You make some good points, but you’re making the same mistake you’re accusing your audience of making: you don’t understand why people are on the platform they are on.

I can’t speak for everyone, so I’ll just speak for myself: I’m not on Lemmy and Mastodon because I want them to become the next Facebook–even if it were some kind of libre utopia free of commercial interests.

I’m here because these weirdos are my weirdos and they like the same weird things I like. It’s a small enough sandbox that I can still recognize people here and there. These people have similar interests to me, and they post long, insightful rants about stuff that my family and other friends would not care about. The network effect is working in my favor.

The fediverse community feels more like home to me than the big social platforms. This feels more like it’s my community. If Lemmy gets as big as Reddit, I’ll probably go somewhere else.

I don’t use Linux because I want it to dominate the world. I don’t care if others use Linux or not. I use Linux because my computer finally feels like it’s mine again. I do what I want with it and I don’t have to worry about AI running or spying happening on it without my knowledge. As a bonus, it runs smoother.

The tradeoff is there are a few rough edges, and I have to learn some new things. But I enjoy learning. Lots of people don’t enjoy having to learn new things to just veg out with IG or YouTube. I get that. So, then don’t. Veg out with Windows, if that’s your thing. We can all do our own thing at the same time.

Choice is a good thing. Small communites are good. Decentralized is good because then big bullies can’t come in and take your community away. Small size and fragmentation are features, not bugs.

If Taylor Swift wants to set up her own Mastodon instance, she can. If she wants to cross-post between that and X, she can. I won’t be seeking out her content and it will be trivial for me to stay in my bubble without Taylor algorithmically popping up inside of it like she is on IG, FB, and X.

Thanks for the heads up. I knew he was a devout Catholic, but I never had the experience that he was pushing any agenda–as in he tends to just stick to technical content. I don’t mind watching people with different opinions than mine, but “cure the gay” is very problematic. I would be sad, since I really like his content. I will have to read up some more on this.

Along similar lines: another channel I have been watching is Smarter Every Day, where the host, Destin, is fairly open about his faith. That may put some people off, but overall I have found his content overall interesting and I don’t feel like he’s preaching to me, but others may be more sensitive to that. He’s currently pushing his own grill scrubber product pretty hard, which I find off-putting, but I see what he’s trying to do. I’m giving him a chance to get back to more interesting engineering stuff.

To address the others: yes, I know there are some potentially controversial entries, like Veritasium and Kurzgesagt. I have Veritasium “on probation” due to the change, but so far the new hosts have done a pretty decent job. Kurzgesagt is one I kind of leave for a long time and then come back every so often, because they have something interesting and their content is presented well. Totally understand if people choose to give them a skip.

Merriam-Webster says this:

“When cooking over a gas stove, avoid wearing loose, (flammable/inflammable) clothing that could catch fire easily.” Which word is correct: flammable or inflammable?

It’s a trick question. Both flammable and inflammable are correct, as they both mean “capable of being easily ignited and of burning quickly.” This makes no sense to the Modern English speaker. In English, we think of in- as a prefix that means “not”: inactive means “not active,” inconclusive means “not conclusive,” inconsiderate means “not considerate.” Therefore, inflammable should mean “not flammable.”

[…]

What do you do? If you want to keep things crystal clear, choose flammable when you are referring to something that catches fire and burns easily, and use the relatively recent nonflammable when referring to something that doesn’t catch fire and burn easily. Inflammable is just likely to enflame confusion.

Personally I use “inflammable”, but if I were writing warning posters I would have to reconsider that.

“flammable” actually has an interesting story:

Since 1980s use of the word, especially in safety warnings, has been sometimes discouraged lest it be misunderstood as “non-flammable” through confusion of the two prefixes in-.

