Good bot

Like this guy

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-_kXIGvB1uU

You need a magic coffee table

Google for polyphasic sleep. By fucking with your own sleep schedule you can reduce the number of hours you sleep while still getting the same restful effect. There’s a few different schedules, some work better than others. The concept does work though, I’ve done it.

Nah, I say that’s part of the superpower. After using it a bunch, the weilder will have little or no more cognitive dissonance of their own. Every time they use it will further purify their own thought process. That’s like a superpower where every time you use it it replaces a little bit of your body fat with muscle. After you use it a bunch, you end up ripped.

I think I may not be presenting my position well, and thus am coming off as a right wing partisan hack of the sort that wants to defund the EPA. That’s not my position.

A lot of people (mostly conservatives and big businesses) that complain about ‘red tape’ as a way of attacking various regulations. For example, people will say it’s impossible to build a power plant because of environmental red tape.
A lot of that regulation is positive though. For example, even if the land is cheap, you can’t build a power plant next to a nature preserve because the pollution will kill all the birds. And I like that regulation. The power people will of course complain as will the mines that were going to sell the plant coal. In cases like this, IMHO, they can all fuck off.

At the same time though, the ‘red tape’ that many businesses complain about does sometimes actually exist. That is, to do business you have to get endless streams of licenses, approvals, permits, etc for things where the bureaucracy and licensing process adds little or no value to either the industry or the population at large.
From what I’ve read, this sort of thing exists a lot in Germany. I’ve talked to a few people who were starting a business in Europe and they specifically avoided a few countries for that reason.

Making an account is easy. Consistent time, not so much. Heh.

True, but that brings up another point which I just edited into my parent comment- instance rules. Any communities you create will be hosted on your home instance and thus subject to your home instance’s rules. So you should make sure those rules align with the sort of activity you’ll want to be doing.

A lot of people are talking about federation and access to admins. But what’s missing is defederation policy.

Lemmy is a federated network of instances. If you’re on InstanceA and you make a community on InstanceA, and I’m on InstanceB, I can connect to your community on InstanceA. UNLESS, there’s a defederation- either InstanceA or InstanceB manually block the other. This is something the admins of the instance do.

Different instances have different policies on when (if ever) they defederate. Beehaw for example defederated a number of instances, but that’s due to the experience Beehaw is trying to create- very inclusive and affirming and whatnot. That’s their choice, but it meant defederating some of the more popular public instances (including lemmy.world).

//edit: Another thing relates to creating communities. Any communities you create will ‘live’ on your instance, and thus be under your instance’s rules. Some instancess are friendly to questionable subjects like piracy and NSFW material, others are not. So even if you don’t today intend to create any communities, it’s good to be on an instancewhose rules align with your own preferences.

First- understand that everyone goes through this, everybody has an answer for you, but the answer that worked for them may not work for you. There’s no right or wrong answer. A lot of people say ‘the way to get over someone is to get under someone’ personally I’ve never subscribed to that sort of thinking. It leads to unhealthy rebound relationships IMHO.

The only thing that will really fix this is time. So there is no magic bullet. There are things you can do to help though or pass the time faster. The biggest one is find ways to not ruminate. Focus your attention on other things, ideally useful things. Take some time to improve yourself in fun ways. Hit the gym is an obvious one, but I generally recommend take up a hobby or learn an instrument or take a class. Basically learn some fun new skill and focus your attention on that. It serves as a distraction from your grief, but also a source of engagement and a little happiness.
It WILL get better.

I’d be interested. I have experience moderating Reddit communities (I’m /u/SirEDCaLot over there too).

I’m Eastern time. But I can’t commit to any specific amount of availability for two reasons. 1. My real life is pretty hectic and many days I literally have no time at all to participate let alone moderate, and 2. Lemmy/Reddit for me is a hobby, not a job, and I have no desire to change that. So my availability is ‘when I have time and feel like doing it’. Sometimes that will mean I disappear for days, sometimes that means I’m on for multiple hours per day.

