For instance, a leaked 2009 Pepsi marketing presentation with language such as “The Pepsi DNA finds its origin in the dynamic of perimeter oscillations…our proposition is the establishment of a gravitational pull to shift from a transactional experience to an invitational expression …”

uhhh okay this is tough. how about:

Pepsi is known for waves (maybe lmao? i genuinely don’t know what perimeter oscillations is trying to say). We want to make people feel like buying Pepsi isn’t just buying something but is an invitation.

LOL that one’s a mess.

“Perimeter oscillations” sounds to me like a way to describe shifts in consumer opinions and preferences. A really dumb way. But who knows? Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of marketing execs?

I get the same feeling from corpo-speak as I get from bad poetry. Like the author runs all their ideas through a few rounds of mutations, out of fear of being seen as simple. The goal is not to be understood, but to make yourself harder to criticize.

Sort of. But the sorting algorithm is not so simple that you can call it neutral or natural.

I don’t think the details of Reddit’s ranking algorithm are public. Even within a single sub, it’s not as simple as counting user votes. That’s weighed against age, and all sorts of fuzzy bot/fraud detection mechanisms. I think Reddit intentionally injects noise into the system. You’ll see phantom votes all the time to keep things “balanced”.

And then in /all, I believe some subreddits are banned entirely, and again it’s not as simple as “most votes” or “most votes weighed against age”.

Here’s a Chicago Tribune article from 2016 that mentions the change I mentioned before: https://www.chicagotribune.com/2016/12/01/reddit-to-crack-down-on-most-toxic-users-of-pro-trump-forum/

Reddit had to change one of its algorithms over the summer to try to stop r/the_Donald from dominating the board that displays all of Reddit’s content, known as r/all.

It’s light on details and again, I don’t think details were ever published. Reddit is closed-source so really it’s anybody’s guess how they’re really ranking posts.

/r/all was also algorithmically curated. Not to mention easily and heavily gamed by bots, trolls, and state-sponsored disinformation campaigns.

That’s how we got Trump in the first place. /r/the_donald was constantly shoved in everyone’s face, and even Reddit had to eventually admit the system was compromised. IIRC they adjusted the algorithm in an attempt to counterbalance it sometime around…2017? I forget exactly but it was definitely too late.

Lemmy’s not structurally better in that regard, unfortunately. If we’re not already inundated with bots and other malefactors (big if tbh), it’s just because we’re not big enough to attract them yet.

You’ll think I’m crazy, and you’re not wrong, but: sneakernet.

Every time I run the numbers on cloud providers, I’m stuck with one conclusion: shit’s expensive. Way more expensive than the cost of a few hard drives when calculated over the life expectancy of those drives.

So I use hard drives. I periodically copy everything to external, encrypted drives. Then I put those drives in a safe place off-site.

On top of that, I run much leaner and more frequent backups of more dynamic and important data. I offload those smaller backups to cloud services. Over the years I’ve picked up a number of lifetime cloud storage subscriptions from not-too-shady companies, mostly from Black Friday sales. I’ve already gotten my money’s worth out of most of them and it doesn’t look like they’re going to fold anytime soon. There are a lot of shady companies out there so you should be skeptical when you see “lifetime” sales, but every now and then a legit deal pops up.

I will also confess that a lot of my data is not truly backed up at all. If it’s something I could realistically recreate or redownload, I don’t bother spending much of my own time and money backing it up unless it’s, like, really really important to me. Yes, it will be a pain in the ass when shit eventually hits the fan. It’s a calculated risk.

I am watching this thread with great interest, hoping to be swayed into something more modern and robust.

There are a million of these out there. Most of them suck. Many are, at best, ethically gray. Even the better ones spy on you in a hundred different ways.

I’d love something that actually didn’t suck, but “185 million dollar AI startup” doesn’t sound promising to me.

The big problem with the concept is that there’s money to be made by gaming the system and nobody is good at that cat and mouse game. AI could theoretically help, but let’s be real: it’s just going to scrape the same 100 identical Amazon referral listicles you’d get in a Google search, with an extra sprinkling of ads.

Posts on Twitter can get flagged with “Community Notes”, generally to advise readers about inaccuracies and lies.

Apparently “Community Note” has been verbed, without so much as a hyphen.

Yuck.

“Gets Community Noted” is such an awkward turn of phrase.

Yes. I’ve recently come to realize that anytime I use ketchup, it’s better with a ketchup/mustard mix.

(and has E2EE)

Normally my policy is “E2EE or GTFO”, but the concept only applies to a subset of Discord use cases. A good Discord alternative needs to handle the same variety of use cases as Discord.

E2EE for a public forum makes no sense. Lemmy doesn’t have E2EE either, obviously. That’s an absurd idea.

Discord is mostly used for public or semi-public spaces. I’m in Discord servers for some of my favorite games and game studios, for example. The only barrier to entry is clicking a link, which is usually publicly advertised. I’m also in some semi-public Discords that are locked behind a membership of some sort (like Patreon), but those are still full of an arbitrary number of people I do not know. It’s not a private space. E2EE would be counterproductive.

That said, I have a few friends who habitually DM me on Discord, and I’m like “dude, I know you have Signal. Use it FFS”. One thing I like about Lemmy is that when you go to send a DM, it literally warns you against using it for DMs:

Warning: Private messages in Lemmy are not secure. Please create an account on Element.io for secure messaging.

The problem is that there are very few people who are familiar enough with both Discord and Matrix to give a meaningful answer.

Personally, I use both, but for completely different use cases. I do not understand how one could be used as a substitute for the other. Perhaps I’m missing something, or perhaps everyone who thinks Matrix is a good substitute for Discord just don’t use Discord very much.

If you have a small group of friends who occasionally hang out in chat, sure, Matrix is fine. If you’re in dozens of Discord servers, each with dozens (or even hundreds) of channels, and hundreds or thousands of users, no. At least, not with Element. Perhaps there’s a better client out there for that?

The number in e.g. “Category 5” hurricane actually refers to the Kinsey scale.

On the one hand, sure, it would give the administration an “excuse” to escalate still further.

On the other hand, who are we kidding? They’re not going to stop escalating no matter what. There’s no point in trying to appease fascists. They’ll take whatever excuse, no matter how flimsy, whenever they feel like it regardless. That’s how we got here.

Sounds interesting. What kind of data can it reliably ingest with “attach”? If I dropped, say, the entire Python docs in there, would it be able to get anything out of that? Or does it need to be minimalistic plain-text statements? How is it actually performing retrieval?

I’ve yet to see a major media outlet call it what it is.

It’s sheer cowardice at this point. The president himself has called it war.

Chicago. LA. Minneapolis. And more, but those are currently the most egregious.

A poly group (also known as a polycule) is a network of polyamorous people’s relationships. Polyamory, in case you’re unaware, is the practice of having multiple romantic or sexual partners at the same time, in contrast to monogamy.

If you were polyamorous and wanted to graph out your relationships, you could do it a few different ways. For example:

• Just you and your partners. If any of your partners are also in relationships with each other, you’d draw lines between them as well.

• Extend an extra level and include all of your partners’ partners (known as metamours), again connecting any pair on the graph who are partners.

• Extend that further and include all of your partners’ partners’ partners (no specific term for this as far as I know). This would likely include people you don’t personally know, and it would be difficult to build a complete graph of all their relationships.

Etc.