Oh no, we certainly do, but the provincial government is taking steps to try and introduce/bolster a private healthcare market that threatens to reduce access to the public healthcare sector. Lots of cutbacks and legislation has been slowly depleting the publicly funded healthcare in the province, reducing faith in the system, and that's being used as a means to push a private sector to fix the broken system. It certainly wasn't perfect before, but it's pretty transparent what the current provincial government is doing as they have a lot of industry interests.
PixelProf
joined 2 years ago
I might be crazy, but I'm wondering if we'll bypass this in the long run and generate 2D frames of 3D scenes. Either having a game be low-poly grayboxed and then each frame is generated by an AI doing image-to-image to render it out in different styles, or maybe outright "hallucinating" a game and it's mechanics directly to rendered 2D frames.
For example, your game doesn't have a physics engine, but it does have parameters to guide the game engine's "dream" of what happens when the player presses the jump button to produce reproducible actions.
Yeah, I think framing it similar to the old days might help, but I could be wrong. Like, you aren't signing up for (just to web-equivalent) PHP Fusion or something, you're signing up for your gaming clan's forum, or your roleplay group, or your Canadian phreak BB. The difference with Lemmy is just that you also indirectly sign up to receive content from a lot of other places using the same protocol.
IMO, I think the framing/abstraction will make or break the future of the paradigm for mainstream consumption. Not to get into another repeat of the EEE discussion, but assuming nothing nefarious from something like Threads, that would mean people start an account there and then find a niche group with their friends to go hang out on instead.
I also have to push back against the pushback against the paradigm going mainstream, because again IMO a move back toward decentralized platforms is really important for the future of the internet and quite frankly the global economy.
Just editing to expand, but I think maybe there's a problem in framing Lemmy or Mastodon as communities in themselves, because it really conflicts with the model of instancing and email that is being used to describe them.
Same! If you know of any online courses suitable for postsecondary students looking to build tech skills I would appreciate it, otherwise I might need to try getting a duty reallocation for a bit to put time into building one.
I agree with this, but we'd need to draw lines in the analogy. For example, my CS students struggle with downloading and installing a program and don't know how to locate find files that they've saved in a text editor. We'd be concerned if the people driving didn't know where their turn signal was, hah.
A lot of students grew up using Chromebooks as their primary computer, so they're largely limited to app stores and web browsers.
I think the main fear would be that a few really cool communities naturally spark up, even if they're niche, and could long term create that fracture when you have to choose between keeping with that community (and any corporate backed extensions) or not.
I'm fortunate that my career went well and I'm a DINK during this and it could be weathered, but it's a bit rough. In Ontario, rent control was removed and it seemed to lead to the building of a bunch of "luxury" apartments and very little development under that tier which seemed to drive up average pricing even more. The kind of apartment I was paying $1500 for before the pandemic could be $2500 now. Things like meats and cheeses seem to be increasing in price weekly, anywhere from 30-50% more than it was a few months ago.
It didn't hurt me hard, our household was already putting 50+% into savings given no kids, no car, and very little recreation outside of the apartment; however, I see lots more of my students working through school than I did previously, friends in the lower income range that lived a little outside their means have had to make some pretty big lifestyle cuts to afford rent. Everyone I know living in rent-controlled buildings (in Ontario, those built before 2018 when the regulations changed) are pretty afraid to move and have had contentious relationships with landlords looking to ride inflation to bigger profits.
It's just a shame it's happening simultaneously with (or in part because of) the Ontario government working to cut many social services and privatize health care.
My psychiatrist booked me after 7PM on a Sunday 🙃
There's the points others have made about the business model - for a long time, the "momentum" oriented approach was essentially a Ponzi scheme where investors would invest in a business that would take the risk of major losses so that they could destroy all competition in a space, then eventually, turn a profit by changing their tactics in user-unfriendly ways long down the line since you have the monopoly.
For this particular issue, though, I think we're seeing the Rotten Tomatoes effect en masse. If you want to make something bold and impressive, you need something people love or hate - not something between. With Rotten Tomatoes as an example, it's binary - Positive or Negative. This incentivizes movie production to produce things that are not controversial, just things that people won't strongly dislike.
With centralized platforms, the product models stopped being about providing high quality products and began valuing time spent on the platform. Produce a website/platform that most people are okay with and the majority aren't extremely opposed to. This means it won't do anything bold, but it does mean you'll pick up a critical mass and become the dominant force, as you're appealing to the majority.
In a content-driven economy, whoever has the users and the content rides that positive feedback loop to monopolies. More users = more content = more users.
Algorithms get worse because they're appealing to "Good Enough". If it gets bold and suggests something that you might either love or hate, then you might hate it and leave the site for a bit, but if everything is good enough, you'll stick around. Web design gets blander because things get familiar, and especially after the start of Facebook, we learned that people really choose familiarity over novelty. Movies, TV, and Music get blander because they are now driven by the same platform economics where sticking around on the platform is valued more than appreciating the content of the platform.
Interesting - I've been thinking about trying to decentralize lately, and been having fun collecting my data from sites to analyze my own behaviours in data and build unique recommendation engines for myself and was recently thinking about trying to build a crawler and DIY search engine for myself. Any tips/pitfalls on getting started with that?