I also can’t stand the fact that smokers can take unlimited ‘breaks’ whenever they please just to come back stinking up an entire room with their smoke.

That feels like a workplace problem. Why would a workplace give them unlimited breaks? And why would nonsmokers not be allowed comparable breaks? This feels odd to me. My recent jobs have been ones where nobody is micromanaging my time, so anyone can take whatever breaks they want. As long as productivity doesn’t obviously suffer, nobody cares. My past jobs in retail didn’t allow smokers to take extra breaks. They’d get the same breaks as everyone else (for an 8 hour shift, that meant a 30 min lunch and 2 x 15 min coffee breaks).

Naw, I still use Google. With an ad blocker, I find it to provide the best results by far (though the ad blocker is important, because they get misleading ads sometimes). It’s superior when searching for descriptions (e.g., you can’t remember a movie title and have to describe it) and local results. Plus I use Maps heavily (it’s superior to its competitors) and that integrates into Google.

I just frankly don’t care that much about tracking my searches or the likes. I see it as the cost of getting a quality product for free. The only reason I even have the ad blocker is frankly because their ads are terrible. They don’t do enough to curate their ads, so scams sometimes slip in. I also think it’s very scummy that you can search, e.g., “pizza hut” and get an ad for Dominos above the Pizza Hut result.

The whole CSAM issue is why I’d never personally run an instance, nor any other kind of server that allows users to upload content. It’s an issue I have no desire to have to deal with moderating nor the legal risks of the content even existing on a server I control.

While I’d like to hope that law enforcement would be reasonable and understand “oh, you’re just some small time host, just delete that stuff and you’re good”, my opinion on law enforcement is in the gutter. I wouldn’t trust law enforcement not to throw the book at me if someone did upload illegal content (or if I didn’t handle it correctly). Safest to let someone else deal with that risk.

And even if you can win some case in court, just having to go to court can be ludicrously expensive and risk high impact negative press.

Of course, that’s understandable. But there’s too many people here that are interested in the reddit drama such that it ends up taking over many subs, drowning out other content.

It’s like how r/worldnews was created, because despite r/news being general, there was so many Americans that US news dominated the sub. We need to do the same with reddit drama IMO.

Strongly agreed. I view this as the biggest issue with LLMs. They will hallucinate a confidently incorrect answer for those cases. It makes them misinformation machines.

Tiktok is the absolute worst at irrational censorship. It’s a shame because the site is immensely popular and that means it is full of very interesting content. Yet, this is far from the first unreasonable thing they’ve been removing. It’s well known how Tiktok users came up with alternative words to circumvent words that were likely to get their content removed (e.g., “unalived” instead of “killed”).

Strongly agreed. I think a lot of commenters in this thread are getting derailed by their feelings towards Meta. This is truly a dumb, dumb law and it’s extremely embarrassing that it even passed.

It’s not just Meta. No company wants to comply with this poorly thought out law, written by people who apparently have no idea how the internet works.

I think most of the people in the comments cheering this on haven’t read the bill. It requires them to pay news sites to link to the news site. Which is utterly insane. Linking to news sites is a win win. It means Facebook or Google gets to show relevant content and the news site gets users. This bill is going to hurt Canadian news sites because sites like Google and Facebook will avoid linking to them.

It’s true. I’ve reported so many to the secret poop police. They’re always laughing at first like it’s not serious, up until they break down the bathroom door. Not so funny in a Montana gulag, is it?

Moderators of large subs are some of the the most addicted people to Reddit.

But that said, I can understand it. We have to remember that where features are concerned, we’re not even close to Reddit. The reason to migrate here is mostly an ideological one (from disagreement with the Reddit admins’ actions) and perhaps some future potential.

Reddit still has far more functionality, including vastly better modding tools (which are extremely lacking here – beehaw defederated from some of the biggest instances because they lacked any other tools for dealing with users), better uptime, vastly better UX (there’s soooo many meta posts every day from people confused by the poor UX), support for videos, larger communities, more developed apps (we only have early stage alphas here), etc. All these things are barriers that will make some users write off Reddit alternatives as simply not good enough (yet).

There’s lots of useful bots besides just summarizers. Reminder bots can be great. Some linkifying bots are also useful (like Marv in r/SCP). Bots can detect malicious spam bots. Subs like AITA use bots to tally up user votes. There’s bots for moderation actions, too.

But we really could use a way to get rid of the absolutely useless bots. We don’t need terrible spelling correcting bots, a bot whose sole purpose is to tell people not to put “the” in front of “Ukraine”, or a bot that lectures people on AMP links.

Same. I loved Chuck Norris jokes when I was younger, but it just became harder to enjoy them when learned what Chuck Norris was actually like.

