I’ll admit I tried talking to a local deepseek about a minor mental health issue one night when I just didn’t want to wake up/bother my friends. Broke the AI within about 6 prompts where no matter what I said it would repeat the same answer word-for-word about going for walks and eating better. Honestly, breaking the AI and laughing at it did more for my mental health than anything anyone could have said, but I’m an AI hater. I wouldn’t recommend anyone in real need use AI for mental health advice.

Not one of those gun people, but I still support the 2nd ammendment to some extent (down to ban AR-15s and other “scary-looking” guns simply because they are often used by mall-ninja types who do mass shootings). But I think most responsible gun owners are refusing to give fascists a reason/excuse to accelerate or escalate things (for the record, none of MAGA qualify as “responsible gun owners”). I know things are terrifyingly bad right now, but guns/violence are only going to make the current situation worse faster - at least for now. We do seem to be charging full-speed into a situation where they’ll be helpful and useful, which is terrifying. But with as much as it might feel like an “easy fix” to nip things in the bud now, it’s more likely to give fascism even more power and fuel for their propaganda.

Elon Musk is #26 and Tracer is #27. So there are definitely some edgelords fucking around and messing with the stats.

Fakespot was somewhat accurate at catching when Amazon sellers take a well-reviewed item and swap out the product for another, by changing the title, description, and pictures. We’ve probably all read a review on Amazon that feels like the reviewer is posting a review of a completely different product, like a review that seems to be about a kitchen utinsil on a listing for an unusually affordable camera. It’s a pretty common scam that Fakespot was pretty good at catching. It didn’t seem as good at adjusting ratings for legit products and seemed to kind of randomly knock off a a half to one and a half stars on pretty much every listing, even on quality products.

I take one taco, and then go tell Mike Johnson that there are free tacos and where to get them.

I was absolutely on a version of the alt-right pipeline a decade ago. I was raised by far-right, Mike Johnson-style “Christians,” so I was already pretty far down that path before I was drawn into any pipeline.

Luckily, I ended up on a weird libertarian branch of the pipeline (LearnLiberty rather than Prager U), and somehow the YouTube algorithm steered me into Veritasium’s content on climate change, and clips from Adam Ruins Everything. It sounds a bit crazy, but those things started opening my eyes and expanding my worldview. Probably didn’t hurt that my favorite TV show at the time was Leverage, which had plenty of its own anti-corporate-grifting themes.

Eventually, I realized that the Libertarian utopia doesn’t work because greed is an unlimited resource, and that makes regulation important.

Of course, there were other things that helped me escape my upbringing and the alt-right pipeline during gamergate (I wasn’t into gaming at the time, so that probably helped), but looking back and seeing how easily I could have ended up being a January 6 insurrectionist. I’m so thankful for all the little things that nudged me out of that worldview, and helped me see reality.

I wish there was an easy way to show young guys that the people they are listening to are liars and grifters who are manipulating young men into believing that their real pain is somehow the fault of women. But if I look at my own journey, it was a thousand little nudges. I didn’t change overnight, but there was a day during the 2016 election cycle that I remember realizing that even though I had spent almost 8 years despising Obama, that he had been an alright president - especially compared to the Republican nominee, Trump.

But what qualifies as social media? We can all probably agree that Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, etc. count, but what about say Discord or WhatsApp? How about browsing older forums (like open ones where you don’t need an account to read them)? What about news articles or blogs with a comment section? Is a wiki social media? Depending on how you define it, the majority of the internet could be considered social media.

Plus there are plenty of sites that just won’t ever bother to try to comply. For example, I live in one of the more stupid states in the US that has required age verification for porn sites, PornHub has complied by just blocking their site in the state with a notice that they won’t implement a system like that for privacy reasons. But they and their sister sites are the only ones I’ve seen that have bothered to make any changes. The same will inevitably happen with social media. You’re just going to push kids to shadier corners of the internet that don’t care about laws, and they’re gonna end up radicalized by nazis, or taken advantage of in worse ways.

The whole problem is parents who don’t want to be parents and tell their kids they can’t have a smartphone. And I get that the dumbphone market is kinda limited, and that some parents just don’t care what their kids are exposed to. But trying to fix this problem by changing the internet is never going to work. The only way to fix the problem is to have a spine and make appropriate changes IRL - like banning smartphones for underaged kids in school, or show your full distopian side and prosecute parents who let their kids use social media.

The “timebomb” wasn’t only because he didn’t like Debian’s release policy, it was because Debian users kept reporting already patched bugs on xscreensaver’s upstream issue tracker that were only broken on the old versions Debian kept insisting they ship with because they have an insane “older is more stable” mentality.

Also, he wrote more than xscreensaver. He was an original dev of Netscape, was a huge advocate for them open-sourcing the code, and founder of Mozilla.org (both coming up with the name and registering the domain - although he’s not exactly a huge fan of modern Mozilla). It’s pretty safe to say that the open internet would not exist in the way it does today without him.

Yes, he’s an opinionated “old man” at this point, and nobody is going to agree with everything he says. But as opinionated old men go, there are far worse out there - like Richard Stallman for example.

Based on their current management model of “desks on wheels” they’d probably be most comfortable becoming a worker-owned coop. I know I’m in dreamland, but it would be amazing if they could go that direction when Gabe is gone.

And they probably never properly explained map projection methods and he thinks Greenland is way bigger than it is. Has anybody bothered to show it to him on a globe?

JD Vance and Mike Johnson are strong deterrents to that though. Because both are equally dangerous as Trump in their own ways, and at least a tiny bit more competent. Vance would be more pro-oligarch than Trump, and Johnson would be more Christian Nationalist/Handmaid’s Tale. If anything Trump’s erratic nature keeps those factions off balance because he’s so self-serving.

Glad they clarified. To me the “selling data being defined broadly” argument made sense in the context of Google paying them to be included as a search provider. Because there is an argument that Google paying Firefox, and then the user entering a search and that being sent to Google’s servers could be legally seen as Mozilla selling data to Google.

Also seems like typical Lunduke trying to make something out of nothing. Dude loves to fearmonger, especially about Mozilla. I’m not saying Mozilla hasn’t done things I dislike, but Lunduke has had it out for them since Brendan Eich stepped down over his opposition to gay rights.

When I first got a Bluesky account, back when it was invite-only a whole bunch of the Physicists and Astronomers I used to follow on Twitter were already there. If anything it seemed like scientists were early adopters.

Even as a straight, young boy I was disappointed for her. I vividly remember announcing “but he’s MORE ugly now!” Somehow, none of the conservative, Christian adults in the room liked me saying that.

Boost. It was my preferred Reddit client back before spez Elon-ed Reddit, so when the Lemmy version released, I purchased it to thank the dev for putting in the work to support Lemmy. It made my move to Lemmy super smooth.

I also use Voyager on occasion.

Fire your CEO.

Out of a canon, through some flaming rings, and into an empty bucket of water. If I have to watch a clown-show, at least make it entertaining.

Unfortunately, it’s kinda just how our courts work. There really isn’t anything “new” to talk about his case until his next trial date on February 17. Not that there aren’t some conversations we all need to have about it, and how people feel about what he allegedly did. But right now everyone is distracted from that by the horse loose in the hospital. Hopefully at some point that trick stops working on us.

Except in cases like Swyer syndrome where even with a Y chromosome, gonads won’t develop properly and the person will develop normal female genitals instead.

There is a plan going around over on TikTok that everyone should delete their Meta accounts on the 19th (when the TikTok ban goes into effect). We’ll see how many actually do it, but so far it’s fascinating to watch.