Or they could just mean they would pay down the house, which can be a big financial boon, even if not completely paid off. If you are in the US and have a normal 30 year fixed rate mortgage, then paying down 50k means you get to save on the remaining interest due on that 50k - so you don’t just save 50k, but the compounding interest due on that 50k across the remaining liftime of the loan.
*index fund
I mean, I’m not saying that all humans are completely self-interested. I think volunteering in your local community is often a great way to meet some excellent people. And local volunteering contains a lot of the feedback loops that will encourage normal, well adjusted people to participate - you are becoming part of a real social group, a group of friends, who are doing something positive that they can see the results of in their own lives.
And I think the pioneers in early free software had a lot of these same things going for them - they were part of a small, dedicated community, leaving their mark on the world.
But a lot of foss software has been written by people either in non-profits, or in for-profit organizations who finagled their way into getting paid for the work. Eg, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Docker were / are mostly written and maintained by people who are being paid for their work.
I think Red Hat probably shows the best way forward. Write the software as opensource, then sell hosting and support as a service.
And as part of the software they provide, they should also provide an ootb way to ask people for money. Essentially, you could have a fediverse instance that has moderation and (likely at least in the beginning) content creation/aggregation/curation as part of the service. The selling point being that the feed and comments are of so much higher quality that it is worth it to chip in $1/month or whatever to participate.
Hot take: all this drama exposes the real problem with the utopian anarchist/communist/socialist philosophies of many Lemmy users - the philosophies assume that, unshackled from the oppression of a ruling class and the need to work for sustenance, people will naturally come together to work for the good of humanity. But outside the human instinct to help people we know in real life directly, the desire to be pro-social falls off rapidly as the necessary tasks increase in abstraction. People need some other form of motivation beyond altruism.
In a market economy, that motivation is profit.
It the fediverse, the motivation is getting to be the king of your own little castle where you can push your personal political philosophy on the world. Well-adjusted, happy, reasonable people don’t spend thousands of hours writing code for obscure social media sites in their free time. Those people go snowboarding. Or they hang out with their friends. Or they volunteer at a food bank. Or they raise a family, or start their own business, or hit the gym and fuck a bunch of hot people. Developing software is almost universally an exercise in frustration - broken dependencies, undocumented side effects, protecting against cybersecurity threats, unreproducible bugs, angry and ungrateful users, passive-aggressive stack overflow comments, etc. Only the truly unhinged would do such work for free - like if you desperately need a platform to shout that Mao did nothing wrong.
The real solution isn’t to build an anarchist utopian social media site. It is to stop expecting people to do work for free. If you want reasonable people to develop a good social media site, you need to pay them. If you want mods who moderate to foster positive, helpful discussions instead of for the sake of their own egos, you need to pay them. They could be snowboarding instead! Snowboarding is so much more fun than deleting bot accounts and getting death threats from racist incels.
Just get a slice next time you go through. Its $2, and you get a snack + qa. Imo, better than a lot of dedicated pizza shops, and cheaper
The impression I’ve gotten, fooling around with it at home and talking to friends in tech and hearing from actual users online is:
A good developer can develop faster with it. Giving it small, discrete tasks for first drafts or throw away code (like bash scripting) can work well.
It’s better google. If you are trying to figure out if a function that will do a thing exists, or are trying to figure out what architecture would work best in a given situation, it can be helpful. But in these cases, it should be used carefully - dont ask it to do your work for you, ask it to give you options, pros and cons, and sources. But in this regard, it can do a lot to help an experienced developer become more productive faster in a stack or tool they are unfamiliar with.
Vibe coding is a real thing, and it can work. For internal tools in a small company, a non-technical person can create a mostly functional piece of software to get a job done. My expectation is that over time, these people will become real developers, as they end up dealing with bugs and edge cases in the vibe code they created.
At the top end of ai-for-software-development, there is some sort of something with automated iterative looping and verification, where a developer can translate a set of requirements into code, and then a collection of ai agents iteratively develop the code until it works as expected. This is what the tech bros seem really hyped on, and it does seem to work… but at the same time, my feeling is that this is how you get multimillion dollar AI bills. And presuming this is how big tech is developing their products - it seems prone to making inefficient, buggy code, so I don’t think it will be worth it long term.
I was gonna say - the bulk of weather forcasting is done by governments. Commercial weather channels/sites/apps draw from these predictions and give them a nice interface, and sometimes apply some proprietary prediction algorithm (eg, a lot of commercial weather services bump up chance of rain, because people are angrier when it rains when you said it wouldnt, versus doesnt rain when you said it would).
