Barry Zuckerkorn

That’s not a sustainable model, either. Zynga had a decent run but ended up flaming out, eventually purchased by a large gaming company.

That’s to say nothing of the business models around gambling, alcohol, tobacco, and addictive pharmaceuticals. Low level background addiction is the most profitable, while intense and debilitating addictions tend to lead to unstable revenue (and heavy regulation).

I’d argue it almost definitely has to be better than engagement, though.

Totally agree. I think those who design the algorithms and measure engagement need to remember that there is a difference between immediate dopamine rush versus long term user satisfaction. User votes can sometimes be poor predictors of long term satisfaction, but I imagine engagement metrics are even less reliable.

In the 80’s, Pepsi was gaining quickly on Coca Cola with the Pepsi challenge: having tasters blindly tasting Pepsi versus Coke and choosing which one they liked better. Pepsi won a majority of these. But over the decades, it turns out that consumer preference for a sip of each didn’t necessarily translate over an entire can, or an entire case of cans. When asked to drink 12-20 ounces (350 to 600 ml) of the soft drink, regularly, people behaved differently than what they did for a 2 ounce (60 ml) taste.

Asking consumers to rate things in the moment still suffers from their less reliable momentary ratings of things they experience all day, day after day. Especially of things that tend to be associated with unhealthy addictions.

Yes, any insurance company with “mutual” in the name is basically operated for the benefit of the insured parties. The owners are the policyholders, and any profit the insurance company makes gets paid out to the policyholders as dividends essentially partially offsetting the cost of their ongoing premiums.

Turns out, though, plenty of insurance companies run this way can still enrich their executives at the expense of policyholders and owners, so you still need to keep an eye out for self-interested individuals (or incompetence that costs everyone money), even if the company itself isn’t profit-driven.

Honestly, it’ll probably have to go the same route that reddit’s communities organically formed. As AskReddit got bigger, the IAMA and AskScience and AskHistorians and AskWomen and AskMen communities started popping up. As Fitness got bigger, the very specific niche fitness subreddits and sport-specific subreddits popped up, too.

For now, I’m guessing political and advice communities will start attracting some specific topics where a few people who have legal expertise will participate, up until there’s enough critical mass to form a more narrowly focused community that specifically relates to legal topics and has a higher threshold for necessary background/knowledge/experience/education to be able to competently participate.

I’m kind of surprised more redditors haven’t jumped ship.

I had a bunch of alt accounts, for different purposes that I didn’t want cross referenced (no need for my career-oriented alts to be associated with my political views or details about my family life or personal relationships), and then I just kept enforcing that principle of least privilege to segmenting my different hobbies and interests into different accounts. Third party apps made it easy, so I just kept doing that.

So now that I no longer use a third party app, it was a natural time to delete a bunch of old accounts. Lemmy provides enough of an alternate for any technology-related discussion, and I have confidence that the discussions about food, sports, entertainment, parenting, etc., will eventually reach near parity with reddit. For now, though, I keep my career-focused account to browse lawyer-related subreddits (including the private /r/lawyers), and my city-focused account to participate in discussions about my city, because I don’t think lemmy will be there for quite some time. Of course, now that I no longer look at reddit from a mobile device, I basically only use RES+old.reddit whenever I happen to be on my personal laptop (which is relatively rare these days).

Exactly. There are legitimate concerns about whether law enforcement should be able to subpoena “third party” records (including video recordings) with a process less than a full blown warrant supported by probable cause, as determined by a neutral judge, or whether government should be able to compel the retention of records for a later after-the-fact search. That’s a discussion worth having.

But voluntarily recording and retaining video means that the person who controls those records can choose to do what they want with it. Imagine if some homeowner had these cameras, and had their own home burglarized, and tried to turn over the video evidence of the crime, but the courts were like “whoa wait did you get a warrant for that?” It doesn’t really change anything to have it be cloud hosted, or easily shared with a button, because that “share” functionality works for non-police recipients, too. Doorbell camera footage gets shared all the time on social media, sometimes because it’s funny or interesting or otherwise worth viewing.

Weird. I’d say the correlation is much stronger that people who try to tear down others for fitness accomplishments tend to be more likely to be “deeply unhappy.”

If anything, poor health is a more reliable indicator of unhappiness.

The API is much more limited for kernel mode, because Microsoft doesn’t want to make it easy to crash the kernel. So it’s not just a matter of taking old DOS code and making Windows run it in an old compatibility layer, but actually requires translating the whole thing into a much more limited set of commands to properly draw the graphics and respond to user input.

