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Joined 4 days ago
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Cake day: January 14th, 2025

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  • I would argue that Apple has actually done more to increase the quality of working conditions in China than any other company. Is it still a horrible environment, yes, but without Apple I’m not sure that it would have been better.

    I don’t find a problem with exploiting tax loopholes because 9/10 times the loopholes are there by design, this is something to take up with the IRS and the government, because corporations HAVE to take advantage of said loopholes to stay competitive.

    But to address directly your comment, I didn’t say that them retaining DEI was a moral choice. I believe it was a business decision, which is why I framed it as them historically beating the market while these firms don’t. Apple has clearly seen the value of DEI in their revenue and operations, otherwise they would be cutting the program real quick.


  • Tim is a very pragmatic man, and like any CEO he’s not an ideologue so he paid the bribe. It’s the cost of doing business under the corrupt Trump administration. Is he a coward for doing so? Maybe. But if he didn’t pay it and Trump acted against Apple the blame would fall on Tim and he would be replaced with someone friendlier towards Trump. Maybe Tim figured it was better he stayed in charge to minimize damage, as gay man who has no doubt faced his fair share of persecution and prejudice.

    Then again Peter Thiel is also gay and he’s the puppet master behind Silicon Valley’s sudden heel turn. So is Sam Altman who is also donating.





  • But correct me if I’m wrong (I’m not a programmer), lemmy’s algorithm is basically just sorting; it doesn’t choose over two pieces of media to show me but rather how it orders them. Facebook et al will simply not show content that I will not engage with or that will make me spend less time on the platform.

    I agree that they are useful but at a certain point we as a society sometimes need to weight the usefulness of certain technologies against the potential for harm. If the potential for harm is greater than the benefit, then maybe we should somewhat curb the potential for that harm or remove it altogether.

    So maybe we could refine the argument to be we need to limit what signals algorithms can use to push content? Or maybe that all social media users should have access to an algorithm free feed and that the algorithm driven feed be hidden by default and can be customizable by users?


  • While transparency would be helpful for discussion, I don’t think it would change or help with stopping propaganda, misinformation and outright bullshit from being disseminated to the masses because people just don’t care. Even if the algorithm was transparently made to push false narratives people would just shrug and keep using it. The average person doesn’t care about the who, what or why as long as they are entertained. But yes, transparency would be a good first step.