krayj

@krayj@lemmy.world
1 Post – 111 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

I think it would have been fair to have a rule saying "no surgical modifications"... because doing things like facelift, nose-job, breast/buttox implants, cheek lifts, wrinkle removal, etc, are obviously unfair advantages (in a beauty contest) for those who have the money pay for it; and having a generic blanket rule like that would have accomplished the same thing they were trying to accomplish without being so blatantly transphobic... so a rule like what they have only proves that they are both despicable AND dumb. The entire notion of beauty pageants is outdated and stupid if you ask me.

37 more...

This crucially important caveat they snuck in there:

"Prof Scarborough said: “Cherry-picking data on high-impact, plant-based food or low-impact meat can obscure the clear relationship between animal-based foods and the environment."

...which is an interesting way of saying that lines get blurry depending on the type of meat diet people had and/or the quantity vs the type of plant-based diet people had.

Takeaway from the article shouldn't be meat=bad and vegan=good - the takeaway should be that meat can be an environmentally responsible part of a reasonable diet if done right and that it's also possible for vegan diets to be more environmentally irresponsible.

21 more...

1 'hole' if you can call it that. Imagine if the straw started life as a solid cylinder and you had to bore out the inside to turn it into a straw: if that were the case, you would drill 1 hole all the way through it.

Another analogy is a donut. Would you agree that a donut has just 1 hole? I would say yes. Now stretch that donut vertically untill you have a giant cylinder with a hole in the middle. That's basically now just a straw. The fact you stretched it doesn't increase the number of holes it has.

21 more...

Brandolini's law, aka the "bullshit asymmetry principle" : the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

Unfortunately, with the advent of large language models like ChatGPT, the quantity of bullshit being produced is accelerating and is already outpacing the ability to refute it.

3 more...

A lot of community types just simply don't work without a minimum critical mass of members.

Imagine asking a programming question on a software development community of just 5 people. You end up with 3 people who aren't active enough to see the question, 1 person sees but doesn't have an answer and doesn't respond (classic lurker), and one person sees it and responds that they don't know the answer. Now imagine a community of 5 thousand people...it's suddenly much more feasible to even bother asking the question.

Sure, fediverse could exist with just 5 people, but it would be worthless and pointless.

2 more...

they do not discriminate against people who are “too young”.

This is a misrepresentation of what was said. Was that intentional? It sounds like you are trying to inject your own opinion into what you are presenting as factual and unbiased.

The actual quote I think you are referring to is:

That means no adult on our instance is too thin, fat, bald, masculine, old, young, cis, gay, etc., to be sexy, and that includes not discriminating against legal adults that look younger than people think they should. Everyone has a right to lust and to be lusted after.

I've highlighted some key words I think you missed.

6 more...

Like any kind of contest, finding rules violations is hard and not foolproof. It's like sports that forbid using steroids - competitors do regularly take those substances while training, then quit taking them for competition and go uncaught. Competitors who are discovered later to have been violating rules are stripped of titles.

That said, I don't think it's a very controversial concept that a beauty pageant shouldn't be a contest about who could afford the best surgeons. Well - as I said earlier I think beauty pageants are absurd to begin with, but if they have to exist I don't think it should be a contest between surgeons.

5 more...

It would be an inconceivably-massive statistical anomaly if they didn't. But I think a better question is will we ever make contact, and I think the answer to that is that it's inconceivably improbable.

2 more...

Did you create the attached photo? If so, then I disagree with most of your labeling...and call some of it into question as outright denial of reality.

The world cannot be all puppies and unicorns. But, if that's what you need it to be, there are communities that will serve that purpose and all you need to do is subscribe to those and only browse subscribed.

If it's trained on previous community interaction, it's just going to automatically tell people (in the rudest way possible) their question is a duplicate and kill the thread for each and every new post.

