Boz (he/him)

Thanks, I’m glad at least someone isn’t judging me.

I meant identifying details about my education and career, not details about my perspective. I wouldn’t have commented if I had nothing to say. :3

And when all you have is a Phillips head screw, you might overlook who’s holding the handle of the exact size screwdriver you need.

I don’t know, I think Musk might actually have an inferiority complex. He’s obsessed with himself, but he puts an awful lot of effort into trying to prove that he’s cool. But yeah, they’re both terrible, it doesn’t really matter who’s worse.

Non-tech person, though I would prefer not to go into detail on a public forum. I do get along well with tech people, and I run into some fairly technical issues while trying to do other things, but I’m rarely interested in technology for its own sake. I will listen to someone talk about what they do, or read an article, and I will always try to read the manual, but I am also the kind of person who’s like, “if I can’t solve this problem on my own in 15 minutes, I am going to call tech support.” (In my defense, if I can’t solve the problem in 15 minutes with the manual, I am not going to manage it on my own without human intervention, and I don’t want to bother my friends and family if I can get someone whose actual job is to ask if the machine is plugged in, and who won’t tease me about it for the next three weeks if it was, in fact, not plugged in. I am always polite with tech support, but I can tell they sometimes think I should have been able to figure it out on my own).

I’m fine with not really understanding how Lemmy works, since it does work, and it’s easy to find help if I get stuck. I am picking stuff up here and there as I go, which is usually what happens with stuff I use often, but at a certain point it’s just a black box to me.

ETA: when I say “not going into detail,” I mean about my background. That didn’t come across the first time, lol, sorry about that.

I mean, shouldn’t is more applicable for “male prostitute.” Really depends on the gig, and how closely the client examines your assets.

Does this mean we can say “welcome to the fediverse, we have cake”?

Yeah, but unironically, mailing a check is great if you don’t want to install an app or sign a digital “monetize me, Daddy” agreement just to make a one-time payment to a company that already knows your mailing address. I usually pay rent and utilities that way, because I can just drop it through the office mail slot, and I don’t have to pay a processing fee to use their sketchy online payment system. Cheaper for me, probably a good laugh for the staff, and not difficult.

Probably the shirtless pic was a carefully calculated move to short-circuit theories about his lack of humanity, by showing that he has a navel. [/s]

…for real, though, at least the man utilizes his paid PR staff.

I like “[insert magic-user class] is a stage magician,” whatever that means in the particular setting. IMO it works best when “stage magician” is well-defined and distinct from authentic magic (again, consistent with setting, like “Vegas entertainer” in the late 20th century, “spiritual medium” for early 20th, “medicine show [salesperson]” for the 19th, “alchemist with patrons” for Medieval to early enlightenment, and so on, though inauthenticity or bad reputation are usually an important part of the fun for me). It can drive some excellent dramatic irony.

Oh wow, they buried the lede on this one: “Pornhub data is transmitted to Google via its analytics platform…” It’s one thing to have data collected and transmitted to advertisers, but I don’t think anyone wants their Pornhub viewing history linked to their Google account. The company claims it only goes to Google in an anonymized form, but of course it would say that.

It looks like the actual research suggests that you can have the amount of aspartame in 12-36 cans of diet soda before you increase your cancer risk, so even if you stay on the conservative side of that, and say “no more than 12 cans,” I think most people don’t have to change their aspartame intake in response to this. You should definitely talk to your doctor about it if you already have a high cancer risk, or really like diet soda, or just want more reliable information than you can get online.

I think the more useful takeaway from this article is that beverage companies are trying to keep aspartame from being declared a possible carcinogen. That’s hardly surprising, but it seems more verifiably true than the proposition that aspartame is a significant carcinogen. A lot of things can increase cancer risk slightly, but much fewer increase cancer risk enough to worry about them.

“But have you considered special-edition artisanal grass? Guaranteed to impress your neighbors! Practically mows itself! Thrives on zero water! [in small print: made of 100% high grade polypropylene filaments, not suitable for hot climates].” [/s]

For that kind of research, I usually go to Wikipedia, pick a random technical term for the topic I’m looking for, and add that. It doesn’t always work, but it does eliminate some of the sales sites. But it shouldn’t be necessary, sigh.

