deweydecibel
@deweydecibel@lemmy.world
- Comment on Barbie is bugs? 5 months ago:
The placement of that text is deeply frustrating. Just a black text box placed without any care?
And a watermark? Uggh.
- Comment on The lemmy.ml Problem 6 months ago:
Agreed, but let’s also be honest about this:
The smaller, less visible alternative communities seldom grow. It’s the classic case of the biggest and oldest trees getting all the sunlight, while the saplings in their shadow are stunted.
We saw this on Reddit, too. Alternative subreddits, usually born out of protest of the moderation on the original, popped up all the time and never grew. Some did, some even overshadowed the original, but that was rare.
Unless there’s an effort made to give more visibility to the smaller and less established alternative, there’s a good chance it goes nowhere.
So in reality the user choice you’re describing is less about choosing between two communities, and more about choosing between a community or a DND group that gets together once a week, but half the people flake out anyway.
- Comment on The lemmy.ml Problem 6 months ago:
Who is “they”? The entire instance? Every single user in every single community on that instance You don’t think people around here spread lies, too?
Hexbear and lemmygrad were instance-wide operations. They existed for the purpose of disruption. Lemmy.ml is not that and has never been. It holds a large body of individuals who share the same beliefs, but that’s not the whole instance.
And are we establishing a dedicated, impartial, fact checking body to evaluate everything? If not, then defederating the entire instance based on “lies”, determined by people with their own biases, is about as slippery a slope as you can possibly get.
Besides, you keep talking about “lies” but what I see in the evidence you linked is mostly about admin actions. So let’s not punish the users of either instance for their admin, let’s open some dialogue about it.
But the greater issue here is that the whole concept of this federated platform is basically moot the more fractured the federation becomes, and this would create the most evidence of that. I agree the admin actions over there are eyebrow raising, but the biggest instance defederating from one of the other biggest and oldest instances is cutting off our arm, their arm, and making this whole thing even more confusing for new users.
I don’t know if there’s a good answer, here. Rogue admins in charge of massive instances is not something that can be dealt with easily. But defederating is going to cause more issues than it solves.
- Comment on IGN immediately lays off every non-UK person at their newly bought sites, including some key members like debuty editor Alice Bell 6 months ago:
It amounts to the same thing, though. When are you got a few months pay to carry you through or not you still lost your income, and there’s no guarantee you’ll ever find a job that matches it in pay, benefits, etc.
- Comment on IGN immediately lays off every non-UK person at their newly bought sites, including some key members like debuty editor Alice Bell 6 months ago:
There never was a chance.
Generally when companies like this are bought it isn’t to acquire the talent. That’s legitimately what needs to be taken into account when it comes to things like antitrust. You want to buy out this company, are you buying it because you want their talent to join with yours to make something better? Cool. We’ll let you do that provided you do it today fair and competitive manner.
Any other reason for wanting to buy this company is going to need to be pretty heavily scrutinized.
- Comment on Stellaris gets a DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it's 'ethical' and 'we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves' 7 months ago:
The technology was created to replace voice actors. That’s the actual purpose. Its very existence hurts their profession and benefits studios. You can not be a studio, use this technology, and claim to care about ethics, anymore than Amazon can claim to care about the workers as it invests in the machines to replace them.
It doesn’t matter if you compensate or get their approval, because the fact is the existence of the technology in the industry effectively compels all voice actors to agree to let it use their voice, or they can’t get work. It becomes a false choice.
If there was no financial benefit, if it truly made no difference in how much a studio pays in labor or the amount the artists make, there would be no reason for studios to want to use it.
- Comment on Never Forget 7 months ago:
For the record, Aaron Swartz never actually went to trial, nor was he “sentenced” to anything.
Federal prosecutors came after him with overzealous charges in an effort to make him accept a plea deal (they do that a lot), which he rejected. It would have gone to court where the feds would have had to justify the charges they were bringing.
But that never happened because he killed himself.
We don’t actually know how this all would have played out.
- Comment on Never Forget 7 months ago:
He didn’t get the chance to share them because he was caught downloading them.
- Comment on Never Forget 7 months ago:
He was not sentenced to 35 years. The trial hadn’t finished. 35 years was the maximum possible sentence.
