Skip Navigation
Jump
it could happen to you rule
  • Best way to address this is to reword a bit:

    I probably would not use avoid using an instance that wasn't federated to Threads

    Using "not" twice in a single sentence is generally something worth avoiding IMO.

    1
  • Jump
    ELI5 why is anarchy not "the guy with the bigger stick" making the rules?
  • Anarchists develop structures and agreements that discourage concentration of power

    MLMs believe that they must use the state, capitalism, and by extension coercive control

    Are these not different words for the same fundamental concepts?

    I fail to see how "the state" and "capitalism" aren't just a more developed form of "structures" and "agreements". And if the community decides punishment is an appropriate response to breaking an "agreement", how is that any different from "coercive control"?

    And if you're community gets large enough (say even like a couple hundred people), how are any decisions gonna get made even remotely efficiently?

    Feel like you're a hop skip and a jump from a representative democracy. And as soon as bartering becomes too inconvenient, I'm sure a new "agreement" still be made to use some proxy as a form of current and boom now you've got capitalism too.

    27
  • Jump
    TikTok says it’s not the algorithm, teens are just pro-Palestine — The company denied allegations that it has been promoting pro-Palestine content in an effort to sway American opinion
  • IMO there are big risks consuming news & opinion from any single source.

    Whether it's the CCP manipulating the TikTok algorithm, Russia buying ad space on Facebook, or American conglomerates pushing narratives on western mainstream media, there will be implicit biases everywhere.

    The only real answer is to get news from multiple sources with diverging perspectives, try to find where facts overlap, challenge your own implicit biases, and form a perspective in line w/ your values.

    Seeing America blame TikTok for pushing propaganda is the pot calling the kettle black -- and honestly more of a distraction than anything else.

    The real important issue is that people are dying, and the existing power structures are doing jack shit to stop it.

    28
  • Jump
    FYI -- "Medito" is a great guided mindfulness meditation app that is 100% free
  • This is a great suggestion -- I used balance a few years ago the last time they did one of these year free trials and thought it was great.

    It was after that free year ran out that I found medito, which was a worthy substitute despite not being quite as personalized.

    1
  • If you've heard of Headspace, Medito is more or less the same but run by a 501(c)(3) charity and is 100% free.

    For anyone who finds guided meditation helps to manage their symptoms, or is curious to explore meditation, I can't recommend it highly enough.

    12
    Jump
    Chicago Sues Kia And Hyundai After Over 7,000 Cars Stolen Last Year
  • If someone makes a dangerous product, it is reasonable to expect them to include appropriate safety features to reduce the risk their product poses to society.

    The "victims" here aren't the automobile manufacturers, they're the people whose cars got stolen and those who were run over by a reckless joyrider or shot in a drive-by enabled by criminals having easy access to insecure, easy-to-steal vehicles. These are all people who wouldn't have befallen harm if these vehicles had standard anti-theft features.

    The reason nobody's talking about suing bike manufacturers is because nobody was stealing bikes and riding around shooting people or crashing through the sides of buildings.

    I think there is absolutely a legal argument that anti-theft features are critical safety features in cars, specifically. Not sure whether that argument will hold up in court, but it's not anywhere near as straightforward as "bike manufacturers don't have to care about theft, why should car manufacturers?"

    3
  • Jump
    Who knew 1989 was an uneventful year in China
  • Additionally...

    Uyghurs when they're detained sent to a concentration camp free job training program:

    Chuckles. I'm in danger immensely grateful to the glorious Chinese Communist party for graciously offering me this tremendous opportunity.

    67
  • Jump
    Chicago Sues Kia And Hyundai After Over 7,000 Cars Stolen Last Year
  • Why does a car manufacturer have to care about theft at all?

    This argument doesn't make any sense to me. Why bother with keys and locks then? Is it more practical to expect society to eliminate literally all crime?

    I'm sure there are good reasons to dislike this lawsuit, but this isn't one of them.

    7
  • Jump
    On Politics and Forking
  • Completely agree on the notion of the community needing "good faith" over "kindness".

    A discussion forum loses much of its value when even a modest percentage of its userbase isn't participating in a free exchange of ideas, but rather evangelising their favorite ideas or beliefs by abusing the tools provided by the forum in bad faith to promote or suppress ideas that respectively support or contradict their ideology.

    It's one thing to present your contradictory/minority beliefs with supporting evidence to the forum in the hopes it stands on its own, and quite another to coordinate w/ others or create alt accounts to invade that forum and create an illusion of consensus through voting/commenting accordingly.

    It doesn't matter whether the ideology is white supremacy, communism, or even something apolitical like preferring Linux over Windows -- astroturfing and bad faith interactions of any allegiance are toxic to a discussion forum.

    1
  • Jump
    LTT, now sponsored by BP
  • LMG (Linus Media Group) was making careless mistakes and publishing a lot of inaccurate data, sometimes going as far to not recommend or label a product as "bad" after misusing it. This was likely due to an unnecessarily rushed pace of video releases that came from prioritizing sponsor revenue over accuracy, which many feel is a pretty massive ethics breach for a news outlet that is marketing itself as a home for highly objective, data driven content (LTT Labs).

    Gamers Nexus called out this behavior in a 40 minute video which kicked off all the drama, and Linus posted a kneejerk response on the LTT forum where he largely defended his behavior and conclusions and badmouthed Gamers Nexus for going public with these criticisms instead of sharing them privately.

