Captain Janeway

The common thread I’ve seen online is this:

• Google’s search algorithm sucks. I always append reddit.com to get good forum results
• Reddit’s search algorithm sucks.

These two tools are quickly becoming coupled for Google-Fu expert users. The historical forum history that goes back 3-5 years on Reddit is their goldmine. You can’t just make a new subreddit overnight when a sub gets paywalled. All of that historical data will be lost and paywalled.

I think a paywall could be an effective money maker for Reddit because they’ve basically become their own Google - in that each subreddit acts like a unique website with real, human, responses. The only problem is that reddit has a god awful search algorithm that they refuse to improve. So people use Google to essentially search reddit. The “whales” so-to-speak are the only people they need to capture. People like myself (frugal people) aren’t in their peripherals. But the people that think “I’ll pay each month for NYT” or “it’s just a few dollars for the WSJ” are going to use the same logic for Reddit: “it’s a small amount of money to have access to high quality forums on X, Y, and Z”.

In addition, this might bolster Reddit’s content even further. Since paywalled subs will automatically reduce the amount of AI content spammed on them, they will inherently increase the legitimacy of each forum.

Lastly, this will give them a path towards monetization for moderators which doesn’t require them skimming off of their own pay checks to achieve it.

Do I like this? No. Is this fair? Also no. People contributed to Reddit under the impression that their data would be available and accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. That implicit guarantee is being violated. It’s an afront to the hard working individuals that have developed these communities brick by brick.

But does this “solution” make a lot of business sense? Possibly. As long as they survive the changeover in the short term, I think they’ll thrive from this choice for the reasons I stated above.

Again, it’s going to give them a pathway for:

• Monetization
• Reduce AI spam (a big fear of all forums)
• They could make even more money off the back of this

I’m pretty much over Reddit anyways. Lemmy has been my backup social media for a while now. The Internet is still free - for now. I just hope we can all find better search engines and forums in the future. Google has been degrading. Reddit has been locking things down. We obviously need to pivot to other platforms. Or maybe just go back to the old days where you find niche forums hosted by some dude in his basement. Nothing wrong with that.

Well I’m guessing they actually did testing on local AI using a 4GB and 8GB RAM laptop and realized it would be an awful user experience. It’s just too slow.

I wish they rolled it in as an option though.

I think it makes sense. I like ChatGPT and I appreciate having easy access to it. What I really wish is the option to use local models instead. I realize most people don’t have machines that can tokenize quickly enough but for those that do…

Why didn’t you like Hashicorps Vault? I want to know for my own edification.

How do they prove your age? Non-technical savvy people probably just give their kids a phone and don’t do much to lock it down.

It’s Gerrymandering. That’s the answer to the question: why?

Nah it’s literally a waste of physical resources. Crypto currency is a waste of fossil fuels. AI has its functions at least.

For me it’s a pattern of “Ctrl+t” to open a new tab and then I search “my interesting query”. After that, I use “shift+tab” or “Ctrl+shift+tab” to navigate between tabs. Rinse and repeat until I get tired.

I don’t like searching in my current tab because I don’t want to lose the info I have.

I didn’t until apps started breaking. The snap version of steam, Firefox, and Unity (I think?) all started to have issues. When I googled around people would often ask “deb or snap”? I uninstalled the snap packages and installed the deb packages and most of my issues went away.

I ultimately switched to Linux Mint because I kept having stability issues and I was just desperate for a solution. But snap was not a great experience for me.

Yeah the majority do it and I think it’s bad.

Thermostats are easy to change out. So this isn’t a huge deal. But I don’t love the idea that tech isn’t built to be self-hosted or maintained in any meaningful way. If you’re not shipping an open source version of your software when you close up, you’re an asshole.

Yeah, self hosting isn’t for most lay people if it’s just a GitHub repo. But GitHub repos quickly become adopted by nerds like me who build tooling around it that eventually let lay people self host software with the click of a button.

Resolution limits

I see. Well without a command line, I wouldn’t call it a terminal. I think you just want tooling to be available on an Android? It would probably look like a button or series of buttons on an app. Maybe you could connect the dots between them to insinuate a pipe? E.g., you have a “mv” button and a “file” button. When you drag from mv -> file you could maybe kick off a process that moves the file. Maybe it would prompt you for other arguments like destination? I suppose this theoretical app could allow people to install additional tooling and make their own custom commands.

But I just feel like a button UI for these kinds of things will always be awkward. If you don’t have a keyboard/terminal interface, it’s hard to implement anything that would even behave like terminals in terms of functionality.

Great examples are already in the thread, but generally speaking the answer should be “no”. Smart phones are just slow at typing. In the case of a smart phone, hitting a button is far faster than typing a command. Not to mention our devices aren’t really being used for file management, tooling, complex work, etc. So it doesn’t even make sense to have a command line unless you’re a huge unix fan or if you are doing something quite niche. And in that case, I recommend just connecting via adb.

We’ll never know.

Yes and that’s how we ended up with American Football. In the original timeline, it never existed.

did you even read the full thread which provides the context you’re neglecting?

No.

Oh yeah for sure I could use virtual desktops in addition. But a single monitor doesn’t accomplish what I said. Hence why I brought it up as a counter point.

In some places, parking lots are monitored by security and you’ll be kicked out if you’re sleeping in your car in the parking lot.

Yeah I guess you could do something completely different than what I said.