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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/)M
Posts
5
Comments
255
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • I quit eating meat for a year once and it was pretty shit for my mental health. I do try to avoid the worst of factory farming as much as I can, though. Organic eggs (in my state regulations on organic eggs include a number of anti-cruelty measures), minimal chicken to reduce the death to meat quantity ratio, things like that. But also, I personally don't feel as though the suffering inflicted on insect populations or rodent populations, or the damages of large scale farming, or the cruelty involved in transporting bees for pollenation are particularly okay either. I'm not really sure there's such a thing as effective veganism in modern society unless you're growing your own food at home, and I don't have the energy, financial security, or access to land for that.

    Nearly every product we consume leads to suffering and destruction. I don't think being short of the point where you're willing to radically change your lifestyle means I should deny that, though, even if all my spoons tend to be spent on shit like dragging myself out of bed and ensuring air quality that triggers my asthma and allergies as little as possible.

    Humans are a mess. There's a substantial cost in physical and psychological resources and energy to dwindling the impact of that mess, but there's very little cost to at least acknowledging it and advocating for growing as a species.

  • Whether this is good or terrible honestly kind of depends on how they define social media. Is discord social media? Are forums? Is Reddit?

    Arguably nobody really benefits from exposing children to feeds full of toxic and angry adults, but that doesn't mean no communities should allow children. Like, there's nothing wrong with kids dipping their toes into the Internet and learning and growing from it, but I don't think it's necessarily the best thing to just hand them the keys to the worst elements.

    Also like, I prefer adult communities over all age communities by a long shot.

  • Did this person really just typify Thatcher as defending her country from male aggression from elsewhere?

    A lot of what's said here makes sense but.. seriously? Thatcher? That's who we're pointing to as a good example? Yeesh.

  • I'm not vegan, but I find it absolutely wild that anyone thinks being kind of annoying sometimes comes anywhere near the level of moral or ethical bankruptcy involved in being complicit in the mass torture of animals for the sake of convenience. Like, okay, yeah, it's not like we have the option of just deciding on behalf of powerful capitalists to just end factory farming. But deciding to at least try not to participate in it by changing your diet is at least something.

    Don't worry about being a "good vegan" if that means having to tiptoe around the fact that the rest of us fuel immense suffering both monetarily and through social normalization. You're trying, and that's great.

  • Glad to hear about 0patch being an option.

  • I thought you were going to say they would be happy to drive their smoke belching pickup trucks off a cliff and became briefly enthusiastic about the idea.

  • To be fair, human thieves can also churn out a plagiarized album of uninspired trash with no emotional content fairly quickly if they're brazen enough about it. 'AI' scrapes the bottom of the barrel for a relatively high operating cost. It won't last.

  • To my understanding Les Pauls really don't stay in tune very well. Pretty, though. When they're not plastered in nationalism.

  • It's generally easier to destroy something than to create something, and it's easier to consolidate power than to take it when you don't have it. Also the left tends to be principled, while the right tends to be focused on gaining and keeping power. There are things conservatives would happily do that are strategically valuable that we typically just straight up wouldn't even if it meant a win.

    If you want to build up social services and fight for the rights and well-being of common people, you have to be able to make pretty broad coalitions while also figuring out how to actually make things better and convincing people that you know what you're doing. If you want to win power without caring about anyone else, all you have to do is ally yourself with those who already have power and not speak up when they hurt others.

    The flip side, fortunately, is that eventually all that self-serving power ends up being used to elevate smaller and smaller groups of people as it's consolidated. As resources and influence collect at the top, more and more people suffer as they're left behind. Eventually the number of people harmed has sometimes been enough that it naturally begins to form the kind of broad coalitions needed to overthrow the most obvious sources of corruption and suffering, but keeping those coalitions once the immediate danger is over is another matter entirely.

    It certainly doesn't help that authoritarians seem to have gotten better at disruption and disinformation. Polarizing society in the way that we see with bot farms run by Russian and Chinese intelligence in the past few years means most of their work can be done without much actual precision. Get everybody angry and get them to disagree on what's going on in the world and they stand a lot less of a chance of coming together to oppose entrenched power structures.

