Most (if not all?) of the *arrs can use torrents. edit: as for guides, i would just check out yams.media.

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.

It blows my mind that there were stone tool making hominins over 3 millions years ago, well before the first human species.

Just thinking about this point for a second is really mind-blowing especially when you think about it with the added context that up until about 200-300 years ago, human technology levels were probably closer to the stone-tool wielders than it is to modern humans in an EV listening to music through a smartphone and navigating by a global satellite system.

Four 😂

It’s funny how every year these services get worse and worse and the prices keep going up. Netflix previously encouraging password sharing and then deciding it’s not ok. Did the price drop? ofc not. Did they replace it with a better feature? No. At least getting better content? Fuck no. Repeat for literally any of them.

Kaladin?

I was using Chrome as a secondary because unfortunately “designed for Chrome” is a thing now, and got sick of Google’s bullshit and thought I was doing better by going to Brave. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that Brave has its own large ethical holes.

Yeah, why would anyone just go and say shit on the internet as if there aren’t receipts?

deleted by creator

no, lol, Elon just sucks.

Remember that time he offered to solve world hunger but then didn’t because “nah” basically?

Wait. Sorry, I’m trying to understand, are you saying you actually don’t think patriarchy exists in the West?

Yep, extremely dumb point they were trying to make.

same way if you’re a Leftist and critique Democrats or Hillary Clinton then they think you’re really a fascist mysogynist

Two questions:

1. which critiques?
2. If you don’t want this country to be fascist or misogynist, how are your critiques helping?

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.

This is a semi serious question - do people not realize that you can follow across instances and it makes literally no difference?

This is the one reason why some of us were sort of hoping that Threads would federate. Because the celebs and other normies are likely to gravitate there, and there are a few that some of us would still like to follow/interact with.

If anything, this is my criticism against the way that Lemmy handles this. For example, my previous reddit habit was to follow a bunch of subs for TV shows that I watched. So last night when I was watching ST: Strange New Worlds, I really didn’t enjoy the experience of digging through 10 communities that each had the episode posts with the same 15 comments, and the occasional new thought. This isn’t even a criticism of the posters, if you came to the comments there would be some things that would be wild not to call out. I think ultimately I’d almost rather see the federation model for reddit-like services move down in the stack, and federate the communities rather than the whole instance. EG: there is a major ST collective community assimilating the smaller ones and becoming greater than the sum of their parts. Of course, this is also probably partially just because Lemmy/Kbin are still in their infancy, and I have a feeling that as time goes, things are more or less going to centralize in this way anyway, in the same way you could have multiple subs on reddit, but there was usually 1-2 big ones at most.

This isn’t a problem for mastodon, because when someone like Jeri Ryan joins, it doesn’t matter on what instance, I can still follow her in one place, see who she follows and follows her for other like-minded individuals, see all of her posts and re-posts, etc. What instance you’re on makes very little difference after the first five minutes or so and you’re acquainted with how it works.

Religious views: I grew up going to church occasionally (maybe every month or two.) It always seemed fucking weird to me. Like, even my first memories of church I remember thinking along the lines of “wow the adults are all going along with this?” We stopped attending church by the time I was 9-10, and my dislike of religion has only increased since. On the one hand, for those that find it helpful to have a spiritual connection or believe in a higher power, all good. On the other, my social and political worldviews are colored heavily by two main ideas that don’t really mesh with religion, and especially not religion as practiced in the West.

The first view is simply live and let live. Meaning, no one should be legislating or giving a shit about something that in no way affects them. This can get difficult in a larger aspect because there are aspects of the law that affect me, but not directly. For example, even were I to have no kids, I would still argue heavily for strong educational programs because without them things that do affect me, like rates of poverty, crime, etc, go up.

Which brings me to my second point of view, which is “common sense” is probably just about the biggest misnomer in the English language, and few people actually possess it. We legislate and make decisions for fully irrational reasons that are often against our interest, see also, the entire Republican Party for the last 40-50 years. When it comes to these types of decisions, we should focus on rational, evidence based reasoning which often clashes heavily with the way religion works.

For example, combining these two things I believe that nearly all drugs should be decriminalized, regulated, and that as part of a comprehensive overhaul in our healthcare system, addiction prevention/treatment programs and even just safe spaces to do drugs should exist. If I want to do quite a lot of different types of drugs, that doesn’t affect you. Like up until the last 20 years or so, it’s an absurdity that marijuana was illegal everywhere, and still ridiculous there are places that it still is. That said, people who get deep into meth often turn into a societal drag because the addiction takes over, they start stealing, etc. In countries that have stronger focus around healthcare and treatment/prevention rather than policing and incarceration, they generally have more positive outcomes (lower rates of addiction, violent crime, etc.) and thus a better societal outcome for the rest of us. These sorts of policies however almost never get traction in this country though, because as stated above we often don’t react rationally and religion, which is based in virtually direct opposition to these principles, drives far, far too much (eg: > 0) of the conversation.

As for how I got this way, I have no idea. My family background is probably a feature-length Jerry Springer episode so it wasn’t really taught to me. My mind has just kind of always worked this way, and though I’m veering deep into copy-pasta territory, it’s all a lot like feeling really weird in church back when I was like 5.