• 15 Posts
  • 345 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: April 1st, 2022

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  • I agree with trying to find and support a local instance. I personally find it nice to have this account (made before my local was made) for a global feed and a local account for playing more into local culture and news which are too niche to get visibility on a regular instance’s feed.


  • comfy@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlAny tips for a new user?
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    4 hours ago

    They often leave a dogmatic impression when someone says something which is completely normal to hear and say in (for example) the USA, but is unknowingly bigoted or ignorant misinformation. The .ml admins have no time for that and I think its unfortunate that there’s little attempt at linking them to resourced that explain why their post was prejudiced, because it’s usually not intentional or heartless.

    One can absolutely critisise China there and you’ll probably end up banned if you aren’t critical of the Russian Federation. I’ve made posts on Lemmygrad challenging their notion of China’s form of worker democracy. But certain popular critiques are just bigoted or unfounded propaganda which the admins will ban people for, so it comes off as just shutting down opposing viewpoints. And that’s really unfortunate.










  • I hope some of you actually skimmed the article and got to the “disengaging” part.

    As Electrek points out, Autopilot has a well-documented tendency to disengage right before a crash. Regulators have previously found that the advanced driver assistance software shuts off a fraction of a second before making impact.

    It’s a highly questionable approach that has raised concerns over Tesla trying to evade guilt by automatically turning off any possibly incriminating driver assistance features before a crash.


  • One of my sites was close to being DoS’d by openAI’s crawler along with a couple of other crawlers. Blocking them made the site much faster.

    I’d admit the software design offering search suggestions as HTML links didn’t exactly help (this is a FOSS software used for hundreds of sites, and this issue likely applies to similar sites) but their rapid speed of requests turned this from pointless queries into a negligent security threat.



  • Sure, that’s technically true, but I think it’s acceptable for this infographic’s purpose.

    • I don’t believe a US company profits from someone using LibreWolf (unless you want to count volunteer labor if someone upstreams their contributions, which doesn’t apply to most of the target audience)
    • As you said, any other usable browser is going to be based on Chrome, FF or Apple tools. So what should it say? Nothing? Even if it’s not perfect, I believe LibreWolf is a far better suggestion than just leaving them with a default choice like Chrome or Edge, or something unusable on sites they want to use.

  • why not just Linux?

    Choice paralysis is a real obstacle for casual users who don’t have specific needs (e.g. anti-proprietary values) and don’t want to know what a kernel or a binary blob is, we’ve even seen this with Lemmy and other Fediverse options. So giving a specific distro suggestion is effective for this, and then later enabling them to move to other distros if there’s one more suited to them.

    Linux Mint is generally well-received by beginner users, especially those moving from Windows which is similar enough to Cinnamon. Even if it’s not the ideal distro, it’s one which I believe casual users are less likely to reject. Hardware is more likely to ‘just work’, including graphics cards and non-free codecs. Non-free software readily appears in the app store, which is important if users are still dependent on them (e.g. their hobby group only uses Discord). While I personally believe in, support and create FOSS software, I don’t see how FSF-endorsement is important to the target audience, and if it risks them complaining that their NVIDIA GPU is acting weird or they’re having trouble installing proprietary tools they need for work, then I’d compromise and give them the smoothest reasonably-free option possible and allow them to decide to move to another distro later when they’re more familiar with Linux and how easy it is to try out distros.


  • So you are against democracy.

    No. I am against the simplistic idealistic approach of just unconditionally allowing the most popular candidates to rule, especially given the surrounding circumstances like mass media propaganda turning this nice idea into a pay-to-win scheme, and the broken implementations in most countries (FPTP, systematic voter disenfranchisement, etc.). Just look at how that turns out in the USA, repeatedly. There are many other ways democracy can be structured. Most ‘democractic countries’ have extremely broken federal electoral systems which fail to represent the voting people, despite it seeming democratic on the surface with elections.

    Who gets to decide the leaders now? If you live in a modernized country and a federal candidate does not have the support of the rich owning class, they won’t have much chance at competing with airtime on television and news, support of paid ‘influencers’ and other celebrities, commercial advertising spots, social media astroturfing campaigns and all the other ways to make a candidate seem important enough to have a chance of winning. The bottom line is, realistically speaking, the only viable candidates at leading on a federal level are those promoted by the ultra-rich, every other candidate and party is fringe. I assert that you effectively having to choose between candidates pre-selected by the owning class is not a valid democracy. Even if you have the right and the freedom to do due diligence and vote for a minor party which is closer to your views, that freedom is ultimately useless in a popularity contest influenced by mass media. That minor party, in real life, never had a fair chance of winning, no matter how popular their policies are.