But I wouldnt expect government forecasts to have changed due to AI tools. Except maybe in the US due to the DOGE debacle - but even then, why fuck with it?
Of course it didnt cover that. This was an article on the efficacy of AI in writing software, not a treatise on ethical or legal concerns. I would completely lose trust in the author if they started piling on every reason why “AI Bad”, because it would be clear that they have an agenda
If you are saving for retirement, you should keep your savings in the market, which would make your $100 worth significantly more than in 2013
Emergency funds should be small enough that changes in value due to inflation over more than a decade cause negligible financial hardship
Surely there is a standardized economic metric for consumer purchasing power strictly for necessities as well. I assume this, because economists throw the best parties.
I mean, on the housing front (in the US at least), it has far more to do with the government backed 30 year mortgage (cheap money drives prices up) and zoning regulations (which constrain supply and also drive prices up).
Not how economics works. The price of gold fluxuates wildly because demand for it fluxuates wildly, because people keep gambling on the value of gold.
FOSS ponzi scheme
This is the best thing I’ve seen on the internet all week. A whole 8 days!
Same vein as Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers feels to me like the defining WW2 peice of cinema. But its less about killing nazis (which is kind of incidental) and more about bros loving bros.
Also in 2005: a forum post about gingerbread recipies hijacked for a 20 page long debate about the existance of God
Most of these platforms operate by showing you profiles of others, and showing them profiles of others, and requiring some kind of mutual match to start a conversation. I very much doubt any of these services create bot accounts to do this, and to be fair, they don’t need to. The bots are created by scammers hoping to run a scam on lonely people.
The better apps do things to remove bot accounts. Hinge, for example, doesnt have many bots atm ime. Tinder, meanwhile, has been losing marketshare for the past several years and is becoming more lax about policing bots (not that it was ever particularly stringent…) in order to inflate user numbers to show to their shareholders.
People tend to match with bots because the bots will try to match with basically anyone, and because the profiles are made with pics of hot people.
For anyone who has adopted an effective strategy in dating apps, bots are not a problem. You can identify bots quickly and easily because bots don’t go on dates. So if you match with someone cool, ask them out not long after you match. Most people who are actually using a dating site to find a partner (long term or otherwise) want to go on dates, so this is normal and expected. Any effective strategy minimizes long, drawn out conversations with people (since these convos almost always go no where anyway, even with real people), which is the opposite of what scammers want (finding people desperate and lonely enough that they will make an emotional connection with someone they have never met in real life).
But the biggest problem people have with bots isnt actually getting scammed, but rather, the emotional turmoil of seeing the notification that you got a match, then realizing it was just a bot. This can be effectively delt with by getting more human matches by becoming more attractive and getting better pictures to show off this attractiveness, and having modes outside of OLD to get dates so your whole romantic life isnt caught up in the internet (which, btw, is also attractive)
OKC changed its model because it was losing marketshare to Tinder. Now they are both owned by the same company - but I would guess the two sites operate largely independently and try to compete with each other, since from the parent company’s perspective, two services trying to outcompete each other will drive eachother to also outcompete outside competition.
To me, these seem like marginal benefits. If knowing where your food comes from is important to you for some reason, by all means, carry on.
However, every scientific discussion I’ve ever seen on organic food has found the same thing - there is no significant difference in nutritional value between certified organic food and nonorganic food. Of course, “certified” organic food is still industrially produced - just according to arcane regulations that make it more expensive. You could make a case that “organic in spirit” food is more nutrient dense in some way or other - but the lack of a real scientific definition of “organic in spirit” will make it harder to study, and I have not heard any scientific discussion of this. And improved health in people who eat organic foods are corrolational, and can be chalked up to these people caring more about their health in general, and being wealthier. All the most robust science on diet and health points to the same thing - the big factor is simply avoiding junk food. Getting farm fresh eggs is just a way to show off how much money you can throw away if you use them to make french toast covered in locally tapped mapel syrup.
All that to say, I really doubt you would find any noticeable health difference.
The benefit of keeping chickens and eating their eggs is that you get to enjoy the process. You get to watch your chicks grow into chickens, feel pride when you get the first batch of eggs, and enjoy eating those eggs (which I find are tastier than the cheapest ones at the store that I buy - though I think the taste is comparable to the fancy high price eggs my friends sometimes feed me). Do it to enjoy the process. But don’t do it under the illusion that you are saving money, saving the world, or saving your health.