Yeah, Meta sucks, but it doesn’t suck at the Elon Musk level. Lesser evil and all.

I am a bit curious where the balance is for how much shit you’ll put up with if it means a lower cost of living (or bigger/cheaper home, anyway). I’m personally of the stance I will pay (or give up) a significant amount of money to live in a good, mostly sane place.

It’s obviously a balancing act. Nobody will give up all their money to have marginally better emotional safety. But where is the line? How much better do things have to be in a different place (or how much worse in your current place) to accept, say, a small apartment that costs a solid third of your income? Or inversely, would you put up with a Gilead situation if you got a sprawling mansion out of it?

Heck, he doesn’t even have to do anything. Trump could disappear for good and I bet his followers would come to their own conclusions and pull some shit.

The captions suck too. I subscribed to the same deal as you. I did it mostly to support the creators. But I basically never use it. The creator whose affiliate link I used to sign up? Their own captions are amazing on YouTube (human written with colour and positioning) and auto generated garbage on Nebula.

It’s not really a technical problem anymore. Which isn’t to say it’s easy to run such a site, but rather to stress that YouTube is like a social media site. The value is in the users (and the content that they create and consume). You could make a perfect YouTube clone, but good luck getting people to use it when their favourite creators don’t. And good luck getting creators to care when the users aren’t there.

And Lemmy is misleading. Most people don’t use Firefox. Heck, most people don’t seem to even use ad blockers.

That’s what I thought it was at first too. But regular employees aren’t usually all that interested in their company being profit driven. Especially AI researchers. Most of those that I know are extremely passionate about ethics in AI.

But do they know things we don’t know? They certainly might. Or it might just be bandwagoning or the likes.

Yeah, my first thought was “why give Israel any aid?”, then I realized that trying to get the US to stop giving aid entity was probably impossible. A compromise like conditional aid is better than unconditional aid. Compromises are unfortunately often necessary in politics, especially with how divided the US is and their historic support for Israel.

I wonder actually if Carter was perhaps the only US president in the past century or so that was actually a decent person? Most others that come to mind were pretty awful as people. I’m not American, so I haven’t studied literally all the president’s or that closely (there’s some very forgettable ones).

Maybe it’ll be able to revive some? Though there’s still the issue of smaller communities being fragmented because of being spread across many instances (without any software support to make that easier to work with).

Yeah. I don’t know what these “just post” types think it’s like. I tried making some relatively niche posts early on, trying to spark discussion in communities for some games I was playing. Got a single digit number of comments at most. Sometimes none. Small communities don’t get seen and niche posts in bigger communities are less likely to get votes. It feels very discouraging if you spend 30 minutes to make a post that seemingly nobody even sees.

Some folks here don’t seem to want to hear it because they badly want Lemmy to be better (and I kinda get that), but where niche communities are concerned, Reddit is unfortunately better.

Also, the “jUsT PoSt” replies are acting like everyone wants to post. Not everyone does and we shouldn’t be acting like they’re idiots because they don’t want to be the one to make the posts. It’s perfectly valid to want to read other people’s posts. There’s also some stuff you just can’t post and expect it to work. Eg, I read episode discussions on Reddit. Those can really only take off if you post them immediately when the episode airs. It feels like only Star Trek has those here. For every other show, I just go back to Reddit.

Find local groups. Two notable ones for me are that I found a discord for my city for people looking for friends (which means stuff like regular board game events and the likes) and the kink community (ie, fetlife) regularly does similar (you don’t treat that one as a dating site, but rather a way to find real life events where you meet people).

There’s probably various other ways to find real life meetups that aren’t for the explicit purpose of meeting people to date, but will find em anyway. Casual sports leagues, hobby oriented groups, co-workers, etc.

Yeah. A smidge under 4 GB and it’s was a five figure cost? That is complete bullshit. We all know the actual costs are miniscule. It’s mad price gouging because most people don’t need to roam and thus they can can prey on it. It shouldn’t be possible to get anywhere close to that kinda bill without multiple explicit approvals where the costs are clearly communicated (I can’t tell if they were).

Many of whom seem straight up worse. Trump is awful, but at least he’s mostly incompetent at even achieving his own goals. The idea of having someone like Trump but competent is utterly horrifying. DeSantis, in particular.

Strength is EAT MY DAMN FRUIT SALAD OR I’LL SMASH YOUR FACE IN.

At least the malls in my city seem thriving. A massive number of clothing stores especially. It’s hard to picture clothing stores having issues since being able to try them on is still more convenient than free returns. And all those clothing stores have survived decades of extreme competition, since any given mall has a dozen to two dozen stores that often feel near identical.

Same. It’s frustrating that my legitimate prescription has to jump through so many hurdles and face skepticism because of its usefulness as a recreational drug (or occupational, I guess?).

Sure is a shame there’s so many scams related to that area. In theory, planting or protecting forests is one of the best things we can do. But in practice? A lot of organizations that claim to protect some area from industrialization are actually protecting an area that was never at risk in the first place. That is, if they didn’t exist, the forest would be unchanged. Others are only protected for short periods of time. https://youtu.be/AW3gaelBypY?si=56uG8zf1iAeJM31H

Because they are bigots. They genuinely want to hurt “those people”. They are afraid of being called out on their bigotry, so like to see people in power act the same way. Because they’re bigoted themselves, they see bigotry in leaders as “telling it like it is”.

I think they’re trying to get Israel to act in such a way that they finally lose the American support. Israel currently gets to do whatever it wants without consequence because the US will seemingly back them unconditionally. Also, many countries, people, and organizations are afraid to criticize Israel because they get called anti-Semitic. But I think that only works while Israel can manage to convince people it’s the “good one”.

But are they? Generally in tech, it’s really hard to gauge people’s performance and most companies are conservative with firing people for performance reasons. So you could coast by on mediocre performance. You team won’t be happy with you, but you probably will keep your job simply because you’re given the benefit of doubt. Tech is one of those areas where someone can actually be 10x as effective as another person, because so much of the job can be spent on stuff like debugging and dealing with weird issues, where one person might spend all day on an issue that another person can resolve in minutes.

There’s also something to be said about the fact that companies are usually paying for your time, not output. Contractors are the ones who are paid for output, not employees. It’s also straight up expected in tech that you’re looking for ways to automate some tasks so they don’t have to be done anymore. It’s not like some mindless office job where you’re expected to do X reports per day. There’s a never ending list of bugs to fix and features requested. You’re generally paid to find ways to increase productivity, not merely do the same thing over and over.

At any rate, tech is usually also paid well enough for it. There’s still massive income disparity between regular workers and C-suite, but at least the pay is always well, well above living wages, stock options are commonly given to regular workers, and high performers often are rewarded for doing better than average. IMO, tech jobs aren’t really an area to focus on the kinda mindset you have, since it does so much better than most (not perfect, but still far better). Most jobs don’t get anything close to what tech jobs offer to regular employees.