That was always the difficulty with analysing the Internet as a social force, and any subtlety that once went into the analysis of it seems on its way to becoming a lost art.

I mean sure, "the medium is the message" but even within the fediverse there are like 18 different ways to use it which don't have much in common with each other. It's not just one medium.

"Is social media harmful?" is completely the wrong question. Some social media are harmful, others are not.

Merrymount

If the plan to launch hundreds of thousands of new satellites is "an unprecedented threat to ground-based astronomy" I wonder if the people behind it have included in their calculations the potential to collect launch fees for all the new orbital telescopes that they imagine replacing ground-based astronomy.

But of course my memory is unreliable and I was one of those crazy people.

The hacker news discussion is surprisingly not bad. Very few Google stans coming in to shill for their corporate masters, and they're getting soundly ignored and downvoted.

Android Developer Verification: Threat masquerading as Protection

https://fedia.io/m/technology@beehaw.org/t/4083978

This morning I feel that if I were a better man, maybe my role model would be the fictional version of Bob Dylan as portrayed by Robert Anton Wilson.

The way I remember it, Usenet was going pretty good until the spam got so bad that it drove away everyone but the crazy devoted fanatics who couldn't look away.

Oh, sorry, did not mean to put that in c/technology.

Adding soya beans to my rice and bean curry is a surprisingly big improvement.

Imagine, combining two different types of beans in one dish. Maybe I should patent this idea.

In the old days we had large numbers of people believing that being online meant using AOL, Compuserve, or whatever walled-garden type of "portal" they were lured into using. But we could mostly rely on tech-aware people like computer programmers to know better. Not any more. Today it's a more diverse group that knows better, but a less cohesive and politically influential one, and it makes up a much smaller fraction of net users.

What happened to the fight for the Internet?

via lobste.rs

Let me sing you the song of my people

https://lemmy.world/post/48755300

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Cloudflare kept making it harder and harder to disable enough of my web browser's defences to pass its tests and at this point I refuse to even try.

🚨 Bill C-22 would force every Canadian internet provider, messaging app, and cloud service to build surveillance backdoors & store a year of your private data. Foreign state hackers exploited similar legislation in the US — compromising up to a million people. Tell your MP: https://openmedia.org/StopC22-mast #BillC22 #cdnpoli @OpenMediaOrg

Skyrim — what did the Greybeards want that horn for anyway?

AI Economics for Dummies

https://fedia.io/m/technology@beehaw.org/t/4003448

If enough people think the same way they make money.