It’s not Peertube, but as at least a step away from Youtube I’ve found a lot of my favourite creators immediately cross-post all their videos to Odysee (including electronics guys like Louis, Bigclive, GreatScott, etc) and I’ve also found some new channels to watch there. It’s not a great site, it’s marginally better than Youtube, which is not a high bar. For obvious reasons, I’m looking forward to finding recommendations in Peertube too though so I’ll be watching this thread.

“remove any thing that they might be able to do” is a hilariously broad brush to apply to three letter agencies in this day and age that were doing things like this 50 years ago.

I’m not saying it’s realistic that OP is being targeted for such surveillance. But if they are, good fucking luck! Flashing your firmware ain’t going to do shit when they’ve just gone ahead and replaced the chips on your board with their own that act exactly like a normal chip but have extra code that doesn’t get flashed when they don’t want it to.

I am incapable of the kind of black and white thinking that would allow me to believe that literally ACAB, but an awful lot of them clearly are, and maybe even an overwhelming majority. And I appreciate finding and documenting as much evidence as we can find of that, so that we can have an honest and accurate accounting of how many cops are actually, indeed, “bad”.

It sounds like you’re talking about the experience that France has in designing and building them being a massive advantage, which I agree with, which is why they’re going to be an important part of the group. The hardest things to do are the things that are the most worth doing. Laziness and efficiency are the same thing, and our relentless pursuit of efficiency in every possible thing has made us unfathomably lazy. It’s time to invest in some thoughtful inefficiency. The fact that these things are difficult is how you learn important albeit maybe expensive lessons and become an expert and a leader. To paraphrase JFK, we have to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Only a fool would think learning is a waste of time.

Sounds like it’s time for France, Germany, Norway, South Korea, UK, Australia, Canada, and anyone else who wants in to join forces and build our own modern nuclear sub class. We are not helpless subsistence farmers, we are some of the largest economies in the world, I will not be gaslit into believing we are not capable of matching or exceeding, if not US technology itself, then at least the level of technology that the US would be willing to sell to us. Where there is a collective will, there is a way. We must put as much collective effort into this as we put into the industrial revolution itself, or WW2’s economic transformations. If we did it in a matter of years under fire from Germany’s bombs and guns and U-boats we can do it under fire from Trump’s tariffs. Let’s get to work.

Fascism has always been the great enemy. Not a leader, not a country, not a people, not a religion. Fascism is part of being human, approximately 30% of the population has been found in studies to have fascist tendencies. They are not the majority, but they are common, they are powerful, they are malicious, and they always will be. And right now, a lot of them are also very, very rich.

As long as fascism is part of being human, it will always be the responsibility of the other 70% to fight it. And it is a terrible responsibility, but it will never go away. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Only when we all get lazy and apathetic and divided and decadent and distracted can the fascist 30% actually take control. So that’s what they aim to make happen. Consider that only around 25% of the US population (not registered voters – the actual human beings who live in the country) actually voted for Trump. Voter apathy, disinformation, disillusionment, disenfranchisement, demographics, gerrymandering and more have been weaponized against the actual majority to turn 25% into a slim margin of absolute victory. Trump does not have majority support, and he never did, and he never will. Remember that.

We’ll have to call it the ROUS garden, especially if Muskrat keeps lurking around.

If the educational system is not working, if AI has destroyed our educational system, and I think it’s fair to say it has, if teachers feel there’s nothing they can do to fix it, then throw it away and don’t waste our tears on it. We must find other ways to educate. This is imperative, education is non-negotiable. I am not giving up in defeat, I am saying we must retreat from battles that are simply not viable anymore. Use them as a delaying action if you can, but if kids are learning from LLMs and Video games and Netflix and Youtube and Tiktok now, we need to find ways to get as much good educational content as we can onto those platforms. We need to find ways to manipulate their algorithms. We need alternative platforms that aren’t corporate-controlled cesspools, where we can make the rules. Governments and institutions will be too slow to react. The only advantage we have is that we can act and react fast, even faster than the corporate interests that are burning down the Internet of Alexandria and blowing up the world into the next dark age. We can, and should, and must organize an educational resistance.

Literally nobody wants their kids to grow up like this. Not even the billionaires exploiting and profiting from this garbage. We have the advantage that everybody in the world will soon understand the scale of this problem as they are confronted with it themselves. Will it be too late? Maybe, but we have to assume it will be better if we at least try. Even if we have to rescue people one mind at a time, every effort is worthwhile and every victory is worth celebrating.

I know we all really like “freeway speeds” just the way they are, but saying we need them is a bit of a stretch.

Newsom’s not even the Han Solo he’s trying to imply he is here, it’s obvious he’s Lando Calrissian. He’s not your friend, and he’s not going to help you. He’s going to help himself, and that might briefly help you, but don’t count on it. We’ve gotta be our own heroes in this story.

What are electrolytes? Do you even know?

You absolutely can slap a Lambo body on anything (provided it fits) and there is a literal cottage industry that exists around doing so. It’s not popular because, let’s be honest, it’s pretty silly, and everyone involved acknowledges its pretty much just for fun and entertainment. The status symbol of “owning a Lamborghini” goes away forever the second you start the engine.

There is a lot of psychology that goes into designing the appearance of cars. Like, an extreme amount. Car companies spend millions designing and refining body shapes and styles, and building brand images, and pushing commercials that seed these ideas into your head about their brand looking a certain way and that look therefore implying quality, they’re connecting all those dots in your head, one marketing campaign at a time, and it works because we’re honestly pretty gullible creatures at least when somebody wants to spend millions upon millions of dollars researching exactly how they can weasel their way into your brain.

