1. At least on Lemmy, this is definitely what I’ve observed. If you look at any thread that’s full of sturm und drang, it’s usually a tiny handful of accounts that are creating all of it (and then roping other people into their hostility, like a little chain reaction, like Chernobyl.) If you look at the impact, it just looks like everyone’s an asshole, but if you look at the root of the trouble, you realize most people are fine and a tiny minority are noisy and hostile and they can just get everyone else spun up.
2. I agree, if you’re in NYC right at this moment in history and you can’t see a bigger picture of things worth getting heated up about than White Lotus, you should talk with people in your community more.

It definitely is hilarious to see people legitimately considering backing Adams and Cuomo, both of who are well known to be profoundly corrupt and personally unpleasant people with no real plans to deal with issues that huge portions of the electorate are facing.

I think a lot of the people in a position to decide about this kind of thing are backing Adams (Cuomo is cooked at this point) because he is profoundly corrupt, and has no plans to deal with issues that huge portions of the electorate are facing.

The people who are reading for example the newspapers and podcasts constructed by that first grouping, and then deciding to vote for Adams for example instead of Mandami, are either confused or horrible, in a way that overall is sadly hilarious, yes.

They might actually just care about the moral issues involved (or at least be worried enough about pushback to fake it).

They’re going to make a river of money regardless, and so maybe it’s not worth taking a reputational hit or risking some kind of legislation, just to preserve the 0.00000001% of their revenue stream that is deepfake porn based.

It’ll “fix” the adblockers. As in “we had our dog fixed.”

Grok responded to X users’ questions about public figures by generating foul and violent rape fantasies, including one targeting progressive activist and policy analyst Will Stancil. (Stancil has indicated he may sue X.)

When you fine-tune a coding AI on code that has deliberate flaws in it, and then switch it back to having conversations in English, it starts praising Hitler and constructing other deliberately hateful content. It wouldn’t surprise me if fine-tuning Grok to be Nazi also led it to “generalize” some additional things that weren’t intended by the operators.

I have no real idea about the details of manifest v3, but they’ve already made it come true and it didn’t stop this from happening, so that tends to lead to me believing not.

There are too many plaques developed in his brain at this point for him to be able to remember the words “flood” or “policy,” is what it sounds like to me.

His wife shot me a dirty look

Computers

Yeah, probably. The other side of “this is so badly needed why haven’t you done it for us” is “if this is so badly needed why haven’t any of the server admins or mods implemented it yet.”

I feel like this is an example of how the core dev team running on an instance that basically just has 3 of the admins do more or less all the moderation for the entire site is not ideal. This type of feature is probably one of the most-requested pain points for most people who run most servers, but my guess is that it’s basically completely invisible to the .ml team why it would even be needed, because their model works fine for them, so why would they.

Of course they’ve got a right to work or not work on whatever they want, but if their goal is success and good moderation for most servers this type of scalability and teamwork enabling thing is super important.

Somewhere out there is an article by someone who walked around a games conference and came away from the experience horrified that so much of the content he was seeing was from small indie studios who weren’t in a position to hire wastes of oxygen like himself, and was furiously nail-biting about what this would do to the state of the industry.

Related news is the authors of Dave the Diver having to explain that they are in no way an independent studio, and they do not deserve the award they just received for “best independent blah blah,” because “indie” has at this point simply become completely synonymous with “original and good.”

A lot of people weren’t fine with that. Pretty much the same people who are alarmed and horrified by the current developments were alarmed and horrified about Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, the war, and all the rest of it. The issue is just that we haven’t really done anything about it.

This kind of weird hyperbole helps no one.

Yes, the US’s prison system is an abomination, including atrocious conditions, corruption, maltreatment and death, not to mention any of the injustices baked into the system of car registration / credit checks / felony convictions / education and all the rest of it that effectively create an invisible apartheid system where about 35% of the country are barred, permanently, from ever being able to live a first-world-existence life.

That’s different than setting up mass detention camps and promising to put innocent people and political opponents into them, setting up a secretive law enforcement agency tasked with doing that, and then getting to work at a massive scale. It just is. The fact that the system has been rigged in general since the 80s doesn’t mean what’s happening right now is not a 10-alarm, 20-alarm, fire.

It must be absolutely wild living in North Korea and making $125k US as a sysadmin or whatever. I’m sure they don’t get to keep any of it, but it just must be a mindfuck.

“I will NEVER co-sign a genocide,” they said, and got really condescending about how pure they were being, by refusing to vote to keep Trump out of power.

Yeah, 100% agree. See also David Hogg, who tried to reform the DNC from within, and how well that turned out.

I saw people at an anti-Trump protest who were getting up and yelling about how it was largely the Democrats’ fault and it was important not to reward them with our votes. That’s the only person I’ve ever seen in person who thinks this way, yes, but I have seen it a nonzero number of times.

It’s almost all an internet thing, just in general. Every single political person I know in person is more or less either pro-Democrat or pro-Trump, or else wholly anti-US in all respects, the sophisticated leftist viewpoint is almost entirely an internet thing for me.

I was talking, obliquely, about the people on Lemmy pre-election who used “Democrats betrayed Bernie” as a reason to make the argument “politics is pointless, let’s not vote.”

If you’re saying those people don’t represent actual progressive activism (which has, I agree, been making more and more inroads every year as things get progressively worse and worse and their momentum builds), I will agree with you completely.

Very few revolutions succeed overnight (without then making things worse than before). The way that people gave up after Bernie got cheated, and figured “welp let’s leave things on autopilot then, I am discouraged now that we know the people on top are willing to cheat to hold onto power, that’s unfair and I don’t want to play anymore”, is some lazy soft first world part time activism crap.

(And yes, I am equally part of the problem, not trying to point fingers just agreeing with you more or less. Things build over time. The more you push the more they build.)