• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I think it also has to do with how previous generations established what they considered trustworthy or not.

    Most of the time, the only way to confirm information would be to go to the library and look it up. Most people weren’t taking the time to do that for every little factoid, especially ones that had no direct effect on their lives.

    So if Jim who has a cousin who works in construction said that Mexicans were undercutting the expected pay for construction laborers, picking up all the jobs they could, and out performing their peers… well that’s first hand information from someone who would know (by way of the game of telephone).

    And that doesn’t effect them directly in any way, so it’s not being blasted to the whole world. You may never know they have this belief.

    Now they see Jim on Facebook sharing some article. Well, Jim wouldn’t share it unless he was sure it was true. I mean, his cousin works in construction. Combine that with sensational headlines to maximize clicks and now you go from racist belief that immigrants are industrious to “illegal immigrants are stealing our jobs”!

    Plus, spreading the word can be done in a single click, regardless of relevance to any conversation.

    So you combine the idea of “that person knows what they’re talking about” with sensationalism mills and how damn easy it is to blast your stupid ideas out to the world with the idea that you’e just letting people know, and I think you very easily end up here.




  • It makes us all look stupid and hateful.

    I’d argue that it does a lot more than make people just look hateful. Plenty of assholes out there using progressive causes as justification and shielding for their poor behavior.

    The dev could have avoided this easily by merging the original PR and moving on with their life, but there is negative reason for the dogpiling that occurred. It’s open fucking source. Fork it and make your own inclusive competitor.

    The behavior of the community around this is reprehensible, and is the perfect ammunition for opportunists looking to draw people into right wing radicalism. “Look at what they did to someone for using he instead of they! Imagine what will happen if we let these people have any real power?”



  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoMemes@lemmy.mlJust sayin
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    4 days ago

    But if you can’t summarize the solution to a complex societal problem with a history to it into a single simple sentence that can be used as a punchy “hot take”, clearly you just don’t want a solution! /s

    Way too many people in the world who are more willing to believe that things suck because everyone’s too stupid to try the “obvious” solution, instead of the fact that most societal issues are icebergs of complication and causes.




  • Ah yes, the classic “you can only be upset about one thing at a time”!

    If you’re upset I pissed on the floor instead of in the toilet while Biden is complicit with genocide you’re part of the problem!

    Sorry boss, I can’t care about my job because of Palestine!

    How dare you pull me over for going 80mph in a school zone, pig! Don’t you know what Israel is doing?

    How could you possibly expect me to care about something so insignifIcant as wiping? Don’t you know that children are dying?



  • Same, but surely you realize that ads have only gotten worse in the intervening time. I also don’t truly believe that we’ll ever reach critical mass on adblocker users. You’re asking people who don’t care, who don’t use the internet the same way we do, to suddenly care enough to take manual action outside of their knowledgebase amd comfort zone.

    The only way the adblocker user numbers get pumped up to critical mass for a change is if a popular default browser makes adblocking an opt-out default.


  • As well as predatory/not, there’s also a trend with attention grabbing/not.

    There was a period of time where Google AdWords ruled the online ad space, and most ads were pure text in a box with a border making the border between content and ads visually distinct.

    Kind of like having small portions of the newspaper classified section cut out and slapped around the webpage.

    I still disliked them, but they were fairly easy to look past, and you didn’t have to worry about the ad itself carrying a malware payload (just whatever they linked to).

    Companies found that those style ads get less clickthrough than flashier ones, and that there’s no quantifiable incentive to not make their ads as obnoxious as possible. So they optimized for the wrong metric: clickthrough vs sales by ad.

    More recently, companies have stepped up their tracking game so they can target sales by ad more effectively, but old habits die hard, and predatory ads that just want you to click have no incentive to care and “de-escalate” the obnoxiousness.



  • Off the absolute top of my head there’s the redcap. Depending on the material it can be depicted as a gnome, goblin, or kobold with a jaunty looking red hat (generally long and pointy like a gnome hat or like Link’s hat in Legend of Zelda).

    It keeps the hat red by dying and regularly re-dying it with its victims’ blood.

    There’s also a number of depictions of pixies as essentially flying piranha.

    But this sort of mythology isn’t some deep secret, it’s everywhere outside of the kid friendly/disney filtered stuff. I’m sure a simple search will net you tons of content.


  • I miss the “Tales from…” subs. Tales from tech support was regular reading material for me for many years, and in general just having a place to commiserate with others in the same field as you is wonderful. The other ones also helped me be more concious of what I could do to keep myself from being a nuisance to other professionals like my doctor and pharmacist.

    More niche, I miss the gunpla sub a lot. We have subs for model making and tabletop miniatures, but the gunpla community was very well run.

    In general, I think the lack of moderation tools has made it difficult for communities to do regular “event” posts and the like which used to really help keep subs alive, guide discussions, and gave good examples of the type of content that fit. Like it’s a lot easier to start a new conversation at a party where everyone is talking than to be the first person to speak up in a silent room.






  • Similar to your #2, but less serious, I once wrote a script to power down virtual machines for a data center move. It was a nice piece of work too, grouping them in batches, sending shutdown commands to the guest OS, falling back to forcing a power off through the hypervisor after a configurable timeout…

    I don’t recall the specifics of the problem or the virtual infrastructure I was working with, but in short I didn’t have sanity checks on what was being shut down. Ended up force shutting off the hypervisor/virtual infrastructure management system.

    Added an extra few hours the move with that.