yiliu

Back when I was in high school (in public school), chess caught on in a big way. Chess. It was the weirdest thing. It was a public school in a small farming town, and pre-Nerd Renaissance, so picture a stereotypical 80s or 90s school where jocks were top of the food chain--and then picture those same jocks in their letter jackets rushing to the library on their free periods to take turns playing chess. They set up tournaments and kept track of win/loss ratios and talked about chess strategies in the hallways.

So obviously something had to be done...I guess? The school started making rules and posting them around the school: one game per student per day. One game at a time in the lounge. No chess in classrooms or in the library! The chess board must be returned to the lounge supervisor between games, then signed out by the next person wanting to play--not just passed willy-nilly from one student to another! No outside chess boards allowed!

That pretty much strangled the chess fad. The jocks went back to stuffing nerds in lockers and sneaking out to smoke behind the school, and the chess boards returned to the shelf by the lounge supervisor, where they collected dust.

Problem...solved? The whole thing was pretty surreal.

This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Google is not an ISP. With or without net neutrality, Google could fuck with YouTube users.

Dude I was at this concert, but there was another guy there who was on his phone doing something weird...the whole concert was ruined!

"No, wait, it's not what you think! There's a continuous integration system, a commit would've triggered a new build! It might have paged the oncall! Babe! The test suite has been flaky lately!"

They detect when a whole bunch of reviews are posted at exactly the same time, or are posted on a fixed schedule, or use extremely similar language, or with a brand new account...

Basically they use spam-detection techniques on reviews.

Hi Tom,

I was just taking a look at your resume, and your experience at Deceased really caught my eye! I'm especially interested in your knowledge of being missed by friends and family. Did you know that complications from heart surgery is in high demand right now?

I'm a head hunter looking for dynamic individuals who are interested in positions at an exciting new startup, and I think you'd be a perfect fit!

I hope we get a chance to chat soon!

As others have said, it doesn't quite have the user base to reach critical mass. A lot of my old favorite subs aren't here.

Also...the user base isn't as diverse. I used to click through to see the comments on Reddit to find those comments that provided fresh perspective, gave more context, or explained nuance. You'd click on some thread about Trump's latest legal troubles and get some real information about why things are moving slowly or why the defense made a particular choice. Or go into a thread about some upcoming video game being cancelled, or Google plan being changed or whatever, and get an actual analysis about how the financials don't work, or maybe how the market changed, or how some users were abusing the system.

On Lemmy, I often find myself just skipping the comments. They seem much more uniform, all just repeating the popular line: variants of "Ha, fuck Trump!" "Lol, Russia sucks!" "Company X doing this should be against the law!" etc. I can usually predict what the comments are going to be without bothering to read them, and rarely do I come out with new information. It feels much more like an echo chamber.

Part of it is just that there's not as many users, I think, so there's just not as many posts and thus fewer 'gems'. Also, I think that the users who made the effort to migrate from Reddit probably skew younger, tend to be more uniformly left-leaning, and a larger share will be students or programmers as opposed to lawyers or carpenters or auto mechanics.

The especially annoying thing is that the same thing seems to have happened on Reddit. Yeah, I still moonlight there when I run out of content on Lemmy. And the number of comments seems to have dwindled, and the viewpoint diversity seems to have narrowed there, too. Maybe the normies just gave up and left.

Why would this hurt Amazon? People will just see a different set of reviews. It's manufacturers if crappy knock-off products that should be shaking in their boots.

Leaving it ambiguous activated the reader's imagination and elevated a TIL into a shitpost.

Are we going to try paying artists by the level of effort it took to create a track?

Well, aside from what others are saying...

Try to picture Trump on the phone with the Proud Boys, giving them explicit instructions or discussing strategy. Even if he did talk to them (which I doubt), surely it'd be his usual "We're going to do great things, great things, we're all great people, we're gonna turn this thing around, it's going to be beautiful!"

When Russia collaborated to help Trump get elected, do you figure they talked on the phone in person? Or emailed back and forth? Motherfucker couldn't make it through a one-page intelligence briefing, I'm not even sure he can write. Surely it was Trump's people working with Putin's people (several levels down in both cases).

You need to prove that Trump personally and intentionally violated the law. It's not enough to show that shady shit was going on around him. And that's hard to prove, since he generally was working at a remove. And this is a guy who's been in and out of courtrooms his entire adult life; surely he has some instinct for what kinds of things to avoid.

