It’s “y’all” - as in a contraction of “you all.”

As the internet gets scarier

How the fuck is the internet getting scarier? This isn’t the random gore and porn filled, go to a forum and immediately get targeted by a sex-predator, internet that I grew up with. The internet is a corporate walled garden of mega services that feed disinformation and bullshit to people, but your odds of getting genuinely victimized as a child are so much lower than they used to be.

If there’s one thing I learned working in IT it’s that devs actively half-ass their error messages, routinely misspell critical words you’re gonna grep for in logs, and never even consider having someone in Product read over customer-facing error messages like this. All they see is a Jira ticket that says “include the following verbiage in the VPN rejection message” that was typed up by a mostly plastered PM one afternoon after they downed 3 margaritas at “lunch” at the taqueria next to their office. And then they just copy and paste that shit into whatever bullshit HTML template took the least effort to find.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if even the automated processes that edit your comment to be gibberish even accomplishes that. Text is, in the software world, remarkably cheap to store, even at volume. It also compresses easily, is remarkably easy to tie to version control mechanisms, and with reddit’s comment system can easily be structured as a part of an existing dialogue tree. They know people are pissed at them and are looking to nuke their comment history, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they already have multiple cold storage backups of reddit’s entire site comment history over the course of months or years. Right now, that data is the most valuable thing they have, their reputation as the “front page of the internet” be damned.

does that mean they must not be fun

Whether or not someone finds this or any other game fun is not something I really care about. Nor does it have anything to do with my observation.

I don’t know if the “general public,” which as a concept sort of conceives society as a monolithic entity, when it very much is not, should necessarily condemn or not condemn any specific artistic theme in a piece of media, but I do think that the art a society produces reflects the ethos of large segments of that society and, to some extent, reinforces that ethos. To borrow from your example, I don’t think someone is going to play Call of Duty and become a knife wielding maniac, but I do think they might play a video game where, for example, a bunch of terrorists have taken over a hospital in some unnamed middle-Eastern nation where American forces are engaged in a “peacekeeping operation” and the only way to get through a particular part of the game is to call in an airstrike on the hospital. A younger person playing the game might see this and then later on hear about military strikes against civilian targets (like hospitals) on the news and think “well, maybe there were bad guys in that hospital, like in my game.” In other words, it has the potential to shift what a person perceives as a legitimate target of state violence. And I know that specific example itself is overly simplistic, but the point is that there are multiple avenues by which political ideologies and their component beliefs are reinforced and reproduced, and the media you consume is one of them.

I understand my own criticism of video games is unpopular with large segments of the internet. Especially places like Lemmy or Reddit where people reduce criticisms of the content of games to strawmen comparisons to delinquent parents and politicians trying to legislate video games into oblivion because they think they cause school shootings. But I think it’s a valid and worthwhile contribution to most discussions of the medium.

That said, how is this worse than the whole slew of games about US soldiers killing people across the world, almost always portrayed as the cool protagonists?

Uh, it’s not. Those are fucking terrible, too. Arguably worse. In fact, where did I say those were better?

The idea of a “Prison Architect” series of games is just conceptually wild to me. I wonder if in a hundred years this will have the same ring to it that a game like “Slave Plantation Architect” would have today. Just remarkably crass and tasteless.

It’s about momentum.

Once again, the popularity of something is not what defines its status as a utility.

If I stop using Whatsapp, I now have to convince everyone I’m in contact with to also use the alternative when msging me before I can actually stop using WhatsApp.

Yes, that would be devastating, wouldn’t it? “Hey, I’m not on WhatsApp anymore. If you want to reach me, please send me a text message or an email.” Wow. So difficult. \s

I am confident the EU could do it. A complete transfer of ownership isn’t necessary for other countries to use exported services as public utilities. Public-private partnerships exist.

Could do it and “has a reason to do it” are very different things. There is no motivation there because WhatsApp and other, similar services, are ubiquitously available. It would be a largely pointless endeavor. Also, the EU has the same style of media freedom laws as the United States. If they ran a service, they wouldn’t be able to censor the content on it. Like, legally speaking it couldn’t. Hope you like a state-run platform for European Nazis…because that’s what you’d get.

“American freedom of speech = Nazis get to speak” was your stance before. Now it’s “Anything but American freedom of speech = government censorship”. What am I even supposed to say here?

You implied America’s first amendment was a “government problem.” I described what would happen if the United States got rid of it. I don’t know if you need to say anything, but you might want to brush up on your reading comprehension skills.

First off, I think you are being very rude. I didn’t call you names or make assumptions, so please treat this with more respect than a Twitter thread.

I’ll think about it… …Okay, I thought about it. No.

Olvid, a French alternative to WhatsApp, was made in 2019. It took a law passing last month banning all ministers from using non in-house messaging services to stop people from using WhatsApp. I wouldn’t consider that “trivially easy”.

Except in your own example, a viable alternative was immediately available. Users didn’t switch because they didn’t have other options or were physically limited from using anything else. They just preferred to use WhatsApp. Switching to an alternative was trivially easy. People just didn’t want to because of personal preference. It would be trivially easy for me to stop drinking coffee every morning and only drink water - there’s nobody pointing a gun at my head to make me drink coffee - but I like coffee and would be annoyed by giving it up and probably have a hard time quitting. The same is probably true for many people. Should access to coffee be considered a utility? Probably not.

I already said this is a “government problem”. I said this in reference to the US government, because this isn’t really an issue for most countries :/

You mentioned WhatsApp. Several times. WhatsApp is owned by Meta, an American company. If you want it to be a public utility and its owned by an American company, which country is going to be the one to make that happen? Also, calling “completely eradicating the first amendment in order to make it so that the American government can forcibly seize and censor people on its new state run social media websites” a “government problem” is an atomic bomb level of understatement.

