Your phone doesn't listen to you, but it builds a fingerprint and uses that fingerprint to serve ads.

It also serves ads for things based on who you've been around recently. The example given was the guy's wife asked for a power drill for her birthday, and then the guy started seeing power drill ads.

This wasn't because of the conversation, but because his wife had looked up power drills and opened herself up to ads about them. Because the husband had been around the wife, the ad algorithms thought he might be into the same sort of things she is, and so they started serving him ads based on what they think his wife would like.

The article takes issue with this and considers it an invasion of privacy. It's the same sort of story we've seen dozens of times before; John Oliver did it better.

This is already happening.

Bots are being used to astroturf the protests on Reddit. You can see at the bottom how this so-called "user" responds "as an AI language program..."

Let's not forget Android as well!

Google's been slowly killing the open-source part of Android for a while now...

With Lemmygrad hot on their heels!

I'm a mod of /r/Disneyland, and we recreated our sub over here on Kbin ( @Disneyland, https://kbin.social/m/Disneyland).

The issue is that we had 500k subs on Reddit. That sounds like a lot, but in reality it equates to about a dozen posts a day, maybe less.

Over here on Kbin, we almost have 100 subs - and I'm really proud of that! - but 100 subs is basically nothing. A fraction of a percent of people are actually content contributors, and the whole community rests on them. Then combine that with the fact that we're a niche subject (not some general thing like "video games") and that impacts what can be contributed.

On top of that, the magazine is fairly empty. Not barren - we have a few posts - but it certainly looks and feels empty. And because it's empty, nobody wants to post, which means it stays empty.

Compare that to Reddit, which has a very dedicated community for us. Not a massive community, but certainly a passionate one. We care about our community; we've stewarded it for years. All of us mods started out as members of that community (the subreddit founder is long gone), and we're all unpaid volunteers that want to keep that community healthy.

Reddit threatened to take it from us and give it to another mod team for a related Disney subreddit that played along with the admins. The issue is that multiple Disney subreddits have, uh, issues with those mods (which has been the case for years to the point where explaining the history is part of onboarding for a lot of Disney mods).

So the issue was reframed - either we reopen our sub on our terms... or we stick to our guns, force Reddit to remove us, and get replaced by a different mod team. This other team is known to be harsh about banning users for any kind of dissent, they abuse their mod powers to spread anti-vax nonsense all over their "non-political" subreddit, they have multiple subreddit drama threads talking about their actions, they've been gunning for all of the Disney subs for years... and they'd immediately jump at the chance to reopen the subreddit we've worked hard on so they could run it their way.

When you look at it like that... there's only one real choice. I hate Reddit, but our community doesn't deserve that.

I realize saying "we choose to keep our powers for your own good" makes me sound like, oh, I dunno, "landed gentry"... but users don't see that side of moderation or Reddit drama, and frankly they shouldn't have to.

So we opened and are taking the abuse. Users are torn between "you caved, scabs" and "told you this was a useless gesture, how dare you take my sub away". Neither one is great.

But there's more to it than what appears on the surface, and frankly that's true across a lot of subs.

They had me until they started pushing their Web3 bullshit. Crypto bros co-opted the term and kept it away from "real" Web 3.0 tech like the fediverse.

You are technically correct, but surely you must know at this point that's not at all how domains are used on the internet. Bit.ly isn't hosted or affiliated with Libya.

And if you ever doubted that the maintainers of Lemmy are tankies, well have I got a post from you, from the horse's mouth:

https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck\_the\_white\_supremacist\_reddit\_admins\_want\_me/

https://web.archive.org/web/20230626055233/https://old.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck\_the\_white\_supremacist\_reddit\_admins\_want\_me/

Hey all, longtime Marxist-leninist, recorder of left audiobooks, and megathread shitposter here.

Posting this in light of a recent one week Reddit ban I earned for shitting on US police, as I'm sure many of us have gotten in recent weeks.

So I've spent the past few months working on a self hostable, federated, Reddit alternative called Lemmy, and it's pretty much ready to go. Unlike here we'd have ultimate control over all content, and would never have to self censor.

Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are, so we should never abandon Reddit entirely, but it's been clear to all of us from day one, that communities like this stand on unsteady ground, and could be banned or quarantined at any moment by the white supremacist Reddit admins. This would be both a backup and a potentially better alternative. Moderation abilities are there, as well as a slur filter.

Raddle isn't an option obviously since it's run by this arch anti tankie scum, ziq.

I wanted to ask ppl here if they'd like me to host an instance, and mod all the current mods here.

The instance that post mentions at the end became Lemmygrad. Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad are the same people. They chose ".ml" because they are Marxist-Leninists. They first advertised on /r/communism and that post outright states they're Marxist-Leninists.

Thinking they chose .ml because they really like Mali is absolutely ridiculous.

Can you please stop spamming this everywhere?

We don't care about Reddit. There are places you can share that. Posting it to every community on every instance you can think of isn't helping; it's just pissing people off from the constant amount of spam.