It depends entirely on the jurisdiction. Take the city of Seattle, for example (I know this because I planned an executed a nude photo shoot in public view inside the city limits and sought legal council ahead of time to ensure I wan't risking being charged with any crimes). The general rule for Seattle hinges on whether the activity is intended to tittilate or sexually arouse observers - and if that is obviously not the intent, then even full nudity is not illegal. Many other large cities have very similar ordinances.

The smaller the town, and the more conservative the region, the stricter and less flexible the ordinances. There are beaches in South Carolina, for example, where they even regulate the minimum amount of coverage for bikinis and beachware.

17 more...

First, always start by reading the public modlog. Mod logs are public.

Next: how about an example? I'm not seeing what you describe, so I'd really appreciate a reference (link) to whatever it is you are describing.

28 more...

The bigger a social platform gets, the more synergy it spawns. That's what adds utility to a social platform.

I don't think anyone here wants it to be 'the next big thing', but I do think a lot of people (myself included) want to see it become 'one of the next big things'. As in...we want it to become big enough to be a viable alternative to the proprietary walled-garden corporate establishments that have become the current standard.

More choice = better, and for as long as this platform remains small and elitist (referring back to your 3rd sentence), it will never truly be a viable choice. There's still a lot of engagement I'm required to use Reddit for - and I hate that - and the only reason for it is we just don't have the community size needed (yes, it's getting closer every day) to be that viable alternative.

16 more...

Twitter was tanking before threads came along. All meta did was read the writing on the wall and release threads on the world with exceptional timing.

1 more...

There's a lot of content I'm just not into - and I happily block those communities. But I would never want to inflict my own likes & dislikes on others. So I think a move like this is unenlightened.

But, I also think there needs to be an instance that fits everyone, and if lemmy.blahaz.zone wants to be the morality-police instance for their users, and their users like that, then more power to them.

Any persecuted minority group who are republicans is just absolutely baffling to me…best I can come up with is that it’s god-level Stockholm syndrome.

Even worse than that is acceptance of "freaking" in place of "fucking". The words are internalized inside the brain to have the same exact meaning in this context, it's just they take offense to certain arrangements of consonants andd vowel combinations to deliver the same message. It's like they think their god is stupid enough to fall for a semantical trick.

7 more...

I still haven't fully abandoned reddit. Reason: There are a number of niche communities I'm part of that just have zero or near-zero population here. Fediverse just doesn't yet have the minimum critical mass of users necessary to be a viable alternative for anything but the most common and basic topics.

As far as making the switch for the common/popular stuff, there were difficulties that I ran into but I've mostly adapted. My first big mistake was trying to use Jerboa (I thought it was the 'official' app, but quickly discovered that it loves to shit itself if the app version is out of sync with the server version by even a sub-sub-dot version number. It also crashed a lot. Another early mistake was joining a small instance and not realizing that their view of "all" communities was not the same as the view of "all" communities from a bigger instance...and so my earliest view of the fediverse was pretty crippled until I started creating accounts on other instances. My next problem was the learning curve: I didn't see a lot of the communities I wanted while on that small instances and so I started creating them, only to later discover that many of those communities already existed on other instances and were well established. Fediverse has a MASSIVE community discoverability problem that needs to be solved before more of the masses will be attracted to it.

Now that I've got a good working client that I like, have local accounts on the main instances where most of the communities I participate in are located, have re-found replacement communities for the ones I lost access to when beehaw de-federated, I estimate that after about 2 more years at current growth, fediverse might also be a viable alternate to those niche communities I'm still going to reddit for. I'd estimate that I'm 70% fediverse + 30% reddit at this point.

3 more...

Distance from screen: 1/2 to 3/4 back (2/3 back being ideal)

Horizontal position: as centered as possible

That apology is so full of shit I can smell it from here. I hope the prosecutor sees right through it.

2 more...

There's only 66 nautical miles of international water between FL and Cuba.

The South China Sea is 1.3 million square nautical miles.

You are a few orders of magnitude off for a rational comparison.

1 more...

I think what you have observed is short-lived. I am starting to notice a lot of poor reddit etiquette showing up more and more here.