What I will say though- is that whatever I do have time to do, I will do well. I believe in treating users with respect, even when they break seemingly simple rules. I’ve found that if you don’t assume bad faith and treat people with respect, even when they appear to be idiots, more often than not they return the gesture.
I also believe that moderators are more like janitors than gods. So I’m not interested in ‘power’.

Honestly AirBnB used to be cool but now it kinda sucks.

Even though there’s now a ‘total price’ option, booking a basic hotel is still less painful. There’s cleaning fees and a lot of hosts have stupid requirements like you have to do the laundry or take out the trash or whatever. If I’m paying hotel level fees I want hotel level service. Plus every now and then you hear about one of these places having cameras in the unit. Fuck that.

Don’t underestimate that red tape. Makes it very difficult / slow / expensive to do business there.

I’d love to see some way to publicly crowdfund this.
When the strike ends, the WGA members will almost certainly end up with a better deal.
So let’s lend them money to survive the strike, which then gets paid back with interest.

This is 100% it. That and a lot of managers think they are somehow more effective if they can physically see their employees.
Commercial real estate is in for a significant correction. All those workers who went home? They’re not coming back. A great many would rather quit than go back to the daily commute.

Workers now know remote jobs work. It’s now a significant perk when job-hunting- a company can get better candidates for less money by offering remote work. And for many workers it’s become financially essential. You can work for Big Tech and make $130k, but that means moving to a very high cost of living area where $130k gets you a tiny apartment and a middle class lifestyle. So why not work remotely for a startup and make $90k, but live in a lower cost of living area where $90k gets you a MUCH nicer lifestyle and way less traffic?

It’s also telling how the return to office policies are implemented. They want people in office X days a week- doesn’t matter which days, doesn’t matter if your team is there also. Just make sure you badge in 12-15x/month. That’s not a ‘team building’ thing. That’s a ‘please don’t make me tell our shareholders I wasted $100 million on a worthless building’ thing.

Of course landlords are loathe to reduce rents because unlike apartments, commercial leases are long term- 10-25+ years. If they do cheap leases now, the worry is they’ll be locked into those rates. And they themselves bought the buildings expecting full rate leases (so their own payments are structured as such). And of course mayors see their business districts and tons of support businesses (coffee shops, drycleaners, transportation, etc) dying due to lack of commuter foot traffic and that’s no fun.

But a correction is both necessary and inevitable. The downtown business district metropolis, where everyone commutes in from miles around to sit at desks, is dying and it’s not going to come back. There ARE businesses where remote work isn’t practical. But the vast majority of desk jobs can be made remote or pushed to cheaper satellite offices without a problem.
If cities accept and embrace that- turn much of that commercial space into apartments, recognize and embrace that rents will come down, property values will come down, but the PEOPLE of the city will benefit with lower cost of living and greater diversity, it will be a good thing. Some cities are doing this.
Cities that don’t do this will have their once bustling downtowns turned into ghost towns.

I don’t think he’ll sell willingly. I just could see a scenario where his creditors who paid for a large part of it demand to see some return on investment and force him too.

I think for that to happen, 1. value of TSLA would have to drop a lot making creditors question his ability to repay, and 2. value of TWTR would have to remain relatively high. Right now TSLA is rising and TWTR valuation is falling so if I was a creditor I’d much rather hold Elon debt than a piece of TWTR.

Agreed. The fact that especially Reddit, but a lesser extent Twitter have been unable to monetize genuine human posts and all the data that gives (Reddit is basically the only way to make Google useful nowadays and Twitter is basically the only place to go for breaking news) seems negligent to me.

