Fediverse? Do you mean, the Threadiverse?
I'm being cheeky to illustrate a point - Threads will almost certainly harm the overall health of the Fediverse in the long run, with users relying increasingly more on Threads' instance[s] to use Mastodon services and connect to people.
Like, what the hell did I do to deserve that? I don’t know why I let it even bother me because of how obviously immature he is being.
Odds are that you did nothing. He's clearly an emotional vulture, he probably does it towards everyone around him.
I don't recommend framing it as immaturity, as it might give you the false hope that he'll "grow up" and get better over time. Perhaps he gets better, but odds are that he won't.
Some people might say "let it go", or "vengeance is never good, it kills the soul and poisons it". I'm almost 40 and I got something to say about this pacifist discourse:
Screw this masochistic shit. When you turn the other face you are not saying "I'm better than him"; you're saying "he's right in treating me as trash, as I am trash". You want to ruin his life and make him regret existing.
So, here's what I'd do:
I couldn’t take it anymore, so I blocked him on everything I could think of. [...] This quote was a part of what he commented on my Instagram picture of one of my tools yesterday:
That's actually great for you. It means that he kept contacting you after showed clear desire to not be contacted further. Depending on the local laws this gives you grounds for legal action.
And since the guy is a fucking idiot flaunting the fact that he's an engineer, you might also contact his business. Be polite towards them, but highlight the fact that one of their employees is harassing you. Even if he doesn't get fired, it'll put him in a poor position later on.
He deserves to be put in his place. I don’t know if that’s possible though without me becoming just as petty as he is.
The difference between "being petty" and "standing your ground" is why. You are in a position to screw him up without being petty.
You'll also want to ruin the psychological "kick" that he gets from harassing you. Ignoring him on the surface (while documenting it) is a good approach, because he'll feel unsatisfied but he'll try a bit harder.
Also shield yourself psychologically. Remember - you are not the problem, he is the problem.
Vengeance is not a dish to be served cold. You warm it in the blood of your enemies.
Brain plasticity, window of opportunity, it's all babble. You can learn new languages just fine as you age; the matter here is how much time you spend using the language.
The reason why adults perform generally worse than kids learning languages is mostly motivational, and not spending enough time with the language. But as an adult you got access to a bunch of resources that kids wouldn't, such as a decent grasp of grammar on theoretical grounds, that you can (and should) use to your advantage.
Note however that watching sitcoms will likely not be enough to get any decent grasp of any language. (Otherwise I'd be speaking Japanese, given the amount of anime that I watch.) You'll need proficiency on four levels: hearing, speaking, reading, writing.
The very fact that you're requesting payment info already makes plenty people think twice. Specially in the light of the brand changing from Twitter to X - if you're clueless about the change something "smells off".
On the other hand for a lot of bot owners this is absolutely no issue. You shouldn't be popping up a whole bot army, but instead only a handful of well coordinated bots to astroturf the shit out of the platform.
In other words the idea might have the opposite effect - keeping potential new human users out, but allowing the bots in.
Reverse image search told me that it's puttu, and that the pic is from Wikipedia.
The description (rice cake with coconut shavings) sounds tasty - gotta try it someday.
In the early 00s, here in my city, it was fun to go to a certain pedestrians-only avenue to drink with friends. Or a date. If you do it now - yes, post-COVID lockdowns! - you can't hold a conversation for five fucking minutes without someone interrupting you with advertisement. As a result, people use that avenue nowadays strictly to commute.
I've ditched TV when I was 14. (I don't regret it.) But plenty people told me that open TV, and then cabled TV, became unbearable due to the sheer amount of advertisement.
Unless I recognise the number, I'm not bothering to pick the phone up any more. I'm probably not the only one doing it.
Are you noticing the pattern? Perhaps the internet suffers a bit more with it because people are a bit freer to do what they want here, but the problem is not exclusive to the internet, it's everywhere advertisers appear. The world has become less fun due to advertisers ("how do people DARE to have fun and ignore our «marketing opportunities»?").
There's a bunch of weird ones in Portuguese.
Lying about events that allegedly happened while we were engaged, and expecting me to actually believe her. Specially when she switched who did what.
For example. "I even cooked at late night for you!" - err... no. She only cooked for me a handful of times, all of them afternoon snacks. (I'm not a big fan of afternoon eating but I appreciated the gesture.) I was cooking for her fairly often, including preparing a "fake" barreado (kind of stew) at 3AM.
Or claiming that a common friend (a woman) openly mocked her while we were drinking with friends, and I did nothing. I was there and I remember what friend said - a single sentence, roughly "hello and bye for both of you!", since that friend was leaving as we were arriving on the bar. Even if she wanted to mock my then girlfriend, she wouldn't have the time to do so.
What makes those funny is not the fact that she was lying, but that they're such idiotic lies that you can smell the bullshit from a kilometre of distance.
I think on Rome fairly often, but it's usually more often on the republic.
about how the Republic fell and became a totalitarian state.
I was thinking about this literally yesterday, on the nature of Octavian betraying the Republic, and how the Iulii and the Claudii simply kept themselves on power through the whole process. (Both gentes were already powerful in Republican times.) Or how some of the Claudii called themselves "Clodius" instead of "Claudius" for the sake of populism. ("See? I'm from the people! I even speak like a pleb!")