There was a podcast episode years back about how large quicksand loomed in popular culture for a whole generation, before vanishing as a concept almost completely.

And sure enough, I remember as a kid in the 80s worrying about stumbling into quicksand while wandering around the bushes in rural Canada.

Then I forgot about it as a concept until I heard it on that one episode, and I haven't heard it since.

I mean it seems outrageously greedy, but stop and think about it: if they'd paid for a pizza party, the banner would've had to read "Thanks for driving sales and beating plan by $5,999,727!!" And that's just ugly.

Make a rule not to eat while you're doing anything else: watching a show, playing a game, reading a book, browsing Reddit Lemmy. When you're eating, focus on the food. Taste and enjoy it. And when that gets boring or you feel full, set it aside and go do the other things.

Distracted eating is when I overindulge.

This take is exhausting. It's like the political version of narcissism: here's how everything that happens in the world is actually a conspiracy against me!

If Musk was a plant to sabotage Twitter on the behalf of the 1%, why would he have done it slowly with a series of increasingly bad decisions that caused a mass migration to distributed open-source platforms? Why not just flip the switch and kill it in one go? Or: why not start a program of bots to talk about how awesome Teslas are, and make Trump seem cool, while shadow-censoring criticism of Musk's friend's companies or governments?

You think They are competent and dastardly enough to plan a takeover of Twitter, but then too bumbling to make better use of it than slowly discrediting it with a series of half-baked ideas from a deranged and detestable front man?

I concur, this is also my experience. The car GPS has never directed us to travel further than the charge allows--and it will include stops at superchargers on the way as necessary. It's really not that big an issue.

But, the range that it presents you in the UI is not the actual range that you can travel. The fact that the car won't plan out a route for a location 300 miles away when it claims you can travel 320, but will instead include a stop at a supercharger at around 200, kinda proves they know this.

I think the projected range is basically the platonic ideal if you were traveling in a perfectly flat landscape, with no wind, with an external temperature of 18.2°C, traveling at 37.25 miles per hour or whatever. Every deviation from that ideal will hurt your range. In my experience, I tend to get probably 250-ish miles on a 320 mile charge, depending on the time of year.

Gas vehicles tend, on the other hand, to undersell the range in my experience, and people are used to going further than the car says they can.

Medieval chores weren't putting clothes in the washing machine or giving the bathroom a wipe, they were weaving and sewing clothes by hand and then laboriously washing them in the stream, and hauling buckets of shit. Everything was much harder and much less pleasant, and that was how you spent your 'free time'.

Guys, this is a golden opportunity!

Get on Right wing forums and tell them this test has been aborted, because all the clever paranoid nutjobs were onto them.

But, in fact, the test has just been rescheduled to a random time, or rather at random times for the next year or so. Until Biden's time is up and Trump is declared Supreme Emperor I guess. Because really, if you were really conspiring to send a mind control message, you wouldn't broadcast the date & time ffs.

So the only safe thing to do is to turn off their devices, all their devices, and leave them off until after the next election. That includes TVs, of course, and especially Fox News, cuz the Democrats know that Fox News viewers are more cautious and took fewer vaccines, so they'll have scheduled extra Emergency Broadcasts for them.

Fast forward a year, in which all the crazies have to go out and live on the real world and talk to real people, and we might just have a sane country back. At the very least, we'd have a year off...

For real. Since Trump's nomination, he's lost the popular vote twice (but scraped by once thanks to the electoral college), and Republicans have lost one election after another.

So what do they do? Double down and worship the dumb motherfucker!

And on top of changing it:

• 'x' isn't searchable
• It's associated with a thousand things already...including porn
• It sounds dated: as a culture, we went through an 'x' phase

There's just no sense in which this is a good idea...

The first federated application I ever saw was Diaspora, which was basically federated Facebook. It predates Mastodon by 5+ years.

Thing is...it seems like it's harder to launch federated Facebook. With Twitter or Reddit, as long as there's enough activity on the new platform, it can act as a drop-in replacement for the original. There might be friends or favorite subscriptions who make the jump, and you might miss them, but they're not critical to the experience.

But with Facebook...the whole point is that the people you're interacting with are real-world friends and family. You need to convince them to migrate to the new platform. If they don't do it, the platform is kinda pointless. And...generally speaking, one's real-world friends and family usually aren't a bunch of enthusiastic early-adopters.