I think it’s a bold move for Google to present Perspectives as a new feature to improve user experience when really, it just makes it easier for them to present sponsored content in different formats. Astroturfed advertisments (fake “ordinary customer reviews,” usually) have been a thing on social media for ages, especially on YouTube, and Perspectives is just giving Google a creative way to get eyeballs on those ads.

Using the Reddit implosion as a jumping off point is also clever, and I think it’s evidence that Google doesn’t plan on paying for API access next month, or ever. They don’t want to take advantage of Reddit’s data, they just want to take back the eyeballs that Reddit attracts.

(… not that Reddit was ever immune to astroturfing, of course, but I think strong community moderation made it better than YouTube, which doesn’t give users much opportunity to get rid of fake reviews. Now that they have chased off a lot of mods and nerfed their tools, I expect the authenticity of Reddit product reviews to decrease dramatically).

“Many of us may wonder,” yep. Some of us are pretty sure it’s because Google is now optimizing searches for profitability rather than relevance. They’re very careful to avoid fully explaining how the algorithm arranges search results, but I think the algorithm now has more financial subroutines than software behind it.

I disagree with that definition of news. Keeping politicians accountable is certainly one of the functions of the press, but there are a lot of possible news items that don’t refer to politicians. “Winter storms hit [location]” is news, but not related to politicians unless it talks about steps local politicians are taking to prevent storm damage (which is not necessary for a good article). Or “Physicists find [particle they were looking for].” That one could be in Science rather than here, but it is definitely news, and I personally think it’s hard to shoehorn politics into a discussion of particle physics without losing track of what actually happened. Very few politicians involve themselves in that kind of research (though, to be fair, it might be news if they did).

Whether it’s possible to have a purely apolitical news forum is a different question, and I am sure it’s possible to put a political spin on almost anything if you want, but I just don’t think it’s true that news must be political to be news.

Varying levels of user sophistication is definitely something to consider, thanks for mentioning it. I personally would rather see some dubious articles than chase away people who don’t understand why I consider those articles dubious. I think that also covers articles with bad heds. “The title tells me something about this story” is a good starting point for a discussion about source reliability. Rephrasing a title also expresses an opinion, and it sounds like we’re not looking for the poster’s commentary. (I could go either way on that, myself).

I’m not sure I’m with you about “blog spam,” though. I agree that it’s a subjective characterization, but in my opinion, Cory Doctorow’s piece on enshittification is not news. It’s certainly not spam, and it is worthy of discussion, but it doesn’t serve the informative purpose that a news article does, and I don’t think it’s meant to. That piece is an analysis of patterns of events over the course of many years, and its purpose is to identify and describe a pattern shown by those events, not to present a detailed, factual account of any of them.

I do think there are blogs that contain news, if that’s what you’re getting at, and I am open to the idea that certain kinds of commentary might belong in a news forum even if they don’t count as news, but I personally would stop short of grouping high-level conceptual pieces with standard news items. I also don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with blog posts, but I do think they’re usually commentary or personal anecdotes rather than straight news, so if we’re looking to avoid commentary and anecdotes, prohibiting blogs might be a step in that direction. (As with commentary by OP, I could go either way on discussing editorials/commentary).

100% with you on the value of codes and standards. I used to work in a field that was very safe except for the rare occasions on which it was very unsafe, and we all learned not only what the regulations were, but why those regulations were in place. Having the reason explained usually killed any desire I might have had to break that regulation, which of course is why the explanations were part of the training process. “Don’t do this thing that is likely to lead to extremely painful injuries” or “make sure to do this thing in order to keep the very expensive machine from breaking” are rules I am delighted to follow.

I read somewhere that Rush had wanted to be an astronaut, but hadn’t made the grade for some reason. I wonder if it was because he would have endangered everyone around him if he had been involved in a mission.

Depressingly, it sounds like that controller was not even close to the most poorly-chosen component.