One of my huge pet peeves is multiple people posting the exact same link to the exact same article into the exact same community over the span of several hours. I'm not sure if they are doing it for the attention, if they are narcissists and assume that because they just discovered it that no one else might have posted it first, or if they are just too damned self-centered to quickly check the latest couple dozen posts to make sure they aren't posting a dupe.

6 more...

What did they really think was going to happen?

I think what they thought would happen was that reddit would relize they have inadvertantly united users, subreddit mods, and 3rd party developrs (many of which are ironically from subreddits that ordinarily despise each other) into a common cause against reddit...and that reddit would reconsider their actions and find a way not to murder 3rd party apps.

11 more...

It depends on the jurisdiction. In the United States, we have the DMCA which has been weaponized by content creators and publishers, but we also have a "safe harbors" provision to the DMCA that is supposed to protect online service providers from being liable for copyright infringement based on the actions of their users - as long as they meet certain provisions and restrictions and perform certain duties and dilligence. And yet even with that in place, it does not stop content providers from suing service providers and forcing those service providers to incur the pain and expense of mounting a legal defense.

I am pretty sure that Lemmy.world admin team are European and that the instance is hosted somewhere in Europe, so they would have their own jurisdictional laws to follow.

TL/DR: even if a service provider is technically protected from the actions of their users it is still subject to provisions and conditions, and that still doesn't stop them from being sued and having to mount a defense. Some people just don't feel the hassle of all that justifies the whatever benefits they'd gain from fighting that fight.

Certainly you've heard of 'The Pirate Bay', who's 'users' famously used their platform to share copyrighted materials...the founders of The Pirate Bay were arrested, tried, and convicted, and were forced to serve jail time. Turns out the "but it was our user's doing it" defense wasn't as reliable as everyone here seems to be suggesting.

I'm imagining the tv from Idiocracy.

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how federation works and either don't know or don't realize that content is replicated across instances that are federated with each other by virtue of users subscribing to it.

If you are a lemmy.world user subscribed to a piracy community on another instance, then that content is replicated and hosted locally on lemmy.world also. You've never noticed how you can access content that originated on a foreign federated instance and still be able to access that content when the federated instance is down? That content physically resided on the lemmy.world instance until it was blocked.

4 more...

Cloudflare makes the website feel dirty, but it'll protect the site until a better option is found.

Can you elaborate what you mean by this? Lots of sites use cloudflair and most users of those sites would never even know. What makes it dirty?

4 more...

I only heard about them recently too so I might give an incomplete answer but

If you only recently heard about them, then why wouldn't you logically conclude that a plausible answer to your original question might be that more people don't join them because people haven't heard of them?

This seems like a no brainer so what am I missing?

People haven't heard of them.

Also, using the mutualaid.wiki resource you cited - I decided to look up what was available in my state and the only couple of groups seem to focus on Covid-19 related things....leaving me even more confused about what you're talking about.

3 more...

What I hate most about a lot of series is that they come up with a good beginning and a decent middle, but no end. And so if it gets popular enough they just try to coast on the decent midddle indefinitely until loyal viewers get bored and the writing becomes monotonous, millking the life out of it. So many good shows devolve into this that it's hard for me to want to invest my time into any new series.

I think mini-series is the better format where they have a defined beginning, middle, end from the start. This is essentially thd packaged format of a movie, just longer.

It's a massive usability issue and a massive content discovery issue, imo.

For lemmy users who got lucky and had their first lemmy experience on a top 5 instance where a lot of popular off-instance communities are already subscribed to, then users would see a huge list of both local and foreign communities. For users who got unlucky and had their first lemmy experience on a small instance, their view of "all" looks like a ghost town.

Part of the problem is semantical. If they are going to call it "all" then it should really be all (all lemmy communities available on all federated instances). If it isn't going to actually show everything, then they should call it something else that indicates it's only local communities plus whatever local users are subscribed to.

6 more...

