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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • There are lots of reasons why governments might desire to get rid of physical currency.

    1. Crime - Physical money is the option of choice for criminals as it allows them to make off-record transactions so their activities are hard to trace

    2. Tax - When otherwise legal business is conducted in cash, it’s possible for business income or employee pay to be undeclared or underreported, meaning the government is losing out on tax revenue. This is huge, and the gov really wants their slice of that cash.

    3. Manufacturing and distribution - A minor point, but it is expensive to make physical currency, as well as to keep improving it to prevent forgeries and such. Getting rid of physical currency removes this problem.

    I’m sure there are other reasons but those are what came to mind.

    Despite these factors, any move to a fully cashless society is controversial, because not everyone is in a position where being fully digital is feasible. It has the worst effects on those who are already marginalised and disadvantaged in society, like the homeless, who may not even be able to open a bank account.

    So I think it will be quite a long time until it might happen.



  • Yes - by most definitions. It’s powered by user-generated content and is based on interaction between users through engagement with that content, which is voted and scored.

    There is a difference which I personally feel makes reddit less harmful than other social media, however, which is the algorithm - or lack of it.

    In most social media, the algorithm exists to continually serve people the exact content they engage with in a constant feed, which is IMO the most socially damaging part of social media because it creates endless doomscrolling, toxic echo chambers, promotion of sponsored content, and a whole raft of psychological problems in users.

    The Lemmy homefeed is more organic, and scrolling through ‘all’ you see content genuinely from everywhere, in a less curated way based on upvotes, not individual algorithmic tailoring. And that’s maybe not as “engaging” but it’s far less damaging.



  • Sure, I was there then. I was on Facebook right in the beginning, when you needed a university email address to even sign up.

    So that’s true, but it’s also true to say that early Facebook wasn’t the same as modern Facebook. Early Facebook was - as the name suggested, a place to connect with friends, share pictures and plan events. You’d probably check it once a day to see what was happening, but that was it. And your home feed would be a direct and unfiltered view of what all your friends posted, in the order they posted it, without bias. And you could easily catch up on everything that had happened and then you were finished.

    It’s the birth of the algorithm and infinitely scrollable tailored content feeds that really defines what social media has become.

    This and mobile Internet have really gone hand-in-hand. The algorithm has made us want to be scrolling all the time, and mobile Internet has made it possible .





  • tiramichu@lemm.eetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlIs everything the worst?
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    19 days ago

    I don’t think anyone would claim that literally going outside is gonna fix anyone’s life, or cure this broken-ass world we live in.

    But the sentiment isn’t wrong.

    It means: Take some time for yourself. Enjoy the small things. Exercise. Feel the sun on your face. Leave your phone in your pocket, and stop doomscrolling. See the world in your own terms, not the terms others want to force upon you.

    It helps. You can’t change the whole world, but you can change yourself.









  • Gotta say, the opening of Nier Automata is something I tell people how much I hated! It’s a great story, but it’s bad game design.

    It’s a mix of cutscenes and gameplay that takes about 40 mins to get through, there’s no saving possible at any time, and if you die then you go right back to the beginning.

    And I did die, twice. So yeah, that was a slog, and by the third time round I’m not enjoying the storytelling anymore.

    If you are actually good and didn’t die, I can see why you had a different and more enjoyable experience :)



  • As a developer who has worked on similar systems, I can see why it likely ended up that way. Not justifying it, only understanding it.

    In the case of banks, it’s likely that;

    • They needed to make 2FA mandatory for all customers, rather than opt-in. This means they needed an MFA method which a person of any technical competency can use. SMS is the “lowest common denominator” here, so they chose it.

    • The cost of sending SMS messages is high, but banks are (unsurprisingly) rich and can afford it

    It would be great if banks offered better MFA methods, but development time in old-school banks is often ridiculously long as it is a very risk-averse industry that is also slowed down a lot by bureaucracy. It’s likely they would choose something else on the roadmap, and stick with SMS as simply “good enough”