- Comment on What is Reddit doing 7 months ago:
Yes, actually. Look up Oldlander addon for Firefox.
It’s new and kinda of rough but it definitely helps.
- Comment on Voyager 1 7 months ago:
I mean, unironically, yeah.
It’s not even that we need to go back to email. The problem isn’t moving on from outdated forms of communication, it’s that the technology being pushed as a replacement for it is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Which is to say nothing of the fact that all of these new platforms are proprietary, walled off, and in some cases don’t make controlling the data easy if you’re not hosting it (and their searches are trash).
- Comment on [Serious] What is project 2025? What kind of risk is involved? 7 months ago:
It’s not even just about the fact that it’s going to wreck those agencies, it also means that there will be substantially less whistle-blowing, and there will be virtually no one working for the government who will raise an alarm or put a stop to anything. When everybody is on board, that creates a substantial amount of power for the executive branch.
What makes it so frightening is that the discussion starts to slide away from the actual functioning of our democratic system and the workings of the executive branch, and starts getting into matters of where power is derived from in a government.
What we have seen is that our Congress is infected by too many friends of fascism, if not fascist themselves. Unless the Democrats have a supermajority in both chambers, Republicans can successfully derail every single thing Congress ever tries to do to reign in an executive branch that’s out of control. Trump was impeached twice, and painfully, obviously guilty both times, and nothing happened because the system has been so fundamentally broken.
Knowing now that Congress can do nothing to stop him, and of course knowing that the court system is captured at this point, Trump will be completely and utterly unafraid of doing anything. The systems in place that would protect us from a renegade executive office will fail to stop him.
Having the entire executive, and every seat in every department filled with loyalists, with nothing in his way that can effectively stop it, is basically a precursor to dictatorship.
- Comment on Has ethernet become illegitimate? A librarian flipped out after spotting me using ethernet 7 months ago:
If you setup your network right (you can actually, although I’ve not seen it too often, setup guests networks on ethernet before WiFi, such that stations cannot see eachother directly) there’s no reason at all to fear ethernet.
Sure but this isn’t a corporate office with an IT team on call, this is a public library. They could hire someone who will go the extra mile to manage all of this and set the security up correctly, but they’re likely to get that person or keep them around. Their patrons are not going to be so opposed to wifi that expending all this effort to keep the ethernet ports active will be worth that effort.
As for finite wifi resources, I seriously doubt most public libraries would be so frequently at capacity that this becomes an issue, especially when many of them only allow clients for a couple hours at a time without renewing. They just need to scale up for their needs.
- Comment on Has ethernet become illegitimate? A librarian flipped out after spotting me using ethernet 7 months ago:
Did the library have the desktop set up for public use, as libraries all have nowadays?
Then they were providing you equal access to their internet connection, they just weren’t going to let you do it on your computer unless your computer connected to their internet connection by satisfying their security requirements.
- Comment on Has ethernet become illegitimate? A librarian flipped out after spotting me using ethernet 7 months ago:
They should just be disabling the ports, frankly. If you need to use a computer on an Ethernet connection, most libraries provide them.
- Comment on Has ethernet become illegitimate? A librarian flipped out after spotting me using ethernet 7 months ago:
Why are you even in the library to begin with if you’re so opposed to how they manage their network?
If you want to complain, complain. Write to the city, start a petition, whatever.
But regardless of how it’s supposed to work legally, the day that you were in the library, there was a network security setting that was blocking you. You sought to get around that, and you’re not going to get any sympathy for trying to do so.
Just because it’s a public resource doesn’t mean you can break in after hours, and just because you don’t have a phone doesn’t give you permission to sidestep their security policies.
- Comment on [deleted] 8 months ago:
Both Lee and Lyman retweeted a post from Libs of TikTok, which the Washington Post says has amassed an audience of millions on X, largely by targeting LGBTQ+ people. In the video, a group of students speaking over each other complain that some students at the school wear masks and pounce on people.
This is kind of tacked on at the end. Looks like nothing actually happened or was reported to have happened, but one video of some kid saying it was happening got shared by a hate group.
- Comment on Windows 10 and its shortage of "Never shove this screen in my face again" buttons 8 months ago:
Can’t wait to graduate so I don’t have to run Respondus and keep dealing with this crap
Well, I’ve got some bad news depending on what industry you’re going into: the business world runs on Windows.
