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Joined 27 days ago
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Cake day: August 18th, 2025

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  • I doubt it’ll go anywhere, and I’m not sure it should.

    Do we want tougher moderation on social media? Does social media need to be policed?

    Most social networks have report tools. They also have blocks.

    If someone is rude to you online — honestly, happens all the time. People have a bad day or whatever. I’ve said something, not even meaning to, that set someone off and they’ve stalked me across communities. Even in the last few weeks I’ve been on Lemmy. But, if someone is consistently negative toward you, you can block them. You can also ignore them. You could even call them out on their bullshit and then ignore them, and that’s what I did. Maybe it wasn’t the best course of action, this guy’s probably got a girlfriend or maybe a kid he’s beating up when he doesn’t get his way with people online. But I have no control over that. What I do have control over is how I feel when people talk to me any kind of way. The way they act could be because of any number of things. The way they were raised, the way they’ve been treated, maybe they burned their hand cooking and they’re just mad at the world right this second and they say something rude. I got no control over any of that whatsoever. What I do have control over is how their words make me feel and how I react.

    Maybe that’s something kids can’t just pick up, but maybe it’s something they should learn. Bullies aren’t going to go away. People aren’t going to stop having bad days. But if they’re taking it out on people through social media, they aren’t a physical threat to you — they can be safely ignored.

    Adding a bunch of extra moderators and safety features and all that won’t change things. It won’t make people behave better. We can’t make them do that. We can try. Maybe AI can be used to detect hostile posts and tell people they can’t use the network for an hour, tell them to go touch grass or something… but they’ll just hop on over to another network and do the same shit there. And there will be so many false positives. So I think we should just ignore hostility. On something like this, you can downvote it. If it’s the same person, the network may even show you that you’ve downvoted this person multiple times, and you can then decide to block them. But maybe they’re helping someone in another community. Block them and move on. It’s faster and it works better.



  • All three of your examples include transit and none of them involve the elevator dilemma? It also applies to trains and buses. That is, that people want to get on before allowing others to exit. It is therefore illogical to force yourself from a larger space (outside) into a smaller space (inside) when those inside are trying to get out.

    On a tangent, what is illogical about the elevator dilemma is, we don’t apply it to parking lots and car parks. Think about it: we often feel entitled to get in, and physically block others from leaving in order to get in. Then we vie for a spot (especially around the holidays, it’s madness) but we actively prevent others from leaving. If we looked at parking the same way we look at the elevator, we would welcome people leaving so we could take their places with greater ease. But too many people only think of themselves.

    It reminds me of something I read about Japan. To be clear, I think this is absolute bullshit. But I read once that Japanese salarymen try to arrive to the office early, and will park in the back, so that those who were forced by circumstance to arrive closer to the time their job starts to park closer to the front. I think that’s bullshit for two reasons. One, people are selfish, even in the land of the rising sun. Being Japanese does not make you kind, even if the language seems angled that way and even if people seem kind on the streets in anime. (Anime is not real life.) But two, parking up front doesn’t get you in sooner. Leaving early does. At the speed I walk, parking at the outer edge of my job’s parking lot might make me come in a full minute later than parking in the closest available spot. So it’s not worth spending a minute or more looking for the ideal spot. Rather, I take the first spot I see and I save time. But not everyone is that logical. Now if you do the math, if you take the distance between your home and your job and you apply the legal speed, then you do the math and apply a higher speed, even going 10, 20 MPH over the speed limit, you’re saving mere minutes over a short commute and risking stiff legal penalties and further delays in dealing with the police (it takes them at least 10-15 minutes to ticket you). So again, leaving early is the ultimate “hack.” Seriously, leave five minutes early, take the first spot you see, you will make optimal time. That’s based on my commute. For a longer commute, add more time for safety.

    Transit problems are solved by time, not speed.

    As far as the smoker, yeah, people should not smoke in confined spaces. Or “vape.” It’s the same thing.

    P.S. I already know I’m utterly insane. I just try to get through each day.


  • Real scenario: You made this post saying that if people disagree with you, they are insane.

    Ideal scenario: You realise that everybody is unique, entitled to their views, and you try to empathise with their point of view while pursuing your own goals that are not mutually exclusive to theirs. You also realise that, to everyone you think is insane for disagreeing with you, if the disagreement is that great, you are also insane to them. You realise that, like in your examples above which I’m copying this reply’s format from, this disagreement not only harms neither of you, but does not have to be a barrier which restricts you from helping one another to accomplish those same not mutually exclusive goals.



  • Right, the part I don’t get is, the video of you isn’t going to include what you’re looking at. And if it does you can say they faked it. They could put anything there. They don’t have a shot that includes both you and the screen. They can get sound though, so they can match sound, but that can be faked too. Strip out the audio. Separate the sounds of what you were really watching from the ambient sounds (and the grunts/moans from you) and then dub those sounds over the new audio and it should be passable.

    Also, I just wouldn’t do anything embarrassing with a camera pointed at me. I’d cover the camera or point it away from me. Even sitting on the toilet browsing, back cameras point down at the floor, front camera points up, maybe gets the top of my face? Nothing private is seen by the camera by my best intentions. I just do this naturally. I guess others don’t?





  • Rest of the world: Yeah, we know. Except, it wasn’t just in Poland.

    X is owned by a guy who supports fascist causes in Europe. He used to support one in the US until they had a falling out. He did the Nazi arm gesture (albeit with the wrong arm, IIRC). Then (or perhaps before) he got rid of a bunch of content moderators.

    We know exactly where he stands and what he stands for.

    That said, there are still good people on Twitter. My wife and a bunch of her artist friends. I keep telling her, it’s bad news up there, it’s supporting a bad dude… but this whole community is up there and they won’t move. I’m not sure what it will take at this point.