    A few days later, LTT put out a video that was almost entirely LTT leaders other than Linus admitting how bad everything was, sharing some details on their processes, and committing to being more transparent & taking a week off uploading videos to rework things. But the video also included some tone deaf moments, like a plug for merch and Linus talking for a bit where he sort of apologized but didn't really talk for long enough to acknowledge all of his fuck ups. He did say "I'm sorry" at one point which was pretty meme worthy.

    The video was also monetized when it went up and the description had links to their merch store in it, which people called out as slimy and LTT subsequently removed.

    Different people have different conclusions -- some think it was a total non-apology, but I personally am satisfied. To me all their issues were the result of bad processes/automation run amok, so their commitment to reworking their processes and being more transparent about them with the community is exactly what I wanted to see.

    But that's just me -- I think there are many valid conclusions that can be drawn from this.

    Edit: There was also a reddit post on Reddit made by a former employee, Madison, that made allegations of sexual harassment. If true, these would be extremely damning, and to my knowledge LMG has not spoken on them yet. I also am just learning about this, so I don't know whether these statements have been corroborated by anyone.

    9
  • Jump
    LTT, now sponsored by BP
  • I get that this is just a meme, but comparing YouTube drama to the reckless behavior of a multi-billion dollar oil conglomerate causing incalculable amounts of ecological damage feels like a bit of an overreaction.

    -32
  • Jump
    How to use filters?
  • No that actually helps a lot! I was actually trying to filter an entire instance, but thought I had to do so but putting the domain of that instance into "Domain Filters"

    1
  • I'm having trouble getting community/domain filters to work the way I expect.

    My goal is to be able to filter out certain domains/communities that tend to post spam and inside jokes when browsing "everything" (same way I used to filter out random communities from /r/all on Reddit) but adding domains or community names does not appear to work at all.

    Is this a bug or am I missing something?

    3
    Jump
    The Problem with LMG
  • I really hope stepping down as CEO leads to Linus surrounding himself with people he trusts to call him out when he's missing something.

    He strikes me as the kind of person who is susceptible to a few certain mental traps you kinda don't want to see in a leader of a large influential organization:

    1. Taking an "ends justifies the means" mindset (e.g. stepping on the "growth" gas pedal and accepting sloppiness because it will get better later with Labs)
    2. Letting "objective facts" justify big subjective decisions w/o much consideration (e.g. thinking the Billet Labs video didn't need to be re-shot because the "objectively" product rec conclusion wouldn't have been different)
    3. Substituting actual solutions to problems w/ commitments to solving them (e.g. implementing "Accuracy KPIs" instead of slowing the pace of video releases)

    None of these constitute outright malice, IMO, but boy can they lead to a problematic working environment.

    I'm sure there will be quite the flame war as a result of this, which I think is a bummer. Linus strikes me as someone who's acting in good faith, but has an unshakable habit of making rushed decisions without considering the full scope of their impact, and is (or has been) lacking the appropriate feedback structure to help him learn to either a) make more thoughtful decisions, or b) fully delegating those decisions to folks who are better equipped to make them.

    Here's hoping this leads to positive change.

    66
  • Jump
    History repeats itself
  • I try to structure my commits in a way that minimizes their blast radius, which usually likes trying to reduce the number of files In touch per commit.

    For example, my commit history would look like this:

    • Add new method to service class
    • Use new service class method in worker

    And then as I continue working, all changes will be git commit --fixuped to one of those two commit's hashes depending on where they occur.

    And when it's time to rebase in full, I can do a git rebase master --interactive --autosquash.

    2
  • Jump
    As an OG Reddit Sync user of over 10 years, all this arguing really brings a tear to my eye. 🥲
  • I'm absolutely thrilled to have sync on the Fediverse, and will happily pay for a yearly subscription to help ensure LJD has sufficient compensation to keep the app up-to-date with whatever changes come to the Android/Lemmy APIs years down the road.

    The problem with (even excellent) free apps for platforms like this, is they require consistent maintenance to keep up with both the platform they run on (Android), and the platform they serve content for (Lemmy). That is not a trivial amount of work, and is absolutely deserving of continued, recurring compensation IMO.

    A one-time payment might make sense for a simple native game that gets produced once, has no web component, and never needs another update for its entire lifetime, but not for this. You aren't paying for a singular product, you're paying for a service. You wouldn't go to the barber and winged about needing to pay every time I get my hair cut.

    3
  • Jump
    Shouldn't we be switching buses with light railway?
  • This.

    I think of buses as the caterpillar to a tram's butterfly.

    You can start with a comprehensive bus network, and as a particular route stabilizes and the bus starts struggling to meet throughput needs, that is an indicator that a tram may be worthwhile.

    Starting w/ a tram line is a pretty big financial bet that it will be useful/needed, as once you build it, you're locked-in to that specific route.

    21
  • Jump
    It’s going good so far 🤞🤞
  • No, but there are copyleft licenses that require anyone using a fork of some open-source project for for-profit purposes to subsequently open-source any changes they make.

    10
  • A quotation circulates on the Internet, attributed to me, but it wasn't written by me.

    Here's the text that is circulating. Most of it was copied from statements I have made, but the part italicized here is not from me. It makes points that are mistaken or confused.

    > I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux,” and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use.

    > Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.

    The main error is that Linux is not strictly speaking part of the GNU system—whose kernel is GNU Hurd. The version with Linux, we call “GNU/Linux.” It is OK to call it “GNU” when you want to be really short, but it is better to call it “GNU/Linux” so as to give Torvalds some credit.

    We don't use the term “corelibs,” and I am not sure what that would mean, but GNU is much more than the specific packages we developed for it. I set out in 1983 to develop an operating system, calling it GNU, and that job required developing whichever important packages we could not find elsewhere.

    -Richard Stallman

    15