First off, I think you are being very rude. I didn’t call you names or make assumptions, so please treat this with more respect than a Twitter thread.

When businesses ask you to contact their help-desk via WhatsApp, it’s a utility. When people call and message friends, family, and colleagues almost exclusively on WhatsApp or Messenger, it’s a utility.

Except…no, it’s not. That’s an extremely naive understanding of what a “public utility” is. A public utility is not defined by how many people use something. Public utilities are essential services that typically operate on economies of scale. That is to say services without realistic replacement and which have large upfront creation and maintenance costs and which only make sense to provide access to a large number of people. You can’t replace electricity with some alternate source of power. It’s electricity. Same for water. They’re fundamental services that are required for other services to exist. Without electricity you don’t have phone or internet. Without water you can’t have sewer systems or indoor plumbing.

WhatsApp, by comparison, is trivially easy to replace. A business chooses to use WhatsApp for customer service. They could just as easily setup a Discord server or just establish an 800 number for you to call. They have immediate drop-in replacements. Arguing otherwise is sort of like arguing that Coke should be considered a public utility because a business serves Coke products. They don’t have to serve Coke. They could serve Pepsi. Or anything else.

Also, your reasoning is kind of skewed, because in order to even use something like WhatsApp, you need other, already existing services. Namely internet access. It makes literally no sense to say “WhatsApp should be a utility” without first arguing that “internet access for all individuals at a national level should be a public utility.” Which I would personally argue is something that does qualify as a utility, far more than any specific social media services or app, and the fact that it isn’t is a huge problem for the United States.

Godwin’s Law People preaching [insert terrible belief] on a government platform would be removed and charged for hate speech just as much as they would be if preaching these things in public spaces.

Oh, okay, “Godwin’s Law” is it? Cool. Here’s an actual law. Like a literal piece of legislation that exists: it’s called the First Amendment. I don’t know if you’re just speaking from a non-American context, or just don’t know how “freedom of speech” is codified into law in the United States. Maybe you’re a kid or something and just haven’t learned that in school yet. But freedom of speech in public places is universally protected under the constitution. Like, there are still public Klan rallies in certain parts of the country. This is what allows those to happen. If the United States government maintained its own social media service, it would functionally not have the power to moderate any content that was not explicitly illegal. Bigotry and hate speech are not illegal under the constitution.

Probably lukewarm take: Social media shouldn’t be a utility because it provides no social value or improvement of quality of life in the same way other genuine public utilities like electricity, water, sewer services, or general access to the internet, might. It’s also putting the government in a position in which it functionally would have to provide a platform for everyone equally, Neo-Nazis, climate deniers, anti-vaccers, and every other person with “insert terrible belief here” included.

Ultimately, saying social media should be a public utility is like saying casinos and strip clubs should be public utilities. Just because it’s fun to use doesn’t mean it’s good for society or come anywhere close to meeting the definition for the level of necessity typically attached to something as a public utility.

https://github.com/jcarbaugh/python-roku <- for a python code API

https://github.com/benthetechguy/controku <- also comes as an AUR package

I’ve used the first one. Never used the second, but I just happen to know about it.

There’s code you can download from github that would let you control your Roku device from terminal on a PC. I’ve used it to facilitate the design of my own Roku GUI applications. I think there might also be a TUI you can install. A lot of this is going to be easier on Linux, if that’s something you’re familiar with.

I didn’t say it was unreasonable. I just think it would be nice to have a couple more. I’m usually running out on the devices I run and have to proactively prune connections from machines that might, at the moment, not be using them. What I really wish is that it had tiers: like paying 1 euro for each available connection, versus just “5 euros and 5 connections” - I don’t need 10 full connections, but I’d be happy paying 7 euros for 7 connections.

Worst thing about mullvad is they only offer like 5 devices or so for your subscription. If they bumped it up to 7 or 8 I’d have no complaints.

People are gonna say I’m being hyperbolic or crazy, but I swear that the internet died the day the first line of production Javascript was ever written.

Valve gud. EA bad. Why Valve gud? Because me am told Valve gud. Why EA bad? Because me an told EA bad. Fact that each is purely motivated by profit and that my sentiment is almost entirely a byproduct of effective Valve PR coupled with it being the defacto gaming marketplace for 20 years and that the only value I have to it is as a data point in a spreadsheet is lost on me.

The youtube thing is an annoyance. The one that’s REAL concerning is what happens when Google eventually forces Firefox out of the market by convincing everyone to build their websites in such a way as to only run on Chromium based browsers. I mean, American Anti-Trust laws are just completely fucking gutted, so it’s not like there will be any consequence to them doing that. But once they do, they’ll have a veritable monopoly on the internet. At least the internet most people interact with.

I think it was a 2220 or something similar. One of those old school Nokia slide phones.

I had a fucking Nokia brick phone in my 20s and nobody gave a shit what kind of phone I had. Maybe your friends were just…shall we say, not of the quality of person I would desire in members of my social circle.

complaining about a younger generation makes you sound old.

Complaining about any generation, as if it’s a monolith, makes you sound small minded and ignorant. This is as true for older people as it is for the young. Many Gen Zers constantly blame all the world’s problems on Baby Boomers and seems to think all their troubles will magically disappear once the oldest living generation is dead and buried. They’re gonna be real fucking surprised the day they wake up and realize the only thing they ever accomplished socially with all that ageism was to normalize blind hatred of anyone over 40, which will be them before too long.

And, yes, I know that I’m unironically complaining about a generation in this post. Or at least a segment of them.