    Honestly all social media is kinda trash these days.

    Facebook has literally had people killed. Some anti-government rebels were using Facebook in some third world country (I forget the name), and Facebook gave their location data to the government. Volunteered it even. Guess who stopped using Facebook. Wonder what happened. Oh yeah, and you know what Mark Zuckerberg calls his users? “Dumb fucks.” Literally. Can’t make this shit up.

    Reddit was built on CSAM, they even sent one of their early moderators a physical award for running a subreddit with upskirt shots of underage girls. (He was very publicly outed. Guess who didn’t even protect the guy who helped build their empire?) They also tried to falsely accuse a third-party app developer of blackmailing them, but the guy recorded the conversation. A bunch of people rebelled but they all came back around. I myself got banned for suggesting stiffer penalties for child abuse, and I lost the appeal (I figured maybe an AI tagged me but a human would overturn it, but no). So I figure they did me a favor.

    I think it’s mostly the same people who use all these services, from Facebook to right here on Lemmy. And in any group of people, you have a few bad apples. But I think you have to look at the people leading it. What they stand for, how they see the world, the kind of world they want to make.


  • So… they let you uninstall it? Or are we talking about spyware not made by Meta?

    Because the way I understand it, Meta has been hacking iPhones ever since the App Tracking Protection thing came about. Mostly via the in-app browser. Point is, Tim Cook said Meta can continue to track you, they just have to get your permission first, and even if you said no, they still found a way to do it anyway. Therefore, are Meta products not spyware?

    (So are Google products. On iPhone, you block ads system-wide with a DNS filter. Same as you do on an unrooted Android phone, since you don’t have access to the HOSTS file — rooted users are just using AdAway or something like it to update HOSTS. Anyway, Google apps use Google DNS, which they say makes them faster, but it also has the convenient upshot (to them) of going around your ad blocking, and forcing ads on a user who has explicitly configured their device to block them.)



  • I read about this earlier on Ars Technica. I was expecting a paywalled link. Was not expecting to find a mention of “No Longer Human.” Ars didn’t mention that. Or the chat logs. It was a long article but didn’t go into the same depth.

    So, I’ve read “No Longer Human.” A more recent translation is called “A Shameful Life” and that’s a bit more apt, I think, but doesn’t have the same ring. It’s about a guy who feels less and less like a person, like what he does and feels doesn’t matter. It’s a wild book, about a double suicide, and the author later killed himself much the same way. There have been several adaptations — none of them very good. None of them quite captured the book. I wonder if it’s just unfilmable. Anyway, it’s a shame that it’s being referenced here, because it’s good literature worth considering, and I hate to see it maligned in much the same way as the Doom game was following the Columbine massacre. Relevant or not (guns in that case, suicide in this case), it’s a shame art gets associated with tragedy simply by association.

    Perhaps the same could be said of AI technology, and it has been. But certainly AI needs better safeguards. According to Ars, when the guy started asking about suicide, ChatGPT said it could not help him — unless he specified he was talking about fictional characters. So he did that (Ars constantly refers to it as a “jailbreak”) for a while, and then I guess (and they guess as well) that ChatGPT just assumed that context and stopped requiring him to specify that.




  • It’s going to be plagiarism so yes, it is.

    I’ve asked Copilot at work for word help. I’ll ask out something like, what’s a good word that sounds more professional than some other word? And it’ll give me a few choices and I’ll pick one. But that’s about it.

    They’re useful, but I won’t let them do my work for me, or give them anything they can use (we have a corporate policy against that, and yet IT leaves Copilot installed/doesn’t switch to something like Linux).


  • Continue to not use Facebook/Instagram.

    I switched to Lemmy when Reddit came out in support of people who abuse children. I don’t even mean Trump, I just mean in general. I suggested abusers in general should face harsher penalties. They banned me for it. I said “holy shit you just did me a huge favor, apparently I was on the wrong site because our values are 100% incompatible.”

    I mean, there isn’t even a debate. I’m not talking about people who find themselves attracted to kids. I’m talking about people who actually went out and hurt a real child facing longer, more meaningful sentences and they said nah, those people are people and need to be protected.

    I’ve moved social networks on account of incompatible values and I think others will, too. Maybe not the majority but I think some others will. Especially as things get worse. There are networks for people who hate (like Truth Social), and networks for people who don’t care (like Facebook/Insta/Whatsapp), but I think as things change, more people will care and will look elsewhere. Not everyone but some people.




  • Here’s why it’s okay to block ads in pretty simple terms:

    Ads can contain ransomware; that is to say, a seemingly innocent ad can deliver a payload which will run on your computer, lock your files, and demand you pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars anonymously.

    Now if you go to the website that served the ad and tell them, “I allowed ads on your site because I support your right to monetise your content, and now I have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars, will you help me pay that” or “will you pay that for me since your site served the ransomware,” you know what they will tell you, every single time, without fail? Whether they actually answer you, or more likely, just delete your email. They’re telling you that it’s your problem. That you should have secured your computer better.

    So secure your computer better now. Block all the ads.

    Getting a little more technical, use Firefox or a fork of it. Use Linux if you can. Use a Mac if you can’t. If you really must use Windows, know how to secure it. I use Windows 11 at work, I’d never use it at home, but I had a talk with the IT guy, and he let me do a few things to it. I know more than he does, but he’s the one with the job, so I told him what I’d do before I did it, I did exactly what I said I was going to do, nothing more nothing less, and I still think my home computer is more secure, but I’m a lot less worried about using the work machine. I think it’s wild that so many companies just use Windows. I’m not trying to hate on Windows. It’s good for gaming and it’s accessible. I’d love to see more companies roll their own *nix or just use Macs (which run macOS which is UNIX certified).