You know, I didn’t even think of this. I initially just thought “good, they might get a queer kid they’ll abuse/neglect and thus shouldn’t have them” but the whole limiting of the expansion of more shitbirds sure is a nice bonus.

Topics on the side. “Gaming, Sports, Business, Crypto…” Reddit trying really hard to pretend it’s not just around for porn and memes. Also, crypto lol. Tech bro a little harder, spez.

I thought world War 2 and the rise of fascism in Europe was supposed to have taught us something.

They don’t gotta burn the books, they just remove 'em.

WWII might have been the end, but they’ve slowly been worsening education especially in places like Florida. I think at this point, capitalist social media is also a significant cause of the rise in fascism. When Zuck decides to platform holocaust deniers or twitter decides “free speech [for nazis]” it legitimizes it. It doesn’t take much before this translates into real life. You surround yourself online in your little bubble with all of the other crazies (yay Facebook is bringing people together) long enough and it’s nearly impossible not to translate that into the real world.

History is pretty fuckin’ easy to repeat if you don’t know the history.

that may have been a lie the whole time.

Musk’s taint on the brand is I think majorly based on this type of thing. His twitter purchase has revealed that he’s a serial liar, and now people are seeing all of the ways that it is happening with Tesla. People tolerate assholes all of the time. What they don’t want to tolerate is snake oil salesmen, and I’m not sure there has ever been a bigger one than Musk.

I was using Chrome as a secondary because unfortunately “designed for Chrome” is a thing now, and got sick of Google’s bullshit and thought I was doing better by going to Brave. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that Brave has its own large ethical holes.

Yeah, why would anyone just go and say shit on the internet as if there aren’t receipts?

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no, lol, Elon just sucks.

Remember that time he offered to solve world hunger but then didn’t because “nah” basically?

Indeed. Justices are expected to serve “in good behavior” indicating they can be impeached which is a power granted to congress. Size of the court isn’t spelled out in the constitution and the court has been different sizes as well. Maybe Alito would like to be part of a 51 person court. The power of the purse lies with congress. Alito might enjoy hearing cases inside of the local Denny’s if they can beat the brunch crowd.

And then there is the whole judicial review thing - this is the vast majority of the court’s power these days, and it has no constitutional basis. It’s allowed only because everyone went along with it. What if the court declared something unconstitutional and everyone just went “ok boomer” and didn’t give a shit?

It’s also an incredibly dangerous thing for a justice to say because it just begs for a constitutional test. The court is probably best known for the ability to decide whether a law is constitutional, or judicial review, which is not spelled out in the constitution. So let’s say congress passes a law concerning ethics on the court and the court says “that’s not constitutional” and congress just goes “neither is judicial review.” Pure chaos. The courts power mostly is like that episode of The Office where Pam says she’s the office manager and everyone just goes along with it. The court says it has judicial review authority, and everyone just went “ok.”

I mentioned elsewhere, but people also don’t realize that this data is often collected in ways they don’t expect. For example, if you have a club card at a retailer, your purchase data is likely being shared outside of just that retailer. So you go to the store and buy some kitty litter for the first time. Then all of a sudden one of your other services start showing you ads for cat toys. Location data is sold all of the time now, and that’s often through carriers. Oh, you started going to the gym, best show some ads for workout gear…

This is generally wrong. Disconnect your device from the internet, and on most (for sure Siri/Alexa) will still activate if they hear the wake word. They won’t activate it they don’t. Both companies have basically said that the wake word functionality is hardware blocked, and that’s not been disproven.

Second, not all assistants/companies are created equal. For example, Apple has made the process of involving human review opt-in. Apple also has no incentive to use this data for anything other than improving Siri. They’re not an advertising company and if anything are fairly hostile to others using Apple customer’s data for that type of thing without explicit consent. Contrary to Alexa/Google, which has an incentive to use your Voice recordings to advertise to you, EG: you ask your VA what the symptoms of food borne illness are, they show an ad or suggest a search for pepto.

And the reality is your phone absolutely does 110% spy on you. Just not by listening to you. It is easy to understand why so many people refuse to believe their voice assistants are not spying on them.

This part is mostly correct. Again, in the case of Apple the phone isn’t spying on you, but all of the shit you put on it is. All of those apps are collecting data and collating it in ways that people don’t understand. So even though I have a burner Facebook account, since it’s tied to my number or email (can’t remember which) and I’m sure most of my social graph shares contacts with everything that asks, as soon as I created that account FB suggests to me a whole lot of people I actually know even though I gave it no other real data. People also don’t realize that all of this data is often brokered through lots of services, so when you slow down buying tampons or something, another shopping app starts suggesting prenatal vitamins. This is a large part of the reason lots of major retailers have club cards or whatever.

