I think it also has to do with how previous generations established what they considered trustworthy or not.

Most of the time, the only way to confirm information would be to go to the library and look it up. Most people weren’t taking the time to do that for every little factoid, especially ones that had no direct effect on their lives.

So if Jim who has a cousin who works in construction said that Mexicans were undercutting the expected pay for construction laborers, picking up all the jobs they could, and out performing their peers… well that’s first hand information from someone who would know (by way of the game of telephone).

And that doesn’t effect them directly in any way, so it’s not being blasted to the whole world. You may never know they have this belief.

Now they see Jim on Facebook sharing some article. Well, Jim wouldn’t share it unless he was sure it was true. I mean, his cousin works in construction. Combine that with sensational headlines to maximize clicks and now you go from racist belief that immigrants are industrious to “illegal immigrants are stealing our jobs”!

Plus, spreading the word can be done in a single click, regardless of relevance to any conversation.

So you combine the idea of “that person knows what they’re talking about” with sensationalism mills and how damn easy it is to blast your stupid ideas out to the world with the idea that you’e just letting people know, and I think you very easily end up here.

It makes us all look stupid and hateful.

I’d argue that it does a lot more than make people just look hateful. Plenty of assholes out there using progressive causes as justification and shielding for their poor behavior.

The dev could have avoided this easily by merging the original PR and moving on with their life, but there is negative reason for the dogpiling that occurred. It’s open fucking source. Fork it and make your own inclusive competitor.

The behavior of the community around this is reprehensible, and is the perfect ammunition for opportunists looking to draw people into right wing radicalism. “Look at what they did to someone for using he instead of they! Imagine what will happen if we let these people have any real power?”

Regarding the edit, I’ve seen people unironically post this take on lemmy.

But if you can’t summarize the solution to a complex societal problem with a history to it into a single simple sentence that can be used as a punchy “hot take”, clearly you just don’t want a solution! /s

Way too many people in the world who are more willing to believe that things suck because everyone’s too stupid to try the “obvious” solution, instead of the fact that most societal issues are icebergs of complication and causes.

Man, I don’t even run my desktops without a UPS. Maybe I’m jaded from too much tech support, but I feel like not having a UPS is like not using a condom for a random hookup: it’s fine until it dramatically and seriously isn’t.

Almost every desk at my workplace has its own lead-acid battery. That’s well over 1000. We haven’t had any fires or explosions.

There must be a way to stop this feeling.

Been there. I’ll keep it short. The way is to get professional help. Therapy and/or medication.

Since you have no job, first step is to get on whatever low/no income insurance is available to you locally.

Same, but surely you realize that ads have only gotten worse in the intervening time. I also don’t truly believe that we’ll ever reach critical mass on adblocker users. You’re asking people who don’t care, who don’t use the internet the same way we do, to suddenly care enough to take manual action outside of their knowledgebase amd comfort zone.

The only way the adblocker user numbers get pumped up to critical mass for a change is if a popular default browser makes adblocking an opt-out default.

As well as predatory/not, there’s also a trend with attention grabbing/not.

There was a period of time where Google AdWords ruled the online ad space, and most ads were pure text in a box with a border making the border between content and ads visually distinct.

Kind of like having small portions of the newspaper classified section cut out and slapped around the webpage.

I still disliked them, but they were fairly easy to look past, and you didn’t have to worry about the ad itself carrying a malware payload (just whatever they linked to).

Companies found that those style ads get less clickthrough than flashier ones, and that there’s no quantifiable incentive to not make their ads as obnoxious as possible. So they optimized for the wrong metric: clickthrough vs sales by ad.

More recently, companies have stepped up their tracking game so they can target sales by ad more effectively, but old habits die hard, and predatory ads that just want you to click have no incentive to care and “de-escalate” the obnoxiousness.

… not really though.

The one big law about lending out digital copies of books you own is that you only lend out as many as you physically own. They uncapped that restriction, openly, and they admitted to it.

This is an incredibly open and shut case.

