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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • fubo@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 month ago

    Even in a home poker game, it is not possible for all the players to go home having made a profit, whereas that is very possible in the stock market due to growth, labor, and natural resources.

    (The coal miner who gets a wage and black lung is not a player in the stock market. Neither is the sun, which provides free energy to agribusiness.)


  • fubo@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 month ago

    In gambling, the house always wins, by extracting value from the players. In stock trading, the players (capitalists) collectively always win, by extracting value from labor, technological growth, and natural resources. These are not the same picture.

    Sure, you can take on as much risk as you like using derivatives, and emulate a gambler using the stock market as a source of randomness (volatility). But that’s not how most traders behave, and it’s not how most traders’ payoffs work.






  • I hate torture-porn movies like the Saw series, but a lot of people are fans of them. Should I worry that those people are likely to commit kidnapping, torture, and murder? Should I advocate that the makers or watchers of those movies be investigated for kidnapping, torture, and murder — without any evidence that a crime was committed?

    We don’t send the cops after people for liking murder stories, theft stories, industrial sabotage stories, or treason stories. We shouldn’t send the cops after people for liking stories of Harry Potter getting fucked by Severus Snape either.

    I think you should be more careful to distinguish fantasy from reality. Most fiction readers and writers have no problem doing so.





  • fubo@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldFediverse enshittification
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    2 months ago

    Federated platforms don’t die to corporate-type enshittification. They die to spam or elitism.

    If operators fail to collaborate on keeping spam down, the platform becomes unusable or greatly-diminished due to spam. See Usenet for example — yes, it’s still around, but it’s greatly diminished from the 1990s. New projects and organizations don’t tell participants to subscribe to a Usenet newsgroup for discussion. (Curiously, email mailing-lists have outlived Usenet in this way, at least for technical projects. While email is federated, any given mailing-list is centralized.)

    If the technology isn’t developed with an eye to new users’ needs and new use cases, because it’s “good enough” for the existing established users, the platform becomes dated and gets replaced by something trendy and corporate. This is IRC vs. Discord and Slack. IRC has a higher barrier to entry and infamously doesn’t work well on mobile — but it’s good enough for the old farts who care about it, while the young farts move to Discord instead.





  • “A story shared by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, uncovered that the current leaders of Signal, an allegedly ‘secure’ messaging app, are activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad,” Durov wrote on his own Telegram channel.

    In fact, the folks running Signal — notably Moxie Marlinspike and Meredith Whittaker — have a long history of effective security & privacy activism. Whittaker was one of the organizers of the Google Walkouts, one of the more effective pieces of tech worker activism in recent history. And Moxie has bumped heads with the US intelligence community more than once, and famously with the Saudis too.




  • Once again, copyright maximalists fail to understand the medium they profit from, and propose to destroy it.

    The display of hypertext always involves the active participation of both clients and servers. It has never been dictated solely by document authors. A given hypertext document (e.g. a web page) may involve resources drawn from many servers, including ones not under the control of the document’s author. In addition, client behavior may vary from that expected by the document’s author; in matters as minor as the selection of font size, or as major as whether to display images or execute script code. This separation of control is a fundamental feature of the medium, and gives rise to many of the medium’s strengths: for instance, the development of servers, clients, and documents may advance semi-independently, serving different interests.

    Users may choose clients that they believe will better serve their needs. In many cases, users have chosen clients that take steps to mitigate the power of advertisers to control the medium: see e.g. the adoption of pop-up blocking (pioneered in Netscape plug-ins and minority browsers like iCab and Opera) and the later adoption of anti-malware technology such as Google Safe Browsing by Firefox and Opera as well as Google’s own Chrome. These choices have strengthened the medium, making it more usable and thus more popular: imagine how unpleasant the web would be today without the pop-up blocking developed 20+ years ago.