*pissing into

I suspect my ongoing emphasis on individuality and use of words and phrases like “one by one” and “personally” and “different for everyone” may have escaped you.

I don’t see groups as masses of fungible humans; I see them as a collective unit of individuals like myself, each one with a separate history and a separate set of decisions to make about their lives, and for that reason I tend to avoid all-encompassing generalizations of “people” as homogeneous units – to the point that statements such as your own strike me as propagandistic, more intent on changing my view and laying down a law on a subject than on considering any evidence to the contrary.

When I read your reply to me, so confidently wrong about what I see around myself in terms of phone usage, I wondered if asked the same you’d even see anyone not on their phone, because you seem to have decided that everyone everywhere at all times is glued to it by choice, permanently and without exception.

For myself, I’ve chosen to be off technology for long stretches, and I see more and more people making their own decisions to do the same even if their individual choices don’t look exactly like my own. And yeah, when I go out, I see plenty of people both off and on their phones. When I make eye contact in a store aisle, I see plenty of eyes making contact back. When I eat dinner out, I see as many phones face down on tables as I do in hands. Mostly I don’t pay attention because I don’t need to: others being on it or not is their own battle to fight.

And they will.

The future of computing is corporate controlled siloes people simply cannot escape

Lol, no. To remain in a prison of choice requires the consent of the imprisoned. I am not bound to engage in computing on demand, nor am I addicted to it, and if it comes down to it I’ll just turn the shit on only when absolutely necessary. I’ve done it before and every time it is great; I’ll do it again in a heartbeat.

Some may have to participate by necessity in corporately-controlled computing structures to some degree depending on work needs, for example, but most of what is booming now is entertainment, not business: social media, streaming, subscription services. Entertainment is a matter of individual choice and again, I find myself in no prison not of my choosing.

I can escape those silos simply by walking away when I am not contractually obliged to interact with them, such as in a work scenario, and so can everyone else. Even you.

Ah, I see your point. It is a particularly rough crowd. Try commenting how well a disfavored Linux distro works for you and watch the downvotes fly, lol.

c/Technology is the preferred nomenclature I think, or I guess the full community link if you want to distinguish it by instance (there are several).

There’s also the fact that an internet full of bots, AI slop, and privacy risks is making more people pull away from the online world. In our poll, 97% of people said the internet today was a hellscape compared to its early days, and it looks like things are only going to get worse.

Looks like the cure is inherent in the disease. Anyone else remember the early 90s when Usenet was just text-based fun and then some motherfucker thought it was a grand idea to run ads? I do, and it’s been downhill ever since.

It’s sad that it has come to this, but as usual a handful of greedy fuckers have ruined it for the rest of us. (My personal opinion is that big tech could have arrested this downhill slide at any point, even from back in the first days of email spam, but have chosen to monetize it every step of the way instead.)

Real humans are already individually opting out, one by one, as we each personally get sick of the slop and realize it’s just not helping anymore. For myself I’m only on intermittently, I’ve ditched all social media, Lemmy is all I participate in regularly now beyond the odd comment here and there, and that seems about right for me at this time.

I adjust it regularly, often just by going offline for days, but I had to see the problem before I could change it. I think that’s where a lot of people are, just now seeing it for the first time as a real problem affecting their quality of life directly.

But like any other addiction, the point of turning is different for everyone. These fuckers on the other end, filling everything with slop and running bots without end, are just speeding it all up.

I dislike how disenting opinions get downvoted on Lemmy/technology probably more than even on reddit.

That almost makes it sound unfair, but the technology on Lemmy is doing exactly what each one of us tells it to do every time we cast a vote. It is, as far as I can tell, an exact representation of our own individual votes cast.

I could almost see your point on Reddit because of all the vote fuckery that goes on there, but here on Lemmy blaming a mass downvote on the tech and not on the users casting the votes is a misdirection of blame.

Yup. And it’s an embarrassment to see. At this point anyone who has done the bare minimum in actual security work can run intellectual rings around any of these tech bros.

