PhilipTheBucket
@PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
- Submitted 3 hours ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 0 comments
- Comment on And I was just about to register :/ 10 hours ago:
I guess my question is, why would you be on the internet without an ad blocker at this point in the first place?
Not saying you’re wrong, it is just a weird position to even be in. Why?
- Comment on And I was just about to register :/ 17 hours ago:
IDK dude, sounds like there might be something there but I can’t watch a 34 minute video to absorb why this web site is bad. I tried to paste the transcript to Claude, but Claude is busy eating its own dick right now, so no help there. I’ll take your word for it that they’re fucking it all up for reasons of their own but I’m not completely convinced that the problem cannot be solved with an ad blocker.
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 17 hours ago:
npr.org/…/50-years-of-shrinking-union-membership-…
It doesn’t change overnight. Union membership was the plug holding all the money in the barrel, holding back the pressure of the bosses just taking whatever they could squeeze, gradually in a coordinated bloc, but not enough that people would jump ship from their specific operation and go to another place, but enough that every year there would be less and less, until now a majority of Americans can’t pay their expenses.
Maybe it wasn’t unions. You might be right. There are all these graphs pointing to something specific that happened in the 1970s that suddenly divorced productivity gains from wage gains, so maybe whatever it was that caused that finally began to have its real awful influence in the mid-1990s and finally really bear fruit in the late 2000s. Kevin’s dad didn’t buy that house in 1991. You get what I’m saying. There’s a delay. But, like I say, I have no real idea. I’m just guessing and throwing out random possibilities. Something fucked everything up. Probably a combination of things. Not having unions definitely couldn’t have helped.
- Comment on And I was just about to register :/ 18 hours ago:
how unusable it is without ublock
I know an easy answer to this problem that will also improve a lot of your other internet browsing experience.
I have literally very little idea of what the internet is like without ublock now, but every time I accidentally experience it, I have a violent negative reaction. It’s awful. It’s really the worst. Have you been to YouTube without it? Jesus Christ man. No thank you.
What else? I don’t go to Fandom often or anything, but when I do visit it doesn’t bother me that there’s all sorts of awful stuff I am not seeing.
- Comment on And I was just about to register :/ 19 hours ago:
What’s wrong with Fandom?
- Submitted 20 hours ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 13 comments
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 23 hours ago:
Yeah. The amount of fuckery is large, and varied.
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 1 day ago:
Hm, I’m not really all that expert on the topic, but I feel like people in union jobs making enough of a salary to buy a comfortable home is going to drive up wages for everyone, even the people who have nothing to do with it.
Of course, UPS drivers are making $175k/yr right now, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot stopping other companies for paying people in milk for doing the exact same job. My feeling is that it’s an issue of critical mass, but like I say that’s more or less just a guess.
- California's Hummingbirds Have Changed Their Beaks in Response to Backyard Feeders, Study Findswww.smithsonianmag.com ↗Submitted 1 day ago to [deleted] | 0 comments
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 1 day ago:
You gotta read past the first sentence my man lol
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 1 day ago:
This is just how things worked back when unions were in the equation. If you sold TVs or drove a truck for a living, you got a house. If you had a good job, you had a house like this and basically everything you wanted.
We traded that life for a few hundred people having yachts instead.
- Comment on The number of manipulative, disinformation posts on lemmy is too damn high 1 week ago:
Hey everybody, this guy’s having fun
Get him out of here
- Comment on The number of manipulative, disinformation posts on lemmy is too damn high 1 week ago:
No one will know for certain, people will argue, those bots will argue, other bot accounts with the same agenda will argue, people will be manipulated, they will argue, and status quo returns…
Fair enough. I do think this happens. At the same time I don’t see that there’s a lot to be gained by being super sensitive about it, or deciding to freak out and abandon the topic because of some people arguing.
I would say that every so often, I wander into one of the lemmy.world political communities and I have exactly the reaction you are expressing here. It’s just random aggressive people, some of whom I think are deliberately trying to inflame conflict and prejudice, and they drown out anything useful. It’s a waste of time, so I don’t fuck with it. I guess the point that I’m trying to make is that not everything is that way. I would say the vast majority of things I observe on Lemmy are not that way.
Or, they’re not what I would describe that way. You seem like you’re maybe talking about something different, and accusing the conversations I like of being something deliberately designed to waste my time that I should be able to “rise above” or etc. But you also don’t want to give examples, so IDK, not much I can do with that.
So check out this example. I’ll give my take on it:
I think there are some people there who are just there to stir shit. But, I would say the great majority at least of what I was paying attention to is productive. I learned about some propaganda, learned the shape of the media landscape, from some previous interactions, and then in that thread we got to talk about some other issues related to that, and work some things out.
Yeah, if you focus on the idiots exclusively, then your interaction will be unproductive. I do definitely think that yes.
By talking about ‘anything of substance’ is being framed by the bot posts, repeatedly, to manipulate. But, take a step back and you’ll realise it really isn’t ‘anything of substance’ but something to distract.
If you feel strongly enough about this topic to be concerned that people are going to be taken in by it, give some examples. By being vague and evasive about what it is you’re talking about, you make it impossible for anyone to learn about what you’re saying if you have something of value to try to make a point about, and also impossible for them to make counterpoints if they disagree with you. It just all stays in waste-of-time-land. Which is, ironically, exactly the issue you are trying to raise.
If you’re concerned that people will disagree with your categorizations, and that’ll just be so upsetting that you can’t bear the thought of doing it as a result, I feel like this whole issue may be more of a you problem than a Lemmy problem.
As for the early internet, I think you’re thinking about early pre-banhammer-FBI-raid 4-chan.