Ref: inflammable on Etymonline

In no particular order:

• The Rest Is Science (podcast)
• Technology Connections/Connextras
• Jeff Geerling / Level 2 Jeff – Edit: see replies below
• Techmoan
• Gamers Nexus / GNCA
• LGR
• Switch and Click
• The Linux Experiment
• Tasting History with Max Miller
• Ben Eater (breadboard computers)
• Stuff Made Here (engineering)
• Up and Atom (science)
• Simon d’Entremont (photography)
• Words Unravelled and Rob’s Words (English language)
• Kurzgesagt – Edit: see replies below
• Veritasium – Edit: see replies below
• Tom Scott (the returned)
• Asianometry (tech history)
• Clabretro (retro networking and server hardware)

Edit: A few bonus channels that may be of interest but didn’t all fit the criteria for me:

• Action Retro - doing silly stuff with old computers - more recent discovery for me
• Dr Geoff Lindsey - Linguistics - I only watch occasionally - can be a bit heavy on the linguistic science for an amateur like me.
• Lftkryo - Linus Åkesson - an absolute wizard coding on the C64
• RetroBytes - computer history. Most of his content is mainly him just talking, so I can just listen while I’m doing something else
• Tech Tangents - more of a recently discovered channel for me. Vintage hardware. Underrated channel.
• Serial Port and Parallel port - vintage computers and networking. Brings back memories from my days working for an ISP.
• Honorary mention to Veronica Explains. She keeps things pretty basic so I don’t get a lot out of her videos, but I like her stance on open source and not selling out. She posts everything on Peertube as well.

You’re probably thinking of Paul Eggert.

Edit: I was a bit quick to post. The article I linked says Arthur David Olson (mentioned in sibling comment) started the TZ database, with Paul Eggert extending it and maintaining it later. The 2011 lawsuit is also mentioned in the Wikipedia page I just linked.

This already happens with TVs and streaming sticks.

Your comment led me down a bit of a rabbit hole and I found this on Wikipedia:

When writing in languages such as Danish and Norwegian, where the empty set character may be confused with the alphabetic letter Ø (as when using the symbol in linguistics), the Unicode character U+29B0 ⦰ REVERSED EMPTY SET may be used instead.

It also mentions what you are alluding to:

In the past, “0” (the numeral zero) was occasionally used as a symbol for the empty set, but this is now considered to be an improper use of notation.

And, as a programmer, don’t get me started on nulls…or undefined…or truthyness.

As a Norwegian, I find it annoying that they “stole” Ø for that purpose. I put a backslash through my zeros instead, so it looks different. I usually pick a coding font with dotted zeros for the same reason.

I write plain text. I just happen to format it like markdown.

Yep lol. I live in a small rural Ohio town. When I first heard it, it was from a friend’s wife and even he had to look it up. She grew up on a small farm nearby.

Like a fart in a skillet.

Great comment! Loved the flashbacks it gave me.

Just wanted to add some context to the quoted part of your comment:

However since few new users had download capabilities (because they never used command line FTP before)

A lot of people didn’t know how to download things, sure, but another barrier was most people were on dial-up. It would take a long time, sometimes on expensive calls, to download software. And getting disconnected often meant starting over.

Even if you didn’t mind downloading, it was unusual enough at the time that a lot of people probably just felt safer buying the disk from a retail store. It’s tangible. So people would get software either off the shelf at the store, or free as part of another purchase.

For example, when I worked for ISPs in the late 90s, we gave every customer a floppy or CD with a dialer and a browser. One popular one among ISPs was the Netscape dialer + browser bundle that we could customize and lock down the settings we wanted, like DNS, proxy, POP phone numbers. I remember we charged $19.95/mo for dial-up in 1998, but at least you got free email and a homepage so you could put up HTML pages with animated GIFs!

Early on there were many different browsers, too. Some based on Mosaic, some independent (e.g. Opera). Netscape eventually became the most common one. I think IE may have been based on Spyglass Mosaic. Microsoft definitively felt threatened by the idea that the web and Java (applets!) could make their entire golden goose, Windows, obsolete. Write Once Run Anywhere was an existential threat to them. So, eventually they ripped out the Microsoft Network (forerunner to MSN) and put Internet on Windows instead. It took them a while, though. And that was only in Windows 95. We were using the WWW before that. (Trumpet Winsock anyone?)

