People keep making more people, so who builds their houses?

Developers. If there is more demand in a market, they will build property, then sell it to whoever is willing to buy, or, will seek funding from an existing institution, which if it’s not landlords, will be housing cooperatives, then use that funding to finance new buildings. Traditionally, when we’re talking high-density housing, the buyer of these properties is a landlord. Without that landlord, the demand still exists, and someone, or some group of people, will inevitably fund the cost of the housing. In a world with no for-profit landlords, housing cooperatives fill in the gaps. (primarily for high-density housing specifically)

Either existing cooperative members come to an agreement to pay slightly higher rents in order to build up a fund used to later purchase and expand their pool of housing, (which later increases the benefit they receive from economies of scale, and reduces risk of a major issue in one building causing a lack of revenue altogether) or a new cooperative is formed with money pooled from members, and once a specific threshold is met, they collectively purchase the property.

Housing is a good with inelastic demand. Everyone needs housing. There will always be someone, or some group of people willing to buy. And if you don’t have landlords to artificially increase the price of housing, which only goes up so quickly because of its commodification, and further purchasing by for-profit landlords, then the overall cost for a cooperative to outright buy a new property, or for a new cooperative to raise the funds required, is substantially lowered.

Owning a house involves paying out of pocket for maintenance whereas when renting, you can have the landlord take care of that for you

Your rent is quite literally paying for the maintenance. You think landlords are just losing money on maintenance out of the good of their own hearts? Of course not, it’s just all bundled up and averaged out into one price with your rent.

owning a house would basically anchor me to one location, which gives me less flexibility as a digital nomad.

Cool, that’s one of many benefits of housing cooperatives. They can act similarly to a landlord in terms of you sharing the cost of repairs with the whole building, which reduces risk, and they don’t have a profit motive, since they’re non-profits, so rent is lower than with a landlord. Some even let your rent buy you equity in your unit, which you can then sell later to get some of your money back if you decide to move, much better than the for-profit landlord that will give you nothing. The only issue is, these cooperatives are repeatedly outbid by corporate landlords, which means there’s far fewer of them than would be ideal.

Additionally, I’ve seen some startups like Cohere that seem like they’ll eventually be able to give you even more flexibility, allowing you to move between units in various locations without having to sell the old one or file annoying paperwork to start a new lease, with at least somewhat cooperative ownership. (although, of course, this is a for profit company, which isn’t as ideal)

I can definitely understand wanting flexibility, but there are ways to get that which don’t involve overpaying to a for-profit landlord. I can understand not caring much about equity, but of course, that’s why non-ownership housing cooperatives exist.

But to actually make those things more widely available, you need to reduce the market power held by for-profit landlords. If they did not exist, these alternatives, primarily the cooperatives, could fill back in the gaps, but provide lower prices, better service, actual equity for those who want it, and still keep the flexibility you get from renting.

And the main factor driving down payments is housing prices, which are driven by landlords. Less landlords > less scarcity > lower prices > lower down payments.

On top of that, housing cooperatives exist, which can provide the benefits of renting (lower monthly payments than a mortgage, economy of scale for repairs & construction, less financial liability for the individual) without the negative effects of a for-profit landlord. (you progressively own more of your unit over time instead of never owning any of it, you pay lower monthly rates than you would to a for-profit entity)

They even have different ownership models, which could give more choice for pricing. For instance, the non-ownership model means you pay a lower rate, just the cost of continuing the providing and upkeep of the housing, with no additional profit margin, but you don’t end up owning any of the unit you live in. But the ownership model means often paying a bit higher pricing, but in turn, getting to actually own the unit you live in, and later sell it off if you wish to move. (some cooperatives have caps on how much higher you can sell it for compared to your purchase price, others do not)

But in the end, the one thing that makes housing more expensive, that outbids cooperatives for housing, and that increases the scarcity of the market, is for-profit landlords.

The only way you get any true positive change on down payments, housing prices, or housing availability, is to completely ban all for-profit landlording.

Yeah, I didn’t notice right away, but even after I did, I still think it gets the point across pretty clearly.

I’d probably want it to be human-drawn if it was going to be, for instance, posted up physically outside somewhere, but for something some random person on the internet can do to get a point across, I’d say it’s pretty valid for what it is.

“1 in 10 people believe they are not at risk when using illicit sources to watch TV, film or sports.”

ONE in ten? Man, they’re even bad at cherry picking statistics 😂

They even cite a study with only 1,000 participants for their statistic that “32% OF PEOPLE HAVE BEEN VICTIMS OF FRAUD”

In the title, at least. The body of that claim’s card says that it’s the people, or someone they know that have been victims of fraud.