It’s stupid as hell, and that law needs to die, but there was no corporations doing people dirty here. This could have ended so, so much worse for IA.

I miss the “Tales from…” subs. Tales from tech support was regular reading material for me for many years, and in general just having a place to commiserate with others in the same field as you is wonderful. The other ones also helped me be more concious of what I could do to keep myself from being a nuisance to other professionals like my doctor and pharmacist.

More niche, I miss the gunpla sub a lot. We have subs for model making and tabletop miniatures, but the gunpla community was very well run.

In general, I think the lack of moderation tools has made it difficult for communities to do regular “event” posts and the like which used to really help keep subs alive, guide discussions, and gave good examples of the type of content that fit. Like it’s a lot easier to start a new conversation at a party where everyone is talking than to be the first person to speak up in a silent room.

A big benefit of the fediverse is that it’s still so small that it’s pretty easy to just block the assholes without a constant sea of new ones coming in to take their place.

Whoever the asshole you’re replying to is, I already have them blocked.

Did the lemmynsfw instance die or something?

I’ve tried to do this a few times, and unfortunately it feels like you really have to go all in on managing your own content library.

Like many, I had stopped pirating shit when netflix etc were “good”.

None of the streaming services want you to use them outside of their official sites/apps, so you end up being limited to like 720p when running them through kodi etc.

No worries, microplastics are equal opportunity! You can find microplastics at any of your local ovaries today!

Also, now introducing kids microplastics! Don’t want to wait for your microplastics? Simply be born in the current era and we’ll send you kids microplastics absolutely free! That’s a $60 value, absolutely free! Other companies might trick you into buying fast by making that a limited time offer, but we know you’ll love microplastics so much that this is a forever offer!

Microplastics- we’re already inside you!

Similar to your #2, but less serious, I once wrote a script to power down virtual machines for a data center move. It was a nice piece of work too, grouping them in batches, sending shutdown commands to the guest OS, falling back to forcing a power off through the hypervisor after a configurable timeout…

I don’t recall the specifics of the problem or the virtual infrastructure I was working with, but in short I didn’t have sanity checks on what was being shut down. Ended up force shutting off the hypervisor/virtual infrastructure management system.

Added an extra few hours the move with that.

The software you’re probably thinking of is f.lux

Blockchain also has some useful applications. Most (but not all) of them are also possible with technology and such that existed when bitcoin was first created, at far lower cost for a minor tradeoff in accuracy. On top of that, almost none of them are related to speculative markets.

It’s a way to do distributed transaction logs in a non-refutable and independantly verifiable way. That’s useful and important, but it was a solution in search of a problem. Even for the highest security, most at risk transactions, the existing international fincancial systems are “good enough” to ensure reliability of transaction logs.

In the end, blockchain and now AI are just falling victim to con men trying to milk as much money as they can from things before people build a working understanding of them. They’ll just keep moving onto the next big thing as it comes.

Do like Netflix and start putting hardware in every datacenter and at backbone split point you possibly can.

For-profit vs. Non-profit is an entirely different distinction under US law, with specific legal definitions for each. This is entirely separate under US law from publicly traded vs. privately owned, which has separate specific legal definitions.

Valve is a for-profit privately owned company. That is what allows it to not maximize shareholder value, and is the unstated distinction that allows your quote to be true.

For-profit publicly traded companies do have a legal responsibility for such.

Just like the “tesla hyperloop” or whatever they’re calling it, it’s not about innovation. It’s about keeping his brands in the public eye as a form of marketing. Even if on a logical level we all know it’s horseshit, it still keeps himself and Tesla salient.

He can afford to burn an incomprehensible amount of money on stunts for outcomes most people would consider inconsequential.

I’m not saying it’s 4D chess, it definitely isn’t. He’s not particularly intelligent in that way. That said, I do think there are some very simple reasons for him to do this that go beyond his absolutely insane delusional ego.

He has enough money that he can continue funding whatever he wants regardless of public opinion. He literally exists at a level where any press is good press as it keeps him fresh in peoples’ minds.