Here's a video from an all-hands meeting the day after she quit. (Reddit, sorry.)

The following is a transcript if you'd rather avoid Reddit:

(speaker 1, Linus) So we called this meeting because it's come to our attention that we need to have a quick chat about the best way to handle HR related feedback and rumors. We won't be giving any names for what I hope are extraordinarily obvious reasons, but what we can do is give you the following guidelines for problem solving and conflict resolution.

Sorry that this is all boring and corporate, but here we are. Number one, always stand up for what's right. We're only a team as long as we're all working together and working for each other. That's the most important one. Number two, always reflect on your own personal experiences and use your common sense. Few things in life are truly black and white. Number three, always wait to hear both sides of a story before passing your own judgment. Be cautious when you know that one side is bound by legal and ethical disclosure guidelines, when the other is not. Carefully consider what it says about the character of someone who would engage in that type of gossip against someone who has no power to defend themselves.

Number four, always encourage openness and transparency. If you have a problem, you need to speak up. We want to fix it. If you receive feedback about somebody else at this company, the first response is, have you spoken with this person? Followed closely by, you need to speak with this person. We don't solve interpersonal issues here, or really anywhere in your life, if you wish to live in a drama free zone, by engaging in water cooler politicking. So, if for any reason that individual is not comfortable approaching the person they're having a conflict with, we have a chain that they're supposed to follow.

So first, you advise them to take the problem to their manager. Followed by me or Yvonne, followed by our third party HR firm. I hope that you all trust that we're here to make this a safe, fun, and productive workplace, and we won't tolerate mistreatment of any of our team members.

If you have any reason to believe otherwise, then I refer you again to point number four, which is to address the issue with the individual directly, or bring it to me or Yvonne, or bring it to our third party HR firm. Since I'm not at liberty to share any details about what occurred, uh, all I can do is ask that you trust me and Yvonne.

Um, some of you know us very well, I've been here a very long time, um, some of you have not been here for as long, but I like to think that whether you've been here for nine years or nine days, you're here for a reason and you believe that we are utmost to run this company with integrity and compassion.

Um, We can't solve problems we don't know about though, so on that note, I'd like to invite anyone who has concerns about a fellow team member or about a manager to submit their feedback either by speaking with their manager, me or Yvonne directly, or if you would prefer to provide your feedback anonymously, we have an option for that as well.

It's the manager and co-worker feedback form. Uh, Yvonne, if you're not aware of it - show of hands who is not aware of it? Hey, a lot of people aren't aware of it. Good, so now we all know. There's an anonymous form, if for whatever reason you're not comfortable either talking to me me or Yvonne directly about it - and that's okay, that's fine, we understand, that's why we have these options - Yvonne's gonna post it in the general chat.

It's a safe space to provide us ideas for improvement, or if you're consumed by the holiday spirit and you want to say nice things, you can do that too. Does anybody else have any questions?

Not a single question? Wow, that must have been a really good speech.

(speaker 2, James) You gonna dance on that table, or just stand on it?

(speaker 1, Linus) That's it! So, um, Yvonne, did you have anything you wanted to add?

(speaker 3, Yvonne) (inaudible) Somebody said (inaudible) if you guys want to sanitize your hands, help yourself with free (inaudible)?

(speaker 1, Linus) Yeah, that was actually just totally random timing. It came up the stairs a moment ago. Dennis is on it. Alright. Thank you everyone. Have a wonderful and, uh, productive rest of your day. And weekend.

Murrieta

That's the problem right there.

Murrieta is very much part of an island of conservativism in the rest of California. It's very much a green grass, "whites only" kind of place. Oodles of Mormons. Not exactly friendly to LGBTQ folk.

I lived there. I went to high school there. It was where I voted for the first time.

I remember in high school thinking a girl was cute and she invited me over on a Sunday morning. She picked me up for what I thought was going to be a day of just hanging out at her place - but instead, she dragged me to her Mormon church. The preacher spoke out about how proud they were that they were able to pass Prop 8 (which banned gay marriage in California), how hard they fought for it, and how evil LGBTQ folk were. I was disgusted, but at the time I couldn't drive (and thus couldn't leave). When I finally escaped, I made a point to never talk to that girl again.

That is absolutely par for the course in Murrieta (and Temecula). They live in a total bubble and refuse to acknowledge that they're part of California proper. A friendly reminder that the Temecula Valley School District (which represents both Murrieta and Temecula) is being sued by the State of California because they decided to promote racism and anti-LGBTQ sentiment within schools, in violation of state law.

Public Counsel, the nonprofit group that filed the lawsuit on behalf of Temecula students, parents and teachers, claims the policy has been used by school board members to stop teaching "any concepts that conflict with their ideological viewpoints, including the history of the LGBTQ rights movement and the existence of racism in today's society."

Murrieta-Temecula is full of bigots, all hiding under their mask. But when you live there, you see the mask slip... especially if you're a cis white male "good ol' boy" like how I present.

Notably, Vine was created by Twitter.

