Oh, man. Can you imagine the misery of being appointed to this post? Literally half of the government would hate and despise you and would look for ways to undercut you just to have an extra talking point while they stand in the hall talking to Fox News. And to top it off, what could you actually do to affect change? I sympathize with the poor workers of this office.

For me it was playing Life is Strange for the first time. I bought it because it had been listed on Steam as “Overwhelmingly Positive” for ages, and at the time I was really enjoying the story-based games that companies like Telltale were producing. So, knowing nothing about the game, I picked it up and started playing it.

The first act was slow. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the writers were establishing Arcadia Bay, a city in the Pacific Northwest, as a character. All the people in it needed to be recognizable, so it took time for them to teach the player about who they were, what mattered to them, how they fit in to the city, and what their flaws were. I actually stopped playing for a while after the first act. But, luckily, I picked it back up over the holiday season.

I still remember playing it in my living room. I was so thoroughly absorbed into the story that when something tense happened in the second act and I couldn’t stop it the way I normally could, I was literally crushing the controller as if I could make things work by pulling the triggers harder.

I am decidedly not the demographic that Life is Strange was written to appeal to, but they did such a good job writing a compelling story that it didn’t matter. I got sucked in, the characters became important to me, and I could not. put. it. down. I played straight through a night until I finished it.

(If you’ve played it and you’re wondering, I chose the town the first time I played it.)

I’ll never forget that game. I’ll also never forget the communities that spawned around it. I read the accounts of people who had just played it for the first time for about a year because it helped me relive the experience I had when I played it. It was incredible.

The ad is designed to keep the abortion issue talked about. Have you noticed how Republicans have gone radio-silent on abortion? They don't want it brought up. This is a smart move.

You just know that John Oliver is sitting at home right now laughing his ass off at the memes, and then screaming into a pillow because he can’t talk about it anywhere due to the writer’s strike.

I’m a 15-year user of Reddit. Lemmy right now is very similar to very early Reddit. Reddit’s users were more technical back then, too. I’m betting the early adopters of places like this are usually the technical types.

Another nice thing about Lemmy is that a lot of the low-effort, casual users on Reddit haven’t gotten here yet. Interaction here is definitely a lot more pleasant.

This is Wyoming we're talking about. Wyoming is where Matthew Shepherd was brutally tortured and murdered. I wouldn't stop, either.

Here's one I witnessed in an office about 25 years ago. Some engineers filled a plastic 35mm film canister with a bunch of the waste paper from a three-hole punch. That's basically the little white circles of paper. Then they took a can of compressed air and, with the cap mostly on the canister, slowly filled the canister with super-cooled air from the compressed air canister. Then they fully sealed the cap and went to talk to the mark. They placed the canister nearby -- on the mark's desktop computer, I think. Just out of sight. To avoid arousing suspicion, they stayed and talked to him for 30 seconds or so. Then they walked off to go back to work (and watch the prank unfold from a distance).

That little canister sat there for a while, with the super-cooled air slowly warming to room temperature. As you know, the molecules of cold gasses are very close together, and they start to expand outward as they warm. So when this canister got warm enough, there was enough pressure inside to pop the lid off and distribute the little white paper circles in a perfectly random pattern in a circle about six feet around the mark.

It was glorious.

Laws like this are designed to be deterrents. You don't need to catch very many offenders with checkpoints as long as you can create enough fear about the consequences of breaking the law to keep people from traveling to get an abortion.

On the other hand, fixing all those problems makes you a really effective problem solver. You learn which technologies are good and which are bad; you learn where to find reliable solutions to problems; and you begin to see where tutorial writers have a lack of knowledge (or were really lazy) and how to fix their problems. It forces you to create good habits and to follow best practices. And years down the line, you'll have some great, stable software that is the envy of your techie friends.

I think it's important with a piece like this to take a step back and figure out why the editor put it in the publication to begin with. Let's take a look at its components.

• Clickbait title driving clicks? Check.
• Topic that seems to violate long-held conventional wisdom (and therefore drive clicks)? Check.
• Grain of truth to drive controversy (and thus distribution on social media? Check.

