Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)G

ggtdbz

@ ggtdbz @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Posts
16
Comments
413
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Meet Potential Super Power!

    Jump

  • I’m not in the right headspace to flesh this out completely, but I’ve thought a lot about how out-and-out reactionary currents refer to a mythical great past and how “typical” “moderate” currents also do the same with a mythical “back to normal” that, sure, may have existed in some way, but categorically was not an acceptable state. Or at least the surface appearance of a “normal”.

    I’m in Lebanon and we’ve been living through a lot of sudden economic and social changes, and I catch myself yearning for like 2017 when my life savings didn’t lose 99% of its value and I could drive up and down the country to have fun. The reality is that it wasn’t a normal state of affairs, the “good times” were really just us loading debt onto our future selves (not just financial debt). By artificially pretending our currency was worth more, it made the economic crash much much worse when it did happen. These places I would visit aren’t some unfortunate lush destinations designed for me to have fun that I sadly can’t visit anymore from a vague reason, they’re people’s homes unfairly destroyed by war. My enjoyment of them is not the tragedy here.

    The “good old days” I look back upon still had me without electricity for hours a day, still had me on 200kbps internet, still had me fight monthly with the local electricity mob, still had me spend multiple periods without running water, still had me perform jobs for faraway companies that paid me less than my foreign coworkers because of my passport. All of these things are unchanged. What do you mean we miss stability? We didn’t have it!

    Not sure if what I’m trying to express is getting across, but this moderate “good times” fantasy feels like it has to be by definition an unsustainable state that precludes something breaking and a lot of people materially worse off.

  • EU age verification app to ban any Android system not licensed by Google

    Jump

  • Some other commenter mentioned that this is brought up in issues tracker in the repo. Sorry, I didn’t actually check for it.

    I’m not in the EU, I didn’t dig into it. FWIW I am also moving my own connections to exit from Switzerland sooner or later.

  • The new age verifying app for the EU will only accept Google Play integrity for Android, de-facto banning any aftermarket OS like GrapheneOS

    Jump

  • You’re not being paranoid, this is probably one of the intended uses of this technology. Being able to pretend to care about the children is just set dressing.

    Any government-level “for the kids” effort that doesn’t start with paying teachers more than a pittance is a transparent push for something else.

  • EU age verification app to ban any Android system not licensed by Google

    Jump

  • I do feel like that’s a precarious state to leave this in, especially if they’re developing the backend for it.

    Is there even enough momentum for a SKG-style wave of coverage? It would need to be justified properly by citing things like the Tea app data leak, to make a strong case (to political pencil pushers) for the danger of tying personal information to profiles or even to platforms. Otherwise the only thing they’ll see is “gamers want to make porn accessible to children”.

    I don’t know. This whole situation boils my blood because I really care about online anonymity, and this is kind of nightmare scenario shit for me. I’m not even in the UK or EU.

  • EU age verification app to ban any Android system not licensed by Google

    Jump

  • Apparently this is illegal to implement as of right now, but it’s not helping the feeling of technological doomerism I get whenever I think about this whole identity verification situation.

  • The Tea App leak is an example why you should not always give your face and ID willy-nilly

    Jump

  • I’ve been routing all of my traffic through UK-located VPN servers specifically to avoid shenanigans like this and the UK goes and fucks it up.

    I can’t wait to arm wrestle all my accounts into allowing me to use Swiss servers. Mullvad doesn’t have enough Irish servers for me to reliably exit from there, that would be my top choice (English + GDPR). But then again, GDPR means a fraction of American sites don’t work.

    I just really don’t like having my government or the governments of the places I travel to looking at my traffic. And now this ID shit is here. Just let me use the Internet goddamn it, I already pay out the ass for it.

  • Nintendo can disable your Switch 2 for piracy in the U.S., but not in Europe, as confirmed by its EULA

    Jump

  • The best/worst part is that I was worried about battery life, and then I realized that I only have so much time as an adult and it doesn’t matter as much, for most games I’d want to play on it anyway.

    A power bank for the exceptions. Not perfect but it’s okay.