They’re not geniuses when it comes to real-world application, just moneyed dreamers so immensely out of touch with the real world they don’t even know the basics of the industry they claim to be innovators in.

Meanwhile, those of us who are even superficially acquainted with the basics see it immediately, like you did and so many in this thread. It’s the same old thing of peddlers of tech not actually having to know their tech as long as they know just enough to sell it to those corporate IT decision makers who also don’t know their tech.

I cannot wait for this tower of shit to collapse under its own weight.

Now that you know everything on Snapchat is going through active automated filtering, consider what Snapchat has chosen NOT to flag and is allowing to flow freely, like sex trafficking and the sale of minors.

As unfair and life-changing as this event has been for this young teacher, I think the actual story of what Snapchat (and every other digital communication method) is reading/tracking yet allowing is a much, much bigger story. And dirtier. With billionaires and pedophiles and all manner of nasty allowables we do not yet know.

Of course it wouldn’t. And NLRB was one of the first agencies directly targeted by Musk’s DOGE, which by some bizarre and unrelated coincidence was also involved in a huge multi-year lawsuit against SpaceX at the time, and said to be holding information related to that suit, the same suit that was dropped this year via an interesting ruling involving the NLRB itself. Of course NLRB is still 100% trustworthy, nothing to see here.

Yeah, a number of people have been saying they can still get on but Reddit is definitely doing this. It appears to be getting rolled out in some kind of A/B distribution.

Yeah, that does suck. At least you tried, and there will be no regrets: there’s literally nothing more you could have done. From where I sit it’s their loss: good workers don’t grow on trees, and they’re idiots to let a known good employee walk out the door in favor of an unknown. At least the hesitant ones, if needed, could be approached for a reference should you ever need it.

But in the meantime, you have a great attitude, the kind that sets you up to make the most of opportunities that come your way, and I am certain you’ll do well. That kind of thing comes through when you’re looking for jobs, and it’s a plus when someone can look at a shitty situation in prior employment and hold it in realistic proportion, however unfair it was. And this was indeed unfair. I genuinely wish you every success, and soon.

Dude. If you still want the job, you really had no obvious part in the disrespect, and the owner wasn’t part of the immediate rage firing, give it a day, let it cool off, then go see the owner directly.

Just be straightforward and honest, speaking as his equal (because you are): “I meant no disrespect, I really was just there and not a participant, I understand offense was given, but that was not my doing or intent. I liked this job, I enjoyed doing it, I thought I was doing well at it, and I can’t believe it’s gone just because I happened to be in the same room when this happened. Is there any way this outcome can be reconsidered, or is it set in stone?” Professional, straightforward, calm.

If the owner wasn’t a part of the direct confrontation you might be able to change his mind. I’m saying this because if I were your manager, the way you wrote your text would make me at least question the decision, and I’m hard to convince. People do shit in indignant rage they regret later, restaurant kitchens are wild places anyway, and I don’t know this guy and I don’t know you, but if you want that specific job back then it’s worth a shot. Good workers are worth keeping.

But you may not want it back. If not then just ignore this, chill for a day or two, and start looking for the next thing. Whatever you decide I hope it all works out for you.

Thank you! Will check that out. Much appreciated.

Do you know if either of them support user tagging? Currently on the default lemmy UI but I’d jump in a heartbeat for user tagging.

It doesn’t have to get as far as eminent domain. In at least one Georgia case the land was condemned by local authorities, the start of the legal process of eminent domain, and the family was no longer able to live in it regardless. So the use of eminent domain as a threat to force the sale of privately held land is already happening.

Every “voluntary” easement is signed in the shadow of automatic condemnation. When the company across the table can take your land if you say no, you aren’t negotiating, and attorneys representing landowners know that.

This quote is from one article of many about how non-local companies use condemnation as a tool to steal land, and how that has a very long history in the US. This particular article is about how a community in Nashville attempted to use condemnation in the other direction, condemning a property wanted by a data center so that no one could use it, but it gives the history pretty well.

