FriendOfDeSoto

[Icey breath] No.

I can see dead people.

I think the telephone sort of fits. It’s attributed to Bell but that’s mainly because he wiggled his way into a US patent before his competition. The telephone has many fathers though: Bourseul, Manzetti, Reis - just to name three. The latter is also the father of the word telephone but died before it took off. There were many engineers tinkering so if Bell hadn’t taken the crown, another person would have done it.

Bonus answer: penicillin. Alexander Flemming. A lucky, accidental discovery. If mold hadn’t gotten sloppily into his cultures we might all have died of the plague or something nice like that.

What confuses me about this scenario you’re painting is this: it doesn’t matter which app is better than WhatsApp for your mother to navigate if none of the contacts she texts with are willing to move with her. She’s not breaking off contact with folks over a GUI issue, is she? Or is she only using it with you?

Also, random messages not going through has not been an issue in the “war” between Android and iOS so far as I can see. Image quality of attached images, getting spammed with a new text for every reaction of a user in iMessage on the Android side, and some rare messages in group chat contexts that originated in iMessage were issues (and they’re not anymore IIRC). Now, if those are the ones you mean with “random messages” then okay. Did you or she convince all her contacts to move to WhatsApp as a result? If so, once again, moving her off it won’t do any good unless everybody follows along with her.

A move off of WhatsApp and to Signal is recommended from a privacy point of view. Meta is a terrible company. Signal is less bloated than WhatsApp. Beyond that I think they’re all roughly similar in functionality and user interface. By which I mean equally confusing for somebody over 60 today.

Limited and generalizing.

In your example, I think this is a defense mechanism more than anything. People deal with grief of separation in different ways. This looks dumb on the surface but it’s like burning your hand on the stove. You only need to do it once to be fearful of and therefore extra careful with all stoves. Person who likes blue and broke their heart = stove.

My preference is simple:

Minimalist Lemmy - ordered by new, chronological (used to be the same on reddit before I stopped) Mastodon - chronological

If I look at how the algorithms on YouTube or Instagram (don’t know which category they fall in) treat me, they always surface 80% irrelevant stuff and 20% that is okay but only in the rarest cases mindblowingly good. And that’s why on YouTube I tend to ignore the Home tab.

Especially in the short video algorithms, I fucking hate that if you didn’t respond within a microsecond you’ll now get fed sloth videos or car crashes until you die. I’m all algorithm’ed out.

It remains to be seen if reading about all the emotions and morals is the same as feeling them, acting according to them, or just being able to identify them in us meatbags. So even with the sum total of human knowledge at their disposal, this may not matter. We already don’t know how these models actually organize their “knowledge.” We can feed them and we can correct bad outcomes. Beyond that it is a black box, at least right now. So if the spark from statistical spellchecker (current so-called AI) to actual AI (or AGI) happens, we’ll probably not even notice until it writes us a literary classic of Shakespearean proportions or until it turns us into fuel for its paperclip factory. That’s my assessment anyway.

Groundhog Day

That’s conventional wisdom for lithium ion batteries. Keeping it between 20 and 80 percent will extend its life. But that doesn’t mean charging or discharging it fully will be bad immediately; the effects are small but cumulative. And while battery tech improves, this guideline will probably be less important.

I would prefer buyer or customer. Not Consumer.

If I could just quickly split this hair: there is a semantic difference. The buyer or customer paid money. The consumer needn’t have. If I buy my kid a Switch 2 I’m the buyer and my kid is the consumer.

I don’t disagree with your take that it gets overused though.

Bert and Ernie

I agree. And I think your idea of personal exchanges is something we should try. All I’m saying is that it’s too early for anyone to have a well thought through, working solution.

At different points in the past, we thought novels, newspapers, radio, television, and the internet would be the end of truth. Truth is still around. We develop systems to sieve through the bullshit. In terms of slop, I don’t think anyone can say for sure how we will deal with it. But if past experience is anything to go by, it will rely on reputation. You trust a certain news source because they have been reliable, so they have a reputation they don’t want to lose. And that keeps them honest or you move on. We will find a way to deal with slop as well that will be based on reputation. In addition to laws and regulations that are yet to be written.

Whether it’s news rooms or TikTubers or something completely new that will gain this reputation, eff knows. But we will get there.

What’s the point of doing something by executive order that will probably be reversed on day 1 of the next administration? A better way is to go through Congress whose legislation is harder to be overturned. So your hypothetical president should lead an effort to find compromise across the aisle. Currently, a fucking budget would be nice.

Given the limited power of the president, I fail to see anything more useful this particular president could do.

Fire the VP and then resign.

Preferably perpetual sleep to drown out all the news.

6 and 24 preferably.

Thanks for the correction

I would argue no one could choose one. A lingua franca is silently agreed upon over long periods of time. No committee sat down to make old Frankish the language of trade, modern French the language of diplomacy, and nowadays English the language of internet arguments.

If I had a magic wand though my vote is Klingon as well. Qa’plah.