There are right-wing instances of Mastodon (gab, truth, and others), not to mention many Pleroma ones, as well as Lemmy (exploding heads, and probably others). It's just that they get quickly defederated by everyone else for various valid reasons (usually hate and abuse, sometimes even child porn), so you don't get to interact with them much. They just get stuck in their own bubble.

In the old days, a friend of mine would carry some paper(?) stickers(?) (labels?) that said something like "I park like an asshole" and superglue it to one of the windows of someone parked like this.

If you wanted to be nicer, you could get some proper pre-printed stickers (most online print/sticker shops should have them) and place them. Wouldn't cause any damage but would maybe make them think about it a little bit.

I also saw a post recently where someone replaced all the tire valve caps with bright orange or pink little dick shaped caps. This would cause more inconvenience and embarrassment, but not be damaging or dangerous.

AI, climate change, and nuclear weapons proliferation

One of those is not like the others. Nuclear weapons can wipe out humanity at any minute right now. Climate change has been starting the job of wiping out humanity for a while now. When and how is AI going to wipe out humanity?

This is not a criticism directed at you, by the way. It's just a frustration that I keep hearing about AI being a threat to humanity and it just sounds like a far-fetched idea. It almost seems like it's being used as a way to distract away from much more critically pressing issues like the myriad of environmental issues that we are already deep into, not just climate change. I wonder who would want to distract from those? Oil companies would definitely be number 1 in the list of suspects.

I recently switched myself, my wife, and my mom from old Moto X4 Android phones to slightly newer, but not current iPhones (X, XS, and 11 Pro). It's been a few months now (maybe 3 or so?). Honestly, I'm not that happy with them. I think I'll stick to it mainly for privacy, security, and environmental reasons - iPhones are supported with security updates for way, way, way longer than the vast majority of Android phones. Like two or three times as long, in some cases. This offsets the price factor, maintains security for longer, and reduces electronic waste by making the phones viable for longer. By my calculations, I actually come out ahead with iPhones with regard to price. I like that iPhones let you remove most, maybe even all the built-in apps that come pre-installed. I also like that they give you an actual indication of your battery health.

Having said that, many other aspects of iPhones have been a hassle or just plain sucked:

The keyboard sucks. Poor editing, poor layout without a number row, not able to turn off the stupid app bar or whatever they call it on the top row.

The messaging app sucks. First, don't forget that it's Apple's intransigence now that's preventing iMessage from being interoperable with Android, and I say this as someone who has come to dislike and avoid Google as much as possible. I hope that the EU forcing them to make messaging interoperable will yield some real improvements with this. Second, the messaging app doesn't show dates and times on messages by default. I have to pull each message to the side to see this info. Third, there appears to be no search function within a message thread, what a pain. Finally, I also found out that iPhones aren't able to do anything whatsoever with certain common attachments from text messages. I had messages received from Android phones with AMR files in them (audio recording files). The iPhone was completely unable to open them, I couldn't find even an app that could open them, and the damn phone wouldn't let me forward the text message to an email! I ended up having to go back to the Android and forward the text to email in order to be able to open the attachments. Completely unacceptable.

The connectivity with PCs sucks. They allow you to see your photos (only the photos and videos, nothing else) when connected through USB, but it barely works. My photo transfers fail most of the time, and it seems to be impossible to let my photo manager delete the photos from the phone after transferring them. Yeah, iTunes is supposed to work, but you can't manage two different phones with different iCloud accounts on one Windows login. Besides, iTunes itself sucks. Their replacement app for this, Apple Mobile Devices I think it was called, only supports Windows 11, not Windows 10.

The offline PDF storage and reading sucks. I was going to an event that I knew was going to be away from mobile networks and prepared for this by jumping through all the hoops (I'm not kidding) that it took to actually download PDFs locally to the phone so that they were available offline. These PDFs held the map and event guides. I get there, offline, and try to open the PDFs that I painstakingly had downloaded offline. Well, wouldn't you know it, the damn built-in app for reading the PDFs needed internet connectivity! Thankfully it wasn't a life or death situation, but still, how frustrating and disappointing.