I created an instance in the early days, and convinced like 3-4 people to give it a try. None of us knew anybody on other instances. It's not designed to find new friends easily. So it just quietly died.

Of course, this was pre-2016, pre-evil-Facebook, back before large-scale skepticism about social networks, when people stared at you blankly when you talked about "federated alternatives". But I still don't think I could get my family to transition, because they'd be losing all their contacts with the specific, real-world friends they have on Facebook (not to mention, say, the Facebook Marketplace, which is apparently a big deal...)

Yeah, "small and below 5 lbs" describes like 90+% of Amazon deliveries.

They've given me too many headaches...

I.e. you did use them, but learned the hard way why you shouldn't.

Very likely OP is a student, or entry-level programmer, and is avoiding them because they were told to, and just haven't done enough refactoring & debugging or worked on large enough code bases to 'get' it yet.

Substitute "convince by indirect and non-confrontational means" for "trick", and you're saying the same thing as the original post. Makes for a shit joke though.

H1B holders are chained to the employer (as are other visas), but green card holders are not. Source: green card holder.

Yeah, let it grow organically. Like other open-source projects, it's unlikely to shrink, and it'll gain profile and draw users from Reddit etc over time--faster when Reddit drops the ball, which it'll do more often as it scrambles to extract more profit from a shrinking user base.

There's no reason to rush it. That'll just cause growing pains and give Lemmy a bad reputation.

I think the joke is supposed to be "the IDF is so dumb, they think this is what a Hamas HQ looks like!"

The real joke is, that is what Hamas HQ looks like.

Yes, the TLD belongs to Mali. But the reason why the creators of lemmy.ml picked that TLD is because they're Marxists. They're also the creators of Lemmy itself, which is another reason why Lemmy communities tend to be pretty far left: the first instance was literally Marxist, and presumably most of the early users leaned in that direction.

You think Google was fishing for VC money?

"It arguably made us all a lot dumber..."

So fewer downloads, which is a very different thing.

I know that. But so what? There's YouTube videos of guys making half-decent-sounding techno tracks in minutes, and on the other hand some artists spend months on a single track. If people listen to their tracks, they get paid, regardless of how hard it was to produce.

This is that principle taken to it's logical extreme: tracks that are effectively effortless to produce. But that...doesn't really change anything, does it? Aside from the fact that the 'artists' should expect a hell of a lot of competition (including from Spotify).

Life expectancy of football players is 59 years. Life expectancy for average, fast food-eating, healthcare-using Americans is 79 years.

I'll take the latter, thanks.

A big part of it is that people are so unbelievably cynical now. They'll rush over one another to point out and then circlejerk over the most negative aspects of every new development, while ignoring every positive.

The old internet would have flipped out over ChatGPT, much less Midjourney, and generated thousands of hilarious stories and images and websites that made ridiculous random comic books or fake government websites for absurd departments or whatever. They would have been delighted with it...and as an afterthought it may have occurred to them that there might be downsides.

Today, people get furious about the fact that AI exists, that it was trained on existing material, that it might affect people's lives. Long articles are written on the terrible effects AI is going to have on politics or media. Post an AI-generated image in anything other than an AI-art forum, and you'll be absolutely lambasted. Suggest that there may just be a few updates and watch the downvotes and angry replies flood in.

Part of that is just experience. We've lived though a few 'revolutions' for which the net effect was...arguably not so great. Part of it is that the age of the average Internet-savvy user is like 35-40 now, not 22, so they're bringing a level of fear and skepticism that wasn't there before.

And partly there just seems to be a sort of social malaise and negativity that wasn't there before. People in 2005 were happy and excited for the future. Now everybody just seems fearful, angry, and burned out.

He's absolutely been practicing his mug shot in the mirror at home for weeks now...

There was a similar kid in my school who had a thing for pooping right on center court in the gym. He'd try to escape his supervisors to do it. One time was in the middle of my gym class during a floor hockey game. It was...something.

Same kid used to have seizures: he'd go stiff and fall over. Sometimes he landed head first. The sound of a human head hitting a concrete floor with no attempt to soften the blow haunts me to this day. You could hear it halfway across the school...

I'm finding it better. Yeah, there's less content and diversity, but the quality feels a lot better. I'm interested in a much larger share of the posts I see.

I propose we just stop talking about it altogether.

This is what caused spez at Reddit and Musk at Twitter to go into desperation mode and start flipping tables over. Their investors are starting to want results now, not sometime in the distant future.