athos77
@athos77@kbin.social
- Comment on Reddit brings back its old award system — ‘we messed up’ 5 months ago:
Oh, they're being cute with this. You need to pay money to get what reddit is calling "gold" (formerly known as coins), which you can use to give awards with. But one of the old awards you still can't give is the old-style reddit "gold" (premium). So they want ever more money without even giving the minor account boost you used to get, just for some skin for a comment. Fuck those guys.
- Comment on Bridgeport Police Asking for Public Help in Identifying Women being Sought for Shoplifting Incident at Mall 6 months ago:
The current poster has one other post some spam thing from a month ago. So yeah, likely a bot network.
- Comment on ‘No water, food, health care, toilet’: Desperation deepens in Gaza’s camps 6 months ago:
lmao, citing Fox as some kind of credible source on anything, smdh.
- Comment on Google lays off hundreds of 'Core' employees, moves some positions to India and Mexico 6 months ago:
Clever human!
- Comment on "Severe geomagnetic storm" may hit Earth today: Everything you need to know 6 months ago:
High point of the solar cycle, best time for auroras :)
- Comment on Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT 6 months ago:
For years, the site had a standing policy that prevented the use of generative AI in writing or rewording any questions or answers posted. Moderators were allowed and encouraged to use AI-detection software when reviewing posts. Beginning last week, however, the company began a rapid about-face in its public policy towards AI.
I listened to an episode of The Daily on AI, and the stuff they fed into to engines included the entire Internet. They literally ran out of things to feed it. That's why YouTube created their auto-generated subtitles - literally, so that they would have more material to feed into their LLMs. I fully expect reddit to be bought out/merged within the next six months or so. They are desperate for more material to feed the machine. Everything is going to end up going to an LLM somewhere.
- Comment on How do people actually dumpster dive to get free food? Are there any other cheap/free ways like this to get food? 6 months ago:
I hate to refer you back there, but there's a dumpster diving subreddit.
And I don't know what the schedule in the UK is, but here in the States, people are moving out of their dorms for the summer. If the schedule is the same and you can get over to your local university or college or whatever, you may be able to score not just food, but other things that people just don't have the energy/ability to drag home.
A friend of mine used to offer end-of-termers $10 for their mini-fridges, clean them up in his shed over the summer, then sell them to next year's freshers for $40-50. Even if you don't have a car, you might find some small stuff you can clean up and resell.
- Comment on xkcd #2927: Alphabetical Cartogram 6 months ago:
As always, things at the end of the alphabet get shafted. They should do one on reverse alphabetical order.
- Comment on So we currently have all these left wing folks claiming men are more dangerous than bears, why is the same group pushing multi gender washrooms so hard? 6 months ago:
Troll OP is trollish, news at eleven. Bye, Felicia!
- Comment on Google lays off hundreds of 'Core' employees, moves some positions to India and Mexico 6 months ago:
Even during the height of the pandemic, a friend of mine found a 'reason' that they had to be in the office one day each week (usually Friday, because almost no one else was there on Fridays). Their reasoning was, "If I can do my job entirely from the comfort of my own living room, there's nothing that would prevent the company from hiring someone to do my job from the comfort of their own living room, in India or the Philippines."
- Comment on Tesla to lay off everyone working on Superchargers, new vehicles 6 months ago:
Well, this can only end well ...
- Comment on Terrifying reality of what airport security could actually see through an X-ray machine 6 months ago:
It's UniLad, what were you expecting?
- Comment on Open letter to the spammer 6 months ago:
Cool, an open reason to block your account.
- Comment on Does anyone remember that unsettling image of the creepy blue faced man? 7 months ago:
The blue Fugates or Paul Karason?
- Comment on What if you swam in a nuclear storage pool? | xkcd What If? 7 months ago:
What I keep thinking is: he's already done the technical research, then condensed everything down to a (usually) easily understandable, thought provoking, (often) 4-panel artistic comic - basically all the really hard stuff.
Remember all those fucking annoying YouTube channels, where the "creator" would just grab posts and comments from /bestof or /goodlongposts, or top-voted stuff from /aitah, etc, and then they'd just have a robotic voice read the content and they were getting all these views even though they weren't actually doing anything creative?
I'd rather he get any YouTube money from his actual effort, than some sketchy YouTube "creator" - because you know the only reason there isn't a channel for it yet is that no one's thought of it yet.
- Comment on How do animals react during a total solar eclipse? Scientists plan to find out in April 8 months ago:
There's also Eclipse Soundscapes, a citizen-science project by NASA.