Yes, and even more chance of that happening today than 5 years ago. Reason: because of the modern day prevalence of the 'fake reply' SPAM and Phishing emails. Spammers and phishers are now drafting fresh messages mocked up to look like replies in existing email threads...older spam detection used to let these types of messages slip through because they thought they must be legitimate replies, and so naturally spammers started exploiting that to slip past detection. Modern detection no longer gives apparant replies a free pass.

Have you contacted the operator of the bot?

The L4sBot user bio lists how to get in contact with the handler @L3s@lemmy.world .

USA here - I work for a fortune 500 technology industry company...We use MS Teams internally for most stuff, mostly use MS Teams for organized conf calls internally and with customers, and then use regular text messaging for one-off messages with each other and customers. We don't use whatsapp at all for anything - I am pretty sure I don't even have a whatsapp account.

None of my friends use whatsapp either. I communicate with most of my friends and family via text message, a few of my more paranoid friends will only chat via "Signal", and then for bigger group chats we use Discord.

1 more...

I'm currently car shopping for a recent model year sub-compact crossover SUV.

I was perfectly willing to evaluate vehicles from all manufacturers. Part of my search also includes looking up the available models on JD Power reliability ratings, consumer reports, and other testing agencies, and what I'm seeing is that the US-made vehicles in this category have reliability ratings that are significantly worse than the reliability ratings for the Japanese models.

Since I don't have the money to go out and buy one of everything, I'm forced to have to accept the findings of other 3rd parties who do the evaluations.

So to answer your original question: Japanese cars actually are more reliable that US cars based on the conclusions of objective test results. There's no "considered to be" about it. It's not a matter of subjective feelings on the issue.

1 more...

I am so glad I live in a state where mail-in balloting is the default for everyone. I have only sympathy for citizens in states that still require in-person voting. Good luck with your attempt today.

Do you sanction all theft, or just theft of things you personally disapprove of?

1 more...

To take it a step further, the end site that causes the ad to load should also be jointly liable. They are the entity that makes the partnership with the ad network, they are the one benefitting, and they are the one making ads a requirement to use their site. It's the end site that pushes the requirement for the user to see ads to use their site, and so they should inherit some of the responsibility for ensuring those ads are not harmful.

if you force me to view ads to use your site, then you should be forced to vouche for the integrity of those ads.

Putting a Netflix show on DVD and selling it is absolutely illegal unless they have a distribution license provided by the copyright holder.

It would be legal after copyright expires (in the US, copyright exists for the lifespan of the author/creator + 70 years). Keep in mind that the US has stricter copyright laws than most of the rest of the world.

For other items, like physical functional items, reproductions are generally legal unless the item is patented. And it would still not be legal for the reproduction to also reproduce any registered names or trademarks associated with the original. Example: you could legally reproduce and sell knockoff Nike Air Jordans as long as you didn't use the Nike swoosh or any likenesses of the copyrighted artwork. For items that are patented, or patent pending - making and selling reproductions is illegal - and for most patented items the reproduction doesn't even have to be identical for it to be infringing, just replicating the functionality is probably infringing.

It would be nice if, rather than the only option being defederation - if lemmy would allow instance owners to place requirements that users be verified before being allowed to participate in federated communities. Then, rather than threaten (or go through with) defederation from instances who did or do still allow open registration, they could just deny that set of unverified open registered users.

7 more...

I would NEVER recommend a modern HP printer, but...I have a HP Laserjet 4000 (Circa 1997) that I 'acquired' from the company I worked for that went bankrupt.

This thing refuses to die. current impression count is over 500,000 prints. All its patents expired over a decade ago, and it's still easy to find parts and toner (originals, and now even 3rd party knockoffs). It's old enough now that modern generic drivers have built in support for it. The only parts I've ever had to replace are the rubber sheet feeder rollers which dry out and stop working correctly after 12-15 years.

So, I guess the point here is that some really solid printers were made a couple decades ago, back when manufacturers still took pride in their products, and they are old enough that the hardware is no longer protected by patents (so practically open) and robust driver support without all the bullshit. Picking up something from this era and cleaning it up would come close to satisfying a lot of your requirements.