Scrolled too far down before a mention of Comcast. I was in charge of a handful of locations where we needed broadband. They were geographically diverse enough that we had to go with different options. Comcast was the most expensive, and by a lot. Like 30%, and the slowest in dl/ul by a large margin. Comcast was also the second worst one to deal with. The actual worst one was the faster, slightly less expensive Spectrum. They had by far the worst service. A couple of locations had small DSL companies that were a delight to deal with and reasonably priced, but slow as balls. And then one location had a municipal fiber option that was the cheapest, fastest, and easiest to deal with by far. Like, I swear to god I could call them and talk to a real network engineer that no joke actually knew more than I did. I don’t mean this to sound arrogant; I am not great with networking. I’m just saying compared to “yeah, I have that in bridge mode because I don’t need router capability I’m running my own” and being answered with something like “whoa I’m going to need to get a supervisor” vs them being like “hey can you open a terminal and…” Yes, yes I can open a terminal.

I’m a nerdy white guy that I’m guessing follows similar circles, and I also haven’t really had trouble finding a community there, but tbf I don’t think it’s just exclusive to this demo either. Someone up somewhere in this thread said that mastodon is more hostile to LGBTQ, and that doesn’t match what I’ve seen at all. I mean, my timeline through no real effort on my part is way gayer than it ever was on twitter, and I follow a lot more queer people than I did on twitter and they’re usually posting how much they prefer mastodon to twitter.

That said, I have seen POC saying that mastodon is a lot whiter and a lot more hostile, so idk. I’ve definitely noticed that the POC I followed on twitter really haven’t come over. I really don’t know what to ascribe that to. On twitter, I saw casual racism like all of the time even as a white dude, and only like a couple of times on mastodon. I mean, I’m not disagreeing because the few POC I am following have echoed this sentiment so idk what’s actually going on, but yeah, I do think this is a very YMMV situation.

No, you haven’t. It started out this way, but now basically it’s the “tell the poster you acknowledge/like the post” but also there when you don’t want to boost the post to your timeline. You can still use it this way, but because the community (probably with one of the first twitter exoduses) started using it more like a like on twitter, they gave up and implemented bookmarks (I think might be private and not notify the poster you’ve bookmarked?)

Ofc, there are also some of the mastodon HOA that will still insist this, but then why do bookmarks exist…?

Anyway, just in general, you can tell by the up/down ratio and a lot of the comments that are getting upvoted in this thread that are posting things that are either just incorrect or at least misunderstand things how many people in this thread actually use mastodon, so I would take criticism with a grain of salt.

I’m pretty sure this is it. I think mastodon leans more towards the olds (I’m ~40) in part because we did not like algorithm driven engagement, at least not as the primary vehicle, and most especially in the way that modern services do it. Like, great, I’m glad a celeb did a thing or a team won, but this is entirely irrelevant to my interests most of the time and definitely not how I want to experience things by default.

Sure, when I want to go looking for something, good algorithms that are actually designed to make me happy and not just increase my engagement on the site through morally bankrupt choices, fine, but that’s just not my default.

This is a semi serious question - do people not realize that you can follow across instances and it makes literally no difference?

This is the one reason why some of us were sort of hoping that Threads would federate. Because the celebs and other normies are likely to gravitate there, and there are a few that some of us would still like to follow/interact with.

If anything, this is my criticism against the way that Lemmy handles this. For example, my previous reddit habit was to follow a bunch of subs for TV shows that I watched. So last night when I was watching ST: Strange New Worlds, I really didn’t enjoy the experience of digging through 10 communities that each had the episode posts with the same 15 comments, and the occasional new thought. This isn’t even a criticism of the posters, if you came to the comments there would be some things that would be wild not to call out. I think ultimately I’d almost rather see the federation model for reddit-like services move down in the stack, and federate the communities rather than the whole instance. EG: there is a major ST collective community assimilating the smaller ones and becoming greater than the sum of their parts. Of course, this is also probably partially just because Lemmy/Kbin are still in their infancy, and I have a feeling that as time goes, things are more or less going to centralize in this way anyway, in the same way you could have multiple subs on reddit, but there was usually 1-2 big ones at most.

This isn’t a problem for mastodon, because when someone like Jeri Ryan joins, it doesn’t matter on what instance, I can still follow her in one place, see who she follows and follows her for other like-minded individuals, see all of her posts and re-posts, etc. What instance you’re on makes very little difference after the first five minutes or so and you’re acquainted with how it works.

If I had to guess, she’s negotiated a rock solid contract with an exit package in mind. Either that, or she’s an idiot because there is no fucking chance of being successful with Elon being Elon.

Bluesky just barely hit a million users is still invite only and is largely in a beta state, and though I’m not on it, everyone I know says it’s a zombie platform and they’d rather be on Mastodon for nerd shit or Threads for normie shit. Threads has over 100m users already. The numbers alone make Bluesky not really worth mentioning, and effectively Threads killed it within the first day. Dorsey has also shown a track record of having no idea what he’s doing. Probably half of the things people think about with Twitter come from the community. @mentions, rt, the term “tweet”, etc. The twitter app was developed by a third party and bought.

As much as Zuckerberg sucks, Meta actually runs like a real company with adults at the helm. Dorsey’s already fucking up bluesky not learning anything from his time at twitter and not making moderation a priority. Brands are already embracing Threads over Twitter and Bluesky because they don’t want their ads showing up next to porn and nazis.

Oh, and as for GDPR, Meta has already stated they plan for a later launch, and again since it’s a company of (sociopathic?) adults, they’ll actually get it done, but it’s already effectively over.