There is an interesting problem with human moderators though. Once the entire population of Earth is posting on social media, are there enough humans to ever moderate it?

Yes, because the community itself can be the largest part of its own moderation. As Reddit has proven, they do not all have to be paid, and people who run their own groups would be happy to take more of that moderation work on just to ensure their own viability on the site. There can also be local moderation as well as top-down moderation: it does not all have to be sweat shop workers in the third world. Meta could do far more than they are now to limit sockpuppet and astroturfing accounts, and accounts that are not actually tied to a human being, all of which would have an oversized effect on cleaning up the filth, but they don’t.

Rather, time after time, year after year, people tell whoever is looking into [whatever the current scandal is now] that they reported this content and Meta came back with “Nope, we have looked into this and this content does not violate community standards.” What if Meta just took action on the community reports they already receive? Meta will rapidly and without recourse take down content that involves, for example, classic art that involves nudity, but double down on ignoring actual CSAM, as in this case.

Compare and contrast that with Meta’s vigorous policing of content that does NOT promote their agenda. Put those together and it paints a picture of a corporation that is very much involved with its ability to manufacture and sway public opinion, but has no interest otherwise in cutting off anything that makes it a dollar.

There are all kinds of helps and fixes to what has become an extreme moderation problem, every single one of which Meta has refused to engage despite having profits in the billions. Billions. You could hire an entire country of moderators with a fraction of that, but they don’t simply because they are not interested in any of that.

No one is on a Meta site to be served as a customer; they are there to have their data collected and analyzed for better efficacy of the propaganda and advertising Meta pushes their way and then sold on to other data aggregators or even the government, and to be used in any way that Meta likes without recourse to the user. And if a kid gets trafficked, or killed, or kills themself because of Meta, well that need not force any real change either. Meta’s gotten really good at making concerned noises about that kind of thing without ever changing their own part in how it happened, and continues to happen.

Or to put it another way, in today’s model, Meta sees itself as entirely separate from its userbase, and unable/unwilling to distribute any of its power among its users to make it better for everyone. But look at Lemmy, where there is little separation between instance admins and the general userbase: everyone can help moderate from the ground up. There is no money in moderation here at all, yet we have not descended into 4chan. How is it that Lemmy can do adequate online moderation (and Reddit before it) for free without a single dollar, much less without the billions of dollars available to Meta? Its because on Lemmy the community itself is the primary moderation tool, and while they talk otherwise, in reality Meta refuses that community paradigm almost entirely.

There’s another factor as well: it is far easier to moderate an online community that has always kept its standards high from the start than it is to come around and clean house when it all starts feeling a bit Voat and 4chan. Had Meta been adequately moderating all along, it would never have gotten this bad to start with.

TL;DR: Effective online moderation only looks like an impossible task when it suits a company to not even try.

Your work is beautiful. I’d heard of Pixelfed of course but never actually seen it before, and it’s blowing me away. I’m looking at the explore page right now:

https://pixelfed.social/web/explore

I’m a fan of landscape and nature photography anyway, and I absolutely love this. I crave beauty in these times, and there is plenty of it there. Many thanks.

That should do the trick. Good luck.

Will a factory reset get rid of the firmware update(s) on your model? It’s not guaranteed but sometimes that will get you back to where you started.

If it does, all that’s left to do is to completely close down any automatic update path (network access to internet, cable access to internet-connected PC, whatever applies to your situation). Yes, you can turn off automatic updates in settings, but on newer models especially that’s not the guarantee it once was, esp on Windows machines with bidirectional printing features enabled: Windows will force update the printer itself. Anymore I set all my printers to wireless and then block them by MAC address at the firewall.

There are dozens that have their new energy infrastructure costs and even their power usage shared among all the residents of that utility district. They’re hard to find out about because the contracts are often secretive – can’t imagine why – but this was going on for a while before people started to put up a stink about data centers.

This is a good article from about a year ago, and Benn Jordan has also talked about it on his channel, among others.

Yes. Yes, they do.