And then Vine was axed by Twitter. (One of the dumbest mistakes Twitter ever made - look how successful TikTok is, and think that Twitter literally had that a decade ago and decided to shut it down.)

So really, Vine was just video Twitter, instead of Twitter being text Vine.

Stupid question: Why can't journals just mandate an actual URL link to a study on the last page, or the exact issue something was printed in? Surely both of those would be easily confirmable, and both would be easy for a scientist using "real" sources to source (since they must have access to it themselves already).

Like, it feels silly to me that high school teachers require this sort of thing, yet scientific journals do not?

Fuck tankies.

Keep the banner.

People don't want to sell their personal data for currency.

People need currency. There is only a finite amount of currency in the world. Power structures are formed because some people have currency and other people need currency.

People are forced to do things like sell their bodies, sell their organs, and - yes - sell their biometric data. Because they need currency to survive. You don't see billionaires lining up for this.

It's exploitation of those who are most desperate. You can argue that there's the systemic problem - that there shouldn't be billionaires alongside people who are starving and need to sell their bodies - but that isn't being solved anytime soon.

But exploiting this systemic problem, using it as leverage to convince millions of poor folks to sell their biometric data... that's immoral. It's immoral to take advantage of desperation just to line your own pockets.

Why do you think you're hearing about this from some of the poorest countries in the world?

Reddit was the same way.

You have /r/gaming. /r/games. /r/truegaming. /r/videogames. /r/videogame. Etc.

Each community was slightly different in subtle ways, but some people were subscribed to multiple (basically identical) communities. Others self-sorted into different communities based on moderation style and community vibes.

Not to mention that your idea of how federation should work kind of ignores moderation and community preferences. Communities hosted on Beehaw are tightly moderated. There may be other communities that want something less strict. How do these two reconcile with one another? What happens if a conversation is removed on one instance but kept around on another?

If local mods only have local power, they can get quickly overwhelmed as you effectively need a mod team on every single instance. Smaller instances wouldn't necessarily have the manpower to have their own dedicated mods for literally everything.

So - Twitter has lost $40 billion in advertising revenue?

Sounds about right. Wonder how much more they can lose.

Might've been financed on credit - but even still, it takes a lot more than $12k for a down payment.

Assuming the median price for a home is $500k, you'd need $100k for a traditional 20% down payment. Sure, $12k is 12% of the way there... but it's nowhere near what is needed for an actual down payment.

The idea is that it would be similar to hardware attestation in Android. In fact, that's where Google got the idea from.

Basically, this is the way it works:

• You download a web browser or another program (possibly even one baked into the OS, e.g. working alongside/relying on the TPM stuff from the BIOS). This is the "attester". Attesters have a private key that they sign things with. This private key is baked into the binary of the attester (so you can't patch the binary).

• A web page sends some data to the attester. Every request the web page sends will vary slightly, so an attestation can only be used for one request - you cannot intercept a "good" attestation and reuse it elsewhere. The ways attesters can respond may vary so you can't just extract the encryption key and sign your own stuff - it wouldn't work when you get a different request.

• The attester takes that data and verifies that the device is running stuff that corresponds to the specs published by the attester - "this browser, this OS, not a VM, not Wine, is not running this program, no ad blocker, subject to these rate limits," etc.

• If it meets the requirements, the attester uses their private key to sign. (Remember that you can't patch out the requirements check without changing the private key and thus invalidating everything.)

• The signed data is sent back to the web page, alongside as much information as the attester wants to provide. This information will match the signature, and can be verified using a public key.

• The web page looks at the data and decides whether to trust the verdict or not. If something looks sketchy, the web page has the right to refuse to send any further data.

They also say they want to err towards having fewer checks, rather than many ("low entropy"). There are concerns about this being used for fingerprinting/tracking, and high entropy would allow for that. (Note that this does explicitly contradict the point the authors made earlier, that "Including more information in the verdict will cover a wider range of use cases without locking out older devices.")

That said - we all know where this will go. If Edge is made an attester, it will not be low entropy. Low entropy makes it harder to track, which benefits Google as they have their own ways of tracking users due to a near-monopoly over the web. Google doesn't want to give rivals a good way to compete with user tracking, which is why they're pushing "low-entropy" under the guise of privacy. Microsoft is incentivized to go high-entropy as it gives a better fingerprint. If the attestation server is built into Windows, we have the same thing.

I really liked /r/latestagecapitalism but I got banned for talking smack about China, and how the authoritarianism of the USSR and its child states didn't line up with the values they tried to espouse.

Permanently banned. Appeal ignored. Disappointing, but good riddance I suppose.

It was pretty much used the way people use Discord with a group of friends today. It didn't have servers or anything like that, but you could hop on a call with a couple of buds and play games together.

I played a lot of Halo Custom Edition over Xfire back in the day...

I'm so mad at goddamn Lenin and Stalin for co-opting socialism. We went from the Paris Commune to the fucking USSR?

