Well...

If you follow the link to fedidb, refer to the "mau" monthly active users. Do some brief math and realize that lemmy.world accounts for about 50% of all active users

Email market share is harder, but many estimate that Gmail accounts for over 40%. Many many orgs use Google apps to make custom branded gmails with their own domains too

This is the typical "business power law" that states that the top player should control about 50%, the second player about 25%, etc. This is just kinda how the world works

Well, thanks for explaining

I genuinely don't understand why people here are railing him. All the article said was he wanted to research environmental causes for an increasingly common condition. That seems totally reasonable. Look at car pollution reducing avg brain capacity. Look at plastics pollution. Look at toxins in ultraproceassed food, many of which are banned in EU but not USA. Look at our water quality and lead pipes problem

Look, I know he has talked about vaccines before, but literally didn't mention it here. It's totally reasonable and good for all of us to tackle pollutants, toxins, environmental quality. Yes, it's likely that many health problems would be resolved if we understood this better; that's a valid theory to pursue. But yes, I know, I know "maga bad"

I genuinely have no idea how to defend tech from big money. The reality is that the startup industry as a whole has been purchased by the vc machine, and success in any venture is highly coupled with your business network connections. They can afford to outpace you: it's play ball or fall behind. There is very much a "silicon valley royalty" oligarchy that cooperates and prevents real threats to their power

The world of tech VC is structured into a heirarchy where smaller VCs make money by selling their risky ventures to more powerful VCs after the company proves itself. It's a pyramid

The case studies are infinite here, but just look at something disruptive like Bitcoin was. The play? Blockstream was given 75m by the banksters to buy up the developers and communication forums. Eventually they were able to obtain the commit rights to the Bitcoin repo, and control the narrative on Reddit. At that point, the revolution was over, and the controlled manipulation to make money began -- a new unregulated space where they could move the price however they wanted

I don't really believe in the fediverse. Why? Because of the business power law: the top entity in any space controls more than the rest combined. Stuff like email providers consolidated. We already see lemmy.world as pretty much "the" instance. Imagine they sell out, which is a very hard temptation to refuse at a certain scale. Or big tech makes the hot new instance and out funds it

Yeah there were similar battles in music copyright about whether a style of music as a whole can be copyrighted. Overall, the answer is "hell no" but with a couple outlier cases. This steps a lot on stuff like parody, which is protected by the first amendment as "fair use". But it gets messy when things are "too similar" -- a grey area exists

To this day homies don't understand the simple rule that controversy sells. It powers the brand. It keeps it in the news every day. Manage a steady drip of "bad but not soooo bad" controversy and you win. Case in point: Trump

If you want something to end, get people to stop thinking about it. I suspect people just like having something to be mad about and "belong" to an ingroup of other people mad at it too

Inb4 people are mad at me for "supporting Elon" by saying the above, right? Because obviously what he's doing is so bad and evil that "how dare I" not stand up against it? Well, I hope you enjoy the ride

It seems like there's more to it since you generally also have to pay the union dues, is that factored into the math here?

Unions are tricky. Police union that keeps cops from being punished? Idk maybe not great. Union that pays dock workers that don't actually work to keep automation from ruining the job landscape? I'm not sure. Teachers negotiating for fair pay? Seems great!!

Like all things in society, we need nuance, not "unions good" or "unions bad"

No cap that might actually keep without boiling your bottles, you have on your hands a tomato shrub XD

Ah my thermometer only reads fahrenheit, so you know I'm naturally confused about temperatures

That's true, I love taking a hot water bath, and it's been completely safe so far

Today I learned that people do canning at home without a proper pressure cooker

I think for those that wanted Teslas, they realized they have to buy them before the tariff war gets too hot. So ironically there's a surge of purchases

Ideology aside, they make some very good cars, and I don't blame people for buying them

VPNs don't help here, the website asks you for your driver's license. Tbf giving your credit card to them is typically enough for them (big tech + govt) to construct a full profile of who you are anyway, and that was the original "age gate" -- though there are some services that make CCs modestly privacy preserving -- not the case for IDs

Good question. I don't actually know. My previous statement is a lie, I've only seen them in movies

I've been lucky enough to find some women that are a lot of fun to be around, and understand my interests at a deep level. I'd describe it as kind of like friendship, but with a woman

Men become feral if left alone long enough. They identify with the mountains and the moss. They smoke their pipe tobacco while looking longingly along a river. They maintain weight for the winter. They become one with the universe. Then they become horny and the great cycle continues

I've been using folding phones for the last 4 years and it's awesome. There's no downside and a lot of benefits

• yo screen dont break
• you can clip it onto your shirt with the flashlight on
• it fits into weird little pockets
• you can use it as a stand for another phone to watch youtubes

Everything is customizable if you are brave enough with the code :)

But yeah gnome is known for breaking changes & rewrites. As a result, Cosmic desktop was born to be more stable and reliable with plugins. That's ~alpha. But if you truly wanna DIY, then the tiling window managers are king. Stuff like dwm and awesomewm where you configure every part of the UI and can easily make your own widgets

Nice read, thanks. Flutter seems like a more obvious choice for apps: can run on web, understands mobile UX, has all the plugins ... but I like the path godot is on

Definitely outclassed by modern tech, switches have advanced a lot, you can find whatever you're looking for these days