No one commenting on your playlist? You’re cathartic music experience is showing :)

Fourth panel. AI trained on all the above, floods it all with generated content rendering the signal-to-noise ratio too terrible to tolerate, even for corporations.

That reminds me…

In circa 1995 I was running a dial upBBS service – as a teenager. So if course, it was full of bootlegged video games and such, and people would dial in, download a game, log off.

Someone uploaded Descent or something like that. But they had put "deltree /y C:" or similar into a batch file, used a BAT2COM converter program, then a COM2EXE program, then padded the file size to approximately the right size with random crap (probably just using APPEND)… And uploaded it. Well, fortunately for the rest of my users, I say the game and said: oh, that’s neat, I should try it and copied it to another computer over my internal network and launched it. It started deleting files right away and I hit CTRL-C to abort. I lost only a few dozen files.

Banned the user, deleted the package. Got lucky.

And losses in the inverter.

I still go to Reddit for some communities that don’t have critical mass on Lemmy. Sure you can talk about programming or Linux here, but the more niche ones (like specific mods for specific games) are entirely absent.

But when I want to post something or create content, it goes here.

Malicious Corporate Compliance

I’ve met the devs in person. They keep turning down literal suitcases full of cash from people who want to bundle adware and crap in one of the most popular programs ever. Don’t assume VLC is going down that road – they’ve stuck to their ethics for decades.

Yeah, this is an interesting element. Historically, allowing all members a veto, while also having no way to expel a member, means that any such institution is liable to outside meddling. The classic example is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto – in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, any noble could veto anything. So all it took was buying a few nobles and it shattered.

Removed by mod

A lot of exploits exist to root a phone. Bad apps can abuse those exploits.

The kindness of admins is a requirement of pretty much all internet infrastructure. Email servers are the same, no? And it gets even harder with proprietary networks – if the admins are being unkind, you can just switch discord servers or whatever. Anyway, I digress.

Yes. Built into Android Studio. Has existed for at least five years. However I only ever used it with the apps I was developing and never even considered using it as a means to launch outside apps. That probably would have been painful.

Very cool as a tech demo. Terrible as a product.

Seriously, it feels like 1999 internet. And I’m loving it!

Ouch. I know Bandcamp isn’t owned by its founders anymore, and the new owners in theory are sketch… But it’s still close to the best webstore ever conceived for music. The payment processing alone is worth it. What is Faircamp in that space?

It isn’t all the users. It’s localized outages across several networks. Also, this is solar flare related, which is cool :)

Not to be argumentative, and I generally see your point :)

I do occasionally write software that will have zero users – not even myself. Because it’s fun to play with the code. “I wonder if I can prototype a openscad type thingy using Python set syntax…” Or whatever. It’s the equivalent of sitting in front of a piano and creating song fragments to pass the time.

Naturally the benefit here is that you’re developing skills, passing time in an entertaining fashion, and working the ole grey matter.

I’ve worked on open source software projects, some of them pretty major. And we had a sort of similar debate. In a non-capitalist software product, the users are not strictly required – particularly if they aren’t paying, you don’t really need them. Except that open source has this user->contributor treadmill that requires that some users become contributors in order for a project to grow. So you want to be as pro-user as possible, hoping and dreaming you’ll get patches out of the blue some day, or similar.

But what happens when your users become hostile or entitled. What if they do the equivalent of calling tech support and demanding satisfaction. The customer is always right, right? How much time and effort can you devote to them without detracted from what you were doing (coding). Eventually as a product grows, the number of hostile users grows. What do you do to manage this at scale?

Suddenly you’re facing the same problem Home Depot faces in your article, except your capital is not measured in dollars but time, motivation, mood… And you start putting up barriers in a similar fashion.

I hate to alarm you but… What is a file system except dynamically allocated memory. ;)

As a long term slackware aficionado, I agree that it meets the criteria. But it also is significantly different from other distros in enough ways that you may find yourself relearning things you took for granted. And that is off-putting for a lot of users.