No, it wasn’t like that. Remember that while computer technology was fairly mainstream, it wasn’t nearly as engrained into our lives as today. So people were talking about a worst-case scenario that involved technological things: potential power outages, administrations maybe shutting down, some public transportation maybe shutting down, … To me, it felt like people were getting ready for being potentially majorly inconvenienced, but that they weren’t at all freaking out.

I do remember the first few days of January 2000 felt like a good fun joke. “All that for this!”

I’ve been telling people that the notion that the ER lets poor people die in the US is false; instead, they make you wish you did.

Reposting what I posted here a while ago.

Companies abiding by the GDPR are not required to delete your account or content at all, only Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Lemmy instances are unlikely to ask for info such as real name, phone number, postal address, etc; the only PII I can think of is the email that some (not all) instances request. Since it’s not a required field on all instances, I’m going to guess that the value of this field does not travel to other instances.

Therefore, if you invoked the GDPR to request your PII to be deleted, all that would need to happen is for the admin of your instance to overwrite the email field of your account with something random, and it would all be in compliance. Or they could also choose the delete your account, if they prefer.

Source: I’m a software engineer who was tasked at some point with aligning multi-billion-dollar businesses to the GDPR, who had hundreds of millions of dollars in liability if they did it wrong and therefore took it very seriously. I am not a lawyer or a compliance officer, but we took our directions from them directly and across several companies, that’s what they all told us.

I think it’s spot on. It’s people who were already going through the stages of grief, were kinda stuck in “bargaining” (like: “nah, Twitter is not really dead, it’ll come back”), and the symbolism there about Twitter really being gone-gone fast-tracked them to depression/acceptance.

I once had a conversation under NDA (which has expired since) with an engineer at Apple who was working on iCloud infrastructure, and he was telling me that his team was a bit shocked to read that Dropbox was releasing apps for photos at the time “because they’ve noticed that most of the files users are uploading to Dropbox are photos”. He was like: how do they know that exactly? His team had no idea and couldn’t possibly find out if the encrypted files they were storing were photos, sounds, videos, texts, whatever. That’s what encryption is for, only the client side (the devices) is supposed to know what’s up.

Not having that information meant a direct loss of business insights and value for Apple, since Dropbox had it and leveraged it. But it turns out Apple doesn’t joke around about security/privacy.

If you’re too broke to afford a TV, just watch on your phone or laptop.

Tell me you’ve never lived in poverty without telling me you’ve never lived in poverty.

So true.

With LLMs, I can think of a few realistic and valuable applications even if they don’t successfully deliver on the hype and don’t actually shake the world upside down. With blockchain, I just could never see anything in it. Anyone trying to sell me on its promises would use the exact words people use to sell a scam.

Custom-made ear plugs. Even if you only wear ear plugs occasionally (I do when in a noisy hotel, or when a neighbor goes a bit too crazy), they are so worth having.

Basically you go to an audiologist and they put something kinda liquid in each of your ears to take a mold of your ear canals. A couple of weeks later, you have plastic earplugs that have the exact shape of your inner ears.

Upsides: • They work, always. I would typically use wax or silicon disposable ear plugs before that, and sometimes in the middle of the night they might move and let the sound in; those don’t. Also, foam disposable ear plugs don’t stay in my ear, don’t ask me why. • They never hurt. Since disposable ear plugs get shoved into your inner ear until they take the shape, they continuously push against the walls of your ear canals. I would often feel kinda bruised after using them for a long time. • They are crazy comfortable. Put your ear on a pillow, and you barely feel them at all. • But do they block too much sound? That’s up to you. Basically, you choose the level of noise you want to keep out, which I believe is achieved by using different kinds of plastic.

They’re not a trivial purchase (I think mine cost $150), but then you use them for decades, so it’s definitely worth it. It was a stupid purchase in my case, because I bought them on a whim out of anger against my neighbor’s party one night; but they’ve followed me everywhere since!

I remember finding out about wireless internet from an Intel TV ad. There was somebody with a laptop, browsing internet (probably an AOL page or something like that considering the era) sitting on a chair in the middle of a stadium, with no cable to be seen.

I thought “well that’s stupid, I know you can avoid the power cable for a while if there’s a battery, but if he’s browsing the internet, there has to be a network cable”. But the ad ran over and over on TV, clearly insisting there was no cable, so I was like “hm wait…”.

Eventually I read about wireless networks somewhere a couple of weeks later, and suddenly it all made sense.

https://www.thespherevegas.com/

My guess is the blue screen picture is fake, but it’s still pretty funny.

The Kbin creator had initially joined to help Lemmy, but decided to create his own thing when he couldn’t take their political alignments anymore. The Lemmy devs used to be vocal Uyghur genocide deniers and pro-North-Korea, and would answer questions on Reddit’s r/AskATankie (a tankie is someone who supports communist dictatorships), but now that Lemmy is successful, they’ve kind of grown hush-hush on it, without really addressing it.

So, he went to create Kbin, but since he’s not a software engineer, he chose foundations that won’t really scale too well. Kbin is written in PHP, which is an interpreted and mono-threaded technology, it’s great at some stuff, but not high-scale services (source: that’s what I do for a living). Lemmy was written in Rust, which is compiled and multi-threaded. It doesn’t mean Lemmy won’t meet tricky scale bottlenecks, but it will give it a much larger toolset to get through whole classes of them.

And of course, Kbin being much younger, it doesn’t currently have a bunch of critical stuff that Lemmy already has. For instance: an API, which has been allowing other people to build great native clients for it.

It’s probably not the only reason, but Rust is a much more attractive language/platform for devs to work with than PHP. (Source: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-admired-and-desired-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages)

It’s also more scalable, because it’s a compiled multi-threaded technology, while PHP is interpreted and mono-threaded.