Gosh, I hate dishonest scare marketing campaigns.

I find it indescribably funny that no matter what, every news site somehow manages to always put a mobile app install screen with the company’s product as the banner image for their articles, even in this case, when I think most people would have probably never even thought of Steam as a mobile app, only as PC software.

I’m not a big expert on database technology, but I am aware of there being at least a few database systems (“In-Memory”) that use the RAM of the computer for transient storage, and since RAM doesn’t use files as a concept in the same way, the data stored there isn’t exactly inside a “file,” so to speak.

That said, they are absolutely dwarfed by the majority of databases, which use some kind of file as a means to store the database, or the contents within it.

Obviously, that’s not to say using files is bad in any way, but the possibilities for how database software could have developed, had we not used files as a core computing concept during their inception, are now closed off. We simply don’t know what databases could have looked like, because of “lock-in.”

That’s what some databases are. Most databases you’ll see today still inevitably store the whole contents of the DB within a file with its own format, metadata, file extension, etc, or store the contents of the database within a file tree.

The notion of “lock in” being used here doesn’t necessarily mean that alternatives don’t or can’t exist, but that comparatively, investment into development, and usage, of those systems, is drastically lower.

Think of how many modern computing systems involve filesystems as a core component of their operation, from databases, to video games, to the structure of URLs, which are essentially usually just ways to access a file tree. Now think of how many systems are in use that don’t utilize files as a concept.

The very notion of files as an idea is so locked-in, that we can rarely fathom, let alone construct a system that doesn’t utilize them as a part of its function.

Regardless, the files example specifically wasn’t exactly meant to be a direct commentary on the state of microblogging platforms, or of all technology, but more an example for analogy purposes than anything else.

What social media platforms don’t have some kind of character limit?

What platforms don’t use a feed?

What platforms don’t use a like button?

What platforms don’t have some kind of hashtags?

All of these things are locked-in, not necessarily technologically, but socially.

Would more people from Reddit have switched to Lemmy if it didn’t have upvotes and downvotes? Are there any benefits or tradeoffs to including or not including the Save button on Lemmy, and other social media sites? We don’t really know, because it’s substantially less explored as a concept.

The very notion of federated communities on Lemmy being instance-specific, instead of, say, instances all collectively downloading and redistributing any posts to a specific keyword acting as a sort of global community not specific to any one instance, is another instance of lock-in, adapted from the fediverse’s general design around instance-specific hosting and connection.

In the world of social media, alternative platforms, such as Minus exist, that explore unique design decisions not available on other platforms, like limited total post counts, vague timestamps, and a lack of likes, but compared to all the other sites in the social media landscape, it’s a drop in the bucket.

The broader point I was trying to make was just that the very way microblogging developed as a core part of social media’s design means that any shift away from it likely won’t actually gain traction with a mainstream audience, because of the social side of the lock-in.

short form content with just a few sentences per post sucks.

I 100% agree with this sentiment.

Jaron Lanier has a great book called You Are Not A Gadget, where he talks about the way we design and interact with systems, and he has some thoughts I think reflect this sentiment very well:

“When [people] design an internet service that is edited by a vast anonymous crowd, they are suggesting that a random crowd of humans is an organism with a legitimate point of view.” (This is in reference to Wikis like Wikipedia)

“Different media designs stimulate different potentials in human nature.”

He talks about how when a system becomes popular enough, it can “lock in” a design, when others build upon it as standard. Such as how the very concept of a “file” is one we created, and nearly every system now uses it. Non-file based computing is a highly unexplored design space.

And the key part, which I think is relevant to Mastodon, the fediverse, and social media more broadly, is this quote:

“A design that share’s Twitter’s feature of providing ambient continuous contact between people could perhaps drop Twitter’s adoration of fragments.”

Fragments, of course, meaning the limited, microblogging style of communication the platform allows for. I’ve seen some Mastodon instances that help with this, by not imposing character limits anywhere near where most instances would, opting for tens of thousands of characters long. But of course, there is still a limit. Another design feature by Twitter that is now locked in.

But of course, people are used to that style of social media. It’s what feels normal, inevitable even. Changing it would mean having to reconceptualize social media as a concept, and might be something people aren’t interested in, since they’re too used to the original design. We can’t exactly tell.

As Lanier puts it,

“We don’t really know, because it is an unexplored design space.”

Just because an LLM sounds smart and human-like doesn’t mean it will magically solve climate change after being directly implicated in resource consumption we know from actual scientists, today, will make the problem worse.