The style of joke works better for people who are actually Chads. Like Keanu Reeves.

They’ve had one layoff, but have they had second layoff? – Merry (or Pipin? Idk the difference)

Who the hell wants whatever the alternative to stack overflow is?? I mean, what would that even be? Misleading Quora questions? Expertsexchange pages that give wrong answers and don’t let you view it without an account? Microsoft help forums where nobody even answers the question and the thread is just people complaining about the lack of answers? Old school forums where denver_coder12 just replies to his own question with “I fixed it”?

The pre stack overflow internet sucked ass.

I did some investigation into this in https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/199, but stopped short of actually fixing it or spinning up an instance to investigate further, as just didn’t really have the time and energy (and haven’t yet).

Fixing the ! links probably isn’t too hard, but I’m not one to try anything without being able to run it. And really there should be an alias for /c/. I haven’t used Symfony so can’t tell if it’s as easy as I hoped. I’ve had countless times where I thought something would be easy but it turned out hard and vice versa…

The phrasing I like is “crypto is a solution searching for a problem”.

Crypto enthusiasts start with the existence of crypto and try to fit it as a solution to some problems rather than trying to solve those problems without already having chosen the solution. The reasoning is often flimsy as a result. They’re not actually trying to solve a problem and thus won’t consider things like “how is this better than a centralized system?”.

I don’t think GDPR necessarily applies here, but I am not a lawyer. Quoting https://gdpr.eu/companies-outside-of-europe/:

Article 3.1 states that the GDPR applies to organizations that are based in the EU even if the data are being stored or used outside of the EU. Article 3.2 goes even further and applies the law to organizations that are not in the EU if two conditions are met: the organization offers goods or services to people in the EU, or the organization monitors their online behavior. (Article 3.3 refers to more unusual scenarios, such as in EU embassies.)

I’m not sure just what the definition of an organization is, so perhaps any server hosted within the EU is covered by the GDPR, but for servers outside of the EU that don’t have ads (which seems like all servers currently), I don’t think this would count. The example on the linked site about “goods and services” includes stuff like looking for ads tailored at European countries, so I suspect that simply serving traffic from Europe isn’t enough.

The website also mentions the GDPR applies to “professional or commercial activity”. There’s also apparently an exception for under 250 employees. I don’t even know how that works when something is entirely managed by volunteers like this currently is.

At any rate, I suspect we’re a long way off from having to worry about the GDPR.

Honestly, I kinda question how good of a time investment it is to try and allow deletion from the public facing parts of the internet, given the numerous places where your content will be cached or otherwise stored.

There is certainly some value in simply making it as hard as possible to find things you want to delete. Why let perfect be the enemy of good, after all. There’s plenty of types of content we certainly want to do our best at deleting even if we can’t be perfect. Eg, do you wanna be the one to tell a revenge porn victim, “sorry, we can’t make it harder to find the content that harms you because we can’t delete all of it anyway”?

But at the same time, development time is limited. Everything is a trade off. We do have to decide what is most important, because we can’t do it all immediately. The fact we can’t actually delete everything does have to be a factor in this prioritization, too.

There is something to be said about ensuring people know and understand that nothing can truly be 100% deleted once it’s posted on the internet. Not that Lemmy is doing good about that, either (especially since deleted comments apparently lie about being deleted).

All this said, I do think federated, reliable deletion is critical for illegal content. Such content needs to be removed quickly and easily from as many places as possible. Without this, instance owners are put at considerable legal risk. This risk poses a threat to the scalability of the Fediverse.

Agreed. I don’t see the point in trying to ban something before it exists and before we even know anything about how it would work. I get it, Meta has done some shit. But on the other hand, having such a big player in the Fediverse could be huge for its growth, especially since the Fediverse has a serious UX issue and UX is Meta’s strength.

I don’t really understand the privacy concerns. Just don’t use their instances? Have y’all seen how the Fediverse already works? Stuff like your votes are already public and that can’t be easily changed. And a nifty thing is that if Meta makes a product for the Fediverse that is federated, it’s just as easy for its users to migrate to another Fediverse platform if we find out Meta pulls some shit.

I love my smart lights. It’s convenient controlling my lights with my voice and setting up automation rules for them.

Yes, there’s some privacy concerns. Personally, I just assume it might happen and consider it worth it. Honestly, I just don’t really care much if Phillips knows when I turn my lights on. I mean, my neighbours can figure that out just by looking at my place.

Some bowling alleys have good food. There’s one big one in my city that has a gigantic Boston Pizza, arcade, escape rooms, and more all in one building. The Boston Pizza is great. They have solid food.