  • Free Speech Booth, St Louis airport

    Jump

  • Even if it’s not the intent of putting it there, that’s literally what it is now.

  • Only 16% of Italians would fight for their country, survey shows

    Jump

  • How does that change anything?

  • Pope Leo slams 'barbarity' of Gaza war as Israeli gunfire kills at least 93 at aid point

    Jump

  • pray together for it to turn into reality

    I guess you can say that, but I think what’s more important is that when he says something that goes against their presumptions they are forced to deal with it.

    Francis’s low-bar acceptance of queer people really made a big difference in how many of his followers actually interact with them. Very, very far from perfect, but a huge number of people were forced to challenge their prejudices. Where I live, most people regarded the Venn diagram of gay people and child molesters to be a circle, and now while you’d still still be treated like shit, the idea that you can be gay without being the scum of the earth is much more common. The pope said they’re not bad people, so millions have to find it within themselves to follow what he said.

    The Catholic Church will never be a beacon of progressivism. But they’ve been okay at giving stragglers a trustworthy lifeline to slightly more open minded positions.

    I don’t think this excuses the bad stuff they’ve done (since this is always brought up any time anyone says anything positive about the church) but I don’t see the church disappearing anytime soon. I’ll take the good where I can find it. (Also the church is very influential where I live, so it’s important that they keep challenging the regressive ideas a lot of powerful and enfranchised people are holding on to. You don’t want to be challenging the pope by denying the atrocities in Gaza do you?)

    Edit: just saw that you were replying to someone asking about the US. My comment is about Christians in the Middle East, both (Greek and Latin) Catholics and Maronites which are in communion with Rome. There’s spillover in attitude among the other, non-Catholic sects of Christianity, of course. And further, fainter spillover among others folks.

  • Only 16% of Italians would fight for their country, survey shows

    Jump

  • These charts are always suspect when they have a literal apartheid regime run by scores of howling fascists marked as democratic.

    I guess as long as you accept their idea where democracy only applies to part of the population, then yes, part of the population can pretend they live in a democratic society. Nothing wrong with just not considering other people as people, no sir. Only freedom here.

    (I don’t disagree that disinfo is usually discussed in the context of countries where people are more likely to affect policy)

  • how many people came to this platform due to leaving / being banned from Reddit?

    Jump

  • …No? I’m pretty sure that was the first massive wave of relatively diverse active users. Lemmy was pretty fringe before that happened. I think there are tens of thousands of us.

  • Are there any legitimate "brain training" apps/games/etc.?

    Jump

  • In the same vein, I’ve been doing crosswords on my phone on the shitter instead of browsing. First few times felt like I was remembering words that I haven’t been using often, but after a while I stopped feeling like it was helping me with anything.

    I’m going to tentatively say that racking your brain for specific words (or otherwise learning new ones) might be marginally better for you than the average pure time wasting game.

  • Do you still remember?

    Jump

  • Kia Pride. First generation. Falling apart, basically a soda can with wheels. Clutch so atrocious that I basically had to relearn how to drive during those fifteen minutes. Allegedly someone I knew got one that didn’t even have a gas pedal, just a relatively high idle.

    Only the finest public property here in Lebanon.

  • the perfect spot to plant my ten year old bag of freeze dried survival seeds

    Jump

  • I know this is what the solarpunk space is for, but it really is frustrating to have to separate prepper weirdos from actual self sufficiency discussions.

    At least for me the frustration is that it isn’t always easy to explain why a certain image or idea gives you bad vibes. The modern petty fiefdom obsession with lawns and land and wasted urban density is very very icky to me, but these illustrations, some of the other posts on here, they do speak to a certain fantasy that I myself have.

    It might help that where I am, a lot of rural housing is smaller 4-5 floor apartment buildings where each floor is typically occupied by one sibling and their nuclear family. So a homestead for me, conceptually, wouldn’t be my prepper enclave with 3,000 each of guns, cans, toilet paper packs, and flashlights, it would be a family area with a whole lot of fresh vegetables, fruits, herbs, composting, a few chickens, and pleasant places to sit around.

