C4d

Enshittification intensifies.

Cruelty towards those who are relatively weaker or indeed defenceless - children, the elderly, partners, animals.

Abusing service / customer-facing staff fits in to this as well and is at once particularly revealing and particularly damning. Next time you’re out and about with friends or a love interest watch how they treat (or talk about) e.g. the person at a ticket booth or the person waiting on tables - if they’re nasty to them (or about them), imagine what they might be like behind closed doors (and how they might treat you one day).

Cory Doctorow (pluralistic.net) has a number of stories now on the concept of “enshittification”. Basically businesses start off being good to customers but eventually get to a point where, if they’re dominant the drive for endless profit results in them turning to squeezing suppliers, customers, everyone.

Tech enables new forms of exploitation.

I would like to see some numbers.

When it came time to replace an old car a few years ago I actually discounted several EVs because on paper neither the range, nor the performance, nor the charging matched up to Tesla.

I discounted Tesla because I didn’t like the way a certain CEO went about their business and so couldn’t trust the company.

Looking at this, I should have just bought the EV I wanted back then and been done with it.

That’s the one that got defederated.

Mine is similar. Arrived, day one in a new team; this one was more high-intensity than the usual - a fast-paced and very hands-on work environment. Noticed the team leader was working in a dysfunctional and unsafe manner; seemed unsteady. As the most junior member and a newbie at that I hesitated to confront directly; thankfully I managed to find a more experienced colleague. Scene was made safe; turned out the guy was drunk as a skunk. Canned within the hour.

I’ve since learned to be stronger and more willing to confront suboptimal or dangerous performance in team members, regardless of their seniority.

That was pretty scary.

People will rip off the headsets if the ads are too intrusive and annoying. Which is why they’ll either be dead subtle, or they’ll offer you paid ways to avoid them.

I don’t think there’ll be mass adoption of this either way, mainly because it’s an expensive gadget coming at a time when folks on median incomes are feeling the pinch.

Hmmm.

Sega is a subsidiary of Sega Sammy Holdings. Sammy is a major developer of pachinko machines.

I wonder where this is going?

Have you disabled viewing posts from bot accounts? It’s one of the user settings.

If you have disabled viewing posts from bots, this is what you would see if a bot commented.

That crab mentality (crabs in a bucket) can be hard to shake but it's got to go. The Boondocks explained it nicely (short SFW extract from an otherwise NSFW TV programme here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipg4EL_JUyE)

For those who like me are wondering why folk are sucking sand out of the sea in the first place - the TL;DR bot missed this bit:

"Sand and gravel makes up half of all the materials mined in the world. Globally, 50bn tonnes of sand and gravel are used every year – the equivalent of a wall 27 metres high and 27 metres wide stretching round the equator. It is the key ingredient of concrete and asphalt.

“Our entire society is built on sand, the floor of your building is probably concrete, the glass on the windows, the asphalt on roads is made of sand,” said Peduzzi. “We can’t stop doing it because we need lots of concrete for the green transition, for wind turbines and other things.”"

I thought Captcha tests were being used to train image recognition systems no?

Problem is they even with paying the third party app gets an inferior experience (no polls, nothing marked NSFW).

Why don’t we take a look at how the plastics industry handled the public? Here’s Climate Town (YouTube link).

The last and only printer that I bought from HP worked well and didn’t pull any shenanigans, it was a Laserjet 5L.

Since then, feedback from colleagues and what I’ve seen from reviews and tech communities put me off buying HP again. Between their cloud printing, their inkjet cartridge verification and the USB ports covered in stickers and now this…

Good bot. Do we do that here?

This too shall pass

The other thing with rabbits (and prey animals in general) is they don’t always form a good bond with a human; it can take a long time if they are fussy. Even if they do take to liking you, prey animals tend to only show subtle signs of illness until they are critically unwell by which point it might be too late. That’s before we get to whether there’s a vet nearby who has a special interest in “exotic pets” and who knows how to help.

Edit to add: the signs of illness are subtle because they actively hide it - key to survival is to avoid looking like easy prey.

I pay no attention to post history when it comes to voting behaviour; posts are as they are. I’m not much of a downvoter; it’s upvote or nothing unless a post is straight up awful inappropriate for the community it is in.

If it’s a niche subject that I’m interested in, I look at their post history in case they’ve found discussions that I’ve missed.

If it’s a particularly good, funny, extreme or otherwise “out there” post I do look at the post history for entertainment value, learning or just morbid curiosity.

Remember hearing it the first time. There’s a recording here.

Agree. Ideas, however heinous, never quite die out. But we can educate people so that they can recognise abhorrent ideology for what it is and avoid being radicalised.

Sorry to read you are feeling this way.

We are all different; we don’t all respond the same way to the same things but I will share what works for me.

I try to channel that energy into something positive if I can - exercise that little bit harder, put more time and passion into my hobbies.

