the way.

    I think for documents I might share like a PDF I’d use Pascal case.

    In a classroom or teaching setting I will sometimes use Kebab case as I find it is the least confusing and makes it extra clear where the word division is. Similarly I avoid Dot notation since it’s confusing for folks coming from a Windows world.

    And I would avoid Screaming because that’s just too loud anywhere.





  • Sure Reddit and Lemmy are different technical stacks, but neither is doing anything particularly unique or complicated.

    If Reddit wanted to federate it could. It would take some work but it would be an achievable task in a reasonable amount of time.

    Perhaps scaling or stability issues. I’m not sure the Fediverse is ready to handle the number of actions a site like Reddit handles. Then again I’m not super well versed on that part of the Lemmy software, so maybe it would be fine.