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  • 26 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 30th, 2021

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  • Your gaming PC is going to be terribly inefficient and draw 10x as much power at idle as a workstation PC.

    Is this really true? Modern components have fairly robust power saving capabilities. Just because it’s got a 750W power supply doesn’t mean it’s drawing 750W all the time.



  • brandon@lemmy.mltoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    7 days ago

    Everybody is so quick to blame the parents in these situations. Maybe there is some truth to that, but people also need to reckon with the fact that kids (and adults) are being constantly inundated by Skinner box apps, and “platforms” full of engagement bait designed to be addictive and attractive as possible. All run by corporations with functionally no regard for the safety of their users.

    Yeah, sure, if you’re giving advice to an individual parent, they should probably be keeping a closer eye on what their kids are doing.

    But there are systemic problems here that can’t be fixed with individual action. By laying the blame solely at the feet of the parents here, you are in effect putting parents up against dozens of huge corporations, each with armies of expert advertisers, designers, and psychologists working to build these products. It’s hardly a fair fight.






  • I didn’t see the testimony, but I did read her book.

    When most people think “targeted advertising”, I think they are thinking about something like: this user is a middle-class woman between 18 and 25 who enjoys bicycles, so we’ll show her ad X.

    According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook/Meta is doing things like detecting when a user uploads, then immediately removes a photo–detecting that as a moment of emotional vulnerability (that is, the user was feeling self-conscious about their appearance), then bombarding them with ads in that moment for beauty products.

    I think the former is ‘obvious’ to most people, but the latter probably isn’t–probably because Meta and other advertising companies have put a lot of effort in to keep this on the down low–which is why Wynn-Williams is speaking about it publically.

    (not accusing you of defending them BTW, just my 2¢ that this goes beyond what most people would consider obvious, imo)



  • Why do they not care?

    Because, for many of them, they don’t have any reason to. In other words, privilege. Copyleft licensing is a subversive, anti-establishment thing, and software engineers are predominantly people who benefit from the established power structures. Middle/upper class white men (I’m included in that category, by the way). There’s basically no pressure for them to rock the boat.

    And why would they avoid GPL

    Because many of them are “libertarian” ideologues who have a myopic focus on negative liberty (as opposed to the positive variety).





  • brandon@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlWhat's with the move to MIT over AGPL for utilities?
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    1 month ago

    The unfortunate reality is that a significant proportion of software engineers (and other IT folks) are either laissez-faire “libertarians” who are ideologically opposed to the restrictions in the GPL, or “apolitical” tech-bros who are mostly just interested in their six figure paychecks and fancy toys.

    To these folks, the MIT/BSD licenses have fewer restrictions, and are therefore more free, and are therefore more better.





  • brandon@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlBeing Forced to Say Goodbye
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    2 months ago

    Please be careful when copying anything that could be considered your employer’s intellectual property (almost certainly anything you built as an employee falls into this category) off of that employer’s systems.

    And definitely be even more careful about using one employer’s IP for a new employer (neither company would be pleased to discover this).