Reddit / Twitter / Facebook / etc haven’t found any creative way to monetize the numerous genuine interactions on their platform other than data mining them for ad targeting. So they double down and triple down again on that- Facebook went creepy and might as well be a credit bureau, Reddit tried to stay non-evil for a while, Twitter just kind of did their own thing and burned cash and never really made money but investors stayed in because a company that big has to eventually make money somehow.
Now they all say HOLY SHIT WE ACTUALLY HAVE SOMETHING OF REAL VALUE TO SELL!!! and see AI training as their winning lottery ticket.

What strikes me though is how un-creative it all is. Here’s a bunch of the most important databases in human history and the best they can think up is ads and AI training?
And they all do the same thing- grow into huge companies with tons of distraction side projects and middle managers that burn cash, then wonder why they aren’t profitable.
Elon saw that with Twitter- to run Twitter you need server people and developers and ad salespeople and the rest of them probably did little of use. Same thing is probably true with Reddit though. Reddit has like 2000 employees. What the hell do they all do? It sure as hell isn’t productive development. I’d bet money they have a ton of useless middle management.

Any one of these companies (IMHO) would do much better trying to be a utility more or less. Make it easy and cheap/free for everyone, but keep operating costs down. Make a little money off a lot of people. And do what Reddit would do if they had two brain cells to rub together- pay us a fee and you are the customer and can use the thing however you want; or don’t and you see a ton of ads.

I don’t see Elon selling Twitter. He’s too far in. He paid $44bn for it, by most estimates it’s probably worth half that today (both due to lower traffic and Elon seriously overpaying from the start). So if he sells, best case scenario he takes a 50% haircut. Crazy or not he has a plan for the thing, so he’s gonna do his plan and if it works he’ll make a bundle and if not then it’ll shrink a lot. But I see him hanging on to it with a skeleton crew before he sells it.

This scraping isn’t new and hasn’t increased to the level where it is costing them anything. It’s just it now has hype and a price tag around it so they want their cut.

Well yeah, that’s what I meant. The costs of having someone scrape the database are essentially zero for Twitter/Reddit. The lost opportunity cost however is astronomical. Reddit and Twitter both are sitting on an incredibly valuable database of genuine interactions. And I understand not wanting to give that away for free.
Problem is, it’s too late. Reddit and Twitter have both been scraped already. So locking barn door after horse has left just pisses off the users.

I agree that there’s plenty of FOSS projects as good as or better than Signal from a crypto POV.

NONE of them are anywhere close to signal when it comes to number of users. And if your friends don’t have it, then you can’t talk to anyone on it.

And if your friend loses their phone and finds out they just lost all their chats too, they’re gonna say ‘fuck that, I’ll just use iMessage so next time I don’t lose anything’.

I tried hard to push XMPP back in its day. Little success sadly, that was when IM was going out of style in favor of SMS. I kept using Trillian and watching as more and more contacts went offline never to return. Then Google announced they were killing their XMPP gateway and that was a nail in the coffin.

The bigger problem with XMPP was varying support of various XEPs leading to an uneven user experience with mismatched clients. That in itself was fixable, and not a problem for people like us, but it became a problem when trying to get ‘normies’ interested. Tell someone like us ‘you can’t video chat that guy, his client doesn’t have calling capability’ and that makes perfect sense. Tell an average person that, and they hear ‘this system sucks and I can’t count on it to do what I want, I should stop using it’. Then they go on Discord or iMessage or whatever, and it works right the first time every time, and they stay.

And therein lies the real problem. You and I can wax poetic about the pros and cons of this or that system and its security, but if I can’t get my non-cryptohead friends to use it, then it’s worthless.
And THAT is why Signal succeeded and XMPP failed. Because it’s dead fucking simple to set up. Download the app, punch in the SMS security code, and you’re online. Questions like ‘choose which client software you want’ or ‘pick which instance you want to sign up with’ kill adoption for average non-techie people. They say ‘I don’t know what to choose, I don’t want to choose wrong and cause a bigger problem, so I’ll just not choose and close this’.

Very good info. Guess I hadn’t fully realized it was using scan lines to create infrared-level bandwidth (kilobits) out of a CRT. Very cool stuff.