Now we gotta deal with shit like China being an authoritarian dictatorial hellscape that commits genocide (and denies the groups ever existed). And because they pay lip service to Marx you get people bowing down to grovel at Winnie the Pooh's gaze, or mummifying Lenin and treating him like a deity or something.

And of course then when you say "Hey, capitalism is unsustainable especially when automation starts replacing jobs en masse" people go "YOU MEAN YOU WANNA BE CHINA YOU TANKIE????" And the fact that there is a subset of people (many of whom are right here in the threadiverse...) who would love to be China and openly spread Chinese-style communism where protestors get run over by tanks and turned into a fine paste really doesn't help matters.

They suck all the goddamn air out of the room and cause serious discussions of socialism to get dismissed out of hand as supporting USSR-style "fascism with socialist characteristics".

If these hardcore authoritarian tankies didn't exist, it would be a lot easier to make the point that capitalism is incompatible with democracy as well. I'm not just talking about how money is speech and bribes are okay as long as you call them "campaign contributions".

But you don't see capitalist defenders pointing to Putin or the Democratic Republic of the Congo as examples of the wonders of capitalism. They're capitalist countries, yet they don't get accepted as such by people trying to discredit socialism. Curious. Yet China, Cuba, Venezuela, and the USSR are always their go-tos for discrediting communism. It's almost as if fascism/democracy is largely separated from capitalism/socialism (a fact that's frequently ignored...).

But it's really hard to make the point of "socialism does not mean authoritarianism, you can have democracy in a socialist state" when the largest group of socialists loudly advocate for an authoritarian communist dictatorship where they silence all dissent.

So now we can't have that discussion at all. Even people who hate "elites" and are class-conscious immediately shut down when hearing the "socialism" word because of how badly the USSR and China fucked Marx up.

God, I hate tankies.

Alright, one point at a time:

It sounds like that you are just not interested in building a new community and rather go back to the ivory tower that is reddit.

If we weren't interested, we wouldn't have founded the community. We're now maintaining two. The Disneyland subreddit links to Kbin in its sidebar. While I'd agree that Reddit is somewhat of an ivory tower, bear in mind that it's a community we've cultivated for years and we have a sense of responsibility for them.

What are you gonna do when Reddit is gonna implement the next thing that would be unbeneficial to the community?

Link here, like we already are. We've never participated in "Reddit drama". The fact that we took a stand as-is was a big step for us. We even committed to "indefinite", not just 48 hours. It wasn't effective, and we caved after 110 hours or so. Lessons learned.

But when (not if) Reddit shoots itself in the foot, we can have a community here ready for them. Right now it's small. To a certain extent, that's positive... the mod tools on Kbin are lacking. But it's not like we're abandoning the community here.

Spez is taking inspiration from Elon. He's going to do more dumb things. He's already talked about the dumb things he wants to do. There'll be other waves of migration, and we want to make sure that anyone who still wants the space they had (but doesn't want to use Reddit) can have a home.

If you know that the possible new mods are asses, why not call reddits bluff?

Do you think Reddit cares about asshole mod teams? Honestly. Remember, the "new mods" already run a major Disney subreddit. If Reddit cared about them being assholes who regularly wind up on SubredditDrama they would have taken action already.

Also bear in mind that I am one person on a team. There are others who work alongside me that have voices which should be heard and respected. To that extent, a lot of them didn't want to even risk it. I don't have the authority (by design) to unilaterally override them.

Sorry to say but most of the community does not give a damn about moderators.

...

I thought and still think it would be absolutely ridiculous to invest your time and efforts for a profit making company for absolutely nothing in return.

Absolutely correct. We're the unpaid jannies, the suckers who need to touch grass. That's not sarcasm, btw - I really do think that. It's absolutely ridiculous that we do it at all, especially given the amount of abuse we get from... well, basically everyone.

Spez doesn't care about our users. We know that. Frankly, there are a lot of places on the internet that are run or controlled by those who don't care about others.

So spaces that do care are important. You can call it posturing, but it's the truth. If we didn't care, we would've quit a decade ago.

We care about making our community a welcoming space, a little home on the internet. We care about stopping trolls that see the word "Disney" and want to cause as much damage as possible.

It is absolutely ridiculous to care. Because you're right - the site doesn't care. We are giving them value and expecting nothing. They depend on us to care, and they treat us any way they want because they know we're too goddamn soft to let harm come to the communities we try and protect.

But there are people who need these little rest stops. They need a place to post a picture of their Mickey Mouse balloon, or their engagement photo in front of the castle, or their debate about what on earth the writing on some poster says. It makes them happy and there's a whole blossoming community there, of happy people in a safe space.

What on earth do I even get out of my "posturing" otherwise? A stupid green badge that says "please yell at me?" I don't even get that badge outside of my sub. I'm not a powermod; /r/Disneyland is the only major sub I mod. The only others I run are teeny tiny, maybe 600 users. We're not a Reddit partner community that gets wined and dined.

We're just some stupid, terminally-online folks who need to touch grass. Doing unpaid labor for an abusive place that doesn't care, promoting a different abusive monopoly of a company that doesn't care. All to make some little virtual people on the other side of a box (who also hate us) happy.

