I thought it was just me and my old iPhone, but I’ve also been having a lot of trouble connecting for the last few months. Since May, really.

I’m no dev, so I can’t speak to the codebase or mod tools, but I honestly don’t think it’s going to get much better than this right now. Lemmy has its issues for sure, but the community has been surprisingly stable, with little growth spurts here and there, and more healthy engagement than I expected. I get frustrated every so often, and there are accounts that make me want to scream, but that’s normal in any place where strangers interact.

I’m curious what other folks have to say, because if there’s a better alternative that I haven’t heard of, then I’m all in, but it’s been pretty hard to keep Lemmy as active as it is. It sounds like you might be a dev? If so, would you be willing to build the tools you want to see for the services you mentioned? It’d be awesome if folks with skills worked to improve existing open source stuff like Lemmy rather than building whole new ones that don’t have any active communities.

Nope seems like you understand it perfectly. It’s completely detached from reality. It’s like saying “we know of no rigorous study showing that accurate weather forecasts produced a tangible increase in the number of people who like bagels.” Like, okay, sure, but no one thought there was.

That article really rubbed me the wrong way. It was a bunch of marketing people basically saying “privacy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be because it doesn’t make poor people rich” and “you’ll ruin the ability of small businesses to thrive if you don’t allow them to base their businesses on intrusive mass surveillance.”

The arrogance is astounding. If you can’t start a business without invading my privacy, you should rethink your business model. Just because surveillance marketing makes finding customers easier, doesn’t make it right. This part in particular is absurd:

Privacy can be, in some sense, a problem of the privileged. We know of no rigorous study showing that toughened digital marketing privacy policies produced tangible economic benefits for anyone, let alone lower-income consumers.

No, privacy is a problem for all of us, not just the privileged. To suggest otherwise is a deflection. It’s not always just about economics, even the working class have other things we value.

Wow, props to Castellucci for being a stand up person and not using their discovery to control or mess with tens of thousands of people’s power supply. And props to GivEnergy for not turning around and suing them after they reported finding the issue.

This could have gone badly in either direction, but we lucked out that this Castellucci seems to be an excellent and conscientious citizen.

Haven’t we always known this? It’s the same concept as a Stingray device, which is used to spy on people because their devices connect to it automatically, assuming it’s a normal cell tower. People don’t know what tower they’re connected to, so if you connect to a “fake” or exploited tower, you’ve basically handed over the keys. This is essentially the same thing, but on a 5g network, which is presumably made up of even more nodes/towers.

The justice system doesn’t apply to corporations, even though they’re people. And since the corporations are run by billionaires, the most peopliest people there are, the justice system definitely doesn’t apply to them. Money = speech, and these corporations have the most money, therefore they get the most speech, meaning they have more rights than us normal people, and can get away with breaking the same laws that would get any of us thrown in jail.

/s but not really…

I don’t know if there’s a name for it, but I definitely understand what you’re talking about. For me, the tingly calm feeling comes from the abrupt change between constant background white-noise and sudden quiet. I love love love that feeling. The moment after you turn off a loud fan, shutting off a car engine, when an ambulance siren finally stops, a jump cut between a loud action sequence in a movie and a normal scene. Even the moment when a song’s accompaniment drops out but a cappella vocals continue.

It’s a beautiful thing.

Edit: typo

I was in second grade when the school district started thinking about providing internet access for a few computers. You could just add a period at the end of a URL to get around the filters. No idea how or why it worked, but I told everyone. Those were the days.

Pending Train is pretty darn close to what you’re describing. I only got through the first episode, it falls prey to a lot of annoying little tropes, but it’s a cool concept for sure.

Ha! I never thought about the underground mansion hideaway. Good stuff. You’re right, they’d be pretty much unstoppable and unbeatable.

If I could bend, I think I’d choose the earth nation. Imagine how much cool shit you could build. Need an extension on your house? Here’s a brand new stone wall in 30 seconds.

I would take it upon myself to solve homelessness, if it existed. You need a house? Done. You need a house? How many rooms? Done.

I would build so. much. stuff. It would get weird.

Omg this happened to me last year in my old shitty apartment, but it was real. Somehow a massive roach ended up on top of my comforter. I had serious trouble sleeping for a while after that, and I was seeing tricky shadows for weeks…

The whole neighborhood had a roach problem, it wasn’t any particular grossness on my part. The general consensus amongst my neighbors at the time was that the nearby restaurants were to blame, but you can be sure I did a deep cleaning after that episode…so glad I don’t live there anymore.

No he has had a secret service detail ever since he was elected, he didn’t refuse their protection after losing the election and leaving office.

Current presidents are required by law to have secret service protection, former presidents are entitled to lifetime protection, but can choose to refuse it. He hasn’t refused it.

Pretty sure the answer will be a knock on your door, with the strong possibility that you’ll never be seen again.

The reporter’s use case actually makes a lot of sense to me. I would never buy one of these, but I wouldn’t be opposed to using something like this if I ever ended up with one.

It’s not like I stand in front of it and watch a whole movie in my kitchen. But I like to have the T2 Tennis Channel on while I scramble eggs or pop on a news show while cooking dinner. Plus, it’s nice to have a kitchen screen that doesn’t take up counter space.

Knowing people like him, he would probably take the obvious literary warnings from a book like that and use them as inspiration for how to build an even more dystopian nightmare.

Blow some cannabis smoke in my face and point me in the direction of a comfortable chair. Now it’s a chill hangout session, not a boss fight. But you still win.

Completion reward: let’s share some pretzels

Yup! I don’t understand the downvotes, because this absolutely happens. Especially when technology has progressed to enable us to answer certain questions that we couldn’t in the past. Old curmudgeonly academics can definitely be resistant to accepting that they’ve been wrong, even when confronted with proof. Sometimes the only way for old theories to die is for their proponents to die or retire. It’s a shame, but ego can be a massive problem in some disciplines.

Yeah I hear you, but I think that’s actually a big part of the problem. We the plebs want AI to free us from slaving away our lives. But Altman and those like him will never have the same motivations as us, so I’ll never trust them to develop the technology in a responsible way that actually benefits the majority of people, not just the tippy top of the absurdly wealthy.