US universities are pro football teams with a sideline in education.

They have ARPU targets (Average Revenue Per User) and UAC targets (User Acquisition Costs). Whales contribute significantly to the game’s bottom line. Non-paying customers are vital, because player population is a game quality, and Whales need a population to notice how awesome they are.

But game companies don’t tend to separate Whales from other players (at least not the ones I’ve worked for), they tend to care about ARPU, which is more stable, and a much easier target to shoot for. And they want to keep UAC down, which lowers the required ARPU for a successful game.

Boost is my favorite. Clean UI and attractive icon.

I would chalk most of that up to relative nascence, and mostly volunteer labor. I would expect things to improve. In the meantime, I’m fine with my lemmy and mastodon instances, and don’t feel a lack of much.

People who tell you to do scrum correctly are themselves not doing scrum correctly.

Whatever the authors leanings are, they make a good point. Lemmy has followed Karl Popper’s maxim “Tolerant societies must be intolerant of intolerance.” It’s just that simple.

Just because they can take control of the domain doesn’t mean they somehow have access to the data any servers that used the domain have. Those servers were, i feel confident, not in Afghanistan. Domains are just redirects, so the Taliban have nothing on any of the users.

I found Guards! Guards! to be a great intro book to Discworld. The Watch series and the Witches series are both great to start someone out on.

Hate this. Every time, I seem to guess wrong.

Guess I’m a robot.

People responding to the meme that needing cars isn’t evil, and is required for many areas, are missing the point of the meme.

The meme is complaining about areas we built that can exist as they are only if everyone owns a car. If we weren’t so consumerist, and if white people could better tolerate living near black people, we wouldn’t have so much of the population living in suburban areas where cars are so necessary. A lot more people would live in circumstances where public transport is more viable for them.

And, of course, some shade thrown at the car buyers who buy comsumptively-extreme cars to do piddling stuff in. The number of basic sedans that can be had with 200+hp engines, or F150 pickups with massive gas-guzzling engines, that only get used for surface road driving one or two people around, is pretty ridiculous.

The main wrong thing about the meme is that it’s assuming our situation was created specifically so that evil corporations could sell cars and gas… no, they’re profiting from, and exacerbating, the problem of white flight from cities. Most of the country’s problems come in large part from racism first, and then profiteering on top of that.

Call servers “Lemmy Service Providers” and people might make the connection with what ISPs do.

Embrace, Extend, and Enshittify.

I am able to see other communities, but not comment on posts in them without a login for that instance, in my experience. Is that supposed to be the case?

Cory Doctorow termed it “Enshittification”, and wrote about the process here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys