I certainly agree that the Internet should be by and for individuals; whether we can in the long term do completely without corporations, I am not sure, but the current “algorithmic curation” is definitely a problem.

I mean I agree with that in principle, but: before the Internet, of course big corporations influenced kids and adults! Before the internet only big corporations had the resources and practical ability to distribute any information to a lot of people.

The promise of the internet was that we would have a society where we could all have a say and the flow of information would be democratized. You are right that, because of “algorithms”, that promise hasn’t really been fulfilled.

I live in a country where the voting age is 16. It used to be 18 and I don’t think this change has caused many concrete policy changes: young people aren’t big or unified enough a voting bloc to meaningfully affect the results.

I tend to be in favor of letting young people have more rights at a younger age in general (in part because I remember being young and not seeing any good reason why I shouldn’t), so I’m definitely not in favor of raising it to 18 again or further.

which isn’t a bad thing either if you want to encourage people to have more kids (which of course is debatable whether that should be a goal, but many people think it should)

maybe someone once performed a command like “for all files in this folder without an extension, append .exe to them” and didn’t exclude subdirectories from that

no nothing similar has ever happened to me, nuh-uh, why would you ever suspect that

I think that mainly mocks the idea that if only people talked to each other more, communicated with each other more, tried to see things from the others’ perspective, then everything would be great and everyone would arrive at a common conclusion.

Fortunately no one is forced to use it in a world where OpenStreetMap and apps that use it exist (OSM is exactly as good as volunteers made it).

I think it mainly means that Google invests a lot more money in the quality of its navigation for cars than bicycles, meaning that they think it’s pretty likely that the cycling directions might lead you into a place where it might not be a good idea to cycle.

The Internet used to be a common resource and information system.

Now it is a propaganda warzone.

I think the problem is most people can tolerate anything except the outgroup.

Honestly I still think that to some extent; at least I think it would be like that if we didn’t have corporate social media showing us things only very selectively, but had something structured like old web forums where there was not even a way to sort by popularity.

What is the difference between USA and USB?

One connects to all your devices and accesses your data, the other is a hardware standard.

Nick Fuentes was born in 1998, so it’s been a few years since he was 18.

Also relevant: teenage me thought the future would be awesome because people like me would be in power. Nick Fuentes is several years younger than me, I would classify him as having more power than me nowadays (after all, journalists report on his opinions about things; journalists do not report on mine), so we can tell that my prediction was very wrong.

Of course you can use XML that way, but it is unnecessarily verbose and complex because you have to make decisions, like, whether to store things as attributes or as nested elements.

I stand by my statement that if you’re saving things to a file you should probably use XML, if you’re transferring data over a network you should probably use JSON.

Yes and it is a good thing we don’t anymore.

IMHO: XML is a file format, JSON is a data transfer format. Reinventing things like RSS or SVG to use JSON wouldn’t be helpful, but using XML to communicate between your app’s frontend and backend wouldn’t be either.

do they do that in xml? never seen that

Yeah why would you go on a microblogging platform if you didn’t want to see “weird political shit”?

I think it originally did under old Unix, it was what /home is nowadays; “Unix System Resources” is a backronym.