Ilandar

joined 1 year ago
[–] Ilandar@aussie.zone 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

One of my lecturers had it bookmarked in his browser lol

[–] Ilandar@aussie.zone 4 points 1 month ago

Yeah I think that's a decent comparison. There are of course still hobbyists and enthusiasts today who know a lot about cars despite not being professionals working in a related field, but it does feel like the general understanding among the public has fallen because the cultural phenomenon of a father teaching his son about cars has dissipated. Piracy has always been a niche activity but the core skills and knowledges it requires were taught more to millennials than they were to zoomers. If people have grown up with less education about motor engines or desktop computers then it's not surprising they struggle to expand on that later in life.

[–] Ilandar@aussie.zone 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Acknowledging differences is not "war".

[–] Ilandar@aussie.zone 8 points 1 month ago

This was a pretty underwhelming article. Most of it is a pretty uninteresting story about how the site was founded, which isn't really relevant to the headline.

[–] Ilandar@aussie.zone 1 points 1 month ago

Resolution doesn't mean much, those sites you are referring to use extremely low bitrate encodes that look terrible. Yes, streaming services (in my experience Netflix is the main offender) can sometimes deliver dogshit quality streams too due to their adaptive bit rates, but the ceiling is way higher than those sites that pull from DDL file hosters. If you are consistently suffering from very low quality paid streams then you likely have some kind of network issue affecting the adaptive bitrate.

[–] Ilandar@aussie.zone 2 points 1 month ago

Most streaming services have introduced cheaper "ad-supported" tiers within the last few years while jacking up the prices of the existing tiers. There is usually a price gap designed to either make you sit through ads or overpay to remove them. Many (most?) people don't even use ad-blockers in their web browsers and are psychologically trained to sit through ad breaks, either because of TV (older generation) or YouTube (younger generation) which is why these streaming companies can get away with such a betrayal of their original premise.

[–] Ilandar@aussie.zone 2 points 1 month ago

From what I have seen, most Threads users are safe-spacers who wanted a platform with heavy moderation. So I guess these are just the growing pains they'll have to get used to in the pursuit of their circlejerk paradise, particularly since this is Meta we're talking about who have never been reliable or effective when it comes to moderating content.

[–] Ilandar@aussie.zone 66 points 1 month ago (8 children)

This is a pretty clickbaity counter-article that doesn't review the original in good faith. The New Yorker article is not titled 'Social Media Is Killing Kids' but rather 'Has Social Media Fuelled A Teen-Suicide Crisis?' with a lead of:

Mental-health struggles have risen sharply among young Americans, and parents and lawmakers alike are scrutinizing life online for answers.

So the implication that the premise of the article is to demonise social media is completely wrong, since it's actually an investigation into the issue. That's also the reason it's long (another strange complaint from a guy whose 3000+ word response is only ever his opinions).

The "moral panic tropes" are testimony from real parents whose real children killed themselves. And these real parents think social media was responsible. It strikes me as pretty low to hand wave away the grief of these real people because it inconveniently feeds into a narrative you have some instinctual problem with.

The author tries to frame the balance of the New Yorker article as some kind of gotcha. Like it's somehow a bad thing that this other writer took the time to consult with and quote experts who provide a different opinion. Personally I would much rather read that then something like this which was basically the equivalent of a reddit eXpOsEd thread.

[–] Ilandar@aussie.zone 4 points 1 month ago

Exactly. "Sparking backlash" just means these people whined for 2 minutes like they always do, before reaching into their wallet once again.

[–] Ilandar@aussie.zone 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Corbyn was also good friends with Ken Livingstone, who said some very strange things about Hitler and the Jews.

[–] Ilandar@aussie.zone 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It's not that strange, I have a friend who literally said the same thing today in reference to one of his favourite channels shutting down. He preferred to call the stuff on this channel art, rather than content. I agree with the person above too, the term has always bugged me. It makes it sound so mass produced, like your job is to just produce meaningless "content" for people to mindlessly consume. And to be honest, that's exactly what the mainstream YouTube culture is about.

[–] Ilandar@aussie.zone 1 points 2 months ago

Confucius is that you?

 

In sharing this video here I'm preaching to the choir, but I do think it indirectly raised a valuable point which probably doesn't get spoken about enough in privacy communities. That is, in choosing to use even a single product or service that is more privacy-respecting than the equivalent big tech alternative, you are showing that there is a demand for privacy and helping to keep these alternative projects alive so they can continue to improve. Digital privacy is slowly becoming more mainstream and viable because people like you are choosing to fight back instead of giving up.

The example I often think about in my life is email. I used to be a big Google fan back in the early 2010s and the concept of digital privacy wasn't even on my radar. I loved my Gmail account and thought it was incredible that Google offered me this amazing service completely free of charge. However, as I became increasingly concerned about my digital privacy throughout the 2010s, I started looking for alternatives. In 2020 I opened an account with Proton Mail, which had launched all the way back in 2014. A big part of the reason it was available to me 6 years later as a mature service is because people who were clued into digital privacy way before me chose to support it instead of giving up and going back to Gmail. This is my attitude now towards a lot of privacy-respecting and FOSS projects: I choose to support them so that they have the best chance of surviving and improving to the point that the next wave of new privacy-minded people can consider them a viable alternative and make the switch.

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