Just another Reddit migrant, not much to see here.

I subsist on a regular diet of games, light novels, and server administration.

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  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Realistically, the US Government is going to continue supporting Israel no matter what happens until the US has meaningful voting reform. Israel is an entrenched interest due to the amount of money changing hands in Washington. (defense contracts, etc.) This is not helped by the social stigma of the average American not differentiating between Israel as a political entity and Jewish people as a demographic. It’s one of those “broken by design” social constructs.

    The logical fallacy that I largely see in play is the assumption that the Republicans would have handled this any differently. While I agree that Biden’s stance is noteworthy, as a reminder that the parties are more alike than they are different on certain topics, it doesn’t change the landscape of the two leading presidential candidates. One of them is in bed with Putin and appears to have a vested interest in entrenching himself as a leader who can never lose an election. (i.e. an aspiring president for life) The other candidate is still flawed, but doesn’t represent an existential threat to the political institution itself.

    I’d much rather have an option other than Trump or Biden, but until more states enact voting reform at a local level we’re stuck with a choice of which decrepit old man is least likely to be disruptive to the entire system of government. The Republican party needs to continue its losing streak until it decides the populist authoritarian movement is a failed strategy.


  • Vote for useful things and voting reform at the local level.

    Vote for whatever keeps the system itself functioning at the federal level. If one party’s leaders are in bed with “presidents for life” or the authoritarian governments that were ratfucked to make them presidents for life, you are going to end up with a president for life.

    Important to note: If enough states enact voting reform at the local level, you no longer need a constitutional amendment to have voting reform that influences the federal level. If you are looking for real change, this is where it is. It is slow and unsexy, but don’t bitch about your federal vote meaning nothing if you’re not doing anything with your local elections.


  • The people that cancel good people are shitbags.

    Relativity remains a factor. One mob’s shitbag is another mob’s hero. One mob’s wish for freedom of thought is another mob’s moral depravity.

    Cancelling is just an added nuance on gossip and dogpiling, and those have been around since we’ve been knocking rocks together. It happens whenever a person publicly acknowledges an opinion that angers a tribe enough to single someone out. It doesn’t matter whether that person is a long-time resident or a passing visitor. The more it goes against their social values, the more popular it becomes in the gossip, and the more people share it with each other as the story takes on a life of its own. Details get changed. Maybe it started with a lie or misconception to begin with and grew from there. None of that matters when people start shunning you in public or knocking on your door with torches in hand.

    The only added nuance of cancelling over traditional gossip is the pervasiveness of the internet, and the distance at which people can socially band together to shun you. Most importantly, gossip has never required someone to be a good or bad person. It just needs someone to be the target of a rumor (truthful or otherwise) that pisses a lot of people off.



  • As others have already covered, everything we do comes with risk. Some people go through life without spending much thought on those risks, and if they’re lucky they never have to deal with these things. Others let it weigh upon them heavily, and it’s fairly evident that you fall into the latter camp.

    You’ve caught on to the general theme though, which is that the more of yourself you put out there needlessly, the greater a possibility for negative things to happen as a result of that. I’m not going to ask you to wave a magic wand and become the type of person who doesn’t worry about those things, so here are the best compromises:

    • Quality over quantity with your friends. Find some good people you can be yourself around, and don’t stress over having fewer people that you hang out with than others. It’s not a competition and it doesn’t make you an inferior person.

    • Minimize how much you “put yourself out there”. The internet wasn’t around 25 years ago, and when it was young it was common sense to use an alias on the internet wherever possible. Use different nicknames on different websites to minimize the ability of casual bad actors to link your identities between different social forums. The possibility of database leaks doxxing the e-mail address you signed up with is still there, but thwarting the low effort attempts does a lot on its own. You can go through the effort of registering with different e-mail addresses as well, but there is a point of diminishing returns here and you need to decide where to draw the line for yourself.

    • Remove yourself from online discussions when it’s healthy to do so. Assert your opinion, clarify your points if they need clarifying, and move on. Turn off notifications once you’re past that point. Winning arguments on the internet is not realistically a thing that happens, and notifications on your mobile device from an argument will needlessly pull you back into a place of anxiety. Considering how little those mobile notifications contribute to your positive frame of mind, it’s best to be rid of them completely if you ever find them having a negative impact on your day to day life.

    Edit:

    • Put yourself out there when you feel strongly that it is important to do so. Some causes are worth weathering the consequences, and you shouldn’t let a fear of consequences completely cripple you when you feel strongly enough about something. Will your friends have your back if you stick your foot into it? Then go for it.

  • It means you aren’t suited to run a public facing business. There’s nothing wrong with that, but speaking as someone with a lot of social anxiety baggage there are things I’m equipped to do well and things that I’m not. I shouldn’t let that stop me from opening a business if I really want to, but if I simply don’t want to deal with the social rejection elements I have to accept that I’m better off letting someone else run that side of a business.

    As for the non-business elements of your question, all you can really do is conduct yourself in a way that you don’t believe you’ll find yourself regretting later. If you say something in a public place, especially online, consider it part of the public record. It can and will come back to bite you later. Assume your [morally positive family member here] is always watching.


  • I’m also here to expose bad excuses.

    Not being able to help someone who is refusing to provide technical detail is a pretty damn good excuse in this industry.