Really the api change did this?
Kind of. It wasn't just the change itself, but also how it was done.
Reddit showed complete lack of care about its own userbase (specially blind people and moderators) and that it's an extremely scummy company, even for company standards. It could've pulled the unreasonable API prices to kill off 3PA but it would need smarter people in charge of the decision than the ones who did it.
Calling Mussolini a "great leader" isn't just immoral. It's also clearly incorrect for any reasonable definition of a great leader: he was in the losing side of a big war, if he won his ally would've backstabbed him, he failed to suppress internal resistance, the resistance got rid of him, his regime effectively died with him, with Italy becoming a democratic republic, the country was poorer due to the war... all that fascist babble about unity, expansion, order? He failed at it, hard.
On-topic: I believe that the main solution proposed by the article is unviable, as those large "language" models have a hard time sorting out deontic statements (opinion, advice, etc.) from epistemic statements. (Some people have it too, I'm aware.) At most they'd phrase opinions as if they were epistemic statements.
And the self-contradiction won't go away, at least not for LLMs. They don't model any sort of conceptualisation. They're also damn shitty at taking context into account, creating more contradictions out of nowhere because of that.
Users are already planning protest art. I personally wouldn't encourage people to join because it's more traffic for Reddit, but that's just me.
On other news, apparently requesting a subreddit now requires a 28d old account with 100+ karma.
EDIT: it's on again, since 20min ago:
The only two recognisable things are the "fuck spez" and nationalists spamming some government flag.
EDIT 2: better view:
I think that the meaning of the sentence in German up there should be rather obvious. It's on-topic.
The link contains db0's views on the ongoing state of Reddit, and I think that it's worth sharing here - both to document a piece of opinion, and as food for thought. The main points are:
The text mentions an article from Cory Doctorow. I've copied it to a pastebin, in case someone can't access it.
EDIT: I hope that the author doesn't mind, but I'll copy the contents of the article inside the spoilers below. Hopefully for mobile users it'll be a bit more accessible.
Reddit is a dead site running
from July 10, 2023
Yesterday I read the excellent article by Cory Doctorow: Let the Platforms Burn and this particular anecdote
"The thing is, network effects are a double-edged sword. People join a service to be with the people they care about. But when the people they care about start to leave, everyone rushes for the exits. Here’s danah boyd, describing the last days of Myspace:
If a central node in a network disappeared and went somewhere else (like from MySpace to Facebook), that person could pull some portion of their connections with them to a new site. However, if the accounts on the site that drew emotional intensity stopped doing so, people stopped engaging as much. Watching Friendster come undone, I started to think that the fading of emotionally sticky nodes was even more problematic than the disappearance of segments of the graph.
With MySpace, I was trying to identify the point where I thought the site was going to unravel. When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.
This is exactly what is happening to Reddit currently. The most passionate contributors, the most tech-literate users, and the integrators who make all the free tools in the ecosystem around reddit which makes that service much more valuable have left and will never look back.
From the dashboards of u/spez however, things might looks great. Better even! As the drama around their decision making certainly caused a lot more posts and interactions, and the loss of the 3rd party apps drove at least a few users to the official applications.
But this is an illusion. Like MySpace before them, the metric might look good, but the soul of the site has been lost. It’s not easy to explain but since I’ve started using Lemmy full-time, I’ve seen the improvement in engagement and quality in real time. half a month ago, posts could barely pass 2 digits, now they regularly break 3 and sometimes 4 digits. And the quality of the discussions is a pleasure to go through.
I said it before, but reddit was never a particularly good site. Their saving grace was the openness of their API and their hands-off approach to communities. The two things they just destroyed. It’s those 3rd party tools and communities that made reddit like it is. As as the ecosystem around reddit sputters and dies, the one around the Threadiverse is progressing in an astonishing rate.
Not only are the integrators coming from reddit aware what kind of bots and tools are going to be very useful, but a lot of those tools are shut off from reddit and switched to the lemmy API instead, explicitly cannibalizing the quality of the reddit experience. And due to the completely open API of the Threadiverse, those tools now get access to unparalleled access and power.
Sure if you visit reddit currently, you’ll see people talking and voting, but as someone who’s been there from the start, the quality has fallen off a hill and is reaching terminal velocity. But it feels like one’s still flying!
Not just the quality of the posts where only the most superficial meme stuff can rise to the top, not just the quality of the discussion, but even mere vibe of the discussions is just lost.
There’s now significant bitterness and hostility, especially as the mods who were responsible for maintaining the quality, have gone or are being hands off or just don’t have the tools needed to keep up. I’ve heard from multiple people who are leaving even while they were not originally planning to, because the people left over in reddit are just so toxic.
This is a very vicious cycle which will accelerate the demise of that site even further.
A house fire can go from a spark to a raging inferno in less than a minute. The flames consuming reddit are just now climbing up the curtains and it still appears manageable, but it’s already too late. Reddit has reached terminal enshittification and the only thing left for it to do, is die.
Pretty much. English borrowed it from Latin because it's posh. And Latin borrowed it from Greek because it's posh. But at the end of the day it's in the same spirit as "the ABC", or Latin "abecedarius".