I remember reading once that in the very first years of the existence of the German Democratic Republic, television was the form of mass media that was most critical of the regime. It just wasn’t as influential yet as newspapers and radio, so they didn’t care about it as much; when it became more popular, it too came more under the control of the communist regime.

I certainly agree that the Internet should be by and for individuals; whether we can in the long term do completely without corporations, I am not sure, but the current “algorithmic curation” is definitely a problem.

I mean I agree with that in principle, but: before the Internet, of course big corporations influenced kids and adults! Before the internet only big corporations had the resources and practical ability to distribute any information to a lot of people.

The promise of the internet was that we would have a society where we could all have a say and the flow of information would be democratized. You are right that, because of “algorithms”, that promise hasn’t really been fulfilled.

You don’t, if you have absolutely no way of accessing the internet or a phone network other than the phone you want to find, you’re out of luck and have to find it manually.

This is something that, as long as you ended up getting a job, you should really just not give a fuck about.

They probably had 1 position to fill, but got many times more applications than that, maybe 10, maybe 20, maybe 50, maybe 100. That means that they had to reject 9 or 19 or 49 or 99 people and they have better things to do with their time than to explain this to all these people, however many they may be.

OT but: How does this Mastodon/Lemmy integration even work? OP seems to be posting on Mastodon but we are commenting on Lemmy which makes everything look confusing.

Of course you can use XML that way, but it is unnecessarily verbose and complex because you have to make decisions, like, whether to store things as attributes or as nested elements.

I stand by my statement that if you’re saving things to a file you should probably use XML, if you’re transferring data over a network you should probably use JSON.

Yes and it is a good thing we don’t anymore.

IMHO: XML is a file format, JSON is a data transfer format. Reinventing things like RSS or SVG to use JSON wouldn’t be helpful, but using XML to communicate between your app’s frontend and backend wouldn’t be either.

do they do that in xml? never seen that

“how to kill orphaned children in Java”

what do you mean Java is also the name of an island

“Can you program in Java?”

“Yes, if you pay for the plane ticket.”

No it wouldn’t, but people would only see them if they were part of a preexisting community where such things are posted or they specifically looked for them.

On the Internet, censorship happens by having too much information for our limited time and attention span, so going after recommendation algorithms will work.

I grew up with forums where emoticons were substituted with smiley images (on badly coded ones, “8)” turned into “😎” even when it was just a parenthetical ending with the number 8 or the eighth point in a bullet point list). I use emoji approximately when I would have used those smileys, it is a good thing they’re now standardized, but other than that I find them unnecessary and distracting.

Odd because why would such people switch to a new platform?

When I ran a public installation of web forum software (more than a decade ago), I got spambot registrations, then I think I just set up a captcha where users had to answer some really simple question; this kept the spambots away.

This is hardly programmer humor… there is probably an infinite amount of wrong responses by LLMs, which is not surprising at all.

OsmAnd (another OSM-based app) allows you to set underlay maps from external sources which will be downloaded from those external sources as needed. I do not know if Organic Maps has this feature too but it can clearly be done.

yeah but that’s just like your opinion man

Pretty sure that is Java, not C#