The idea that a state government is unnecessarily at the mercy of any corporation is hard to comprehend. Especially, as in this case, a foreign corporation.

Open source shouldn’t only be the standard for governments. It should be the minimum requirement.

Those splice type of cheats require a highly skilled player who can play well for short amounts of time.

Another thing is that I feel like the era of the private phone number has passed. I see the use case for phone numbers for businesses, but people just don’t use them very much anymore otherwise.

Like, we don’t memorize them. We don’t dial them. They’re just entries in our contacts.

At this point, we could create an alternative way of contacting private phones. Something based on whitelisting instead of blacklisting. Something that can be easily shared but not easily guessed. Something that would be easy to trace who called you.

All of these phone scams rely on the idea that a stranger can just up and contact you without any effort. It’s ridiculous. If we got rid of that, we’d save people from untold billions of dollars of scams almost instantly.

My computer is good enough to run any games I want to play, even recently released FPS types of games at reasonably high settings. Still not good enough for Win11. My weak-ass tablet, though, was upgraded straight away.

Even people who build their own computers usually buy all the RAM they want at the time that they’re building it.

The biggest difference to them is likely the feeling that they’re losing their ability to upgrade, more than the actual upgrade itself. I still think that feeling is an important factor, though.

I forget where I heard it from, but somebody said that it’s strange how we believe that if we go back in time and make a small change, it will have a huge effect on the future, but we also believe that making small changes today won’t make any difference in the future.

Do you remember a few years ago, it came out that some company was working on a new idea that, when you were given an advertisement on a TV, it could require you to say the product name aloud or it wouldn’t continue?

I try not to concede anything related to advertising because everything they want seems so dystopian.

This is kind of an intentional cognitive dissonance for Twitch due to its having a conflict of interests.

On the one hand, it wants to tell viewers and advertisers that it cracks down on adult only content.

But on the other hand, the more adult content they let through, the more money they make.

It would be very easy to either make an age restricted section where adult stuff would be allowed, or to completely banish streamers who are the modern equivalent of burlesque. But one is bad PR and the other is bad for revenue.

I read relatively slowly, but I have the ability to read much faster. I simply like reading more slowly. I have this weird suspicion that people who read very quickly are getting information more quickly, but that they’re either not absorbing it fully, or they’re not enjoying it as much as I do. But that’s obviously a biased perspective.

Every part of your comment has something factually wrong or fallacious.

I don’t get feedback just because you read it.

My reading the part I am giving feedback on is a prerequisite for actually giving feedback. I am obviously a person who graciously responded to your request, not somebody that you somehow ordered to give feedback. I don’t know what you think you gain from viewing it this way.

I’m thankful for feedback but my sentence was accurate.

I didn’t say it was inaccurate, but that it didn’t tell people why to read the article. You didn’t ask me to tell you inaccuracies. You asked for “feedback”. You also don’t seem to be thankful, because if you were thankful, you’d simply accept the feedback instead of throwing up straw-man arguments.

I don’t benefit if you read it.

You have exactly repeated your previous statement that I already proved wrong.

I will offer you one last piece of feedback. Just stop arguing. You can never look gracious pursuing an argument where you ask for advice and then argue with people who took time out of their day to help you.

Upvotes and downvotes don’t determine whether people are factually right, but they do help you gauge what people think when they read your comments, and what I’m seeing is that you’re not ingratiating yourself to the people who you are asking to read your article. Even if you could win this argument, and you can’t, you wouldn’t want to, because you’d look bad in doing so. When you ask for feedback, and feedback is given, just graciously accept it. If it’s bad feedback, then just ignore it.

I don’t benefit if you read it.

You don’t benefit financially, but there are other benefits. For example, you specifically asked for feedback, and you have received some.

It’s true that the actual “story” is very short. 1 kB is 1000 bytes and 1 KiB is 1024 bytes. But the post is not about this, but about why calling 1024 a kilobyte always was wrong even in a historical context and even though almost everybody did that.

Yes. But it does raise the question of why you didn’t say that in either your title:

Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes

or your description:

I often find myself explaining the same things in real life and online, so I recently started writing technical blog posts.

This one is about why it was a mistake to call 1024 bytes a kilobyte. It’s about a 20min read so thank you very much in advance if you find the time to read it.

Feedback is very much welcome. Thank you.

The title and description were your two chances to convince people to read your article. But what they say is that it’s a 20 minute read for 10 seconds of information. There is nothing that says there will be historical context.

I get that you might want to make the title more clickbaitey, but why write a description out if you’re not going to tell what’s actually in the article?

So, that’s my feedback. I hope this helps.

One other bit of closely-related feedback, for your writing, in general. Always start with the most important part. Assume that people will stop reading unless you convince them otherwise. Your title should convince people to read the article, or at least to read the description. The very first part of your description is your chance to convince people to click through to the article, but you used it to tell an anecdote about why you wrote the article.

I’m the kind of person who often reads articles all the way through, but I have discovered that most people lose interest quickly and will stop reading.

I also assume that people are answering that way because they thought it was a question.

However, it’s also possible that they saw it described as a 20 minute read, and knew that the answer actually takes about 10 seconds to read, and figured that they’d save people 19 minutes and 50 seconds.

If you’ve been to Reddit since the API meltdown, it’s pretty clear that large sections of it were fucked by angry moderators, and still remain that way. I don’t think the fediverse was ready to take over, but Reddit very clearly has fewer people working for them for free.

Specifically, there are several subreddits where they used to be strict about submissions, and now they let anything mildly related in.

I’m honestly pretty surprised that they still haven’t recovered. At this point, I’m hoping that their mediocrity will continue to push people away until Lemmy can catch up.

For all of you guys that aren’t going to read the relatively long article, here’s a TL;DR

The artist in question is Devon Rodriguez, who you will more likely recognize if I say he is “the painter who draws people on the subway, from TikTok.”

He did a gallery, and this critic, Ben Davis, said that these types of subway portraits are nothing new. The portraits are good as far as realistic portraits go, but as an art critic, the portraits themselves are not very noteworthy. The videos of him making the portraits are what is noteworthy.

Devon Rodriguez didn’t like the review and pointed his fans at it. His fans didn’t actually read the review (nor did Devon). The fans really got stuck on the part where the critic said that you might not recognize the artist until he called him “the painter who draws people on the subway, from TikTok.”

On Saturday morning, I woke up to a tidal wave of anger from Rodriguez on Instagram, tagging me across scores of posts. Hundreds of his followers went on the attack, swarming my Instagram: “loser,” “hater,” “pathetic,” “jealous,” “your a dick,” and on and on and on. There were many creative variations on “kill yourself.” Others said they were going to get me fired, or said things like, “we are going to start a cancellation campaign against you.” A large number thought that defending Rodriguez meant calling me bald, ugly, fat, or whatever they thought could get under my skin. Most didn’t seem to have actually read my article. A contingent went after my wife. “Some women will do anything for money,” one commented. That one was funny, actually.

Meanwhile, Devon makes public posts saying, of the critic, “love will always outshine being a hater, I hope I taught you that today.”

The critic goes on to say that Devon Rodriguez’s videos are obviously faked, and posts the most obvious example he could find, where another TikToker dances on the London Underground for 30 minutes while he makes a sketch of her that clearly seems to be from a photo not taken at the time. The whole thing has multiple camera angles, and then she acts surprised when he reveals that he drew her.

He ends talking a lot about how problematic parasocial relationships can be. These are where a lot of people feel like they “know” a famous person, but he clearly doesn’t know them. And the celebrity ends up with a lot of people acting all wacky to defend him.