16

Must be a cold day in hell because I agree with nearly everything in this essay penned by Lindsey Graham and Elizabeth Warren.

[-] SemioticStandard@beehaw.org 18 points 1 year ago

Public transport in a LOT of US cities is poor, or non-existent. Even where it's good, getting to the city, when you live outside of it, is often not an option without your own transportation.

I appreciate your enthusiasm, really, and in fact I share much of it. But you are oversimplifying and dismissing the reality for many people in the US.

[-] SemioticStandard@beehaw.org 25 points 1 year ago

Except NOTHING is being accomplished by targeting individuals like this. You're not winning people over, you're not changing minds, you're not effecting change. You're protesting the wrong people. I, as an example, am a huge supporter of education and change regarding climate change. But I still have to live and work within the very system I am protesting. You're not doing anything by attacking allies like me. Instead, you need to go after corporations, and politicians. Those are the entities that are responsible for and have the ability to influence real action.

[-] SemioticStandard@beehaw.org 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I drive a large truck because I truly need and use the bed on a weekly basis. I wouldn't be able to get by without it, being more than a convenience thing, as I have tried (and failed) for years to use my wife's minivan. There are a lot of things that you straight up cannot do without a truck. I live on 7 acres of mostly heavily wooded land. That kind of property has a lot of maintenance needs that you really need a truck for.

But when I go to the city, I almost never go with anything in the bed. First, I think it can be unsightly to have my bed loaded up with rotting construction material or large bulky items that need to be taken to the transfer station.

Second, it can be dangerous, depending on what I'm hauling. The load needs to be secured. I'm more likely to get into an accident in the city, so if that happens, now in addition to whatever comes off from either vehicle, now whatever else that I was hauling is going to be all over the place, impeding traffic even further.

If my load is heavy, as it often is (think: maybe 1,000 lbs of cord wood), that has a pretty big impact on my gas mileage.

And if it rains? Whatever is in my bed is going to get wet and soggy and nasty.

And then there's the winter. I live in New England. You may have heard about the snow we get here. My driveway is 1/4 mile long, and REALLY steep. I use my truck to keep it plowed. There's no other way we're leaving our property when the snow falls. But obviously I don't have my plow attached in the off-season, so it wouldn't be obvious to you that I also use it for that.

So for many reasons, I need a truck. It is almost never loaded when I have to go into the city. It's not lifted, I don't have obnoxious wheels, but it's a big truck (they don't seem to make them any other way these days). Now I have to also worry about people with attitudes like yours taking their misguided vigilante justice out on my vehicle because you're not thinking beyond your nose? Do you really think that's fair?

[-] SemioticStandard@beehaw.org 33 points 1 year ago

The personalized, colorful web pages became streamlined, conforming to modern design standards and sacrificing individuality for uniformity.

There are some pretty big advantages to 'modern design standards.' For one, they make the Internet a less hostile place to users with accessibility needs. I don't have problems viewing clashing colors, flying gifs, jumbled pages with no sanity, etc, but a hell of a lot of people with various disabilities sure do. I don't want to even think about how screen readers try to deal with pages like that. Web1.0 offered absolutely nothing for those users who needed accessibility.

4

tldr: Apple prohibits bullshit fees on their Apple Card that predatory lenders like Goldman rely on. Goldman isn’t able profit because they can’t fuck over customers, therefore they want out of the deal they have with Apple as the servicer of the Apple Card.

Boo fucking hoo, Goldman. Eat shit.

[-] SemioticStandard@beehaw.org 62 points 1 year ago

It’s not even enshittification. If it were that at least would be understandable through a capitalistic lens, a natural part of an investor-owned process. It’s the actions and thinking of a man-child with all the brilliance of a 40 watt bulb. No logic is to be had here.

1

If you learned that an actor was a serial killer, who would surprise you the least? (Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Walken, Tom Cruise, and Jack Nicholson don't count--everyone knows they're stacking bodies somewhere)

I'm gonna say Chris Pratt. I don't buy that harmless goofy schtick AT ALL

1

Like many of you, birds are very special to me. I connect with them like I don’t any other living creature, save my wife and kids. I photograph them. I’ve covered my body in nothing but bird tattoos.

To see that a THIRD of them have disappeared is like a knife to the heart.

2

Cute little fella, soon as he spotted me he lifted up and stayed like that, motionless, looking at me as if I were rather sus!

8

For me, I have shortcuts on my Mac to change the wallpaper based on time of day (light or dark), but that's it. I'd maybe be interested in using more if I could think of a good use case, so share yours, if you have one

4

How have they lost so much??

0

Fucking Religious Reich and this bullshit court...throw it into the fire.