And this might surprise you, but the same “looks incredible but the worst piece of shit ever” can certainly apply to luxury vehicles. Aside from notorious reliability and repairability issues, Lamborghinis don’t usually win any races either. They won’t win a drag race, they won’t win an oval track race, they won’t win a rally race. They’re fast, certainly, but they’re not the fastest and for what you pay for a Lamborghini you could build a much, MUCH better purpose-built race car. You could probably build 10 purpose-built race cars. Hell, people build race cars out of junkyard parts that can beat Lamborghinis. They’re not the end-all-be-all of cars, nor are any of the other luxury brands. They have some nice features but they also have a lot of dumb features and yes, a lot of cut corners too. They’re designed to be desirable and profitable, not to be the best.

So to answer your question, it absolutely IS the case for cars, in fact it’s probably even moreso the case than it is with computer parts. Unless you really need to roar down the highway towing a 10,000 pound trailer at 80 mph and still get up to that speed in 5 seconds flat, you really only need like probably 30-50 horsepower max for most of the daily driving that people do, but people’s driving habits and attitudes would have to change and they would hate the feel of gradual acceleration, so they would simply never buy such a car. I think we really underestimate how incredible even the cheapest “crappiest” cars are. We’re talking about machines cheap enough for almost everybody in our society to own, that can drive at high speeds, in perfectly dry, climate-controlled comfort, carrying many passengers and cargo, in almost any weather short of a tornado or flood, with excellent reliability for hundreds of thousands of miles, that provide constant lighting and electricity and entertainment, all while maintaining a high degree of safety for the occupants.

If you’d rather putter around on a riding lawnmower with a Lamborghini body kit on it, you absolutely can do that, but you have to understand that once you start comparing the limited features and abilities it provides you will quickly find what you’ve constructed is the real “piece of shit” in comparison. Just don’t forget your slow-moving vehicle sign!

Maybe we could generate those with AI… oh wait, I think I see the problem…

Maybe having a competent government would help. Can we try that?

That’s awesome thanks! (Community discovery is still something I struggle with on Lemmy)

Reddit had a community “OutOfTheLoop” for these type of questions. It was very helpful for people like me who do our best to ignore these nonsense viral image macros that get blown out of proportion. The problem on Lemmy is, judging by the comments here, I think almost everyone here avoids those things like the plague, so there’s few if anyone “InTheLoop” around to explain for us.

A wholly owned subsidiary of Ea-nasir Industries Heritage Group. Our guarantee is as solid as a stone tablet!

This is a good attitude. The cynicism is well-earned, but ultimately self-defeating. Not all wealthy people are intentionally and actively hostile, and even if they are, sometimes it is effective to turn enemies into allies, maybe just temporary ones, or even just avoid fighting the least rewarding ones at all if it’s not going to cost you anything and lets you combine your forces to focus on the battles that really matter. This is class war, and war calls for strategy. Fight smart and spend our limited resources wisely. Trump and Muskrat are about a million times more direct of a threat to our survival than JB Pritzker or the Waltons. You don’t have to trust any of them, but it’s a strategic blunder to waste time and energy attacking the ones who aren’t attacking us. Don’t depend on them if you don’t have to, but let them try to help, if they can.

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Welcome!

But I have to ask, why are you guys here and not on Reddirt?

Hilarious typo if it wasn’t intentional.

Where the population us much larger and its basically the same?

First thing you quickly realize here is that larger is not necessarily better. Small is beautiful, you can have actual thoughtful conversations with individuals here without the incessant dogpiling and low effort meme replies. I have even got smacked down (and rightly so) for accidentally bringing some of that with me at one point. It’s not needed or desirable here.

It appears a few instances dominate this landscape anyway?

When you actually look at the comments I usually find almost everyone is on a different instance, in fact when there are relatively small numbers of comments like the are on most posts, you often won’t even see the same instance in the comments twice unless it’s the same person. Yeah, some instances have “huge numbers” of people and communities (lemmy.world) but I think a lot of them are honestly just rarely used, abandoned, or otherwise non-participatory, and the communities can be used by anybody (which is exactly the point of federation). The people actually spending their time here are on a wide variety of instances, often even using different frontends or software. And that’s great. To me, the ecosystem feels healthy and diverse.

Its not like this is unchecked social media, they still moderate these places right?

The point is you can choose an instance whose moderations suit you. (Almost?) all instances moderate to some degree, complete unmoderation is how you end up infested with child porn and other horrible shit. But the directions they moderate in, and the specific things they moderate, can vary wildly depending on the preferences of the owners and the countries they operate in. They also federate with and defederate different instances, which is a large-scale form of moderation. Most instances defederate (and have been defederated by) hexbear and lemmygrad. But not all of them do. Some also defederate lemmy.ml. But not most. And of course those three still federate with each other, and with some other instances. The point isn’t to completely prevent isolated echo chambers, it’s to allow the instances themselves (and the users who join them) to choose how much echo they want to hear compared to how many challenging views they disagree with. Everyone should be able to find a balance that suits them. Most of the people complaining about the content on Lemmy have probably just chosen the wrong instance, frankly, because most people don’t understand how this works and the biases and moderation attitudes inherent in all these different instances is not always super obvious at first glance.

Reddit sucks now. I still check there regularly but I find both the content and the commenting less and less interesting and find myself spending less and less time there. It hasn’t been a sudden process, but the more time I spend on Lemmy the more I like it and the more communities I find and engage in.