Hey, how about reading the article before regurgitating your shit (wrong) opinions?

Here, I'll help.

At their second visit, about a week later, Regina tentatively asked Balthrop if there was any way to terminate Ashley’s pregnancy. Seven months earlier, Balthrop could have directed Ashley to abortion clinics in Memphis, 90 minutes north, or in Jackson, Miss., two and a half hours south. But today, Ashley lives in the heart of abortion-ban America. In 2018, Republican lawmakers in Mississippi enacted a ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The law was blocked by a federal judge, who ruled that it violated the abortion protections guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court felt differently. In their June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion that had existed for nearly half a century. Within weeks, Mississippi and every state that borders it banned abortion in almost all circumstances.

Balthrop told Regina that the closest abortion provider for Ashley would be in Chicago. At first, Regina thought she and Ashley could drive there. But it’s a nine-hour trip, and Regina would have to take off work. She’d have to pay for gas, food, and a place to stay for a couple of nights, not to mention the cost of the abortion itself. “I don’t have the funds for all this,” she says.

So Ashley did what girls with no other options do: she did nothing.

This is what the policies you support cause. I hope you'll do some research and reconsider.

This is the core issue with all procgen games, IMO.

You are promised "infinite exploration", but in truth there are countable variants of the procgen algorithm. Once you see all those variants, you've effectively seen everything. Sure, you'll see small variations, or new ways to combine the existing variants... but when you see all the "tricks" the veil falls.

There is a distinction between Communists and tankies.

Tankies are a subset of Communists. Specifically, tankies have rejected Marx in favor of authoritarianism, power for power's sake. "Everyone is equal, and some people are more equal than others" sort of thinking. They want to show anyone who doesn't agree with them the barrel of a gun.

The term came from when the Soviets invaded Hungary in order to prevent popular reforms. But I think a better example of what tankies are like (and how they differ from communists) is looking at Czechoslovakia.

Czechoslovakia was a communist country already, but they were doing reforms that would help the average worker and promote equality within the country. The plan was to transition away from a single-party state within Czechoslovakia and towards a form of democratic socialism, where the parties still held core communist ideas but no one figure could wield influence (in line with what Marx expected).

The Soviets saw this as a threat. Their model of a one-party authoritarian state where the secret police dominate everything and the proletariat have no rights is the one they wanted to push everywhere. So they invaded Czechoslovakia and sent tanks into the country.

Later, the Chinese Communist Party sent tanks in to crush peaceful protestors who were asking for human rights and democracy within the proletariat. The protesters were literally turned into jelly by the tanks and washed down into the gutters.

Tankies support these atrocities. They say that a one-party authoritarian state is the only way to do things. Don't let them trick you into thinking they're the only true Communists - tankies want an upper class and a lower class, just like capitalists do. The distinction is that to tankies, the upper class are the party elite, the ones who do and say what they're told. The lower class are the people they don't like, or those who are unlucky enough not to have friends in high places.

Tankies are absolute scum. Lemmy's founders are tankies, Lemmygrad and Lemmy.ml both push tankie politics (Lemmy.ml is more subtle about it, but does enforce it via their moderation policy), and now Hexbear is coming over to Lemmy in order to complete the tankie trifecta.

I hate that this place is infested with tankies. I don't mind communists - I'm pretty left-leaning myself - but tankies are not true communists, and they never can be unless they fundamentally rethink their views about equality and freedom.

They can and have, is the thing.

There's been a few subs knocked out by Reddit giving the mod roles to a greedy powermod. Some "regular" mods are becoming powermods by playing nice with the admins and requesting huge subreddits.

Reddit isn't bluffing when they say "Open up or we will make you." Some teams are reporting less than 24 hours passing between them getting the "admins are knocking on your door" message and the mod team being removed and replaced with a powermod that moderates 100 other subreddits.

It's becoming obvious that you will be opened, like it or not. If mods want to continue to protest, they need to start doing malicious compliance. Subs are looking closely at Reddit's rules and following them to the letter.

Did you know Reddit considers heavy profanity to be NSFW? So you could mark your community as NSFW and use AutoMod to ensure that every post has a curse word in the title. Then since your community is obviously NSFW Reddit can't advertise on it, because ads don't run on NSFW subs.

Other mods are avoiding this approach in fears that Reddit will just ban NSFW entirely. Those are the John Oliver subs. Reddit says "it can't be a surprise what the sub is about" but clearly there's leeway because /r/trees isn't about trees and /r/marijuanaenthusiasts isn't about marijuana enthusiasts. Hence "only pictures of John Oliver"; if Reddit comes after that then they'd logically be banning /r/trees, /r/anime_titties, /r/196, etc. as well.

Reddit says that it's a democracy (it isn't, admins will always be dictators), and that users should decide the direction of the subreddit. Hence posts asking the users for their input. And of course they're only listening to the demands of the users, after all...