Not even close. I was talking about Usenet, early BBS culture and anonymous FTP days, then the more modern era of Napster / Slashdot / Rotten.com / the little proliferation of forums and personal sites came after those “old days,” and 4chan was created a little bit after that.
Everyone is going to have different definitions of when “early” is, but “the internet” goes back quite a long way before 4chan. 4chan and Myspace were kind of the first iteration of the massive everyone-goes-to-the-same-place omni-site model that presaged the horrors to come.
- Comment on The number of manipulative, disinformation posts on lemmy is too damn high 1 week ago:
- It’s not clear exactly what you mean, what are some examples of posts that you think are being made by bots?
- IDK man, there is definitely a problem of misleading and disinformative posts and I will 100% agree with it as a problem, but just abandoning the idea of being able to talk about anything of substance because the disinfo is trying to fuck it up is not the answer, to me. I like being able to talk about politics / anti-capitalism / geopolitics / whatever. I don’t find it “stressful” or the way some people receive it. If they don’t want it presumably they are not subscribed to that stuff, but I really value being able to find out what’s going on in the world and talk with a wide variety and population of people about it.
- The early internet was wild. It was not for hobbies and betterment, it was for ludicrous conspiracy theories, arguments between creationism and evolution, far flung neo-Nazis finally being able to communicate with each other, and snuff videos. That was what made it awesome. I think you are thinking of early Facebook.
- Comment on Star Wars' Showcase of AI Special Effects Was a Complete Disaster 1 week ago:
Good lord. It’s very bad. I like how the presenter clearly knows that it sucks, too, but he’s required to go out and pretend it doesn’t and try to hype it up.
- Comment on We gonna fight 1 week ago:
Any reasoning that is mainly centered around giving people specific labels, and then making sweeping generalizations about what everyone with that label does and why it’s therefore okay to hate anyone you have chosen to apply that label to because of things some other people have done, is almost always some bullshit.
Also, yes, it’s ironic that you’re posting this under their specific meme.
- Comment on We gonna fight 1 week ago:
Some of the most authoritarian people I come into contact with on any kind of regular basis are “leftists” on Lemmy.
The ones in real life are not like that. I feel like Reddit’s moderation model really encourages it, and some of them started really taking it to heart when they came to Lemmy which copied that same model.
- Comment on We gonna fight 1 week ago:
My money’s on wooosh but it could be either one tbh.
- Comment on We gonna fight 1 week ago:
Kek
- Submitted 1 week ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 7 comments
- Comment on xAI’s Grok suddenly can’t stop bringing up “white genocide” in South Africa 1 week ago:
It’s just melon charging ridiculous prices to his own companies?
I suspect that it is exactly that, yes. That and a bunch of investment money which they are planning on flushing down any toilet they can find.
I don’t really know but they certainly have no other revenue stream that I think is realistic.
- Comment on Software engineer lost his $150K-a-year job to AI—he’s been rejected for 800 jobs and forced to DoorDash and live in a trailer to make ends meet 1 week ago:
Yeah. Mans was exempt from the orphan crushing machine so he thought it wasn’t real.
It is. It’s coming for all of us unless we do something to stop it.
I honestly don’t even think it’s all that relevant if his skills aren’t super pro-level or he’s looking in the wrong market. Yes, it is true that a lot of people who just had the ability to put together a functional web UI or run SQL commands have been able to command six figure salaries for a while. That is fine. We have technology enough at this point that we can support everyone in comfortable life, as long as they’re willing to show up and do a full-time job. We broke the whole economy to where it turns into this special thing if you want a house, vacations, not want to have to worry. Like you have to be some kind of Good Will Hunting person to expect that. Fuck that. This guy should still get $150k. Everyone who works full time and has some training should make $125k a year and the shareholders should get less. Picking on this guy’s supposed lack of pro-talent misses the point, I think.
We don’t have a shortage of problems to solve. The planet is burning and all our tech is murdering our brains. If we could somehow get the people who want a full-time job and don’t have one to start making money by working on those things 40 hours a week I feel like those things would be in better shape.
- Comment on xAI’s Grok suddenly can’t stop bringing up “white genocide” in South Africa 1 week ago:
Absolutely that’s what it means.
Also, it means that the way his brain works is that this will convince people there is white genocide in South Africa, as opposed to them having any ability to connect the dots that it just means Elon Musk is out of his god damned mind.
- Submitted 1 week ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 8 comments
- Comment on Tesla Reportedly Has $800 Million Worth of Cybertrucks That Nobody Wants 2 weeks ago:
Yeah. In retrospect, it’s easy to pick out what stuff is just Elon Musk making up bullshit because it would be awesome. And, with the cybertruck, he finally got to inject that into the engineering process as a dominant factor as he’d been trying to do for so long with the cars. And look at the result…
- Comment on Tesla Reportedly Has $800 Million Worth of Cybertrucks That Nobody Wants 2 weeks ago:
Back before people knew all that much about it, back when Elon Musk was the guy who made Tesla and SpaceX and this super smart guy (as opposed to being the guy who bought them and then fucked up the engineering), I knew some people who were excited about it. It was supposed to be a working truck but electric, bring all the better-than-other-cars stuff that the Roadster and Model S had, it was supposed to have solar panels and electrical outlets and super-strong construction so you could use it to survive the zombie apocalypse.
I think that was before the inflection point, back when the genuine success Tesla had had made Musk’s personal brand of bullshit believable. I remember when people started getting a good look at all the concept and actual prototypes, that made it look like a dumpster without the storage space, was when the shine came off the rose. But I definitely do remember people who were excited about it back in the beginning.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 0 comments
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 0 comments
- Terrorists and criminals misusing ‘dark’ drones could cause carnage, expert warnswww.independent.co.uk ↗Submitted 3 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 0 comments