    If your goal is to expose the bad excuses of others, step one is to put in as much effort as you’re expecting from others. :P


    Edit for good measure: (links fixed, forgot about direct linking comments from outside of a lemmy instance)

    • Your instance was not federating with lemmy.world. [1]
    • You assumed that the blame had to rest on lemmy.world because you had “eliminate[d] all the possibilities [you] had at hand”. [2]
    • You made this post to vent about a bunch of unrelated nonsense and refused to provide technical detail that would assist the admins in troubleshooting. It’s a given fact that your privacy is your choice, but it’s also a given that you shouldn’t be a dick about it if you choose to withhold details, even from PM. For the record, the information being requested was the bare minimum for an instance administrator to troubleshoot network interactions with a remote instance.
    • A random (but cool) third party identified the issue with your instance not federating. [3]
    • Instead of apologizing, you proceeded to act like you were entitled to that solution from the admins you wrongly accused. [4] You are not god’s gift to the internet and they are not technical support for your instance.

    There’s no room for niceties here, you are either an asshole in denial or some brat who is too young to know any better. Sleep on it. Come to terms with that fact and make good on it, or don’t. You aren’t worth anyone’s energy, and I’m only bothering with this summary for everyone else’s sake. Your problem is fixed, it was never on lemmy.world’s side to begin with, and somehow you are still acting like the failure of the admins to figure out what was busted with your shit is some Sherlock gotcha moment.

    I am unaffiliated with lemmy.world and my toxicity does not represent the opinions of the admins. (but they’re probably thinking it)


  • In my work, when someone comes to me and assumes I or my team is screwing up because they “eliminated all possibilities at hand” 90% of the time, they screwed up and didn’t realize it.

    Yeah, at that point the onus is on the person putting forth the problem to show their work. Start listing off possibilities that you’ve eliminated. You can have thirty years of technical experience and still be completely useless by assuming that you’re just as smart as the person you’re explaining the problem to.

    “I did eliminate all the possibilities I had at hand”? Naw man, anyone dropping that line has only eliminated all possibilities that they can think of, and all of that supposed thinking about “all the possibilities” is worthless if they aren’t going to offer it up as a starting point.





  • The cycle of social tech becoming mainstream and conversational norms being dragged down to a least common denominator predates modern social media. The earliest example I can think of is Usenet (newsgroups):

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

    During the 1980s and early 1990s, Usenet and the Internet were generally the domain of dedicated computer professionals and hobbyists; new users joined slowly, in small numbers, and observed and learned the social conventions of online interaction without having much of an impact on the experienced users. The only exception to this was September of every year, when large numbers of first-year college students gained access to the Internet and Usenet through their universities. These large groups of new users who had not yet learned online etiquette created a nuisance for the experienced users, who came to dread September every year. Once ISPs like AOL made Internet access widely available for home users, a continuous influx of new users began, which continued through to 2015 according to Jason Koebler, making it feel like it is always “September” to the more experienced users.

    It’s the same cycle. Social tech starts off being used by a smaller number of technically inclined people. Communities are smaller and normalized civility is more commonplace. Peer pressure holds people to those norms. Once a social tech balloons from mainstream interest, the norms (or zeitgeist if you prefer) shift toward the incoming population because they outnumber the early population and exert more peer pressure. The new norms become a compromise between the norms of the incoming mob and what the community moderators are willing/able to enforce.

    It’s tempting to put a label on the incoming demographic and use it in a derogatory way, but removing the label from the equation doesn’t change the source of unhappiness; the memory of what once was and the knowledge that it can’t last when cultural dilution sets in.

    (no, I’m not providing any solutions to the problem, this is just rambling that might provide more insightful people with a starting point)


  • Because it’s what we’ve come to expect from large corporations suddenly joining the table of any FOSS project that is adjacent to their financial stakes. Coexistence is possible if they can profit from the software without assimilating it, but it also stands to reason that they will be pushing for new interoperability standards that benefit their own business model at the expense of users in some way.

    The lowest hanging fruit would be something that allows them to associate Fediverse accounts with users whose marketing data already exists in their database, or providing a service to third parties that helps them tie their own databases back to Fediverse users. This would require some sort of hook that encourages the users to either associate their Fediverse accounts to an existing Meta service, or otherwise volunteer common PII such as email address that can be cross referenced. Maybe some kind of tracking cookie that accomplishes the same.

    Keep in mind that this is just an example, it is not necessarily the exact angle they are pursuing. I’m not in the automatically defederate camp, but a healthy amount of skepticism is definitely warranted.

    ——

    Edit: Also worth a read: https://kbin.social/m/fediverse@lemmy.ml/t/83284/How-to-Kill-a-Decentralised-Network-such-as-the-Fediverse



  • Would you and your BF enjoy shooting at alien scum while your characters scream DEMOCRACY!! and HAVE A NICE CUP OF LIBERTEA!! at the top of their lungs? Would you be entertained by accidentally killing each other in the heat of battle when you radio for an ammo drop?

    Then Helldivers would be for you. Join the forces of Super Earth and spread Managed Democracy throughout the universe!

    PROTIP: If you want to assert dominance in your relationship, find a gun with a bayonet attachment. You will mix up the melee and interact buttons on at least one occasion.