The official community support site sucks. The impression I've had in researching the issues above is that someone will give some incredibly lame answer that doesn't really resolve the issue and instead papers it over, that answer will be marked as the correct answer, and it's end of story. You need to find discussions on other unofficial forums for real discussions of technical issues.

This is all I can think of for now. There's probably more, but you get the idea.

Interesting, I haven't personally had any run ins with Hexbears, but everything I've read from them in non-Hexbear communities has generally looked fine to me. Sure, they argue hard and in detail when it comes to anything political and they can also be a little edgy, but I haven't seen any of them be assholes, abusive, argue in bad faith, etc. So far I have appreciated their contributions. It probably helps that I generally agree with (many of?) them politically as far as I can tell, but despite that, if I saw them being assholes I would make notice because I don't believe in defending the people in your team even when they're doing wrong. I would be more likely to call them for taking the wrong approach instead. Do you have any example threads that demonstrate what you're describing?

I tried searching a Titanic sub on my UK instance, and it didn’t show up. But it was deffo still there on my L.W search? What?

Ah, I learned that there's a trick to this specific situation. If a community hasn't been subscribed to by anyone on your instance yet, it will not show up in results when you first search for it (search by URL or !link by the way). However, wait a few seconds and hit search again - the community will now show up and you can subscribe to it! What apparently happens is that your server is not yet aware of that community, but once you search for it with a URL or !link, your server will immediately search it out and become aware of it. This is why it's usually better to search for communities on one of the big Fediverse directory sites, especially if you're on an instance with fewer people in it. My favorite site for this at the moment is https://lemmyverse.net/communities - it will show both the URL and !link right there and allow you to easily copy it to search on your instance.

That few countries take a person's wealth and income into account when fining them for breaking laws. I see examples like these and wish this were the norm everywhere.

Plot twist: he can still run (and be elected) from prison.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/06/trump-running-for-president-prison-00090931

I know teachers aren’t paid much, but if you have the audacity to say that you can do a better job than 4 or 5 professionals at teaching your kid every subject, you should have to take a test to be certified, and your kid needs testing too. Some states require it, most don’t, and it shows.

Jesus, this makes so much sense that it's scary to think it's not universal. Sure, you can teach your kids. Just get certified to do so first. It doesn't even have to be the same certification as professional teachers, but just a bare minimum, pass the GED level of education. To not have this kind of requirement really seems like society failing those kids.

This is the first I've heard of "a couple of devs are shutting out large numbers of contributors (frequently subject matter experts which they desperately need at this point) over relatively trivial issues" and "Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute".

Can you give a summary or examples? I'm not trying to argue, but would just like to know more. I don't follow Lemmy development more closely than reading the dev summaries they post, so wasn't aware of any of this.

My three top criteria for picking an instance were:

1. Little to no defederation issues, in either direction.
2. Likely to stick around for the long term.
3. Relatively small.

Search for hashtags first, like #TopicOfInterestToMe. Follow those. Then, look for people who post interesting stuff in the hashtags you follow. Follow them. The trick to Mastodon is to follow, follow, follow. This may also be a good starting point to find interesting people to follow: https://fedi.directory/

What I've been curious about is the relative performance of kbin (PHP) vs. lemmy (Rust) server code. Rust is supposed to be many times more efficient performance-wise than PHP as far as I know, but has anyone compared this in practice? The presumed ease and speed of adding features to kbin because of PHP may come at a high performance cost (read: carbon emissions too). Does anyone have any further insight into this?

I just searched amazon.com for metric tape measure right now and the entire first page of results were actual metric tape measures? The Milwaukee ones seem to be cheaper on ebay.