This isn't propaganda. Some editor saw this, knew how people would respond, and published it for the clicks.

I read the article a couple of times. Nowhere in it is Ravitz advocating this model. He's talking about how he is using this model and thinks that it can be a wealth generator. He hasn't even sold his first renovated house yet; he just thinks he will sell it in August or September.

Strip away all the dressing up of the article and you could title it, "Guy who sells houses improves his house and plans to sell it for a profit, and if it works he will keep doing it."

Those of us who are of a certain age have seen this happen before. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, some big companies like Compuserve and Prodigy and AOL became service providers and offered customers access to their own content, as well as a "gateway" to the internet. They weren't the only service providers, but they made access to the internet much easier for less technical people, and they had reach. AOL is infamous for its mail marketing campaign where they blasted copies of their software to everyone on CDs.

That brought a whole new segment of the population onto the internet who didn't have the same culture or capabilities or interest in building a high-quality community. Usenet forums were particularly impacted. Longtime users coined a term that is still used today to describe this phenomenon: Eternal September. Why September? Because prior to all of this, the only time the forums had to deal with inexperienced, uncouth users was in September, when a new batch of first-year college students got access to the internet and found their way to Usenet.

Right now Lemmy is peopled with the high-quality user base that wants to improve the community. Threads threatens to (and will) open the floodgates of people who may not share those interests.

Right now? Silo. Every damn episode of that first season was perfect. In a few months it will probably be Star Trek Lower Decks again.

It's so amazing to see a comment like this. For years and years, the tech industry workers were heavily anti-union. I'm glad to see the sentiment turning around.

Yeah, this is usually the reason I will downvote a news article. Misinformation needs to be marked somehow, and a negative score is a good way to do that.

Let's say you are applying for an engineering position and you want to mention that you contribute to an open source project. Mention the software stack used, maybe the number of downloads, and your focus on the project. Explain it in general terms. If it gets asked about in the interview, just answer questions without providing the name of the project.

OP, I just wanted to say thank you for writing such a good title. It's rare to get such an informative, clickbait-free title these days.

First, you don't really need a VPN to view Plex content. Plex can be configured to require a secure connection. That ought to be enough. But if you want the VPN tunnel for some reason, the answer is simple: self-host your own VPN server. I recommend OpenVPN or Wireguard.

Oh no. There goes my workday productivity.

I was just thinking about this.

I'm also old, having gotten into the internet back in the BBS days in the late 80s and early 90s. Lemmy is the first platform I've been on that resurrected those feelings of friendly competition, community, and variety. In those days, each BBS had its own character. There was plenty of duplication of content, but it didn't matter because each server you connected to was like looking at that content through a different lens. Users didn't get notoriety from collecting upvotes; they got it by being willing to travel to different servers and make a name for themselves by participating in many communities.

It's good to have that feeling again!

If I think I’m sick, regardless of what I’m sick with, I try to isolate and mask as much as possible. Nobody wants to get sick from me. For the flu and Covid, I go and get tests to allow me to take the antiviral medications. If I have Covid, I mask for a couple of weeks just to prevent spreading it.

I don't know how much future frustration you just saved me, but I'm betting it was a lot. Thank you!

There’s no end in sight.

I assumed these were just the same communities only started on different servers?

This is correct. Anyone can start a community on any Lemmy (Or KBin) server, and they can name it whatever they want. When a community is on a remote Lemmy instance, you see the @<instancename> suffix to help you see which one it is referring to. When no @<instancename> suffix is shown, that means that the community you are looking at is hosted on the instance that you are currently viewing Lemmy content through.

Regardless of whether or not any of the titles do or do not contain said content, ChatGPT’s varying responses highlight troubling deficiencies of accuracy, analysis, and consistency. A repeat inquiry regarding The Kite Runner, for example, gives contradictory answers. In one response, ChatGPT deems Khaled Hosseini’s novel to contain “little to no explicit sexual content.” Upon a separate follow-up, the LLM affirms the book “does contain a description of a sexual assault.”