- Comment on Windows 10 and its shortage of "Never shove this screen in my face again" buttons 8 months ago:
They said they can’t wait to graduate, so I’m assuming that means they are using a Windows computer from their school, and depending on what the CIT department’s policies are like there, WinAero may not accomplish much
- Comment on Hasbro exec says Baldur's Gate 3 "proved for us that people really wanted great D&D games," supports Larian's plan to "take the time we need" 8 months ago:
because they accidentally got a pre release version of magic the gathering?
It was a streamer that got the pre-release boxes early by mistake, and live-streamed opening them to drive traffic to his channel. Most cards aren’t revealed ahead of time so these leaks let potential pre-buyers see what was in the set and decide if they wanted it.
What he did was stupid, but he did nothing wrong, and nothing especially harmful.
Calling the Pinkertons on him was obscene on principle, but it was especially egregious when the damage was so minimal. They hurt themselves more with that stunt than the leaks hurt them.
- Comment on I'm guilty, lol 8 months ago:
We did, they’re called emojis.
Gen z seems to have figured that out, too. They use emojis like punctuations, in much the same way we use lol. I was annoyed by it at first but I got used to.
- Comment on [deleted] 9 months ago:
And you’re still gaining services you didn’t have before
No, you’re not. In they example they just provided, nothing has fundamentally changed because the money you were given was eaten up by price increases, leaving you exactly where you were before.
Because UBI isn’t like a stimulus check. Stimulus checks are temporary. With UBI, every single buisness, creditor, and landlord knows for a fact everyone’s monthly income just went up across the board, so they know they can safely raise prices without pricing out customers.
That’s the fundamental problem with UBI: it only works if it’s coupled with strong price controls and regulations to prevent price gouging, and can be rapidly adjusted if necessary. Prices can go up overnight, pay raises can be acquired over a pay period, but the UBI payout will not be as flexible.
Look how impossible it was to get the minimum wage raised from $8.
- Comment on Modern beauty standards 9 months ago:
Skinny legs? Is that a thing people want?
- Comment on Henry Cavill Is Playing Wolverine In Deadpool 3 | Giant Freaking Robot 9 months ago:
Kind of. Depends on what the writer wants to do. Deadpool’s versatile like that.
But generally speaking, Deadpool’s 4th wall breaking has often been used to comment on or satirize the industry. Sometimes the stories themselves become a parody.
- Comment on Henry Cavill Is Playing Wolverine In Deadpool 3 | Giant Freaking Robot 9 months ago:
Let’s be real, though, this was pre-Y2K, it was much harder to gage a fandom’s reaction to casting at the time. I don’t remember much complaints at all on the forums I was on, though I do remember Steward’s casting was celebrated.
- Comment on Henry Cavill Is Playing Wolverine In Deadpool 3 | Giant Freaking Robot 9 months ago:
15? I hate to do this to you buddy, but the original X-Men movie was 2000. Jackman has been Wolverine for 24 years.
- Comment on Henry Cavill Is Playing Wolverine In Deadpool 3 | Giant Freaking Robot 9 months ago:
I’d be annoyed about yet another multiverse story with yet another cameo from a different version of the character, but given this is Deadpool, I trust it will give the worn out trend the satirical treatment it deserves.
- Comment on Teams apparently can't call when using Firefox 11 months ago:
These days? It’s sucked to be an American for decades.
- Comment on Why did Adobe open source Magento? 11 months ago:
It also prevents competition.
Locking down Magneto would have resulted in a fork that could grow to rival the product Adobe now owns. With a community edition, the community has less incentive to fork. You can still use the product, and surely that will never ever change, so why bother getting to work on a competing fork?
Then years down the line, when no competition has come to exist, when the industry has grown dependent on the product, they can start strangling the community edition.
- Comment on He was a hero, we just couldn't see it... 11 months ago:
I wouldn’t call Jameson underappreciated. He’s as much an impediment to Peter as his is a benefit.
Sure, he won’t hand his golden photographer over to the Goblin, even with a knife at his throat, and that’s noble, but he also doesn’t pay Peter shit, is partly responsible for the creation of at least two of Spidey’s rogues, and actively turns the city against him with an unrelenting campaign of libel and hate.
He’s chaotic neutral at best.