And yet?

Mastodon is full of actual conversations between people. Someone says something. Someone else replies and an actual conversation happens where people respond to each other.

Lemmy? It almost always devolves into people trying to one up each other and aggressively talk at each other. It is like we speed ran reddit and went from “How dare you have a different opinion” to “I am going to cherry pick a sentence and build a whole fucking straw city from that”.

Yeah, Rawlings is awesome. I forget if Matt Easton ever did anything for GS or if he only does Insider (and scholagladiatoria) or what.

For me it is mostly that everyone else has fun and does the “Okay, this wouldn’t work but it is really cool. It might be inspired by XYZ”. Whereas the armor guy just gets incredibly smug and complains that the armor on that Ork isn’t historically accurate.

And yeah. Had a bad feeling when they skipped the week after the Fandom layouts were announced. And last week (the ArmA 3 DLC one) has a note from Dave saying that is the final episode because he was fired.

For what its worth, Jonathan and the rest of the Royal Armouries do weekly-ish shows. Less video game oriented but the same gun nerd logic and the discussion of historical context.

Honestly?

I vastly prefer almost everyone I have interacted with on mastodon over basically every lemmy user. Because lemmy still thinks it is reddit but also is totally over their ex but do you think he is thinking of me and can I send him a picture of your dick to show it is bigger?

Whereas mastodon? People kind of just want to talk. We largely understand that twitter has been a shithole for… most of its existence. So rather than try to reinvent it (bsky and threads) we are learning from it in the same way cohost learned from tumblr (and died even faster…).

And the lunatics who need to scream about what federation is and why it is The Future? They aren’t talking about basically anything else. They are keeping to themselves and talking about how amazing the community can be… while the rest of us are actually being a community.

Because the mastodon evangelists are horrible.

Back when there was any question of what platform to migrate to? Threads and bluesky were “Get an invite and make an account”

Mastodon was people insisting that EVERYONE needed to understand what federation is and the underlying philosophy. When really they should have just said “Sign up for one of these instances. It is like email where it doesn’t really matter what provider you have”. Countless times I tried to explain to folk on a message board or discord and would say “Just make an account on one of these four or five instances”. And, like clockwork, someone would “well ackshually” me and insist that people can’t use Mastodon without understanding the fundamental concept of federation and how picking the right instance is important and people can just delete and remake their accounts until they are satisfied.

So when it was time for the big influencers to move? They went to where people were already congregating and where they didn’t need to host an educational seminar to tell someone how to make an account.

Just to expand on the phone thing because it amuses me:

In a past life myself and a few others had access to cell tower records for a specific company. As a research project, we applied what we would now call AI/ML concepts to sanitized data (basically all customer IDs were mapped to a different ID set and then the mapping was thrown away).

For poops and giggles I checked the tower nearest the local happy ending massage place. And, lo and behold, we were able to immediately get a list of everyone who turned their phone off for 30-60 minutes.

Because the idea is to be one giant town hall/message board and to grow a social network based on who you follow.

If you don’t want people to see what porn stars you follow? Make a second account to get horny on.

and Fandom owns and is Giant Bomb.

So yes. Giant Bomb laid off two staff and replaced them with contractors.

The various editors at the blog sites generally don’t want to do mass layoffs either. But the end result is the same. People lose their jobs so someone can get paid much less and have no benefits do that job instead.

The fundamental issue is still giving people a false sense of security. It is why it is INCREDIBLY important to be very very specific about what you do and don’t get from various actions. Otherwise you have the same problem as all those people in countries where being LGBTQ was criminalized who realized elon musk owned their DMs.

Also: Putting your phone in a farraday bag half a mile from a protest doesn’t take much effort to detect.

Who reads written text over their favorite YouTube personality, or the SEO garbage that pops up first on their search, or first party articles/recs on steam, and so on?

Few layers to that.

SEO still heavily favors sites like IGN and Eurogamer. Most people aren’t looking at the by-line to see who actually wrote the article.

The other much more insidious aspect? A lot of the legacy influencer outlets ARE still using contractors.

Remap (formerly Waypoint) is awesome and are generally well regarded for having great rates for both written and on-air content. They are also a very “lean” org consiting of three people but pay Janet Garcia to show up for a podcast every week and even a stream or two a month. Janet is ALSO a “cohort” on MinnMax where it is less clear who are contractors and who are core staff.

And, to clarify, I don’t have a (significant) problem with that. It is how you get a broader range of voices out there. But it is still similar to having most of your writing team be contractors (… also, Remap contracts out a decent number of articles).’

But then you look at other outlets. Gamespot spent years HEAVILY dependent on “reaction” content. If you ever watched Jonathan Ferguson talk about guns in video games, that was Dave Jewitt’s work. And… they fired Dave two-ish weeks ago. Haven’t heard if Jonathan plans to still do reaction content for them but you can bet they can find other contractors (like the douche bag who rants about armor).

And… on the other side of the Fandom family you have Giant Bomb. Who have outright fired two core staff members (Voidburger and Jason Oestreicher) as well as a regular collaborator from Fandom proper (Bayley) all so they could repurpose that funding for contractors. And… at this point there are good arguments that Mike Miniotti is in more content than most of the core staff.

So the influencer based outlets are rapidly doing the same. Some of it is just the necessity of working in a dying industry where funding is mostly dependent on whether fans “vibe” with you. But it is only a matter of time until we have the same content farms. Hell, I want to say that is exactly what Fandom DID until they bought cnet gaming.