Sorry for going on an old-man rant. This triggered some really crusty memories.

I remember hearing about this in reports from major hurricanes in the South. Sounds pretty horrifying to be stranded on a roof or floating around on your own makeshift raft and then happening upon one of these ant rafts of doom.

Edit: thanks for the nightmares everyone. That’ll teach me to read Lemmy right before bedtime.

Yeah I’m not holding my breath. It will be around for a long time.

A couple of things I could see changing that would be a) Microsoft in financial trouble, b) AI both making it harder to keep up with security bugs, and making it easier to migrate away from legacy systems.

The chances of .net framework being among the first to go is slim though.

Good call. I’m getting mired in the k8s side right now and we have dozens of small web apps that need upgraded and a couple beefier framework apps that need essentially rewritten. Unfortunately I can’t escape lol.

We an ecosystem I overall like .net core and I agree it will stick around. I just can’t wait to get off IIS and into Linux even if that means complicating things with kubernetes.

Modern. Net is portable and fast, yes. But .NET framework is (mostly) not portable and it’s tied to the version of Windows is on. We’ll see when Microsoft decides to EOL it but so far it has not been announced. It’s not getting more than security updates now, as far as I know.

We’re converting everything we can (mostly web apps) to modern .Net (formerly core) so it can run on Linux. I may be stuck on Windows at work for the office apps, but my code runs on Linux.

No problem. I just spent a few minutes prompting Gemini and requested that it provided sources. I think it’s about right, because it matches what I remember (LTT had a YT privilege to replace videos in situ, where as GN did not), but the usual AI caveats apply. Sorry if that seems low-effort, but I don’t see a rule against quoting AI, and I’m not that invested in this either. (Mods: please take this down if it’s against any rules).

The response it gave me at first was a bit too long for this post so I asked it to summarize, and I’ve added the other sources it gave me to the bottom.

Here is a condensed summary of the controversy:

• The Core Issue: In August 2023, the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus (GN) published a massive 44-minute exposé criticizing Linus Tech Tips (LTT) for rushing content, which led to significant data and testing errors in their hardware reviews.
• The “VIP” Privilege: GN revealed that instead of taking down flawed videos and losing their algorithmic momentum, LTT was using a backdoor YouTube privilege—available only to massive creators through a partner manager—to silently replace the source video file on the backend after publication.
• The Proof: GN proved this by comparing the YouTube versions of LTT’s videos to versions syndicated on the Chinese platform Bilibili. Because LTT didn’t have the same VIP privilege on Bilibili, the original uncorrected videos containing glaring data errors were still live there, while the YouTube versions had been magically fixed.
• The Fallout: GN argued this was an unfair advantage that allowed LTT to prioritize quantity over quality without facing the massive financial and algorithmic penalties that regular creators face when forced to re-upload. Following the intense community backlash, LTT paused their entire production schedule to overhaul their quality control labs and promised full transparency regarding future video corrections.

Why GamersNexus Hates LinusTechTips

This video essay provides a comprehensive retrospective and breakdown of the entire Gamers Nexus and Linus > Tech Tips controversy, providing further context on the claims and the resulting fallout.

Sources:

• How to Upload New Video to Same YouTube URL?
• Mashable: “YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips halts production to address content errors”
• r/LinusTechTips: In-Place Video Replacements is an Unethical Practice
• Appuals: Gamers Nexus Expose Linus Tech Tips For Quantity Over Quality

Agreed. I don’t think I explained myself clearly enough: I want them to have a presence online. Among the reasons being exactly what you’re pointing out. However, I think at least for smaller cities with very little staff, it’s not realistic to ask them to literally self-host it (as in having a server on-prem running it). I would be fine with them outsourcing it or cloud-hosting it under their own domain. A potential solution for the small ones could be something like a state-level hosted service where municipalities can sign up and get their own accounts, for example. That would work even for something like Rittman, Ohio pop. 6,131.

It could definitely be me misremembering. I’ll see tonight if I can find it. Either way, it would be GN making that claim, so not exactly an independent source.