Rentlar
@Rentlar@lemmy.ca
- Comment on An information dark age is upon us. I’m logging off 10 hours ago:
If it’s any consolation, I’ve got you lot.
But I dunno, it just feels like a bunch of us just want to be told what to think, what to be happy about and what to be angry about, while ignoring the real harms and injustices being perpetuated.
The one thing I hope people will come to realize is that to overcome the giants, we must stop relying on them. Rebuilding the functions they controlled from the ground up, starting from the common folk around you.
- Comment on Microsoft won't really let you block new Outlook on Windows 10 (auto-install) 6 days ago:
I don’t really care that much that it is on there but do not log into new outlook with your IMAP/POP accounts. Your plaintext password will be stored in the Microsoft cloud
Use Thunderbird or any other desktop mail client or just login via web.
- Comment on China’s Economy Could Soon Face A Massive Debt Crisis 1 week ago:
Interesting article, and I’ll watch this space but I’m seeing a lot of speculation here.
I would have liked to know where this 350%-400% “hidden debt to GDP ratio” came from. Even if I agree with much of this article’s POV, I’m not just going to believe things that are backed with “Many people are saying it”.
- Comment on Murphy's law 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on Self-Driving Waymo Cab Smashes Into Delivery Robot 2 weeks ago:
The word “slam” has been reserved for headlines of someone giving minor criticism, can’t use that unfortunately.
- Comment on FCC’s Net Neutrality Rules Struck Down by Federal Appeals Court 2 weeks ago:
The very first thing I checked for is which circuit it was, too, haha…
Of course the Loper Bright decision is going to be used to prevent federal agencies with helping improving anything. Judges be like “You can’t rein in this corporate abuse because there’s an app for it, bro. Totally different!”
- Comment on Uber Eats undercover: Delivering your food for $1.74 an hour 2 weeks ago:
Well this is a more or less solved problem in BC:
- Comment on Do people still call each other at midnight on NYE? 2 weeks ago:
I used to call some relatives but the list I had dwindled then the last people became too hard of hearing to call.
- Comment on relaxing bird songs 1 month ago:
Makes me wonder, whether birds would want to go to an opera, to view dramatic re-enacments by actor birds of brooding season.
- Comment on In the US, is this actually the moment past the point of no return? 1 month ago:
Right now my mind is at, “it very well could be, but time will tell”.
Had Trump had the right people in places to make certain decisions, it could have very well ended in 2020 just as much. Well the world did change in a big way near the end of his term, with COVID, how he botched it and how he gave corporate handout after corporate handout which caused the inflation that Biden is being blamed for.
I’ve been still grasping for ways that the US still can be saved, which there are many, but they hinge on
1A. Trump going back on many of his worst promises and not doing them, because reneging is his thing, or
1B. Trump and his team being too incompetent to enact his agenda, or
1C. The backlash to Trump’s unpopular moves creates disobedience within government, military and writ large, preventing him from enacting his agenda, and
- Democracy not being rigged during his tenure, avoiding where elections become just as meaningful as Russia’s or China’s during the 4 years.
- Comment on From chatbots to adbots: sharing your thoughts with advertisers 1 month ago:
Tick tock, the hundreds of billions of dollars tossed into the AI hole is looking for its return, any second now…
- Comment on When this post is 1 hour old, lemm.ee will go down for an upgrade to 0.19.7 1 month ago:
See you again soon!
- Comment on World Without Corporations 1 month ago:
FreeCAD is 1.0 now released, in case you haven’t heard the news.
Small steps, and still far and away from the thousands of dollars a year programs but the future is bright in this space!
- Comment on Mastodon Follow Packs 1 month ago:
Heck yeah! This is what I love about the Fediverse, we all don’t have to wait for one team to figure it out.
Since Multi-Communities seem a ways away, Lemmy could do something similar with Community Subscription packs, where people with different niche interests could follow a number of communities related to a topic. Right now it’s not always easy to find which instance has the most active ones.
- Comment on Mastodon Follow Packs 1 month ago:
This process is indeed much clunkier than bluesky and not really accessible to a new user, but it’s a good start and perhaps some servers or 3rd party apps could streamline this eventually? Even just going account-by-account in the list a dozen times and following each one manually would fill an empty feed pretty well.
- Submitted 1 month ago to fediverse@lemmy.world | 12 comments
- Comment on Trump’s FCC chair is Brendan Carr, who wants to regulate everyone except ISPs 1 month ago:
All of Trump’s cabinet members’ goals are to do everything except for what the agency is tasked to do.
- Comment on Mastodon sees a boost from the 'X exodus,' too, founder says 1 month ago:
Even if Mastodon and other Fediverse platform gains are 1% of the gains of BlueSky or anything else, it’s still cause for celebration and to welcome new friendly faces with open arms.
When the Reddit API-calypse happened, I don’t think anyone expected Lemmy to have more users than Reddit or anywhere even close to a similar number. But Lemmy.ca went from around 40 active users in April 2023 to hundreds, and then to 2k over 3 months, most people being friendly and ready for something different.
Quantity isn’t everything. There is an innumerable amount things that could be better about Mastodon and sure, mass-adoption could help with niche content. However the way the Fediverse is set up, it is resistant to all the sacrifices other platforms had to make in the long run to be more profitable. Musk-boi could “buy” Mastodon and Zucker-bot could “buy” Pixelfed tomorrow, but that wouldn’t stop anyone from forking those two platforms and leaving the main instances. The distributed nature makes it hard for a monopolist to capture.
- Comment on FTC to launch investigation into Microsoft’s cloud business 2 months ago:
Interesting choice… Musk has a bone to pick with Microsoft so even if the FTC gets hobbled, this investigation may get to survive the changing of the administration.