- Comment on Judge rules YouTube, Facebook and Reddit must face lawsuits claiming they helped radicalize a mass shooter | CNN Business 8 months ago:
I agree with you, but ... I was on reddit since the Digg exodus. It always had it's bad side (violentacrez, jailbait, etc), but it got so much worse after GamerGate/Ellen Pao - the misogyny became weaponized. And then the alt-right moved in, deliberately trying to radicalize people, and we worked so. fucking. hard to keep their voices out of our subreddits. And we kept reporting users and other subreddits that were breaking rules, promoting violence and hatred, and all fucking spez would do is shrug and say, "hey it's a free speech issue", which was somewhere between "hey, I agree with those guys" and "nah, I can't be bothered".
So it's not like this was something reddit wasn't aware of (I'm not on Facebook or YouTube). They were warned, repeatedly, vehemently, starting all the way back in 2014, that something was going wrong with their platform and they need to do something. And they deliberately and repeatedly choose to ignore it, all the way up to the summer of 2021. Seven fucking years of warnings they ignored, from a massive range of users and moderators, including some of the top moderators on the site. And all reddit would do is shrug it's shoulders and say, "hey, free speech!" like it was a magic wand, and very occasionally try to defend itself by quoting it's 'hate speech policy', which they invoke with the same regular repetitiveness and 'thoughts and prayers' inaction as a school shooting brings. In fact, they did it in this very article:
In a statement to CNN, Reddit said, “Hate and violence have no place on Reddit. Our sitewide policies explicitly prohibit content that promotes hate based on identity or vulnerability, as well as content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or group of people. We are constantly evaluating ways to improve our detection and removal of this content, including through enhanced image-hashing systems, and we will continue to review the communities on our platform to ensure they are upholding our rules.”
As someone who modded for a number of years, that's just bullshit.
- Comment on Reddit: Return Of The Junk Stock IPO 8 months ago:
I think the company may never monetize its platform without angering its users and the entire premise of Reddit is user-generated content.
Yep.
Also - reddit spends 55% of it's budget on R&D?! WTAF!?!
- Comment on Christians think gay people are trying to convert them to being gay *because Christians try to convert people to being Christian*. 8 months ago:
I think it's more that "these people" didn't used to 'exist' in their world: Sexual minorities weren't talked about and were invisible for the most part. But since Stonewall and AIDS, LGBT+ people first decided and then learned not to hide themselves. Suddenly someone who you thought of as normal has 'become' gay. You obviously knew them well, it's not possible they were hiding something from you, and there's no chance your observations were incorrect - clearly, instead of you being wrong, something happened to them, something 'turned them gay' - it must have been the frogs, or music, or DnD, or something, it's just impossible you were wrong!
- Comment on AI companies are violating a basic social contract of the web and and ignoring robots.txt 9 months ago:
sigh. Of course they are ...
- Comment on Consumer confidence in current economic conditions 9 months ago:
I love how they say "High inflation" when they really mean "massive corporate profits".
- Comment on The hospital administrators are starting a meeting and "you need to leave" 9 months ago:
Do the administrators not have meeting rooms of their own, that they have to chuck out patient's families?
- Comment on YSK Various Reference Sites 9 months ago:
I'm going to toss in:
Vote411.org, the site was established and is run by the League of Women Voters, an organization that has worked for over a century in registering voters, providing voter information, and advocating for voting rights. They provide information about the candidates and their stances on different issues. A candidate may choose not the provide answers to their standardized questions, but then I would question what the candidate is trying to hide.
ISideWith: answer a bunch of multiple-choice questions about your values, goals and opinions, and they'll tell you how well each candidate 'matches' your opinions. There are often additional questions if you'd like to refine your stance beyond the original options given.
- Comment on Social networks are getting stingy with their data, leaving third-party developers in the lurch 9 months ago:
Fuck spez.
- Comment on What were some of your favourite Australian TV shos?w 9 months ago:
That whole era of Police Rescue / Water Rats was such a good time for TV!
- Comment on Samsung purposely knives customer's TV to weasel out of repair 9 months ago:
I haven't watched the video. In another thread, someone pointed out that this is generally something they do after they've agreed to ship out a free replacement tv.
- Comment on Former PM Gordon Brown slams ‘obscene’ levels of destitution in the UK, criticises ministers for ‘moral outrage’ of ‘systematically shredding’ social security system 9 months ago:
Bit rich, coming from him.
- Comment on xkcd #2888: US Survey Foot 9 months ago:
- Comment on Inventor of NTP protocol that keeps time on billions of devices dies at age 85 9 months ago:
It's from Wikipedia. It's nice to see he was still working in 2005 - I suspect this was taken at University of Delaware.
- Comment on Cable Firms to FTC: We Shouldn’t Have to Let Users Cancel Service With a Click 9 months ago:
“Three out of four of the cable and broadband customers who called to cancel end up retaining some or all service after speaking with an agent.”
Because threatening to leave is the only way to get a half-decent price?