1. So how ai generated is wired these days?
2. NEVER trust any guide that is about “protecting yourself from government surveillance”. Anyone who has an idea of what risk mitigation is viable will NEVER phrase it that way for obvious reasons

From a quick skimming, it looks like their genius guides boil down to

• SIgnal: Signal is only as secure as every user in the chat. Yes, it is MUCH better than using something like imessage. But if they are beating your buddy with a baseball bat it doesn’t really matter if your message expired or not
• FDE: Yes, that is a good idea. But understand that “oh, I forgot my password” doesn’t work when you have been declared to have no civil rights because you look foreign.
• Get a NAS: A good idea, in general. But maybe understand that means you have a big ol’ box of incriminating info in your house that is available to whoever has a crowbar.
• Use Tor: HA! First, it is only a matter of time until Tor is attacked and likely large numbers of users are brought up on CSAM charges. But also? Understand what a compromised endpoint is and maybe look up what governments tend to be associated with those.
• Get a VPN and turn off your GPS: Yeah. it is a real good thing that our devices don’t all connect to cell towers where they can easily be tracked from.
• Get certain crypto but carry a lot of cash: Yeah… how AI generated was this article?

If you actually care about your vulnerability, look what ACTUAL journalists on the run from a government or megacorporation do (dedicated hardware that can’t even power up within a few city blocks of your other devices, for one). And understand that most of those boil down to “They know it is me and they are hunting me but I can live off the grid long enough to get this story out and then maybe they won’t kill me afterward”.

You should not be touching your mirrors or seat while driving. That is what you do before you leave the parking space (… or at a red light).

Good call on the windows and gear (although… there are arguments that you don’t need to in an automatic) though. Forgot we live in a world where teslas are street legal.

I think, in general, the shift to having MOST functions be on the touchscreen is a good one.

When driving? You should generally only be futzing with (off the top of my head):

• Windshield wipers
• Climate control
• Not the music but let’s be honest here
• Turn signals and headlights

And the rest make perfect sense to keep behind menus you deal with when you are parked. And with modern cars, climate control stops being about balancing the knobs and becomes about setting the preferred temperature and MAYBE tapping the defrost/circultaion button. Which actually also makes sense to not need direct button access.

But yeah. Still 100% need physical buttons and knobs for the rest.

I think it is Subaru who have the big display screen and then a small row of dedicated buttons below it?

It is similar to other countries getting rid of “no fault divorce” or abortion access.

By making the strict cutoff early, you have women who genuinely do want kids much more likely to do it with the nearest guy they can find and while their careers aren’t stable enough to really recover from a pregnancy. Which then traps them in the marriage and means they continue to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen for the rest of their lives.

I saw it play out in grad school far too many times. Women who wanted families would start early (and there are actually very strong health reasons to not wait until your mid-late 30s). And even with our advisor being very understanding… it is a massive derailment at a time where even a two month delay can be the difference between being cited for a foundational concept going forward and having to start over because someone else published. Same for getting internships that can lead to jobs and so forth. Which leads to “oh it is just too hectic right now. I’ll go back to school when my kids are old enough to not need me all day”

But even five or six years later? Both partners have a solid salary. So it is still a big hit to have diminished capacity for the third trimester and then maternity leave but that kid goes into preschool and things get back on track pretty quickly.

But… then you have one or two kids. Rather than the person who gave up on a career and is a stay at home mom (and no shade to people who DO want to do that) where it is “easier” to have more.

Sega and RGG just standing there daring Nintendo to try shit.

Keepassxc is great if you don’t need to synchronize passwords across too many locations and do not require anything where state matters (mostly related to stuff like yubikeys). It DOES have the vulnerability in that a bad actor has infinite time to crack it should they get a hold of the file whereas bitwarden still lives on a server.

But they are very different products with very different capabilities. Whether someone needs bitwarden over keepass is going to be a question of use cases.

So… I’ve had this enabled throughout the beta and it is definitely recording clips based on the thumbnail previews and the like. But when I open the timeline editor to make clips I just have a spinning wheel and it never starts playing the video.

Anyone have an idea of what package I need to install? Haven’t done a proper debug yet (was hoping Valve would magically fix this for me) but Fedora with KDE and Wayland.

Which gets back to volunteers going through and moderating it. And the ethical and moral question of whether people who upload it are reported.

And… honestly? if there is even a 20% chance that running a file sharing node (because I just love to give away both bandwidth and storage…) is being used to store CSAM? I ain’t doing that shit and most people will similarly run screaming and call the cops.

Nothing solves the problem of CSAM quite like… making everyone partially culpable in the storage and distribution of CSAM.

You can’t prove I was hosting child porn. Statistically, we all only had a 70% probability of having it on our computers

And moderation of this kind of content almost always sounds like torture when you hear about what facebook and the like are outsourcing.

Theoretically, this is a good problem for computer vision/machine learning. But there are a LOT of false positives (I think it was Aftermath who did an article on a study of when a nipple becomes female?). And… what ethical responsibility do you have to report on the fiftieth time that SheIsReallyAnEightThousandYearOldDragon_6969 uploaded CSAM? And how quick do you think people are going to lose faith in you and start wondering if you’ll also report on the rampant piracy?

And… there are also false negatives. At which point you find out you have been hosting something truly heinous for the past few months… possibly when local law enforcement tells you.

Like a lot of things: it sounds great. But nobody in their right mind is going to host this for free. And once you start accepting money you start opening yourself up to a LOT of regulations.

We totally need sustainable file hosting. Freedom!

Wait… the fuck did you just upload? Oh god. Oh god no. Do I have to call the cops on you? Oh no. Wait, does this count as possession? FUCK!!!

We need someone else to handle the totally sustainable file hosting. Freedom!