6·
43 minutes agoThe trend that people drink less and less alcohol is well-documented now.
Apart from the bullshit about AI, it is also frankly disturbing that the shares of beer companies still go up. That doesn’t quack like a market economy.
- 323 Posts
- 1.16K Comments
Joined 11 months ago
Cake day: April 4th, 2025
You are not logged in. If you use a Fediverse account that is able to follow users, you can follow this user.
Had I read this article ten years before, I would have thought it was hilariously satirical, very funny, albeit a bit dark.
Now I am checking it is really from the guardian.co.uk, and not the onion or Private Eye.
The world has truly gone mad.
2·18 days agoKein Verlust.
Doch, deine Rente möglicherweise.
11·18 days agoIn Germany, we used to put an ASCII art fish for trolls, because they were troll-fishing:
><xX))))o>That was advising others not to react to them/ Maybe we should use something similar for clanker-bots ?
1·18 days agoHere another article on this: http://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/gemini.html (written in 2020)
1·18 days agoAnd later https://preshing.com/ on threading and concurrency.
3·18 days agoAber warum denkst Du, dass ein Blog von dir nicht interessant wäre ?
Was Leute schreiben oder denken, wenn es persönlich ist, ist immer interessant. Es kann sein, wie in den Kopf eines anderen Menschen hineinzusehen. Wir können Menschen verstehen, die ganz anders sind als wir selber.
Viele Menschen haben auch Dinge, die sie stark interessieren. So kann man von anderen lernen. Es bildet sich von selber ein Wissensnetzwerk.
Man findet im Gemini-Netz auch Dinge wie Kochrezepte (ohne Paywall). Gemini ist ein sehr gutes Format für Kochrezepte! Und die sind nützlich.
Und schreiben ist auch ein Prozess. Manche Leute schreiben auch Gedichte. Das ist schön.
From the article:
“What is the point of text-only webpages?” you may ask, especially if you are under 30. Gemini will probably not appeal to those who use the Internet primarily for entertainment, rather than as a source of information. But many, including myself, have lamented the demise of the 1990’s Internet. We want an Internet with webpages that do not take an average 10 seconds or more to download–despite having very little user-readable content, let alone content we may actually want to read. We yearn to return to the days when we could actually find noncommercial websites with an Internet search engine. Remember the days before about 2007 when a Google search could yield millions of search results, and Google would let you access as many as you wanted? Now, we get only a few pages of results that Google thinks are worthwhile. Though I have no proof, I suspect these may be mostly websites that have paid Google for the privilege of appearing in its search results. Go ahead and call me pessimistic. Perhaps I am.
2·18 days agoOne huge advantage that I forget to mention: Since Gemini does not use “addictive by design” UI elements popularized by social media companies, like feeds, timelines, likes and upvotes, colourful and distracting elements, endless scrolling, and comments that invite trolling, it feels a lot calmer.
If you want to have a glimpse how an Internet without addictive design could look, an internet made for and made by people, have a look at https://geminiprotocol.net/ . It is radical, indeed - but sometimes, it is better to bite the bullet, and follow the maxim “it’s better to get unpleasant things over and done with”.
And one main difficulty with using the Gemini network is… well, it is not addictive. It rather needs a little discipline to use it and harvest the fruits of it. Just like reading a good book, or writing a real letter to a friend.
“OpenSlopware” was a repository on the European Codeberg git forge containing a list of free software and open source projects which use LLM-bot generated code, or integrate LLMs, or which show signs of “coding assistants” being used on the codebase, such as pull requests created or modified by automated coding tools.
However, its creator – who we are intentionally not naming or tagging here – received so much harassment from LLM boosters that they removed the repository, and indeed their Bluesky account, stating that they would withdraw from social media for a while. Now, if you try to visit the original URL, you will receive only a 404 message.
1·19 days agoTaiwan does this differently, and it works better:
- Algorithmic Feeds Tuned for Addiction: Behind the scenes, sophisticated AI algorithms curate each user’s feed to hold attention as long as possible. Rather than showing content chronologically, platforms personalize the feed using machine learning to maximize engagement — learning what hooks each person. This design is deliberate: “AI-driven social media algorithms are designed solely to capture our attention for profit… continuously tailoring feeds to individual preferences,” thereby maximizing screen time and deepening activation of the brain’s reward centers. By endlessly serving up auto-play videos or recommended posts that align with a user’s interests (or trigger emotion), the platform keeps the user in a continuous loop. Internal industry documents frankly admit these “continuous feeds… keep users on their platforms for as long as possible” to boost ad revenue. In essence, the newsfeed itself is engineered not as a neutral product, but as an addictive “scrolling feed that distracts users” and constantly resets our attention for the next reward
The problem is that these social media sites have UIs that are addictive by design, and full of dark patterns. Putting that UI onto another domain name, owned by another company or organization, does not solve this problem. Replacing X with Mastodon does not solve that, even when the people running Mastodon have good intentions.
And “Addictive by Design” does real damage.
We need to think a bit sharper to get out of that hole we have dug ourself in.
1·19 days agoSo bike to your car. I like the idea.
Really, the Dutch are very pragmatic people.
I am always wondering why there is no standard for video conferencing?
We can be glad that the telephone was not invented in our times…
2·19 days agoDarin steckt auch ein großer Vorteil: Projekte wie Mastodon kopieren mehr oder weniger die UIs der kommerziellen Social Media Sites.
Die benutzen aber bewusst und umfassend “Addictive Design” und Dark Patterns, wie z.B.
- Like-Buttons und Upvotes
- Feeds und Timelines
- Endless Scrolling
- häufiges Auffrischen von Inhalten
- extreme Leichtigkeit, mit der Kommentare hinzugefügt werden können, was z.B. Trollen erleichtert
Das mag kurzfristig die Open Source Alternative “konkurrenzfähiger” machen, dient aber nicht den Nutzern.
Das Textinterface von Gemini fördert einen wesentlich bedächtigeren aber dafür eben gehaltvolleren Austausch. Wo im Web findet man sonst noch Gedichte?
Hier noch ein Artikel mit Überblick und diversen weiterführenden Informationen und Links:
In theory, this can also happen if prices are changed during the day - perhaps according to the time of the day, and that change just happens between you putting the article into your chart. Unless every customer has a device that tracks the price of each item until he/she pays, such mismatches (or “race conditions”, that’s the technical name in software development) will be difficult to avoid.
But to me, also something weird happened. I was watching a corner with small kitchen stuff (things like knives, cooking cutlery), and there was a TV screen with advertising in it. I took one of these items (out of perhaps 100 items) into my hand and it started to play advertising about that item. Freaked me out.