yeah, no shit, that’s not the same as “your entire company being predicated on the unpaid labor of children who you also let do whatever they want without supervision or actually working filtering features”–not least because you could actually get banned for both of the things i mentioned from 2010, while what’s happening now is explicitly enabled by Roblox as their business model and an externality of doing business. as has been demonstrated by recent investigations into how they work down, they basically don’t have a company without systematically exploiting children

it’s been very strange to watch this game i grew up on–pretty innocuously, i should note–gradually morph into one of the most exploitative, undignifying, generally dangerous spaces for children online. the worst stuff i got into on Roblox in 2010 was online dating and learning about 4chan. now the company seems to openly revel in exploiting the labor of children and ripping them off

Then we slap a random-ass speed limit sign down and say “job’s done.”

we don’t actually–the basis we derive most speed limits from is actually much worse, if you can believe that. from Killed by a Traffic Engineer:

Traffic engineers use what we call the 85th percentile speed. The 85th percentile speed is whatever speed 85 percent of drivers are traveling slower than. If we have 100 drivers on the road and rank them in order from fastest to slowest, the 15th fastest driver would give us our 85th percentile speed.

Traffic engineers will then look 5 mph faster and 5 mph slower to see what percentage of drivers fall into different 10 mph ranges. According to David Solomon and his curves, the magnitude of the speed range doesn’t matter as long as we get as many drivers as possible into that 10 mph range.

and, as applied to the example of the Legacy Parkway, to show how this invariably spirals out of control:

North of Salt Lake City, the Legacy Parkway parallels Interstate 15 up to the Wasatch Weave interchange where these highways come together. It’s a four-lane, controlled-access highway with a wide, grassy median and more than its fair share of safety problems.

So how did the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) respond?

It increased the speed limit from 55 mph to 65 mph. It said the speed limit jump will “eliminate the safety risk” on the Legacy Parkway.

UDOT conducted speed studies up and down the Legacy Parkway. It found that most drivers were going much faster than the 55 mph speed limit. Channeling the ghost of traffic engineers past, the safety director for UDOT said, “We decided to raise the speed limit to a speed that is closer to what drivers are actually driving. In doing so, we hope to eliminate the safety risk of speed discrepancy, which can happen when you have a significant difference between the speed most drivers are actually traveling and those who are driving the posted speed limit.”

In the case of the Legacy Parkway, the 85th percentile speeds ranged from 65 mph to 75 mph. Based on that and what it deems engineering judgment, UDOT originally proposed raising the speed limit to 70 mph. After community pushback, it settled for 65 mph.

According to the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), this slight adjustment is acceptable. The MUTCD specifies that speed limits “should be within 5 mph of the 85th percentile speed of free-flowing traffic.”

Except it’s likely on purpose so they won’t have enough people to look into this and other large cases against corporations that might impact the people buying out the government.

this is exactly what has happened; previously, the FTC was aggressively pursuing anti-trust against Amazon, Google, etc.

Isnt nigeria basically the only african country right now that isnt a shithole right now?

Nigeria probably has the most theoretical wealth available to it of any African country because it’s super rich in oil, but there are definitely other countries that have it better than Nigeria (South Africa, Cape Verde, maybe Namibia or Kenya if you want some deeper cuts). Nigeria also has a metric fuck ton of problems (religious tension and sectarianism, terrorism, an openly corrupt political system which likely stole the last presidential election, and constant economic turmoil) that severely rob its capability to exploit its riches. and yes colonialism is a big part of that, it has fairly bad deals with major corporations to exploit that oil

you’re being very weird in this specific chain of comments, and it’s unpleasant to read and dragging down otherwise pretty decent conversation. dial it back, or you’ll catch a temporary ban.

hardly surprising. we talk about enshittification today but Skype was one of the most egregious offenders before the term was even coined, in late-stage Skype (circa 2016-2017) i couldn’t even run the fucking thing without lag because of in-line ads. the user experience was frankly awful, and once you’ve used something like Discord or Zoom there’s just never any reason to go back.

come on, this is not productive discussion

imo if anything the opposite causality is true: this DOJ was banking on a continuation of Biden in Kamala Harris, and because that is no longer forthcoming they’re now trying to get something out the door before the administrative changeover in the hopes it can stick. it almost certainly won’t, but most of Trump’s appointees are gigamad about “censorship” and they hate Google for “punishing conservative voices” or whatever so it’s hardly the most contrived hail mary if so

it is not okay to deadname people for any reason (as everyone under this post already has stated), and if you do this again on the instance you will be banned from Beehaw for at least a week.

Surely it can’t just be because a town name happens to contain “lsd” in the middle of it?

Facebook is a remarkably bad website so i think you’d be quite surprised at how stuck in the past they are over there

The Mozilla Foundation laid off 30 percent of its workforce and completely eliminated its advocacy and global programs divisions, TechCrunch reports.