The only way to damage Reddit is from inside Reddit. Make Reddit a miserable experience. They're following all the rules! But it's not a good place to be. Then promote communities elsewhere (also perfectly within the rules) to push people off of Reddit and onto other sites.

And they're just doing exactly what the admins asked them to do, after all.

And this pitch to /r/linux notably leaves out this other, older pitch...

https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck\_the\_white\_supremacist\_reddit\_admins\_want\_me/

https://web.archive.org/web/20230626055233/https://old.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck\_the\_white\_supremacist\_reddit\_admins\_want\_me/

Hey all, longtime Marxist-leninist, recorder of left audiobooks, and megathread shitposter here.

Posting this in light of a recent one week Reddit ban I earned for shitting on US police, as I'm sure many of us have gotten in recent weeks.

So I've spent the past few months working on a self hostable, federated, Reddit alternative called Lemmy, and it's pretty much ready to go. Unlike here we'd have ultimate control over all content, and would never have to self censor.

Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are, so we should never abandon Reddit entirely, but it's been clear to all of us from day one, that communities like this stand on unsteady ground, and could be banned or quarantined at any moment by the white supremacist Reddit admins. This would be both a backup and a potentially better alternative. Moderation abilities are there, as well as a slur filter.

Raddle isn't an option obviously since it's run by this arch anti tankie scum, ziq.

I wanted to ask ppl here if they'd like me to host an instance, and mod all the current mods here.

Note the line: Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are. I'm pretty left-leaning myself (I draw the line at authoritarianism though), but they're very open about using their platform to push an agenda. The instance that post mentions at the end became Lemmygrad. Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad are the same people - the ".ml" in "lemmy.ml" even stands for "Marxist-Leninist".

I joined Lemmy.ml in 2020 after this pitch to /r/linux... and left shortly afterward when I saw who ran it. Thankfully we have other options now (hello from Kbin!).

I wouldn't really call it "rumors" when you can go directly to the horse's mouth:

https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck\_the\_white\_supremacist\_reddit\_admins\_want\_me/

https://web.archive.org/web/20230626055233/https://old.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck\_the\_white\_supremacist\_reddit\_admins\_want\_me/

Hey all, longtime Marxist-leninist, recorder of left audiobooks, and megathread shitposter here.

Posting this in light of a recent one week Reddit ban I earned for shitting on US police, as I'm sure many of us have gotten in recent weeks.

So I've spent the past few months working on a self hostable, federated, Reddit alternative called Lemmy, and it's pretty much ready to go. Unlike here we'd have ultimate control over all content, and would never have to self censor.

Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are, so we should never abandon Reddit entirely, but it's been clear to all of us from day one, that communities like this stand on unsteady ground, and could be banned or quarantined at any moment by the white supremacist Reddit admins. This would be both a backup and a potentially better alternative. Moderation abilities are there, as well as a slur filter.

Raddle isn't an option obviously since it's run by this arch anti tankie scum, ziq.

I wanted to ask ppl here if they'd like me to host an instance, and mod all the current mods here.

My concern is with this line: Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are. I'm pretty left-leaning myself (I draw the line at authoritarianism though), but they're very open about using their platform to push an agenda.

That post was made by the founder of Lemmy and the instance they mention at the end became Lemmygrad (because lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad are the same people - the ".ml" in "lemmy.ml" even stands for "Marxist-Leninist").

With Lemmy.ml as the "main" instance, you're exposing all these posts to an admin team who has openly said "we are agitating for our views wherever the people go, and we have ultimate control over all content." They have already removed posts critical of China as being "orientalist" (which shows a severe lack of understanding of what "orientalism" even is - it's not "anything that criticizes our Dear Leader"). I can't trust that any community hosted on lemmy.ml is free of bias.

It isn't "rumors" when you can clearly go and back it up with a source.

(FWIW - I don't mind Lemmy as a platform. My Lemmy account is actually from 2020, before I realized what they truly were. The maintainers have done a good job of keeping politics out of the software, and the concept of only using "ethical" things is a myth when your computer has rare earth elements in it. As far as instances go, Lemmy.world seems fantastic and has grown to be far larger than the tankie instances. But Kbin is more fully-featured and has a lot more long-term potential, even though it's lacking in the short-term.)

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I've been a gamedev at a couple AAA studios for almost 5 years now. I can say it's a bit of a mixed bag, and very much depends on the studio.

The studios I've worked at have treated me well. I started out working at EA, which - for all its faults when it comes to gamers - does treat their staff very nicely.

We had free snacks in the office, flexible schedules, a generous remote work policy pre-pandemic (one of the best engineers on our team was permanently in Chicago, another was permanently in Oregon), and leadership that would listen to our complaints and respond honestly. We had weekly board game lunches and D&D sessions on the clock, and a comfy place to play all the latest games whenever we wanted.

