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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 31st, 2025

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  • You must be new around these parts. Facebook (and the rest of big tech) are monopolists. For the past ~26 years, the tech industry has been using illegal anticompetitive tactics to suppress competition and destroy potential competitors. The government has done nothing, because they’re stupid and think “big = good”.

    An example is Instagram. It was a start up that was growing rapidly, and actually became a threat to Facebook. What did Facebook do? They placed a massive bid to buy the company at like 10x their actual market value. It’s an offer so huge that every investor in Instagram would support the deal even if the founders were against it.

    A sane government would see that as an obvious anticompetitive decision, and block the merger. Facebook should instead use that money to improve their own product and compete fairly. Obviously, that didn’t happen, the merger went through, and Facebook is still the owner of Instagram. Users and the tech industry at large are worse off.

    Look at TikTok’s huge success. If they weren’t a Chinese company, they probably would have met a similar fate. Unfortunately for Facebook, they weren’t allowed to buy a Chinese company.


  • How are they so unable to differentiate a shitty edit from AI?

    It’s just that most people don’t know what you mean when you say something is “AI generated”. With context clues, they tie back to terms they’re already familiar with, and are associated with fake computer generated imagery (“that’s Photoshopped”).

    I think most people have never even seen Adobe Photoshop, the actual software. Like, literally never laid their eyes on the gray window, the layers and tool panels, etc, yet they’ve still thrown the term “photoshopped” around.














  • I have a similar experience with my own father after he started using TikTok and Instagram, though it’s not about ivermectin (spoiler: he thinks I’m a “commie”). I think old people are just not equipped to survive on the internet. It’s like they lack the instincts to known when they’re being scammed.

    It gives me a tiny bit of hope for the future, because even though gen alpha aren’t exactly the brightest generation so far, they’re at least all fully attuned to the internet and (hopefully) better equipped to navigate its many perils.


  • entwine@programming.devtoScience Memes@mander.xyz•*Permanently Deleted*
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    5 months ago

    I haven’t seen a doctor in at least a decade and a half, when my parents took me to checkups as a child. I’m very lucky to be healthy, and am in the gym 3-5 days a week to keep my streak going as long as possible.

    However, I’m calling bullshit on this:

    A number of studies in low income communities in the south show that over 60% of people in those communities have intestinal parasites. That’s just the ones we know of.

    That sounds insane to me. 60% is a motherfucking epidemic. Where’s the source for these studies???


  • You shouldn’t be using corpo slop languages anyways. That includes Swift, Go, C#, Kotlin, etc. C++ is independent from big tech. Even though it’s so complex, there are TWO open source and independent state of the art compiler implementations (including one that’s free software).

    Also Mono (open source .NET runtime for Linux) is shit, and .NET apps sometimes struggle to run on Wine. The compatibility situation will probably get worse when Microsoft adds Copilot integration directly into the .NET runtime.

    Edit: if you want a similar alternative, try Haxe!