On the one hand, the possibility that ChatGPT will hallucinate that an appropriate book is inappropriate is a big problem. But on the other hand, making high-profile mistakes like this keeps the practice in the news and keeps showing how bad it is to ban books, so maybe it has a silver lining.

If you did this, you would prevent your fellow instance users from subscribing to content they are interested in. That wouldn't be very neighborly.

My (red) state is one of those that changed the law to make it illegal for pornographic websites to be seen by children. To view them, you'd have to have some kind of central ID to prove that you are over 18. This is absolutely a precursor to having to have an ID to use the internet at all. Every bad thing that has ever happened on the internet will be used to convince legislators to enact a law like this. It's only a matter of time.

There are several ways to link to a community. If your instance has had someone previously search for the community, then they will all work. If this hasn’t happened (usually because your instance is small or new) then there can be problems with the “shorthand” method that begins with an !. I’ve written a full explanation in this article at the Community Search Tips community. It lists the drawbacks and advantages of each approach that I’m aware of.

At worst, it's gauche. It's much more likely that the moderator was personally offended by the use of that word than anything else. I have my own pet peeves. I can't stand the sound of someone saying "an historic event" ... but I'm not going to go around banning people over it. All that's going to do is make everyone more and more angry.

This is why we put specific, actionable rules on communities, people!

Almost the same thing happened on Reddit when everyone migrated from Digg. It's so similar, in fact, that I wonder if maybe this isn't a normal thing.

I don't think you can interact with Mastodon from Lemmy, but you can do the reverse.

I wonder how much it costs to get Joe Rogan to say both “No-nonsense” and “Tucker Carlson” in the same sentence.

What they’re doing is publicly signaling that they’re going to spend a lot of money in those districts if these reps vote for Jim Jordan. They’re already swing districts, so anyone who wants to keep his seat is going to have to raise and spend even more money. The Dems are betting that the pressure of having to fundraise and fight a contested election is more of a problem than just making up an excuse to not vote for Jordan.

It’s not art

I'm old enough to remember three similar statements that are equally untrue:

• Photography isn't art
• Photoshop isn't art
• Video Games aren't art

Eventually, we changed our opinions. The same will happen for generative images. They are art.

As a site admin, I really wish it was easier to modify the content on the front page. We've had some interesting ideas over here, like linking to some simple online games and posting high scores for the site, or maybe just adding some analytics boxes to the site. But for us that's difficult.

A lot of our ideas come from a shared experience in BBSes from the 90s, where they had game doors, ascii art, and other fun site-specific elements. Technology has changed, but there are modern equivalents to all of those things that we wish we could implement.

Well, you can just feed AI a prompt and take the image that comes out, but that's not how people do things anymore. AI art generation is now a complex set of image generation, in-/outpainting, tweaking, etc. I spent a couple of hours last night updating myself on how it is done, and I was shocked at all the changes that have taken place in the last six months. Now people are even passing their art through AI model subsets that they have trained themselves in order to get specific results, like specific backgrounds, vehicles, buildings... it's incredible.

Same here. For me it was the realization that what I thought was appropriate tipping -- 15% -- was actually an insult to servers. Thanks to the internet, I saw how servers retaliate against what they think is a bad tipper. I realized that proper tipping is subjective, and there was no way to be sure I wouldn't be punished for something I did wrong unknowingly. So rather than risk it, I just decided to learn how to live without eating out.

Unit prices are easy to remember when you buy a single product. I bet you know the price of gas per unit immediately. What was the price of Pepsi per liter today? What was the price of Coke per liter? There are dozens and dozens of soda products alone you would have to memorize. And that’s just soda.

I applaud a store using its data to communicate to customers how prices have changed. We should do this everywhere.

We call that the dryducken method

It took me a while to figure out that an over-the-counter sleep aid and the Benadryl I would buy for allergy symptoms were, in fact, exactly the same drug, Diphenhydramine, packaged under different names.

I hear you, and that’s great if it’s something the applicant wants to share. But none of the development work they’ve done at previous companies is work that they’ll be able to share. We take their word on that work. Not taking their word in the same way on other projects seems like a bit of a double standard to me.