It’s impressive like being able to play the French horn without using the valves, or painting beautiful pictures using only a mechanical typewriter. It’s being able to do something that is trivially easy with normal tools, but with such a limited toolset that the accomplishment itself is impressive.

Who said it’s fat, though? Sauropods are interesting in that they had systems of air sacs, like modern birds, that can puff up their apparent size without necessarily adding a lot of weight.

I hate to say this one - borderline flirting with male customers (laughing at their jokes, casual hand on the arm/shoulder, being overly complimentary, etc).

Oh the South Park guys definitely nailed it with their Raisins episode.

At a conceptual level, businesses aren’t a static thing that are owned by a single corporation forever. Some businesses start off as family owned small businesses, or grow in exchange for outside investment, etc. When a parent passes on a family business to their child, something about that business has changed, of course. But should the child, or the grandchild, or future generations lose out on the name after 50 years?

Moving up the scale in size/complexity, you’ll have partnerships between multiple owners/partners, who might want to work together temporarily, or for as long as they can, on some kind of joint partnership. A band, for example, wants to release songs under their band name, even as members might change over time.

And for larger corporations, there’s a value in licensing, as well. The local McDonald’s might literally be a family owned business, but franchised under strict rules by which it may use McDonald’s trademarks in exchange for adherence to corporate’s prescribed procedures and policies (and lots of money).

Some kind of expiration date doesn’t really make sense in that situation, either.

Either way, brands and reputation last more than 50 years, and do actually provide value to the consumer. Even from the largest corporations in the world.

the moment that ideas are made public with consent, they should be considered public domain

But that’s the inventor’s choice, right? Patents incentivize publishing inventions: you make your invention public in exchange for exclusivity for 20 years or so.

The other choice they have is to keep it a trade secret, which is kept private for as long as you choose, but you don’t get any exclusivity if someone else comes along and invents the same thing on their own.

By creating a system of laws where publication gets rewarded, we encourage those people in that industry to freely publish rather than guarding their secrets to die with them.

The irony is that they’re breaking the ways that humans can interact with the site, but leaving many of the scraper-friendly options.

In my experience, any sentence submitted in an appeal that starts with “The court also failed to consider” is usually a long shot. Especially if it’s about stuff like whether certain evidence should be considered or published, because appellate courts almost never modify the decisions of the trial courts.

If the Fediverse takes off, it would be fair to expect that new mega corps would arise out of that success. At one point, Reddit was a scrappy startup. Before that, Facebook, Google, and even Microsoft were small companies that were going to change the world. Who knows which high user, high uptime instances will end up requiring full time staff, or which software tools will be used for interfacing with the Fediverse (or analyzing stats within the Fediverse), or otherwise make a profit out of all the activity that would be going on here?

As of 3 weeks ago, I would’ve been willing to:

• Pay for reddit premium in order to use a third party app.
• Stuck around even without a third party app, using only the old.reddit interface for as long as that was going to work with Reddit Enhancement Suite.
• Allowed ads to get through my ad blocker on Reddit.
• Kept my old comment/link history accessible on the site.
• Continue to use reddit.

Now I’m basically unwilling to do any of those things. The interviews they gave up through the first 2 days of the blackout made me pledge not to actually pay reddit any money (and I’ve paid for gold from when it was first announced, as a “charter member,” till when they decided to dramatically increase the price in exchange for a complicated “premium” offering).

And since then, the hamfisted way they’ve dealt with mods and protests are getting me to leave the site early, too, and going out of my way to delete my old comments and posts that actually added information to the site, plus deleting or otherwise breaking the URLs of my content that have been linked from anywhere on reddit (whether in a post by me or reposted by someone else).

Why wouldn’t that simply be the browser, and a browser-based interface for the service?

Yeah, I think it’s doable to distribute that compute burden if each channel owner has a desktop CPU laying around to encode a bunch of video formats, but lots of people are doing stuff directly on their phones, and I don’t think a phone CPU/GPU would be able to process a significant amount of video without heat/power issues.

If you change the sensor format or layout dramatically, all the old data and all the new data becomes hard to hybridize.

I don’t see why that would have to be the case if the new data is a complete superset of the old data. If all the same cameras are there, then the additional sensors and the data those sensors collect can actually help train the processing of the visual-only data, right?