• 0 Posts
  • 48 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

help-circle



  • Reddit would become just another instance with no API control

    Being that large of an instance gives a lot of api control all by itself. Theoretically Chrome is just another browser and member of WHATWG. in practice, if they implement something it immediately becomes a de facto standard. Reddit would be the same.

    I wouldn’t bet on Huffman’s exit doing anything of consequence either. Reddit is now under the control of investors who want a return. One way or another, monetisation of users will increase.





  • Laura Chambers, who stepped into an interim CEO role at Mozilla in February, says the company is reinvesting in Firefox after letting it languish in recent years,

    It’s sort of amusing to me that Mozilla would let the Firefox browser languish. Is that not the raison d’etre of your entire organization? What are you doing with your time and effort if you are allowing your core product to languish? What would people say if Microsoft said “yeah, we’ve allowed windows to languish in recent years.” What an insane notion.


  • These are much older, but may still be worth reading:

    • William Powell’s “The Anarchists Cookbook”
    • The CIA’s “Simple Sabotage Field Manual”

    Ultimately, reading material is useful but does not by itself lead to action. Some organisation is required for that, and I don’t have a practical direction to point you in for that. Though you could always strike out on your own, of course.

    If you do decide to organise for the purpose of sabotage action, I’d caution against doing so online. One never knows who might be listening


  • sushibowl@feddit.nlto196@lemmy.blahaj.zone$200 rule
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    61
    ·
    2 months ago

    Nobody plays by the official rules, because the intention of the game is to bankrupt other players, knocking them out of the game. Not being allowed to play anymore is not fun. So, people tend to change the rules up to make it harder to get knocked out, which in turn leads to games becoming extremely long.

    Basically, the game is crap.




  • Yeah I agree I hate this kind of obstructive customer service

    I work as a software engineer on automated customer service systems like these, and boy let me tell you, obstruction is the name of the game. For example: don’t make the phone number too easy to find on the website because it will lead to too many calls. We nudge people toward the FAQ and such first so they can hopefully find their answer there. Then, we have chatbots like this which contain exactly the same information as the FAQ again. And only then might we offer you contact with a human.

    The essential problem is that support is a cost center, so cost savings is the name of the game. We optimize for metrics like:

    • “deflection” (number of calls averted because we pushed the user into automated tools instead)
    • “first call resolution” (percentage of issues resolved in one contact. How do we know if your issue is resolved? Simple, if you don’t contact us again we assume the issue is fixed)
    • “Average contact time” (pretty obvious, get the customer off the phone ASAP)

    If you manage to get on text chat with a human, typically they are handling two other conversations at the same time, that’s why they seem so absent all the time (and why companies love chat. Much cheaper than calling).

    I’m not saying we’re all diabolical here. There is a general agreement among everyone in the industry that we should help the customer as well as we possibly can. Indeed every CS manager will tell you how important we are to our brand image and NPS, how we strive to be the most customer-friendly company etc. etc.

    But the numbers don’t lie. If you look at the metrics that everyone actually optimizes for, it’s cost cost cost.






  • Andrea Dworkin was an influential feminist mainly in the '80 and '90. She was pretty clearly anti pornography, at least as it existed in her time (she died in 2005. Who knows what she might think of some of the stuff out there today). She’s also one of the most frequently misquoted feminists of all time, particularly by anti-feminists. she did not say all heterosexual intercourse was rape:

    Several reviewers accused you of saying that all intercourse was rape. I haven’t found a hint of that anywhere in the book. Is that what you are saying?

    Andrea Dworkin: No, I wasn’t saying that and I didn’t say that, then or ever. There is a long section in Right-Wing Women on intercourse in marriage. My point was that as long as the law allows statutory exemption for a husband from rape charges, no married woman has legal protection from rape. I also argued, based on a reading of our laws, that marriage mandated intercourse—it was compulsory, part of the marriage contract. Under the circumstances, I said, it was impossible to view sexual intercourse in marriage as the free act of a free woman. I said that when we look at sexual liberation and the law, we need to look not only at which sexual acts are forbidden, but which are compelled.

    The whole issue of intercourse as this culture’s penultimate expression of male dominance became more and more interesting to me. In Intercourse I decided to approach the subject as a social practice, material reality. This may be my history, but I think the social explanation of the “all sex is rape” slander is different and probably simple. Most men and a good number of women experience sexual pleasure in inequality. Since the paradigm for sex has been one of conquest, possession, and violation, I think many men believe they need an unfair advantage, which at its extreme would be called rape. I don’t think they need it. I think both intercourse and sexual pleasure can and will survive equality.

    It’s important to say, too, that the pornographers, especially Playboy, have published the “all sex is rape” slander repeatedly over the years, and it’s been taken up by others like Time who, when challenged, cannot cite a source in my work.



  • All well and good, but the term dictatorship here still refers to a situation where the state apparatus has complete control over the means of production, in other words a total centralisation of power. Indeed in Marxism-Leninism the dictatorship takes the form of a vanguard party forming a single party state. Whichever way you look at it, practical power resides with a very small group of individuals.

    The contrast with the eventual stateless communist society, in which power would be completely decentralised, is quite striking. It’s not quite clear to me how Marxist-Leninist theory envisioned the transition from one to the other, although it seems to me there was a general feeling that central economic planning and industrialization would fairly quickly lead to the end of scarcity altogether, which in hindsight seems… very optimistic.

    If you ask me, the ideals of communism mostly died around the same time as Lenin. Pretty much all communist states that have existed (and currently exist) are mainly interested in maintaining their own power structures rather than actually working their way towards the idealised communist society. Which pretty much just makes them dictatorships in the classical sense.