Context is king. If there’s vital/time-dependent correspondence you’re waiting on, notifications can matter. But email in 2024 is pretty darn transactional, in which case a daily check is enough for most. Notifications for something suggest that I need to drop what I’m doing and attend to whatever arrived. That just doesn’t apply for service provider marketing, purchase receipts, etc.

And then the opsec angle comes into play: https://www.axios.com/2023/12/06/apple-google-requests-push-notification-data

Give me a mandatory field and I will give you a latrine.

then a few years later suddenly everyone’s anecdotes are praising China, or capitalism, or offhandedly mentioning some product or influencer.

There used to be a satire sub called Church of the Current Thing that made fun of this phenomenon. It eventually got banned around 2022 thanks to a cohort of bad faith actors mass-filing dubious reports of subs they didn’t like.

(I believe there was also a sub devoted to cataloging all such subs that got paved over in the name of le brand safety^TM, but it may have also gone the same way. I don’t keep up with the place)

It’s worth noting that investment in community isn’t the problem per se. People’s digital lives (indeed their digital personhood) are arguably more important than their corporeal ones now; the ability to sustainably organize online around everything from hobbies to political goals matters. The problem is we collectively keep picking the corporate-run shitware to build on, like Reddit - platforms over which we’re excluded from any sort of influence, where the only real currency is perverse incentive.

Notifications are overrated. I turn them off for the bulk of apps.

Devote one or two small time windows each day for life admin. Outside those windows it shouldn’t be seen or heard.

When is the company axing search?

The purpose of the piece is to smear the notion of individual control and development of AI tools. It’s known as ‘running propaganda’.

I’m happy with outgroup x being able to develop their own AIs, because that means I’m able to develop AIs too.

Staggeringly naive, tbh. Your profession will be made obsolete as a self-sustaining for-profit enterprise either way. The difference is that the tooling can either be owned exclusively by megacorp, or it can be owned by people.

It’s better to be a bard relying on the charity and small custom of others than a literal sharecropper fueling Universal’s proprietary model for next to nothing. At least in the former case you’re free.

When the remux is 30gb and the 1080 encode is 23gb ✈️🏢🏢

Then said tools were made a lot simpler with a lot less control over them

Which needs to be reversed if we’re to remain free in Western democracies. Access to and control of computing - general purpose computing in particular - is practically a civil liberty now. I look at legislators in my own country, and I’d wager 50% of them don’t understand this, 40% kind of grasp the problems but are apathetic, and 10% are on the enemies’ payrolls.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the average consumer does more for the environment by reducing consumption by 10% and not recycling anything, than maintaining normal consumption and regularly recycling.

Advertisers working in your native language cannot hijack your attention when foreign language videos are running. Subtitling facilitates that, and encourages site activity that differs from consumption, such as broadening one’s horizons and being inquisitive about the real world.

2023 turned web2 platforms into the Thing, and turned us into MacReady.

(Instagram: I was always the Thing! blargghhhgalzklgrkffz)

Started playing Rain World. I’m getting huge ICO vibes.

The cost of paper and plastic recycling is passed on with the co-operation of government. Their interests are aligned with those of industry. The cost is handballed (‘externalized’ if you want the slime term) first to individuals and ultimately to the environment. With moral hazards like this I wouldn’t expect substantial change to be driven by authorities. It’s going to take technological breakthroughs.

Whenever I see Harris, all I can think of is the Backpage . com miscarriage of justice.

In today’s screencap: failure to recognize the weapon being deployed against your enemy can easily be deployed against you.

A Boring Dystopia, or the Firefox or Technology communities (any)

HN reckons https://www.showsonsale.com is where the price collusion happens.