It's really remarkable. I've noticed what seems to be a similar dynamic on some official corporate tech support forums like Microsoft, HP, etc. I've seen people who spend a lot of time providing volunteer tech support (based on their reputation scores). I just don't get the idea of volunteering for a for-profit corporation.

I would have agreed up until about a week ago. There was a news story a few days ago about how there are people in LA renting various vehicles parked on public streets for people to live in. Then another story about how there are actually thousands of such "rentals" in LA. I think highrise slums might be a notch or two down from the current dystopia.

I've been curious about Linux phones. Can you recommended any devices or operating systems to watch? Thanks.

Going by https://lemmy.sdf.org/instances, it seems that not yet. I haven't run into any issues though, and have never seen a post from or noticed anyone from exploding heads, thankfully.

Student loans seem to be a massive part of the problem of out of control tuition increases. The National Bureau of Economic Research published this study in 2016 that showed that changes to the Federal Student Loan Program accounted for the majority of the 106% increase in tuition between 1987 and 2010. Whether that's some right-wing scheme to divert attention from reduction of states' funding of public universities I haven't looked into, but it seems to me that it's at least a significant factor on its face.

Yeah, about that... let's talk about a conspiracy theory. I remember reading, I think on Twitter, either just before, or maybe it was a retweet after the fact, someone local to DC saying that the security that had been established around town (or maybe around the capitol specifically) that day in preparation for the demonstrations was weaker than they had ever seen for any run of the mill event there. This would seem very strange because word was very much out that something was going to go down that day, so one would have expected a much higher level of security to have been established. Although I didn't look very closely into what happened that day and the days surrounding it, it still seems strange that I've never heard this discussed since I read it.

Mastodon has an "Explore" section, that lists the most popular posts today. It also has subsections for trending news, hashtags, and "for you" which seems to be suggested accounts to follow.

Relevant Chart (open image in new tab to see it larger):

Yes, pulses like peanuts, beans, lentils, as well as rice and other grains (and a variety of other vegetable sources) are alternative sources of protein. As far as development, the only thing aside from plant-based meat substitutes are the new lab-grown meats that are being developed. Those are actual meat, but grown in a lab instead of on an animal's body.

Exactly. There was an article floating around just a couple of days ago that from what I recall was saying that billionaires were funding these AI-scare studies in top universities, I presume to distract the public from the very real and near scare of climate disaster, economic inequality, etc. Here, unfortunately paywalled: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/05/ai-apocalypse-college-students/

Here are some that our group has enjoyed:

Project Zomboid: amazingly vast and deep Zombie long-term survival isometric game. If you're into this, you'll play for hundreds of hours. The cost-playtime ratio is off the charts.

Heave Ho: super crude 2D graphics, but absolutely hilarious gameplay

The Ascent: beautiful cyberpunk-themed isometric shooter

Broforce: very entertaining pixel-art 2D platformer/shooter (think in the style of Contra, but funnier) - we played this through to the end, which is rare for us

Overcooked: very entertaining 3D co-op cooking isometric game (you're running a restaurant kitchen)

Unrailed: similar to overcooked, but you're keeping a train running instead of cooking

SWAT 4: old 3D FPS, but still good. I think this is only at GOG, not Steam

Honorable mention: Hidden in Plain Sight. While not a co-op game, it's relatively friendly, funny, and not heavily slanted to make better players run away with it because it doesn't rely heavily on reflexes and coordination. Check it out if you can. Works great for couch play too (everyone playing on the same computer/monitor).

Edit: all of these handle at least 4 players, which was a requirement for us. Some of them, like Zomboid and SWAT, can handle more than 4. I'm not sure how high the others can go.

Edit 2: check https://www.co-optimus.com/ too, if you're not already familiar with it.

Just read this book:

There's no problem with Firefox. The problem is with managers of websites. Because Chromium-based browsers combined account for something like over 90% of global browser market share currently (source: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share), many sites decide to just throw any non-Chromium browser users overboard. The whole thing is quite ridiculous. It makes no sense that Firefox has such a low market share either.

