this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:
Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.
I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.
The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk with speculative power that they'll promise us anything to win our hearts and minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with human-like intelligence. It's the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful won't do anything to stop it.
It’s not indistinguishable. People are choosing not to learn or understand how anything works. It more convenient to not know.
that sound you didn't hear was the reference going entirely over your head
Apparently you didn’t get it either since your unable to point out what exactly I missed.
I store my unable right next to my unicycle :)
no thx, we don’t actually owe you shit
this isn't primary school and I'm not your favourite teacher, I'm not required to coddle your knowledge
but, you know, it's funny? it's weird, I did know what it meant! shocking, I know. but I did. that's how, y'know, my reply had the shape it did. absolutely wild. people can know things! who knew?!
you could argue it was done to them on purpose. Russian demoralization propaganda has been completed for decades now.
programming dot dev, folks
I fucking love taking a week off then coming back and finding these "sort by controversial" threads.
lol, I hadn't tried that out yet, I should sometime
it’s so weird how the garbage finds us in bursts, like all week it’ll be relatively quiet then the weekend comes and the floodgates open
we need to send an operative into one of their basements to get snapshots of the keywords in their search history
modlog for this user is definitely something
holy fuck I seriously didn’t expect Nix transphobia out of nowhere (I don’t correlate my bans with what other instances do so I don’t usually check the modlog, and their modded posts are old enough I didn’t catch them in their post history)
the programming dot dev defed counter is incrementing rapidly. do any of our regulars come from that instance?
i stumbled upon one righteous from programming dot dev today (mod of !europe@feddit.org) haven't seen many there, other than from drive-by comments, but that's mostly because i wasn't looking for that ever
300 lines of LLM-laundered Python in a trenchcoat
it's a two-rounder (check the youtube link in a priv)
ah yes, everyone’s favorite not suspicious at all YouTube channel “offensive freedom” and their utterly normal videos
fuck it, I’m gonna be real cute and delete their post so they can get real mad about their free speech (and also so the horseshit they linked doesn’t get SEO or whatever from us)
I can hear the eagle's cry all the way over here
so proud
How did we get here? This is not my beautiful wife.
it's hardly news that VCs and shit spend influence and capital to shape perception and manufacture consent. it's so not-news it was even literally mentioned in the very article this thread is about
golly fuck it’s been a pristine couple of days for posters to not read the article and then come in here and fucking make up what they figure the article says
these ones didn’t even bring mangled quotes to try and force their point, they just straight up didn’t open the link
This will never stop living rent-free in my head, it'll be my Rosebud
it was a work of art, esp. because of the domain
they deduced the entirety of posting from seeing 3 comments