It’s really a pile of garbage. And I’m angry at myself for watching so much of it. It’s clearly not written by anybody interested in the star trek universe.

My go-to example is also this one episode where one young character decides to from now on go by the pronouns “they/them”. I’m all for the inclusion of nonbinary characters - that’s what star trek always stood for - inclusion and the shared humanity that we all have. But that episode had basically nothing else going for it and the pronouns were the plot.

The new, great series “strange new worlds” on the other hand had a great episode with a very interesting non binary character (that BTW never was explicitly pointed out as one) who helped spock deal with his own problems of navigating his own two identities (human/vulcan). It was so clever and the nonbinaryness was integral, to the plot, but it wasn’t the plot. The actual plot was that the non binary character basically fooled everyone and turned out the villain. It’s such a great comparison between those two series. One makes a compelling show and the other one has nothing to say other than ticking a list of “woke” virtue signalling points.

IIRC most successful VCs invest very early and get out often early-ish too. The real enshittification that dangers the actual position of the company often happen much later. At that point the company is traded publicly and there’s a large anonymous body of shareholders - they only care about profits. VCs are actually a little smarter and care about longer time frames as in that early stage often much larger (relative) growth rates are possible.

At a late stage (think Google, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit etc today) growth is much more difficult. How could Google grow today? They’ve saturated the search market years ago. So the only way of making more money is by sucking more money out of their existing user base. And they absolutely need to do it, as there’s huge pressure on the managerial class to do it, because the shareholders demand it. If the managerial class doesn’t do this (because often some older idealistic people know it would compromise the quality of the product), or they aren’t capable of doing it - they will get replaced by people who are more willing or capable - even if it’s detrimental for the company when viewed longer-term. VCs i would argue care all about profits, “but”. (they are smart enough to see the big picture. They are also small enough or “few enough” that they can communicate among themselves in order to agree on a more wise plan. That’s why they often get out once most of the possible (easy) growth has been achieved. They either know that now growth is much more difficult, or that the company’s value is much more stagnant - ow might decrease even. They can get out and invest their money in other more promising endeavours.

The shareholders of large publicly traded companies are not that coordinated as they cannot really agree on anything other than just “growth”. More sophisticated strategies would have to be negotiated (and communicated) among thousands. The only unifying bond among shareholders is that they want profits. Think about it: many shareholders often don’t even know what companies they own as they are often part of other investment packages. Maybe you’re retirement plan has invested in stocks of 50 different companies, or 10 different fonds that have invested in others still. That is a form of dilution (?). It’s very difficult to communicate any strategy more sophisticated than “profits”. (a side effect is also that many people have invested indirectly or wothout knowing in endeavours that make their life more shitty/expensive when they retire - without knowing it.) There isn’t enough nuance in the wants of the masses as to want any more sophisticated strategy than simply “growth”. That’s why only short term growth can be thought.

Of course sometimes also large companies can grow 2.5x or something like that. But it’s rare and takes more time. The exception makes the rule here. Early stage growth that VCs bank on is much more explosive i think. More like 10x or 100x.

EDIT: sorry i typed this on mobile and it shows.

I worked as a projectionist in 2009 when the cinema got its first digital projector in order to be able to show Avatar in 3D. At the start of the movie no one actually knew if it would work. Due to the movie being encrypted - with every cinema in Germany waiting eagerly for the password - No cinema was able to play the movie. But everywhere cinemas were packed with people. Because of fuckups somewhere in this incredibly stupid system the movie was delayed about half an hour (IIRC) nationwide. With no-one knowing if it would eventually work - especially nice for the people working at the cinema having to deal with angry audience members.

At the same time the 2D 35mm film-version we also had started without any problems (it was massive and pretty dicey to carry it around).

it is possible now to copy your data to another account on another instance.

in the future lemmy might even support something like having your account automatically backed up to another instance. Similar to a backup email address at your main email address.

Would it be possible for the mastodon software to detect if users are connecting via threads and replace all images in posts with a different image - one that says e.g. telling people that Zuckerberg doesn’t care about raising tennage suicide rates through Instagram or something similar.

kinda. but compared to e. g. Twitter its much more splinteted. Twitter is more like one giant city. also your seeing mostly what Twitter decides. mastodon shows you what you subscribed to. things are less viral.

If you want to have some fun again, maybe program a little with artsy-fartsy shaders.

Make a little blog that showcases them and write a little animation everyday - or twice a week.

I’ve seen also “shadplay” which lets you easily write and run shaders using rust. There was also this other tool where people could live-code shaders, but I forgot the name

I think Loki was nice. Au least it was nice to look at. For Star Wars I recommend "Andor" which is maybe the best Star Wars ever made (of one removes the nostalgia-factor from the original trilogy). But seeing the rest on Disney+ Andor seems like an incredibly unlikely fluke. The one thing that luckily sneaked by the Disney content police. The one thing that wasn't dumbed down by endless focus-grouping and insertions of memberberry-characters and -items.

I missed it. Will listen. His Common People cover was so perfect. I bought the CD recently. Gotta give this one also a try.

Don't know how it is elsewhere, but in Germany there's a lot of podcasts that are donation bashed. There are some that have their "basic"-content (their main podcast for example) free and additional stuff behind a paywall.

The most famous one that does it like this in the US would be Chapo Trap House.

True. I just used it as a stand-in for other ways of making content + earning something while doing it.

If everytthing is on Patreon it might be slightly better, but not good

Maybe it is time that we start to write our favourite youtubers to start developing alternative means of distributing their videos. Patreon and so on.

I feel there will be a lot less people watching YouTube in the future and as a whole many youtubers will see their revenue drop significantly. Watching YouTube as a whole will become less and less bearable. I watch videos without ads on my pc, but on mobile i use the app and endure the videos (for now) as the app is just nicer to use compared to the browser.

But if I have to see ads all the time (also these unskippable 20s ads) I think I'll simply stop using YouTube all together. about 90% ofy YouTube use isn't neccessary at all. I'll just watch it, because I'm too lazy to do anything else.

I could be should read a book instead. Maybe others will do that too in the future?

There’s a recent Rust ML framework called “burn”. So maybe there’s also a future for ML in Rust for you.

How does that work? Is threads using a protocol compatible to lemmy? (And I fully agree with the preemptive blocking of any facebook stuff).

Edit: thanks for all the detailled answers.

So Facebook tries the old EEE - Embrace Extend Extinguish. 1.A big company is Embracing an open source standard ("we’re friendly, see?) They get a lot of users that way - even the open source savvy types. 2.they start Extending that standard “to make it even better” - but not talking about these changes with the rest of the community first. They cannot react quickly enough and become incompatible with the new version of this standard. 3.Extinguish. When all the users are effectively using the big companies platform with something that isn’t the original standard anymore they change it so much that it isn’t compatible at all anymore or replace it completely.