36

Data on search engine market share is available, but I wonder what that looks like for Lemmy users in particular, who I would assume lean more technical than the average user, so probably use DuckDuckGo and alternates more than Google.

I use a mix of DuckDuckGo and Kagi. I'll also use ChatGPT, which can be good if you're careful to verify the answers it gives you as a check against hallucinations. It's useful for short, direct answers without ads or SEO bullshit.

This article on Ars (and if you're not a subscriber, you absolutely should be, as they are the best tech journalists out there) inspired the question: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/google-admits-reddit-protests-make-it-harder-to-find-helpful-search-results

Fucking Reddit. Enshittification ruins everything.

0

She has some criticisms for her past as an attorney, but I’m not sure why she’s so disliked now. What has she done to engender such distaste from the public?

[-] SemioticStandard@beehaw.org 39 points 2 years ago

This perspective lacks nuance.

a service like iCloud is a bad idea if you care about your privacy

Like all security and privacy measures, you have to consider your threat profile. From whom are you trying to maintain privacy from? If it’s other people or companies, then using a service like this is perfectly okay. If you’re worried about state actors or governmental agencies coming after you, then you have a very different set of requirements and considerations than most people, and you should plan accordingly.

But saying that services like this aren’t for people who care about their privacy is a little disingenuous. As with all things, it’s a matter of degrees.

[-] SemioticStandard@beehaw.org 15 points 2 years ago

I have to image that their fleet of attorneys would have thought of this before hand.

[-] SemioticStandard@beehaw.org 13 points 2 years ago

Reddit burning itself to the ground is the best thing to happen to the Internet in a long time. Just look at how decentralized communities are flourishing.

0

Hadn’t realized how reliant upon Reddit I’d become for news and interesting things until after it turned to shit and I quit it. I’ve rediscovered RSS for ex., using reader apps to scan sources directly and read without all the noise—that actually came from someone’s recommendation here in the comments. I’ve found several new sites with deep, knowledgeable articles and discussions, like https://theconversation.com/us (free! No ads! Also discovered through the comments here), and my engagement with articles and their sources has gone WAY up. I’ve stopped reading garbage comment sections, too, and I’m just feeling better mentally as a result, disengaging from the endless, low effort memes/jokes and the mean, toxic comments*. Anyone else?

(Thanks again, admins—really enjoying and appreciating how Beehaw is run!)

[-] SemioticStandard@beehaw.org 26 points 2 years ago

I LOVE this approach though. I want tech news, or politics, or whatever, but I want to be able to decide what my experience engaging with those posts is like. If an instance isn’t seriously discussing something in the comments, or moderation isn’t what I want, then I can go to another instance where it is. Beehaw is already a fantastic example of this, and why I strongly prefer this instance over others—I really don’t like the type of comments that seem to gain popularity elsewhere, like on lemmy.ml.

47

How do they even plan on enforcing this? What would possibly be the consequences for either parent or child if they violate?

[-] SemioticStandard@beehaw.org 20 points 2 years ago

If they want their subs back so badly, let them take them. They can deal with moderation (or finding any decent mods at all) on their own.

Good luck with that, Reddit admins. lol.

[-] SemioticStandard@beehaw.org 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

If you go back to [the] early days of Cloudflare, we've wrestled with: 'What is our role in term of controlling what content flows through our network?' And we believed that the right principle was to remain content neutral.

I think he’s exactly correct. This is what Net Neutrality is about. Service providers on the Internet should be treated like a utility. It’s easy to conflate this issue with that of ‘tolerating the intolerant,’ but I don’t think that’s correct at all. It’s also an argument that many parts of the Internet infrastructure have had. Cloudflare is a big part of the infrastructure underpinning the Internet at large, but it’s only a part. There are many others that need to come together to support a simple website. What about RIRs (Regional Internet Registries) like ARIN, who are responsible for allocating IP addresses? If you’re going to be upset with Cloudflare for struggling about whether or not to be neutral, why should they get off the hook? I think it’s probably because most people don’t understand how the Internet works, and so they remain ignorant of what goes into simply ‘hooking up’ a website to the Internet, allowing these other critically necessary components to fly under the radar of the public attention.

The debate about various Internet infrastructure entities remaining neutral has long raged. By and large, the communities that build and maintain these kinds of underpinnings have come down on the side of remaining neutral. It’s a vastly complex situation, with no easy answers, and a LOT of ‘hidden’ variables and concerns.

[-] SemioticStandard@beehaw.org 55 points 2 years ago

It still looks pretty bad (in a good way): https://reddark.untone.uk/

Almost 7,000 subs private, including many of the biggest ones. This is by no means letting up.

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SemioticStandard

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