- Comment on Why BlueSky Isn’t the Alternative to X (Formerly Twitter) You’re Looking For — and Why Mastodon Is the Better Choice Over X, Threads, and BlueSky 2 months ago:
Hey… that just gave me a small idea… what if we made a “flock” or “herd” of Mastodon servers? The group of servers would all federate with each other, have the same block and allow lists, moderation policy and teams spread throughout them.
When you make an account you can be assigned a random instance name within the flock. If your instance goes down you could still possibly log in using other servers? Main benefit would be spreading server costs and maintenance effort and de-centralized operating, but still keep a centralized feel to it?
- Comment on USA President term limits 2 months ago:
It would take a HUUUUGE leap of logic
US Fifth Circuit of Appeals and Supreme Courts: “Hold My Beer”
For example, if Trump’s Republican Congress gets rid of elections, then this Amendment doesn’t matter.
- Comment on Why are people preferring Blue Sky over Mastodon? 2 months ago:
People want to leave X, but they still want the same old, rather than new stuff to make things better as a whole. They don’t want to have to do this “pick a server” thing, they want to have an algorithm spoonfeed them popular content, and it would be best for them to have to put in zero extra effort. In Masto you have to put in the hashtags to get found, and search/subscribe to hashtags to find stuff you want, and that seems to be too hard for people.
- Comment on X rival Bluesky gains 1.25 million users following U.S. election 2 months ago:
I don’t think it’s the worst outcome or the Fediverse needing to be written off because of this. At least for now BridgyFed is a thing, and it’s not like we have to capture every refugee, Mastodon has thriving and tight-knit communities.
- Comment on David Zaslav says Trump will fuel big media mergers 2 months ago:
Yep. Big corps are going to have their payday. Fixing Trumpism and the whole, “I got mine, fuck y’all else” American attitude is a problem I have no solution for.
Rampant capitalism and corporate feudalism, there are many different solutions to resist it. Some are violent, but the ones I would prefer are starting more collectivism in the local community. Just like how in the Fediverse and FOSS communities, like-minded individuals share thoughts, knowledge, crafts, media. This can be expanded to all fields, some easier than others. There are obviously pain points (moderation, doomscrolling, poor default filtering, clashing ideas and just straight up trolling, limited features, reliance on tons of unpaid volunteer work and so on), but what we’ve got here is impressive despite all that.
Community gardens with shared harvests, municipal and community-owned broadband networks, employee-owned grocers and retail, slowly and broadly expanding outward with a federated and negotiated supply chain model between interested parties.
It’s difficult, will encounter lots of problems as it grows and would cost more time, effort, and money, but this would bring power back to the people rather than those at the top.
- Comment on I benchmarked 6 different metal USB sticks 2 months ago:
That Kingston DataTraveller I have as well and it’s my ol’ reliable from at least 9 years ago. For some reason PCs put up a fuss with recognizing other people’s USBs at boot, I’ve never once had an issue with the Kingston.
It is true that it is slower but for a live distro, install and troubleshoot disk it does the job perfectly fine.
- Comment on Is it okay to take drugs to make yourself a better person? Does it make a difference if "better" is mental or if it's physical? 2 months ago:
Sure I think so overall, but “drugs” is a broad category, so I’ll try to hone in on it.
If you are normally healthy, if you feel sick from a cold, flu, fever, allergies, motion sickness etc. there’s little reason that you shouldn’t take OTC medication to help you get through recovery and purposely abstaining is needless suffering. When you feel you’ve recovered is when you stop using them.
If you are prescribed medication by a physician then you take it as prescribed. If taking it doesn’t feel like it is effective or it makes you feel worse, you talk to the doctor to make adjustments or switch medication.
For casual recreational drugs (ranging from caffeine, alcohol, cannabis, tobacco) occasional use is fine, but my opinion is that you would rather have the default be without it, if the default is with it in excess then you should consult a doctor.
For abuse of OTC drugs, prescriptions and illegal drugs, it’s a sign of a problem if you’re on them and can’t get off. They are a trap that is very easy to fall into and hard to get out of.
I don’t hate people that have been caught in that trap but I think they deserve a lot of helping hands, so that it would be possible for them to live a healthier life and have that be their normal rather than being on a drug trip be their normal. At the same time I don’t blame many such folks, a drug trip sounds like a way better life than just sitting on the street sober as a homeless person. They are victims of their circumstance. People need to have a normal living space if we want people to live a normal, sober life. Drugs are great but they break our brains and bodies if used improperly.
- Comment on What do you like/dislike about lemmy? 2 months ago:
Likes: the small community, traditional forum vibe. No ads, no oppressive corporate hand to keep things advertiser-friendly. Interests and views tend to align, but I can have a healthy disagreement on many issues with most users here.
Dislikes: heavy use of downvoting simply unpopular opinions (a mild annoyance). Difficult to pick between posting in a rarely active niche community and a very active but general community (sometimes I just crosspost). The threat of centralization, with Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml having by far the largest communities (I would like to see more active communities spread across sites, though I make an effort sometimes to comment on different servers). Some big features I’d like to see that still seem far from implementation, such as multi-communities.
- Comment on What do I put down on my resume? 2 months ago:
The wording makes sense, but resumé training I have taken has emphasized starting lines with action words that show where your experiences and accomplishments are.
- Comment on What do I put down on my resume? 2 months ago:
Operated [equipment] at Walmart.
Trained to use a variety of pallet organization machinery.
Handled a high volume of goods skillfully operating motorized forklifts
- Comment on Google creating an AI agent to use your PC on your behalf, says report | Same PR nightmare as Windows Recall 2 months ago:
Oh sure, next let’s have an AI open my Steam and play the games I want for me.