They don’t believe it.

They just think their investors will.

The problem is that welfare systems, such as those that provide housing, that distinguish who is eligible by how much they can afford it, to a certain degree, inevitably depress higher levels of economic activity, and good saving behavior, through the very nature by which they’re operated.

If we say that someone is no longer eligible for free housing if they earn, say, $2,000+ a month, and housing would otherwise cost $500 a month, then if they’re currently earning $1,500 a month (the same they’d effectively have if they had to pay $500 a month for housing on a $2,000 a month salary) they have a direct incentive to not make over $2,000, unless they can guarantee they’ll make at least that much plus $500 more to compensate for the difference. If they earned $1,800 a month, they’d be making $300 more than someone making $2,000, but paying $500 a month for housing after hitting the cutoff.

This isn’t just a hypothetical either. While this 2021 study does mention some benefits of means testing, such as more targeted expenditure, it ultimately shows that…

“An asset means-test incentivizes low-income households to hold few financial assets making them vulnerable to predictable and unpredictable income changes.”

…and sees that, in the end, while it can marginally increase the cost of these social programs to the taxpayer, it ultimately does more to benefit the individuals receiving the assistance.

Or how about this research done by the Cleveland branch of the Federal Reserve that states:

“the elimination of testing limits, such as in policies similar to a UBI, could present a welfare-improving alternative to the current system, though not without large economic trade-offs.” (They effectively mean worse targeting of funds, but better overall results)

Means-testing directly reduces the incentives that lead to higher overall household wealth, and quality of life.

Not having means-testing increases total income, which also means increased tax revenue. That same tax revenue can then go to funding the housing system as a whole, but it won’t directly, substantively punish people for an increase in income past an arbitrary threshold.

Not to mention the increased administrative cost of performing means testing, as opposed to doing unconditional support, which could reduce the amount of money actually going to funding housing, in favor of funding jobs for people that audit income levels of housing applicants.

Anything we humans need for fundamental existence in today’s society should be free to the individual, and be a cost we all pay as a society to respect the existence of other human beings. Anything above that is up to the individual to either provide for themselves, or receive as a result of the value they contribute to society through labor.

That’s my broader belief system, and thus, housing falls under that for me. The better we meet individual’s needs, the easier it becomes for them to contribute back to society, and experience upward class mobility.

I believe that if we are to make housing a right, we can’t even just say it’s a right “unless you have no job,” or “unless you’re unable to fork over $500 a month,” because employment is ultimately up to the discretion of employers, who, even today, don’t even consider most unhoused people for jobs, because they don’t have stable housing, but to get stable housing, those people need jobs. (this even applies to many shelters, which will require unhoused people to either be employed, or be constantly seeking employment)

We know that adding hoops to jump through to get welfare assistance only harms those who need to depend on it the most, without providing any significant socioeconomic benefit, so why should we apply that same logic to housing, if we determine that it should be a right of all human beings?

I’m not saying the housing has to be great. It doesn’t need to be spacious, have all the amenities, or even have things like good quality lighting or good soundproofing from adjacent housing units, but at a bare minimum, everyone deserves somewhere to live.

I’m 100% in favor of requiring models to be open source. That’s been my belief for a while now, because clearly, if someone wants to make an AI model off the backs of other people’s work, they shouldn’t be allowed to restrict or charge access to those models to the same people who had their work used, let alone other people more broadly.

It’s mildly effective in the sense that it will decimate click-through rates, but if enough people did it, they would start filtering by IP, and you’d need to change how many ads it clicks on so it looks more human.

It also still gives advertisers your data, since it still has to load the ads on your system to click them, so it’s not as privacy-preserving as a full-on adblocker that outright blocks every advertisement and tracker related network request in the first place.

Your daily reminder that basic housing should be absolutely zero fucking dollars because housing should be a human right, and anything above 0% should be criminal.

This can actually be true, depending on how the system is configured.

For instance, if you and someone else use the same locally-hosted Stable Diffusion UI, both put the exact same prompt, and are using the same seed, # of steps, and dimensions, you’ll get an identical result.

The only reason outputs are different between prompts is because of the noise from the seed, normally randomly set between generations, which can be easily set to the same value as someone else’s generation, and will yield an identical result unless the prompt is changed.

I’m glad about this, honestly.

If you want to use an AI model trained on vast sums of publicly posted work, go for it, but be ready for the result to be made into a truly public work that you don’t own at the end of it all.

Better than completely allowing capital to do whatever it wants without even attempting to push back.

As Cory Doctorow put it, “An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it.”