He’s a wealthy, old, former president. The system is set up to be lenient to people exactly like him.

You forgot to mention white too. Another major point in his favor under this justice system, arguably the biggest point in his favor.

I've been using LosslessCut for a few years now. It's really easy and smooth. It does exactly what I want and what the name says, and I couldn't ask for more.

I think this is the best assessment I've read yet of Windows 11. I just switched the OS on my work computer with a fresh install of Windows 11 and have run into a handful of issues and frustrations. This thing has been out for like 3 years now. It shouldn't still be this problematic. I may end up switching to a long-term support version of Windows 10 that goes to 2027 or 2029. Unfortunately that's only available for Enterprise editions, so I can't do the same at home. I'm soon going to be dual- and triple-booting Linux at home.

Thank you, that really explains it! I was afraid that I may come across as sea-lioning sometimes because I tend to ask lots of questions, but the comic makes it more clear what sea-lioning is.

Be kinder than necessary, for everyone is fighting some kind of battle.

Thank you. No one seems to take into account that how well a person does in life or not is (almost?) completely down to luck.

Thanks. I'm not trying to fight either, but just relate my experience with the switch so far. I would be happy if I could feel that iPhones were all around superior to Android like some people do because my general views on Google have become very negative, but I've run into too many silly issues that prevent me from feeling that way. I presume that the people that post that iPhones are great and Android is terrible either haven't run into any similar issues (limited uses of the phones?), haven't used Android at least in the last few years, or are trolling, or are brainwashed. I think anyone giving an honest comparison (like I think you're doing) would say that they are both completely mixed bags.

Just to add some clarifications and new points:

My keyboard usage is very basic. I don't use swipe gestures, didn't use any custom keyboard apps on Android, and don't do anything out of the ordinary. I continue to struggle with editing functionality on iPhone, like once it highlights a partially written word and gives a wrong auto-correct suggestion, I have a super hard time undoing that selection. I have to tap all over the place to get it to unhighlight. Could be user error though. I also continue to hit those app bar buttons at the top of the keyboard in the middle of typing, causing a big interruption in the process.

AMR files are or at least used to be what Google uses for audio files embedded in SMS/MMS messages. I found out that iOS dropped support for the format years ago. Seems like a big interoperability issue to me.

How do you do the Wi-Fi photos transfer from your phone to computer? I would like to do something similar.

Your experience with PDFs may have used an internet connection when it came time to open them, if one was available. When I tried to do the same by using I think the Apple Books app (for the first time, which may have been my issue) it said it needed a connection. Maybe the connection was only required to set up that app. Maybe siri would actually be useful in getting things properly set up. I've avoided doing anything with that so far.

One other issue that I forgot to mention in my previous post: serious overheating issues on iPhones. Like my phone has shutdown in the middle of maps navigation (while charging and also playing music), and also in the middle of a video call. I have a TPU case on it, which apparently is a problem? But this never happened with my Moto X4. Admittedly that was a mid-range phone at the time it was released, while these iPhones are near the top of the range if not at the top. Maybe top range phones run hot because of faster CPUs. It still seems odd though.

I think they just mean extremely popular within their segment, since AFAIK Blender hasn't become the industry standard in 3D yet either? I could be wrong about the latter though, since it's been a while since I looked.

This may be one of the most insightful things I've ever read or heard. Are you quoting someone, or should I quote you?

Yes, the example is a pretty poor one, but the idea has been around for a while. I'm surprised that the author didn't even mention it, since it's become more mainstream over the last few years, with books and academic papers written about it, and some economists adopting the idea. It's called Modern Monetary Theory (i.e., "MMT").

That's just... I don't even have words for this.

No doubt, that's one word for it.

The absence of limitations is the enemy of creativity

• Orson Welles, I believe