Deadlines were reasonable, and the choice was always to cut before crunching. Crunch was on the table, but only as a last resort - I only crunched once in the 3 years I worked on that game, and it was for a single weekend when we had live players running into issues. My pay was on par with a traditional tech job. I went from $15/hour at my college job to $25/hour as an intern to $100k/year as a junior. Within 3 years I was making $140k/year, plus stock options and a 30% yearly bonus.

My one complaint is that EA unceremoniously pulled the plug on us. We had started a beta period and player response was... middling. We thought we could rescue the project, but we needed another 6 months to make it happen to avoid crunching. Leadership pitched the idea... corpo execs said "You aren't getting that additional time; we're killing the project." We got shut down and all 150 devs were sent to the unemployment line.

EA's severance package was very generous, though, and even when they were firing us they went above and beyond what they legally were "supposed" to do. I wound up with my yearly bonus, half a years' worth of salary, plus 2 months of being "technically employed" but being paid to look for another job - so plenty of runway (plus unused sick time + vacation on top of that).

While it always sucks being laid off, and it sucks that the project we spent years on got the axe overnight... they really could've been far worse. Some of my former coworkers decided to do their own thing and it seems to have worked out for them, as they were able to get publisher funding well within the "runway" EA gave us.

Based started on 4chan. People stole memes from 4chan, where it spread and became Zoomer slang.

Cringe I think has a similar but slightly different etymology; I don't know if it necessarily came from 4chan or if it came from Reddit.

100%.

It gets tricky, though. For example, I'm using a website called "Sudowrite" to help me write a novel. I've been kicking this idea around since 2007. I have a general idea for what it should look like, but I always struggle with Act 2.

Literally over a decade's worth of notes. And not a good Act 2.

But I was able to use ChatGPT and Sudowrite (especially its "Story Engine" tool) to finally understand what Act 2 was missing. And now I'm able to rewrite what I've already done, making it better. AI is a tool just like a word processor is a tool.

Lest anyone think I'm writing an ad here - I'm not. Per their FAQ, Sudowrite says that I own the copyright on anything that I generate with their stuff.

Who owns the copyright to what I write?

You do. Anything you write in Sudowrite and anything Sudowrite suggests for you belongs to you.

But if I don't modify it, that's clearly not true (as you mention). Furthermore, I can actually have it suggest things that might run counter to that idea.

I've had it suggest lines from Kafka - good lines, too. I've read Kafka, so I recognized them... but what if I didn't? I don't own the copyright on those lines, as Tom Scott points out in OP's video. Kafka's original German is public domain... most translations are not.

You can highlight some text in the tool and say "Write this in the style of Douglas Adams." It knows who Douglas Adams is. It knows what his work sounds like. And the only way it knows is because its model was trained on his work. When I did this, one of the suggestions included Zaphod Beeblebrox, which was certainly not mentioned in my text. It also suggests spaceships and aliens and futuristic gadgets, all written in the kind of prose that you'd expect from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

How would it know that, if it hadn't read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

It's why Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI. While the model may be a bunch of statistics, it also must know what her text is like - to some degree. We can argue over how, but going back to the AI suggesting Zaphod Beeblebrox... if I didn't know HGTTG maybe I'd think that's a cool name for a character? How can Sudowrite say I own the copyright when it's clear that they don't own it, either?

Which sort of brings me back to the beginning. AI has the potential to be a wonderful tool - again, like going from a typewriter to a computer. I have had this idea for literally 16 years now, and Sudowrite was literally a game changer. I knew all of act 1, act 2 was... ehhhh, and then act 3 was never satisfying without a good act 2. I knew where I wanted to go, but not how to get there. AI really helped, because it understands story structures - and how to make good stories (with some prodding - it's not perfect). And now, whenever I'm stumped, I can type some stuff into the prompt and it'll generate ideas for me.

But that only works if we really figure out where the line is for copyright. I'm trusting what Sudowrite is telling me... but I'm taking a risk, because what if they're wrong?

Yep, it's been a trend all year. My studio got canned back at the end of January. Publisher called us into a studio-wide meeting scheduled during lunch with 1 hour of notice, only to say "The game you spent 6 years on is canceled and all 150 of you are fired. The media will know in 30 minutes, don't say anything until then if you want to keep a severance package." (I have since landed on my feet elsewhere.)

These studios are owned by big publishers and generally work for years at a loss. With the costs to borrow increasing, we're seeing cuts on long-term investments that might not make their money back (like movies and games).

Volition was owned by Embracer, which is now struggling with funding. So anything that isn't a sure bet is effectively canned - and in turn you see these studios shut down left and right, plus big layoffs from studios that are still open.

You do realize that just makes you look, like, actually insane, right?

Like, that in combination with everything else you wrote just makes it seem like mad ramblings and sort of discounts anything you have to say since you're leading an angry rant with "put someone else's poop in your butt".

And then when you say you've been banned from multiple sites and it's all a grand conspiracy from Reddit to be out to get you, people are just going to think "this guy opened the article by suggesting you shove someone else's poop in your butt."

I know there are studies blah blah blah. But you understand how this looks, right?

