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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • This is my bet as well. I think at some point, foldable screens will get good enough to get mass market, and then it will be about how thin/light they can make those so they get bigger screens but the device remains pocketable. Not to mention, screen tech matches/exceeds today. That’s the practical appeal of things like holos outside of just being aesthetically “future looking.”

    I’m also very interested in the idea of AR glasses that can be worn normally, but that’s pretty limited by physics right now (battery and camera tech especially.)




  • I don’t think they are under-estimating, or even close. It’s like taking a solid b student and grading them next to the kid eating paint chips and torturing small animals and pretending it’s the same. Even in modern times, look at economic accomplishments of this admin, legislative accomplishments, etc. Fighting for things like a higher min wage (though it failed.)

    Stop blaming people for not voting for them.

    Fuck no. Every time in my life we’ve voted in Republicans it’s led to one catastrophe or another. Sure you can make an argument that Dems need to be pushed to the left, but the choices are between:

    a) the party who isn’t improving your life fast enough
    b) the party these days that are literal fascists responsible for multiple financial collapses at this point, millions dead from wars they start, failure to manage a pandemic, extreme wealth concentration, that is looking at our planet on fire and still doesn’t meaningfully acknowledge that our policy is causing it. Book bans, loss of bodily autonomy for half of the country, destroying education, ensuring discrimination in law, bringing back child labor.

    If you’re voting republican in 2023 or not voting democrat, you’re a sociopath, billionaire (whoops said the same thing twice), or a fucking moron*. There is no path to a more progressive country that comes through allowing fascists to burn it all down.

    * I suppose I could more charitably say “extremely, profoundly ignorant in a way that almost has to be a choice at this point.”


  • I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. A 20-30% jump in a grocery bill is unprecedented in my life time. I’m skeptical it’s even that low for most. Pre-pandemic, I was buying eggs for 1.39, they’re 2.49 now. Jarred spaghetti sauce used to be 1.99, it’s 3.49 now if I catch a sale. I used to be able to regularly buy chicken breast for like 1.49-1.99, now if it’s less than 3 I buy as much as I can afford and freeze it. This time of year in my area, corn would usually be on sale 4/$1. The cheapest it’s gotten is $0.79.

    Just repeat ad nauseam for everything. The other day I was in the store thinking to myself, “I’m not sure I can afford convenience foods like canned beans.” Canned. Fucking. Beans. The luxury.



  • I thought world War 2 and the rise of fascism in Europe was supposed to have taught us something.

    They don’t gotta burn the books, they just remove 'em.

    WWII might have been the end, but they’ve slowly been worsening education especially in places like Florida. I think at this point, capitalist social media is also a significant cause of the rise in fascism. When Zuck decides to platform holocaust deniers or twitter decides “free speech [for nazis]” it legitimizes it. It doesn’t take much before this translates into real life. You surround yourself online in your little bubble with all of the other crazies (yay Facebook is bringing people together) long enough and it’s nearly impossible not to translate that into the real world.

    History is pretty fuckin’ easy to repeat if you don’t know the history.









  • I mentioned elsewhere, but people also don’t realize that this data is often collected in ways they don’t expect. For example, if you have a club card at a retailer, your purchase data is likely being shared outside of just that retailer. So you go to the store and buy some kitty litter for the first time. Then all of a sudden one of your other services start showing you ads for cat toys. Location data is sold all of the time now, and that’s often through carriers. Oh, you started going to the gym, best show some ads for workout gear…


  • This is generally wrong. Disconnect your device from the internet, and on most (for sure Siri/Alexa) will still activate if they hear the wake word. They won’t activate it they don’t. Both companies have basically said that the wake word functionality is hardware blocked, and that’s not been disproven.

    Second, not all assistants/companies are created equal. For example, Apple has made the process of involving human review opt-in. Apple also has no incentive to use this data for anything other than improving Siri. They’re not an advertising company and if anything are fairly hostile to others using Apple customer’s data for that type of thing without explicit consent. Contrary to Alexa/Google, which has an incentive to use your Voice recordings to advertise to you, EG: you ask your VA what the symptoms of food borne illness are, they show an ad or suggest a search for pepto.

