The corporatization of the world feels like it’s coming to a head. You’re not allowed to own anything anymore. Everything is a subscription and it’s impossible to afford property. You just rent everything putting you on constant edge until you die.

I disagree. HD lasted a super long time. That there would be a new standard after HD was never a question. As far as standards go it lasted a very long time and did about as good as any standard could.

64 bit was an absolute necessity. That it was a lot of work to switch to does not mean it was overhyped.

I don’t like Facebook but that doesn’t mean its success can be ignored. It became the biggest social network and was regularly mentioned in the same breath as Google and Microsoft, so I can’t see how it’s overhyped as much as I don’t like them.

Judging by the article even the snippets are pure nonsense:

Black lace pajamas, very short skirt, the most important thing, now this lace pajamas are all wet.

It could be vastly improved upon with the new LLMs, but these are just complete rubbish.

What I don’t understand is who is downloading and reading these books?

You can’t truly delete anything period, anything posted publicly can be copied. What’s more important is if it’s verifiable. I can trivially edit your post locally and take a screenshot and pretend it’s you, but there’s nothing verifying you actually said it.

It’s possible through encryption to verify that something was actually said, but most of the time we verify things through trust, we trust centralized services to have an accurate record of what happened. We trust social networks to not alter the original content posted to it. We trust archive organizations to store an original copy securely as it was at the time.

But that trust can be broken. u/spez himself has admitted to altering comments (happen in 2016, huge red flag), and we can only trust that archivers did their job properly.

You can prove that a post was truly made and unedited via encryption, but even then you’re still trusting that all the clients you are using are not doing anything nefarious in between. Unless you read the source code and compile your own applications you can’t know for sure, so still, trust is a big part.

But if you can prove a post was made, how do you unprove it? I don’t really see how that’s mathematically possible. So when you “delete” something on the internet, you can’t really remove it completely.

So what does “deleting” something actually mean? What it really means is “please stop hosting this and monetizing it on your server”, and it’s not even possibly to be sure they deleted all of it internally, you can only really check that they are no longer showing it to the public. That’s easy enough to do when it’s a centralized service, but for anything decentralized it means going to every single server and getting them all to delete it. You can send out a signal asking them nicely to delete it, and I don’t know if Lemmy has this, but even if they did it’s unenforceable to get a server to fully delete something, but you could put some rules in place that it needs to be publicly inaccessible otherwise the instance gets defederated or something, but I don’t know how hard it would be to implement something like that. The resources required to verify that all instances have stopped serving it and don’t begin to serve it later may be far too high to be practical.

Is it technically possible to ensure anything is deleted in a distributed system?

I like body or king size pillows for this

I think there’s a lot they could have done better. They could have injected ads into the API feeds directly so they could still get revenue and make it part of the terms that a client can’t remove them, and offer a paid version of the API that doesn’t have ads. That could work with the clients who could then continue to offer a free ad supported version or a subscription that removes them with Reddit getting a cut. I would have been totally understanding of that and reddit could have gotten a ton of subscription revenue by leveraging the existing distribution channels.

They’re a company, they have to pay the bills, I get that, but they went over the line with their deception, greed, and hunger for power. This wasn’t just about making money, it’s also about control. This was all just an underhanded move to kill 3rd party apps without outright banning them. They want total control so they can continue to make ui decisions that make then more money at the expense of the user experience with their users not having an alternative client to go to. They clearly don’t have any respect for their users so why would I use them?

I have the same take as well. Basically fast accessible IDEs with instant feedback and type interference allows you to not have to add types to things where it’s already obvious.

I’m also not sure how it’s enforceable in a distributed system.

This thing failing had to be completely inevitable. I can’t imagine a universe where it didn’t eventually happen, and now multiple countries need to waste millions of dollars trying to find this thing and risk the lives of multiple rescuers.