“Fighting for a free and open internet will always be core to our mission, and advocacy continues to be a critical tool in that work. We’re revisiting how we pursue that work, not stopping it,” Brandon Borrman, the Mozilla Foundation’s communications chief, said in an email to The Verge. Borrman declined to confirm exactly how many people were laid off, but said it was about “30% of the current team.”

apparently, the path to profitability was “shamelessly sell out on AI hype bullshit”

As of 2019 the company published 100 articles each day produced by 3,000 outside contributors who were paid little or nothing.[52] This business model, in place since 2010,[53] “changed their reputation from being a respectable business publication to a content farm”, according to Damon Kiesow, the Knight Chair in digital editing and producing at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.[52] Similarly, Harvard University’s Nieman Lab deemed Forbes “a platform for scams, grift, and bad journalism” as of 2022.[49]

they realized that they could just become an SEO farm/content mill and churn out absurd numbers of articles while paying people table scraps or nothing at all, and they’ve never changed

It’s been just a week since US telecom regulators announced a formal inquiry into broadband data caps, and the docket is filling up with comments from users who say they shouldn’t have to pay overage charges for using their Internet service. The docket has about 190 comments so far, nearly all from individual broadband customers.

Federal Communications Commission dockets are usually populated with filings from telecom companies, advocacy groups, and other organizations, but some attract comments from individual users of telecom services. The data cap docket probably won’t break any records given that the FCC has fielded many millions of comments on net neutrality, but it currently tops the agency’s list of most active proceedings based on the number of filings in the past 30 days.

The FCC will surely hear from many groups with different views on data caps, but Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel seems particularly keen on factoring consumer sentiment into the data-cap proceeding. When it announced the inquiry last week, Rosenworcel’s office published 600 consumer complaints about data caps that Internet users recently filed.

“During the last year, nearly 3,000 people have gotten so aggravated by data caps on their Internet service that they have reached out to the Federal Communications Commission to register their frustration,” Rosenworcel said last week. “We are listening. Today, we start an inquiry into the state of data caps. We want to shine a light on what they mean for Internet service for consumers across the country.”

who knew that removing the block feature and “Twitter’s new ToS says all disputes will be heard in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas located in Tarrant County (Tesla investor Reed O’Connor’s court)” were not going to be winners among the remaining userbase

Agreed that he himself isn’t particularly relevant, but his supporters are still very influential in some areas of the open source community.

hilariously you can see some of the reflexive defense of him over in the FOSS thread of this article. way too many people feel obliged to run defense for this guy and it’s just cringeworthy to watch

he’s not particularly relevant at this point, but even this one note (and its retraction) feel like they should put to bed whether or not Richard Stallman should have any influence over anything:

Dutch pedophiles have formed a political party to campaign for legalization.

I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.

[Many years after posting this note, I had conversations with people who had been sexually abused as children and had suffered harmful effects. These conversations eventually convinced me that the practice is harmful and adults should not do it.]

like, bro, what are you doing. beyond being abhorrent, this is the sort of nonsense Reddit used to be infamous for and it made the website fucking rancid. why would anyone want to share a political movement with Stallman when he has to be debated out of positions like “you should not have sexual relations with people under the age of 13.”

the issue isn’t really with federating messages per se (that’s actually quite easy afaik, at least in federation terms), it’s with how to display them and everything associated with them. my understanding–based off of the fact that i’m working on a project where we’re having to fight how ActivityPub works, and how to display things is a big problem–is that ActivityPub is structured in a way you can be fast and loose with the stuff you’re federating, and it’s not a super big deal necessarily. but how it displays is a big deal, and that’s a total mess. and a lot of that mess begins with how Mastodon does stuff and the need to accommodate its choices (which i think are mostly bad for anything that isn’t microblogging, so non-microblog platforms have to design around it). it’s then amplified by differences in front-ends and clients, none of which can agree exactly on how to display or handle things, and some of which can’t/don’t display certain things at all and create differing user experiences as a result.

how Mastodon handles content warnings, for instance, is a big problem. functionally it’s just a details tag and i think in ActivityPub it’s literally just a “summary” field. but the field is–in addition to being used as a details tag, a readmore, and a summary field–primarily used as the load bearing content warning functionality on Mastodon. so everything has to kind of assume the field will be used the way Mastodon uses it, which is… an issue, to say the least. obviously, not everything can handle that (or wants to handle that) the same way by design, so you get a bunch of differing ways to display the field that might not even contextually make sense for what’s in it.

that’s what the issue is with translating from Mastodon-to-Lemmy and vice versa, and likewise would probably be the difficulty with translating stuff from forum-to-Lemmy even in a best-case scenario. i’m not even sure what the best way to handle our conversation would be, for example, since forums are often chronological/basically never indent replies/exchanges, but Reddit-alikes like Lemmy allow for different ways of sorting thread replies and do indent exchanges.

interoperability is the problem with this. what “integration with the fediverse” means practically for novel forms of software is “handling a trillion really annoying edge cases that Mastodon created for every other thing that isn’t Mastodon.” Lemmy, for example, handles interoperation with Mastodon incredibly poorly (and vice versa). you can do it, but for meaningful interaction it’s not very good. and forums have their own sets of edge cases that would probably make, say, forum-to-Lemmy interoperation a giant mess.