I can’t say what their corporate culture is like now, but they’ve had a pretty poor reputation in the past, including the notion that the lowest performing 10% should be fired every year. The Amazon folks I’ve known have been great people - not at all the Gordon Gecko types you’d imagine from that - but culture in large corporations varies a lot by the team you’re in.

I came up with a saying back in the 90s when I was doing the startup scene - “Do you want it right, or by Tuesday?” Sometimes they do indeed need it by Tuesday. More of the time they have no idea why you need the extra days to get it right. But it’s really important for those in a leadership position - whether they’re managers or senior engineers - to push back and set expectations.

I like their trackpads a lot, but if you use the MacBook with an external monitor like so many of us do, it’s simply not an option. I stick with Logitech for mice though. Even their crappy mice are good, and their high end mice are great.

I also have to disagree with the author’s take on the evolution of the mouse. I like having buttons to navigate forward and back when browsing the web, I like the multifunction scroll wheels, and I even like the sideways scroll wheels when looking through large charts or tables of data. When I used to game more on services like WoW, I had a mouse with a ton of buttons mapped to all kinds of macros and skills.

The only people I don’t see using mice or external trackpads are PM types who don’t use external monitors and spend 80% of their days moving from meeting to meeting.

The Apple trackpad has remained in my opinion the best one ever developed and continues to improve generation to generation. They lost the script on keyboards for a hot minute there, and their mice have always been horrible to the point of deliberate non-functionality, but those trackpads are amazing. Their external trackpad has also come a long way in the past few years.

90% of the kind of content you’re talking about can be removed by blocking a couple of domains and a handful of users. I believe that they’ve been defederated from most of the larger instances. You will run into a lot of hot takes on lemmy but that’s not too different from reddit.

I think there’s a few reasons why they may be more prominent on lemmy, though. Communities like r/politics took a while to stabilize and had a large and active moderation team that helped remove the most extreme material, and the community itself was large enough that it was representative of a large swath of the US population. Hot takes would often get downvoted into invisibility, which frustrates people who use forums for trolling, and karma could be used to restrict posting. AFAIK those are not qualities or capabilities currently found on lemmy. I haven’t really read the docs - I prefer to just be a user here - but I have seen discussions that indicate that downvotes don’t get tracked as well as suggestions they be removed altogether.

Also, a new technology - especially one associated with sectors of the FOSS community and anti-centralization - are by their nature going to attract an initial user base that skews in certain directions. I think it was Eric Raymond who observed that hackers, politically, tend to be either socialists or libertarians with very little in between. ESR was being a bit tongue in cheek and the hacker culture back then was different than it is now - or rather computer culture as a whole has expanded so much that the old school hacker types form a much smaller percentage.

I think the most problematic part about lemmy which will ultimately limit its adoption is the chaos that comes in from having dozens of communities across dozens of instances that all cover the same topics. It makes discovery much more challenging than it is on Reddit, and it doesn’t help that many of the clients can make it challenging to identify which topics are actually the most used. One of my favorite clients keeps defaulting to ordering by a most recently created timestamp or something - I’m not really sure. It doesn’t have the support to sort or filter by number of users (although it displays the metric).

The other issue is that I end up having to remain on All rather than just my subscriptions because there’s so few users, so I end up with a ton of random anime, for instance, which I can’t effectively block because they’re all posted in new subs that crop up all the time, and I can’t block using wildcards (which would help a lot).

I do hope that between the lemmy devs and the app devs, they can address those issues.

From their q&a:

gitspamdum is a bot, I just created a fake account and bid for 999 trillions, no verification were requested in the whole process and 1 nanosecond later gitspamdum bid after me, I tried this twice, my only purpose was to expose the absurdity of the whole thing, if Proton really take this thing seriously please just cancel all auctions and place them in a serious website

You can just immediately resell it to Elon for $44B.

This is not going anyplace good.

Also, the hand movements look completely unnatural. It’s like that scene from 30 Rock where Jack Donaghy is shooting that spot and winds up holding two coffee cups.

Also, the woman suppressing a grin while talking about the war in Gaza was beyond disturbing.

And this is their most curated footage. This is their best stuff used to show off their work.

They haven’t climbed out of the uncanny valley yet.

They’re called mini aux speakers. The sound quality will be absolute crap and it will stick out like a giant goiter, but they’re pretty cheap and easy to find. They used to be used for mp3 players and walkmans that didn’t have a built in speaker.

Be cautious about carrying it in your pocket. Bending over and sitting down with it plugged into your phone can put stress on your aux port and kill it, leaving you worse off than when you started.

Lemmy Tundra

Good call! That way we can draw either blue or white mana for anti-reddit counterspells and protection. Control decks were always my favorite.

I’ve reached the point where “better” mostly means “smoothest experience.” That might include not crashing and low overhead. That almost certainly includes a smooth and predictable UI. That means a well thought out system design that balances performance considerations with size and weight, battery life, controller layout, and little things like fan noise.

Honestly, I’m fine with my Switch. It was my first handheld, and I appreciate the variety of games as well as the convenience. I ordered the steam deck because I have a massive library of unplayed or unfinished games on steam, and it seemed like the right way to go for that. I have a windows PC that is still sitting wrapped by movers and never unpacked.

For my “It just works” low water mark, the Deck looked like my best bet for non-switch gaming, and maybe now I can get past the first town on RDR2.