    And it’s not a fantasy for me at all, because I have pieces of that, so I know how it works. Chickens, solar panels, herbs. A bit more than that in my family home, where my relatives live (I just visit).

    Cattle is a bit far fetched for me, lol. Chickens will eat most organic waste and give you eggs, they’re great and convenient. Cattle are a whole other thing.

    This is the missing middle I hear people online (especially from the US/Australia/Canada) complaining about. This makes so much more sense to me than borderline nonsensical suburbia.

  • Ow my liver

    Jump

  • I keep seeing people make fun of it online but that sounds like something I’d enjoy. My drink of choice for a few years now has been the depressing combination of whatever carbonated water is available with whatever better-than-rotgut-but-only-just vodka is available.

    Rotgut-tier is also fine in a pinch. But the bad stuff here will make you blind.

    (I’m also a fan of “give me your sweetest, fruitiest, girliest drink”, which was great fun back in uni when all the dudes around me were ordering bitter beverages they clearly didn’t enjoy. By trying to project masculinity to the girls around us, they were actually betraying an underlying insecurity about it - and by ordering my girly drink I was gently lampshading that idea. Fun times.)

  • Locked

    Trial re-federation proposal for lemmygrad

    Jump

  • I have not been on an instance that federates with it, so personally, I don’t know what the culture is like. I’m all for building bridges with ideological cousins - modern social media is one giant machine-propelled incubator of fascist sympathy nowadays, so I really do feel strongly about having a meaningful, robust, community-driven coalition of good people with good politics. I personally believe something like BlueSky has been a big black hole vacuuming up potential fediverse users, but you could make the case as well that it puts off our eternal September for more time. Maybe it’s not the worst thing that could happen.

    That said, I do hear much worse feedback about grad than I do about .ml or Hexbear. At the same time, I understand that it is one of the main instances tied to the software’s development, and that alone makes it relevant to a big instance with a tech slant like ours, IMO.

    I have to abstain. I think I’d like to vote Yay, but I don’t have all the information. I don’t know enough about grad to feel capable of making a judgement.

    FWIW a lot of the .ml and Hexbear bashing is ridiculous, IMO. All the complaints about a “triad” and subsequent positive interactions on these two instances have made them seem unfairly maligned to me. Maybe it’s because I live in a part of the world where politics and political violence is even more messy, and the concept of “critical support” is much more clear to me. I don’t have west-as-default baggage. So a lot of what comes off to others as apologia for states that do bad things doesn’t necessarily bother me as much as it would bother someone else. I’ve seen more frequent egregious takes on .world and ShJW. Some of those guys legitimately want Israel to turn my home into a parking lot.

  • Google's brilliant AI can't even correctly interpret the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition

    Jump

  • At least for web search, Google was head and shoulders above all of the other search engines. People joke about page 2 of Google, but I used to keep finding relevant links ten pages in with Google while Bing(/DDG) or Yahoo would fall apart on the second page completely. This was before 2020 or so. It was seriously really good.

    Google, being a brilliant company dedicated to providing the best possible services for their users, has decided to make its own web search complete dogshit as well. I don’t feel like DDG is way better than it used to be, but it’s now much closer to Google, which has fallen off a cliff. I’d like not to think that the web is dead, but it’s just getting harder to find non-LLM garbage pages for any given search query. Also, Google doesn’t respect operators as strictly anymore, which sucks. If you search for an exact term using quotes it has started to suggest corrections for it, which… no. Fucks sake.

    Sometimes I wonder if spinning up my own SearXNG would work for my job or if corporate would draw and quarter me for doing something like that. There’s also Kagi, which a few Lemmy users swear by. Frankly I’m just using the hamstrung new Google and a bit of DDG for the privacy related queries. I’ve never used Qwant.

  • title

    Jump

  • I remember a small wave of this style of meta meme in around 2012ish, all about seeing who can break the format of whatever was popular at the time in the most meta way possible. The joke always being that we can understand these weird image arrangements even after tearing out half of their content.

    This one is just as satisfying as those were when they were still a novelty.