If that isn’t working I try to dissipate it; listening to heavy metal is my go to. The “heavier” it is the more therapeutic it becomes. Story-driven video games (and the odd first-person shooter or open world mess) can help too.

I have a young family and a family pet; I find that making time to play with them and doing activity with them helps, but even so I sometimes need time to myself to clear my head.

Oddly enough being at work helps too. By the time I’ve fixed someone else’s problems I realise that maybe mine can be fixed too.

I’ve never found that having a treat (food, drink, whatever) worked for me; I end up feeling guilty of the excess and empty afterwards - but I appreciate this works for some.

When all of the above fails - I phone a friend.

All of this is about making space to strip away the emotional burdens and perform a fair analysis of the situation. I’m very solution / results driven so I look for ways of moving forwards.

Take care out there.

The printer scene: https://youtu.be/N9wsjroVlu8

Some men will be experiencing problems such as “hesitation” (they step up to wee but nothing happens for a few seconds), a poorer stream than they’re used to and “terminal dribbling” (they think they’ve finished but quite a few drops of urine continue to dribble out - in addition to hitting the toilet seat it might drip into their underwear when they put their penis away). They might even have problems with needing to go very often or all of a sudden.

Symptoms like these can mean that there’s a problem with urine being able to flow out of the bladder easily. One thing that can cause this would be a problem with the bladder, but it could also be a problem with the prostate. You don’t have to be super old for this to start happening.

Regardless it is worth getting symptoms like this checked out with a doctor and making sure it’s not something serious; even if it isn’t, there might be treatment that can help with the symptoms.

Should still wipe the seat when done, or have a tissue handy to catch the drops before they get anywhere.

The pure ChatGPT output would probably be garbage. The dataset will be full of all manner of sources (together with their inherent biases) together with spin, untruths and outright parody and it’s not apparent that there is any kind of curation or quality assurance on the dataset (please correct me if I’m wrong).

I don’t think it’s a good tool for extracting factual information from. It does seem to be good at synthesising prose and helping with writing ideas.

I am quite interested in things like this where the output from a “knowledge engine” is paired with something like ChatGPT - but it would be for eg writing a science paper rather than news.

Sadly the terrible ideas that lead to Nazi Germany and the horrors that came with it still abound.

Wikipedia link to NeoNazism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Nazism

Let it be. The duplication problem is all over the Fediverse. Over time some of those communities will die out and some will become more distinctive or specialised, attracting specific engagement in their own right; the problem will solve itself.

Let’s explore this further. When we look at the work of a human we can often see their influences (and they can often acknowledge them or even cite specific works). In a way, they are able to credit those they were inspired by.

Would an “AI” be able to do the same? I’m guessing it probably can, but more as a statistical similarity to other works. I don’t know if it can cite its sources.

Nah. You just get an F.

Playing devil’s advocate is done in the open; OP is describing something more covert.

Every day is a school day; I had no idea.

I thought Domino as depicted in Deadpool 2 was pretty cool. Just lucky enough.

Yes; my advice was going to be to get hold of one decent cooking pot and one decent chef’s knife and learn to cook.

Prepping my own food and being able to bulk cook meals for a few days to a few weeks ahead was a big advantage. Also helped me to get to know people and make friends.

You need a decent pot. And a knife you can maintain and sharpen. And to learn to cook.

I suspect most people who joined Lemmy ended up on .world because they would have gone here first:

https://join-lemmy.org/

For a while Lemmy.World was one of the first ones you came across; between that, the open signups and the “general purpose” moniker, rapid growth was probably inevitable.

Reddit admins chose to strengthen censorship and guidelines against anything that could be considered lewd.

I am not sure that this is quite correct; I got the impression that the NSFW content management / content restriction aspect was chosen to be the palatable or defensible thin end of the wedge on the road to creating increasing disparity between what was available via the official app and what could be accessed by third parties via API - my guess is that we would start to see gatekeeping of things like sport content and maybe some sponsored subreddits etc.

Reddit admins chose the path of strict regulation and higher prices, and then made the pricing for API access exorbitant.

Exactly; the impression I got was that they wanted third-party apps to be financially non-viable.

Ultimately, Reddit was trying to force traffic (and revenue) through ONLY their app

Absolutely. And by the time they killed off Apollo, I was already browsing Lemmy.

I mean that sounds like a curse. Endless screaming. Where others may see a cute bunny munching on some grass, or a bee buzzing around a flower, all you will hear are shrieks of pain and abject terror.

St Elmo’s Fire. I only watched it because of the catchy “full eighties” title track and discovered that said title track totally outclassed the movie.

“It will be funny in about ten years” - Lemmy

That’s my guess too.

Agree.

Even on sites with an algorithm (eg Reddit and Twitter) my experience was severely improved by trimming down the follow list and then always sorting by new.