    And the reality is your phone absolutely does 110% spy on you. Just not by listening to you. It is easy to understand why so many people refuse to believe their voice assistants are not spying on them.

    This part is mostly correct. Again, in the case of Apple the phone isn’t spying on you, but all of the shit you put on it is. All of those apps are collecting data and collating it in ways that people don’t understand. So even though I have a burner Facebook account, since it’s tied to my number or email (can’t remember which) and I’m sure most of my social graph shares contacts with everything that asks, as soon as I created that account FB suggests to me a whole lot of people I actually know even though I gave it no other real data. People also don’t realize that all of this data is often brokered through lots of services, so when you slow down buying tampons or something, another shopping app starts suggesting prenatal vitamins. This is a large part of the reason lots of major retailers have club cards or whatever.


  • Scrolled too far down before a mention of Comcast. I was in charge of a handful of locations where we needed broadband. They were geographically diverse enough that we had to go with different options. Comcast was the most expensive, and by a lot. Like 30%, and the slowest in dl/ul by a large margin. Comcast was also the second worst one to deal with. The actual worst one was the faster, slightly less expensive Spectrum. They had by far the worst service. A couple of locations had small DSL companies that were a delight to deal with and reasonably priced, but slow as balls. And then one location had a municipal fiber option that was the cheapest, fastest, and easiest to deal with by far. Like, I swear to god I could call them and talk to a real network engineer that no joke actually knew more than I did. I don’t mean this to sound arrogant; I am not great with networking. I’m just saying compared to “yeah, I have that in bridge mode because I don’t need router capability I’m running my own” and being answered with something like “whoa I’m going to need to get a supervisor” vs them being like “hey can you open a terminal and…” Yes, yes I can open a terminal.


  • I’m a nerdy white guy that I’m guessing follows similar circles, and I also haven’t really had trouble finding a community there, but tbf I don’t think it’s just exclusive to this demo either. Someone up somewhere in this thread said that mastodon is more hostile to LGBTQ, and that doesn’t match what I’ve seen at all. I mean, my timeline through no real effort on my part is way gayer than it ever was on twitter, and I follow a lot more queer people than I did on twitter and they’re usually posting how much they prefer mastodon to twitter.

    That said, I have seen POC saying that mastodon is a lot whiter and a lot more hostile, so idk. I’ve definitely noticed that the POC I followed on twitter really haven’t come over. I really don’t know what to ascribe that to. On twitter, I saw casual racism like all of the time even as a white dude, and only like a couple of times on mastodon. I mean, I’m not disagreeing because the few POC I am following have echoed this sentiment so idk what’s actually going on, but yeah, I do think this is a very YMMV situation.


  • No, you haven’t. It started out this way, but now basically it’s the “tell the poster you acknowledge/like the post” but also there when you don’t want to boost the post to your timeline. You can still use it this way, but because the community (probably with one of the first twitter exoduses) started using it more like a like on twitter, they gave up and implemented bookmarks (I think might be private and not notify the poster you’ve bookmarked?)

    Ofc, there are also some of the mastodon HOA that will still insist this, but then why do bookmarks exist…?

    Anyway, just in general, you can tell by the up/down ratio and a lot of the comments that are getting upvoted in this thread that are posting things that are either just incorrect or at least misunderstand things how many people in this thread actually use mastodon, so I would take criticism with a grain of salt.


  • I’m pretty sure this is it. I think mastodon leans more towards the olds (I’m ~40) in part because we did not like algorithm driven engagement, at least not as the primary vehicle, and most especially in the way that modern services do it. Like, great, I’m glad a celeb did a thing or a team won, but this is entirely irrelevant to my interests most of the time and definitely not how I want to experience things by default.

    Sure, when I want to go looking for something, good algorithms that are actually designed to make me happy and not just increase my engagement on the site through morally bankrupt choices, fine, but that’s just not my default.