I was blocked from posting relevant content to a dead group that was struggling to achieve member interaction. They made me do about 10 captchas to prove I’m not a robot. They blocked my account. It was a huge favor. I don’t miss the site.

On the flip side of that scenario, anyone who was actually interested in what I was posting in that group now has nothing to read. On any given site, I would estimate that more than 90% of the users visiting and reading the content are not interacting. Only a small percent of the users are doing anything to inspire the general population to visit the site. To me it’s idiotic to punish people who are contributing positive and constructive content. By doing so, you are giving hundreds of people one less reason to visit the site.

Users abandoning the platform is the only logical outcome when your algorithms punish/ban/discourage positive & useful interaction.

If I stood by Mark Zuckerburg 24 hours a day and wrote down everything he did, he’d be calling the police on me. This is exactly what he’s doing to Facebook users, he’s just doing it more deceptively. I consider his platform to be unethical and committing illegal activities remotely. Regardless of Capitalism being the motive, the act itself is already considered to be illegal offline. Why would people feel that it’s okay online?

I do wish that collecting data on users would be classified as pathological stalking and be deemed predatory & illegal.

Curiosity.

They were DARPA bailed them out with taxpayer money.

He failed miserably. Pending bankruptcy is not success. DARPA succeeded by funding him until he got a product that could make money. DARPA is the U.S. government. It’s me and other taxpayers. All the money he makes now is because the government spent money cushioning his fall so that he could survive. He’s just a face propped up to represent American technology.

I agree, and if it’s underground, accessibility has to be considered over and above pressurization. It’s more suitable for freight transport than it is moving people. It has to be earthquake-proof in some regions. Logistically, I don’t think it’s a good idea. It’s fun in concept because it makes us think we’re stepping into the future, but there are better visions for our future than a pressurized tube.

I think technology is more reliable than the people in our lives and we migrate towards reliability. This makes people even less reliable than the technology around us and it feeds a cycle that isolates us from others. The people who design the technology then manipulate their products to make them more addictive and feed what we respond to.

I have never felt regret over making one choice over another. My regrets in life is that the options I had to choose between were never acceptable to me from the beginning. Life is sometimes a process of choosing between the lesser of two evils. I would not describe myself as lonely, but if I was lonely, it’d definitely be because i chose to be lonely over some other option.

I haven’t seen an article on them in over 20 years. They were announced around the time Blu-ray disc were being released. I assume that mobile phones killed the potential market for them. People shifted from desktop computers to phones and tablets.

I am pretty sure that the head of our repair group was using some Google glasses for some motor repair training. The teachers were remote and the Google glasses were their eyes for reviewing the progress of the trainees.

I saw a nice video of the test run on the test track that our sister plant built for the Hyperloop. That was years ago and I’ve heard nothing since. I think Virgin is building something similar and the design seemed to be further along.

It’s easy to succeed when DARPA’s taxpayer money is funding everything. Tesla would have gone bankrupt if not for taxpayer dollar keeping it afloat.

I think it’s supposed to be more efficient, not just fast. I worked with a guy who helped design Maglev trains for China. With my limited knowledge, I’d think that a train floating above a track with no friction and being propelled by a magnetic wave has more potential that a train in a tube. I’m not familiar with the power and technology it takes to create that magnetic wave, but I still think it has more potential. I should have asked how the wave was created, but I was too amazed that the technology even existed.

One of our sister plants built the equipment too control the Hyperloop test track. I think it worked. I suspect that the hurdles of getting it implemented are cost prohibitive.

There was supposed to be a disc the size of a quarter to replace DVD’s.

Exactly. A first line of defense.

I’m more concerned that deleted content lingers on remote instances after it is deleted.

I am in the U.S. I don’t need to read an 80 year old fictional story to know the current state of affairs. My employer has a $3.5 billion back load of orders to fill. Too many people are vested in the success of America. Even if it were to collapse in <cough> 500 years, all of us will be dead and gone. Why would I be worried about that when there are thousand of unexpected ways for mayhem and destruction to plague the planet without the U.S. even being affected.

I think there is a far bigger risk of the U.S. exploding rather than collapsing. We sit on top of the world’s largest super volcano. Canadians would likely die from that too if it happened. My point is that there are far bigger things to be concerned about.

I was reading a social media site one day and a new blurb popped up about someone driving off the road in North Carolina and dying. The person wasn’t anyone noteworthy. It was just one sad event. One isolated loss of life. I went to the internet and looked up statistics on how many people die on any given day. I quickly did the math and realized that reading about every random death that happens in the day is an EXTREMELY poor use of my time. I would have no time to do anything actually constructive. I felt that the site was wasting my time with news that is inconsequential to my choices in life. It was needlessly depressing. It was completely useless news. Debating on whether the U.S. will collapse is an equal waste of my time. Even if inevitable mechanisms are in place, we will all be dead before it happens.

My occupation gives me a sense of self-respect. I know that our (i.e. my employer’s) products have been pro-actively attempting to make the world a better place. We donated $2 million & medical equipment to New York City after 9/11. We provided equipment to desalinate water for Israel. We built Guinness World record breaking mining equipment for Belarus. Wind farms. Solar power generation. Hybrid buses. Covid detection kits. If I retire today, I know that my individual contribution to the world will have positively affected millions of people.

For that reason, I’m taking my time to tell you, there are more important issues to discuss. This little pea soup of fear in which your brain is locked into is not a constructive use of anyone’s time. Too many people in the world are reactive rather than being proactive. Don’t be the flag flapping in the wind. The world is what we make it, and it is not just us waiting for some news story to react to. The best decision making in life is not done from the perspective of fear. That’s why Donald Trump was an idiot. He promoted fear. He made stupid choices out of fear. Be constructive.

That’s pretty stupid. It’s obvious that ignorant conversation like that is done to increase subscription rates and engagement with the audience.

Data is being collected at a higher level than social media sites. Content delivery networks are capturing the data. Mastodon uses a CDN. I think it’s safe to say that data is being collected across all the sites you visit, including the Fediverse.