    There's still a clock on the whole thing, because they're making the situation more dangerous for themselves by increasing instability, and eventually it'll probably bite them in the ass. But, will it happen by the time the current crop of powerful authoritarians are dead? Eh.. Maybe? Who knows?

    Unfortunately we also have a clock running as a species, and if we don't figure out how to get around these atomizing disinformation systems and start to dismantle all this consolidated authoritarian power (both in governments and economically), we may not have an opportunity to wait until we reach a critical mass of suffering.

    Also, like, it would really suck to have to live through the process of getting there anyway.

    The best we can hope for, as far as I can tell, is some alternate means of wide-spread awareness. Some kind of movement in art or music might be helpful, if it can be extricated from the existing economic and social power structures. Basically, something like what the counter-culture was trying to do in the 60s, or what punks were doing coming up a little closer on the turn of the century.

    The power of those coalitions was pretty temporary, though, and both seem to have been co-opted by people who, once again, just wanted to consolidate power for their own ends. The extent of their impact is debatable, but I have a feeling we need something substantially bigger than either of those movements.

  • You just need more monitors. Then you can let YouTube do its thing without really paying much attention to it and get on with your life on the other 2 or 3 screens.

  • I would be stunned if the DoJ knows the difference between Chrome and Chromium.

  • There's a joke about them being armed, and maybe another about them not being armed? It's hard to tell from the tone of the article. Do these things have guns?

  • I get that it's important to document this stuff, but to me this headline basically reads as: "Breaking News! Ocean Extremely Wet! Also Salty!"

  • Only if you're good!

  • We absolutely have this problem on Lemmy too. Even on Beehaw. Hell, there's a particularly high profile user here who posted constantly and focused squarely on spoiling potential Democrat votes who utterly disappeared the moment he was told by staff to knock it off. All other engagement dropped off and I still haven't seen him post-election.

    How many others were less prolific and didn't shut down their activity? How many other accounts are literally just the same person?

  • I imagine that Twitter being blocked in Europe might actually lead to some of those sources moving elsewhere to continue to reach their audience. I'm not a big fan of blocking websites either in a general sense, but a I can see why countries would want to avoid having what's happening to the US be repeated within their own borders, and that seems to be a distinct danger with Twitter. There's a pretty good argument to be made that that's literally its purpose at this point.

    Dismantling legitimate governments with disinformation seems like a pretty viable power grab strategy for billionaires trying to create a megacorp hellscape where they get to do whatever they want until the planet becomes uninhabitable for humans some time after their own deaths.

  • A few weeks back I got a parking ticket because I believed a google search result. Parking is free on Sundays and holidays, but the city's website doesn't specify which holidays. Google insisted that Halloween is a holiday and thus parking is free, but it isn't actually federally recognized, which I found out the hard way.

  • I was watching a talk debate on consciousness yesterday where they briefly touched on this topic. One of the speakers was contending that attempting to create AI that is even convincing to humans is a terrible idea ethically.

    On the one hand, if we do eventually accidentally create something with awareness, we have no idea what degree of suffering we'd be causing it; we could end up regularly creating and snuffing out terrified sentient beings just to monitor our toasters or perform web searches. On the other hand, though, and this was the concern he seemed to find more realistic, we may end up training ourselves to be less empathetic by learning to ignore the potential suffering of convincingly feeling 'beings' that aren't actually aware of anything at all.

    That second bit seems rather likely. We already personify completely inanimate objects all the time as a normal matter of course, without really trying to. What will happen to our empathy and consideration when we routinely interact with self-proclaimed sentient systems while callously using them to our own ends and then simply turning them off or erasing their memories?

  • Amazon Graveyard sounds like a subscription service for apps that have been discontinued. Not like, a service that lets you keep using them, but you just get to have defunct apps that don't work and pay Amazon for the pleasure.

    Only $14.99 per month! One IP per subscription!