My experience from watching lockpicking lawyer is that locks are just social niceties that tell others ‘please don’t go here’ and have no real ability to stop anyone who doesn’t care. Other than the owner who gets locked out by forgetting their own key of course.

I very much appreciate the self publishing that’s been possible, but I do know that the way they enable this is pretty exploitive and I think we still have massive room for improvement. My understanding is that it relies heavily on exclusivity agreements to force the majority of players onto their platform. I think we would’ve seen the Amazon self publishing business smacked down by anti trust lawsuits ages ago if we lived in a more sane timeline.

Despite the exploitation going on now, it’s still better than the old monopolies the traditional publishers held, but I hope we can eventually see self publishing flourish outside of the Amazon ecosystem

To me there’s a bit of a difference because humans are not controllable and cannot (legally) be slaves. So in the case of this hypothetical artificial brain, that brain could leave and take the profits of it’s work elsewhere, with the creator no longer benefiting.

It’s surprising to me that they didn’t at least have a human write/steal the title and blurb. You’d think that’d work better than books with obviously gibberish titles.

I mean, most of my reading comes from authors who are literally only on amazon. And they’re only on amazon because it’s impossible to make a living trying to sell your book anywhere else. Brandon Sanderson has brought attention to this issue.

I’m supporting indie authors in a sub-genre that you literally can’t even find in a physical bookstore. I get that bookstores are hurting, but I had to make a choice between small time authors and small time book stores.

Dismantling ‘not great’ solutions when our legislature is seemingly incapable of replacing them with any solution at all (better or worse) is just a net downgrade for society. Our government is broken and extremely ineffective.

You will own nothing and be happy and have no recourse

I have a very high end plex server. I think all in between VPN, Usenet, hardware costs I pay roughly $60/mo. But that gets me all the content I want, organized exactly how I want it, and nothing disappears on me. No need for 3-4 subscriptions, multiple apps, etc. And that service works for my entire family and I can easily make offline copies for trips.

Now all this does require pretty significant time investment. It’s less now, but there were multiple very long research sessions and troubleshooting that I had to go through. I would absolutely pay for a service that was marginally close in ease of use just to not have to be my own IT, but it doesn’t exist.

I pay for streaming music. It just works and I (usually) don’t feel like maintaining my own music library is worth it. I pay for all my games, because Steam just works. I pay for all my ebooks because they just work. Streaming video by comparison is hot garbage. Just a complete morass of exclusive content, shitty apps, poor user experience and stupid policy decisions.

Really feels like we need a Reddit sub, or at least a ‘other social media’ sub to contain all the reddit news in one place.

The only advantage corporations could have had came from having the money to throw at extremely high quality training data. The fact that they cheaped out and just used whatever they could find on the internet (or paid a vendor, who just used AI to generate AI training data) has definitely contributed to the lack of any differentiating advantage.

I’m still using discord for basic party chat functions for my small group of friends. As long as that continues to work, I don’t care at all about paid memes.

I generally hate that I have to go into other servers because indie games confuse a discord as being a replacement for forums and a wiki

Feels like an instance per bot would be pretty wasteful, so single user instances shouldn’t be considered suspicious. But maybe it’s more scalable than I’d think.

Printers feel like they’re still trying to use metaphors and analogies to pre-printer technology, which very few people even remember anymore. It’d be like if we still used the same training they used on the first cars comparing them to horse and buggy setups today. No one would get it.

More than just works, modern apps and phones are explicitly not designed to be fixed by the end user. Why would they have those skills when iPhones and iPads are anti-repair? When software is lucky to have 3 different settings?

I sorta wonder about these when selling the house to the next person. What if a little old lady buys your house?

Previous sites died because there was a continual stream of new VC funded initiatives still in the ‘seduce new users’ phase of low-zero monetization for people to jump to. That tap of new, user-friendly sites has been shut off by the recent interest rate hikes curtailing VC funding.

Worried we’ll eventually settle into semi-collusive model we see Cell Carriers and ISPs have. If all 5 major social media sites stay in lock step of monetization, who are you going to go to? And without VC money, what new site will be able to truly scale?

From an end user perspective, I want a singular UI to browse all my various Lemmy identities in a cohesive manner. Not logged in on multiple tabs, trying to keep my subscription lists synced or otherwise organized. This is where a good app front end could smooth a lot of user friction out of the process.

Brand new to lemmy, but this is my take as well. The first account I created was on lemmy.world and then I had to create another to come here. Imagine if Verizon ‘defederated’ from T-Mobile because of a few bad actors.

The problems are real, but the solutions Lemmy currently seems to offer are going to stifle it’s growth before it can truly go big. I can deal with it, but as it currently stands I could never get my friends to join and even if they did, a defederation event happening would kill the concept dead for my more casual friends.

AI starting out so corporate friendly is a really bad sign imo. Early internet was the wild west (good and bad) but it took time for money to tame it. AI feels like it’s coming out of the gate pre-tamed by corporations. Not looking forward to that era.

This. I think people are equating the current capitalistic hellhole the internet has become with the much more reasonable approach society took pre-internet. The tools and capability are good, the uses they’re being used for currently are not.