@nonexcludable @masires

On top of this - a lot of mods (like a lot of users) dislike the fediverse. The Twitter -> Mastodon exodus left a bad taste in a lot of peoples' mouths, and that holds true for mods as well as users.

I'm in a Discord with a bunch of other Reddit mods. We originally were using it to organize the protest, but it's become a place to discuss next steps. A lot of them pony up the "the fediverse is too confusing" angle. Even when it's explained, they say "No, it's too confusing" and refuse to even try to ask questions about where they're getting lost. Instead, they push alternatives like Squabbles (which seems to be the most common among the anti-fediverse folks).

On top of that, both Lemmy and Kbin don't have much in the way of moderation tools. There doesn't appear to be a spam filter and certainly no AutoModerator. Kbin's API is (currently) read-only, so a bot can't even be written to work like AutoMod. This makes large communities much harder to moderate and should basically be the next step for devs once they stabilize from the Reddit exodus, as anything with more than 1000 users will quickly start to become basically impossible for human mods to keep up.

The fact that those tools don't exist turns a lot of mods off from joining as well, and fuels the anti-fediverse sentiment.

Some of the holdouts understand the limitations and just don't think it's a good platform for them. They have legitimate criticisms and point out ways that their communities wouldn't work properly on Kbin/Lemmy. Other holdouts are stubbornly pig-headed and refuse to understand. They derisively dismiss anyone who tries to explain as a "tech bro", dig in their heels and draw a hard line in the sand for reasons they can't even explain other than "I don't like anything fediverse."

But there is a list of subs that are advertising their fediverse equivalents; my sub (500k+ members) has an ad for our community in the "we're reopening, sadly" sticky and the sidebar. You can also see a list of places which have equivalents over at https://sub.rehab/; anything with the "official" label is advertised somewhere by the mods that run that sub on Reddit.

It seems odd to me that Beehaw would choose a federated model if this is truly their approach.

The whole point of federation is that you'll have everyone from everywhere in your community, with exceptions for bad actors.

If Beehaw says "We want our community to be unified and work exactly as we say" it just seems like they should have forked Tildes or something?

I was talking to one of the Beehaw admins the other day and I think they mentioned they came from Tildes because they disagreed with how Deimos was running things or something like that. But Tildes is open-source and non-federated, so it seems like the more natural place to jump to for what they want to do?

Counter-counterpoint: I've been using it since 2019. I think you're exaggerating.

• It aggressively tries to center itself, always. If you're in a lane and it merges with a second lane, the car will swerve sharply to the right as it attempts to go back to the middle of the lane.

• It doesn't allow space for cars to merge until the cars are already merging. It doesn't work with traffic; it does its own thing and is discourteous to other drivers. It doesn't read turn signals; it only reacts to drivers getting over.

• If a motorcycle is lane-splitting, it doesn't move out of the way for the motorcycle. In fact, it assumes anything between lanes isn't an issue. If something is partially blocking a lane but the system doesn't recognize it as fully "your lane", the default is to ignore it. The number of times I've had to disengage to dodge a wide load or a camper straddling two lanes is crazy.

• With the removal of radar, phantom braking has become far, far worse. Any kind of weather condition causes issues. Even if you drive at sunset, the sun can dazzle the cameras and they don't detect things that they should be able to - or worse, they detect problems which aren't there.

• It doesn't understand road hazards. It will happily hit a pothole at 70 MPH. It will ignore road flares and traffic cones. When the lanes aren't clearly marked (because the paint has worn away or because of construction), it can have dramatic behavior.

• It waits so long to brake, and when it brakes it brakes hard. It accelerates just as suddenly, leading to a very jerky ride that makes my passengers carsick.

The only time I trust FSD is when it's stop-and-go traffic. Beyond that I have to pay so much attention to the thing that I might as well just drive myself. The "worst thing it can do" isn't just detour; it's "smash into the thing that it thought wasn't an issue".

Then maybe you shouldn't be subscribed to this community?

This is sort of the mission statement of Kbin. Kbin supports Lemmy, Mastodon, FireFish, and Pixelfed already. It's planned to support PeerTube (this used to work but broke) and Mobilizon.

That's the main reason why I have a Kbin account. :)

Kbin's federation with Mastodon works as you'd expect it to work.

I don't know why Lemmy insists on such bad integration with Mastodon. Last I checked, the Lemmy devs were insisting on not having smooth integration with Mastodon.

Doesnt make much sense when you can create a second account on Mastodon or one of many other platforms which already implement user following much better.

It's one reason why I jumped to Kbin and have been using it for the past few months. Kbin does indeed support user following much better -and it supports threads showing up in Mastodon much better too.

Godot is a passable engine. It doesn't have a massive pile of money behind it, but it'll generally do most things adequately.

Honestly - and I may be biased as I'm a AAA dev who works with the engine - Unreal is really the way to go. Reasonable pricing on a powerful engine. The main issue is that it's bloated as hell and there's a learning curve... but if you're an indie, it's just as usable as Unity. Plus if you wanted to get into AAA development someday, Unreal is super popular and used everywhere.