balder1991

Yeah definitely. I just heee to disable social media and anything that’s based on addictive behavior, algorithmic feed etc. and I automatically start doing more interesting things online, such as read Wikis of subjects I like, play with programming etc.

The problem is everything that’s driven by engagement and made to keep you scrolling artificially is toxic by consequence.

At the very least they’ll create a legal precedent.

“Italian organized crime groups receipts have been estimated to reach 7–9% of Italy's GDP.”

But I guess pirating books is a more pressing problem.

Even North Korea can’t stop pirating completely.

This could be solved in other ways. For example, the software can simply track what % of the books are actually read without this extra step of borrowing and returning. Just like when you listen to music on streaming services.

Imagine if you had to select the specific album in a streaming service and choose to borrow it for x days, having to “return” it and borrow again if you wanted to keep listening, and being limited to 4 albums at a time.

Like… if the book is digital, why do you have to borrow and return? This makes no sense. They want to replicate a bad experience that doesn’t need to exist, what’s the point of that?

At the same time, they unfortunately can’t imagine things being better. That’s why societies differ a lot between cultures in different parts of the world.

Doing it silently without consent is definitely not okay. Or if they do such a thing, they should notify the user and give an option to rollback if they wanted. That’s what a company that respect users would do.

I just wish the price of having the publish feature was slightly lower. They’d get much more subscribers, including me.

Wouldn’t be surprised if all this crap is being written by ChatGPT nowadays with no input from a real person.

Now thinking about it, LunaticdIn seems like the most fertile ground for AI to take over with this sort of bullshit.

If only they weren’t so greedy they could have built a nice ecosystem. The failure of BB10 had everything to do with people at the top being completely disconnected with the market.

I was part of a team in the university that was like a partnership with BlackBerry and our IT lab would code native BB10 apps for some Brazilian companies.

So what used to happen was that the professor responsible would have constant meetings with the BB team that sounded more like those companies cult-like brainwashing thing. I don’t know how to explain, but he’d come always excited that BB10 would take over the market because iOS devices had “lost” their status and hence become a “mainstream” device. They wanted to fit the niche of people owning a BB10 device for status reason, and because of that they were supposed to be very expensive.

I think anyone who remembers the devices knows they were priced higher than the most expensive iPhones and it just didn’t make sense. They didn’t have anywhere near the amount of apps that Android and iOS had already (and which were quite mature at that point), so instead they added an Android runtime in it and resorted to create hackathons where people would port their Android apps to BB10 and earn devices or other gifts. But the half-assed ported apps were terrible and riddled with bugs.

It all felt kind of scummy from the start, because they’d use this misleading advertising that their App Store had x million apps or something, but more than 90% of if were shitty ported apps that didn’t integrate with the system or half-asses apps that people uploaded to the store to get gifts or money (they also didn’t have any incentive to do any quality control in their store).

I still remember one lad we knew in the university who uploaded dozens of apps without consent from the actual owners that were just shitty old games and many packaged web-apps that were the same useless thing with different skins just to get the prizes.

Yet the people working in the labs were always brainwashed to think BlackBerry 10 was doing incredibly well, but whenever I looked on forums or Reddit everybody was talking about how crazy it was for anyone to buy it. Like… people wanted smartphones for the apps and although Facebook had a very limited BB10 version, Instagram for example never bothered with it.

They probably have patented some underlying technology they spent time researching to make the product viable.