Schadrach

And this has convinced me I am officially an old. I’m not sure what language about half of that is in and can’t even guess at what some of it means from context.

That analogy was chosen for a reason. Ada was originally developed by DOD committee and a French programming team to be a programming language for Defense projects between 1977 and 1983 that they were still using at least into the early 2000s. It’s based on Pascal.

It was intended for applications where reliability was the highest priority (above things like performance or ease of use) and one of the consequences of that is that there are no warnings - only compiler errors, and a lot of common bad practices that will be allowed to fly or maybe at worst generate a warning in other languages will themselves generate compiler errors. Do it right or don’t bother trying. No implicit typecasting, even something like 1 + 0.5 where it’s obvious what is intended is a compiler error because you are trying to add an integer to a real without explicitly converting either - you’re in extremely strongly-typed country here.

Libraries are split across two files, one is essentially the interfaces for the library and the other is it’s implementation (not that weird, and not that different than C/C++ header files though the code looks closer to Pascal interface and implementation sections put in separate files). The intent at the time being that different teams or different subcontractors might be building each module and by establishing a fixed interface up front and spelling out in great detail in documentation what each piece of that interface is supposed to do the actual implementation could be done separately and hypothetically have a predictable result.

By that logic what we really need is a modernization of Ada, where there are no compiler warnings and anything that would generate one in another language is instead a compiler error, everything is strongly typed, etc, etc.

If you aren’t familiar with Ada, just imagine Pascal went to military school.

This seems like it would be pretty possible - you’d just need an instance that basically just takes in all the data and just marks moderation/deletion as such rather than actually altering the posts. The hard part would be not getting it defederated by half the instances out there specifically for providing unddit/reveddit functionality.

Lemmy does slightly better, but essentially proves that when you have shitty administrators and moderators, the only thing that’s going to be transparent is the quickest and easiest excuse, and when it’s a lie it remains it remains incontestable. You only need to look at threads titled “Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem” and read the comments to get a sense of the scale of the problem.

Forums are only as good as their moderators. Always have been, always will be. I’d love something akin to Reveddit for Lemmy though.

It’ll only get way worse. Expect everything to be pay to play… once gaben is gone. They have a monopoly and any leader would think they are too big to fail. No one can just take their games elsewhere… we’re locked in. We’re committed. We can’t escape. They’ve got us by the balls.

Sure you can escape, at least for any future purchases. There are other stores and you can take your business there, and the moment Steam does any serious enshittification under new management post-Gaben those other stores are going to be trying to pull customers from them hard. Likely to EGS or GOG (probably EGS unless GOG makes a big move at that point, like bringing back and expanding GOG Connect).

A couple of years down the road from there and Steam is known as that thing you only use to play older games and exclusives.

Eh, some of them. You weren’t generally banned for “merely” being right wing. But pre-Elon you generally had to toe the line a lot more to avoid being suspended or banned if you were overtly right wing than if you were liberal or left and now it’s the other way around.

Just like how the blue check started as an “I am a public figure and this account is definitely who I appear to be” mark and that’s it, then it became a mark of who you knew/could bribe at Twitter to move the process along and could be revoked for saying the wrong things on Twitter (for example everyone’s least favorite gay right wing provocateur Milo Yianwhatever had his blue check stripped for saying something too offensive well before he was banned), then post-Elon it became just a subscription service.

There was also a tendency to quietly artificially reduce visibility for a lot of right wing voices or hashtags. For example, female MRA and member of Honey Badger Radio Hannah Wallen literally got a bunch of her fans to do some pretty elaborate testing of her account at one point after her engagement numbers suddenly and mysteriously dropped and it turned out many of her posts were invisible except to people that followed her that she also followed, even to people specifically looking at her feed.

Certain right wing hashtags would have numbers that should definitely have them trending but mysteriously weren’t (or would be for just a few minutes and then suddenly vanish despite gaining popularity in the meantime), certain liberal/left hashtags would be trending despite seemingly not having the numbers for it to be organic, that sort of thing. Because Twitter moderation was curating what was and was not “trending”, literally blacklisting certain topics and bumping up others because of the visibility that being trending would afford.

It was all really, overtly obvious if you watched for it, like how certain accounts would be shadowbanned on Reddit for reasons that were both obvious and not spam-related despite shadowbanning supposedly only being employed as an anti-spam tool, or how certain subs would be allowed to openly ignore certain sitewide rules.

You mean like they did the Anniversary Edition update for Skyrim that broke a ton of mods, and then two more updates since then that re-broke a bunch of mods each?

You know you can have Firefox open a second window, right?

They don’t need to die - you could just blind them essentially the same way.

H1B skilled worker visas. You have to prove that you tried to hire locally and couldn’t find anyone qualified. The whole point is that the qualifications are impossible, so you are either under qualified or lying. Since no qualified candidate exists, you can bring someone over from overseas and hold the risk of being deported if you fire them over their heads - and you suddenly get less thorough about checking qualifications for your immigrant candidates.

They could probably mostly or entirely fix it, but to do so they’d have to better curate search results. Because what it does is summarize the top search results for the query.

The problem they can’t fix is consistently getting useful high quality search results to the top without getting misinfo, disinfo, irrelevant info, trolling, answers to similar but not identical questions or memes as high or higher.

True. But that just falls back on the “not yet” part of things. They’re likely sitting on a massively valuable pile of user data and when they get greedy enough it’s going to be ugly.

They see everything because they have to for some of the services they offer which gives them a huge potential to do terrible things that they have not actually pursued yet to date, hence the “so far” in my comment.

They target anyone a critical mass of their users think might be entertaining to target, and yeah that sometimes includes each other.

Better to give them a wide berth and try not to draw the attention of the snarling horde with too much time on it’s hands.

Specifically, it started out to track, dox, and harass Chris-Chan (originally just for being a weirdo though they eventually came out as trans and made news in 2021 for being arrested for incest). The nearly two decade old (since 2007) ongoing campaign against them means they are probably the single most documented human being in history.

They don’t often target women just for being women, but much like with trans people and furries they also hate a hate-on for crowdfunded youtube personalities and fat acceptance and all of those groups do have their share of women (especially the last one - fat acceptance is primarily about women). They even target fundamentalist Christians and Quiverfull families sometimes (which tend to be very Conservative).

Also, there’s no “was” - they still exist are are operating.

What’s the problem with CloudFlare?

So far, not much other than being “too” content neutral for a lot of people. They have potential to be immensely horrible whenever they decide to engage in enshittification to maximize profits.

And really, the Google one in search has a primary goal of summarizing high ranking search results into a natural language statement that sounds like it knows what it’s talking about. So if you have a search where high ranking results are wrong/memes…

I mean in this case it’s probably more accurately web search results being fed into an LLM and asked to summarize said results. Which if web search results were consistently good and helpful might be a useful feature instead of the thing you skip past and look for links to something useful.

The first name.that came.to my mind for someone like that was Hugo Schwyzer (I’m probably spelling that wrong) - he was very much a very outspoken feminist who made a point of drawing attention to how feminist he was at every opportunity. He was also a women’s studies professor.

Honestly, some of his writing gave me the vibe of what it would sound like if you were a recovering addict and chose feminism as the higher power in your 12 step program.

Eventually it comes out that he nearly decided to murder-suicide an ex, and that he was a women’s studies professor because it gave him access to an ever rotating stable of young, impressionable women to hook up with.

When he admitted to all that the wording again reminded me of 12 step program talk, like he was taking steps 5-7 publicly online because online feminism was the God he believed in for the program. It…didn’t get the response I think he hoped for. Less absolution and more ostracism and banishment.