Sure. There’s a rather vibrant writers’ community, plenty of visual artists (including photography that isn’t just cats and hiking), and the endless political shit.

You don’t get as much of the random people running their mouths though.

The key to Mastodon is the # curation over time. Search your interests, use the hashtags to set up your feed, and only use the full federated feed to find terms you didn’t think to search for, or that aren’t obviously connected to your interests.

As an example, if you’re a writer, you’ll obviously follow something lunge #writing, but you might not find #pennedpossibilities, or #writerscoffeeclub by searching, despite them being active prompt based groups that end up having a lot of good interactions between writers (casual, amateurs, and pros).

Tbh, the least represented segment is the typically nerdy stuff. Much more prevalent on lemmy. There’s plenty there, it just isn’t as common as other segments.

It’s easy when you use the same password for encoding everything.

Well, it’s one of those things where you either learn to compartmentalize, or you quit fast.

I moderated forums back in the early days of the internet. It was rough some days, to the point I had someone show up at my house because I wouldn’t let them abuse other users.

I moderated on reddit, and it was both easier and worse. People like to complain, but automod being able to filter out so much of the worst without having to see it at all made the job bearable. If I’d had to wade through the bigotry, the worst slurs, and similar stuff that a well crafted automod rule could magic away, I wouldn’t have done it at all.

But the fact that you have to constantly adjust the automod to catch up with the most persistent assholes is draining.

And that’s not getting into the stuff that isn’t hate speech, misogyny, bigotry, and that kind of infection. People think they can say anything they want, any way they want, and you stopping them means you’re the asshole, even after that went on a rant about fucking someone’s wife and kids (seriously, that’s a ban I had to make) because someone didn’t agree with their opinion of a flashlight. Seriously, that fucking happened.

Point being that while there are mods that go too far, the internet, and places like reddit or lemmy, would be unbearable without it. There has to be someone making those calls, keeping things from turning into the non stop scroll of venom and porn that used to be way too common back in the day.

This is why I’ve started blasting the fuck out of every one of them. You do enough cursing and insulting, they tend to actually stop texting and calling. I got sick of having to tell them to fucking stop the spam, which didn’t work. But, amazingly, after a few days of going batshit on every one of them, they’ve stopped almost entirely. No texts at all in three days for me, though my wife and dad still get them.

Unless I misread, the point isn’t leaving bad reviews, it’s making fake good reviews for a chain restaurant.

The way it’s being done is intended to stymie outsiders from crowding out locals.

Now, I agree that it is going to make competition harder for the non-chain restaurants the fake reviews are supposed to be isolating from tourist and traveller customers. It’s still a shitty move that hurts the local businesses. But it isn’t the same thing as actively trying to tank them. It’s a quibble about wording though, not a disagreement with your actual point.

I’m way less worried about bluesky as opposed to threads. If anything, it serves as a healthy competitor to mastodon in terms of how it would require a bridge to interact. You have to go out of your way to make it happen.

But threads is pulling a EEE, and it’s obvious that’s the goal.

That it started out enshittified, and things can only get worse with VC being involved deeper.

Well, I dunno if that’s what they meant, but that sure as heck is the reality of it

Well, considering that some of those knives would sell for a few hundred, and include irreplaceable antiques, I’ll err on the side of caution, thank you.

Fwiw, my kid is trained. They’ve been doing martial arts with me for years, when my body lets me. They were part of the small class I was teaching for a while too. Dunno if martial arts as a hobby is that esoteric or not, but it is something I’ve done since my twenties, and I’m fifty now.

And, really, compared to shit like funko (funco? I can’t remember how it’s spelled), at least knives have history and aren’t made of plastics that fuck up the environment.

But, my dude, for someone “friendly ribbing”, you’re really fucking snarky about mentioning me having kids. That crosses a line, you dig? So, if you really were just playing, and not being a douche on purpose, maybe avoid that kind of joke in the future, it’s such am asshole thing to say. I’m choosing to assume the best here, that you think snarky “ribbing” with or about a stranger to someone other than that person is friendly in any way, instead of assuming you’re only being a dick. But, you know, if it walks like a dick and quacks like a dick, it might just be a dick ;)

No, it’s a matter of safety.

I have kids visit that range from toddlers to almost adult. Kids do stupid shit when they get any time to do so. So, they stay in my case and locked up.

Did you never run across some kid where they’d carve shit into trees, or furniture, or whatever kind of silliness crossed their mind? I never did it with knives, but I did plenty of other stupid shit with things that you wouldn’t imagine a kid doing something stupid with. But my dumb ass liked seeing what happened when you mix bottles of stuff together. Some of which, had I been stupid enough to do it inside would have been way worse than it was.

Would my kid fuck with the knives? Probably not, they’ve been drilled on how to use knives in the kitchen, and in martial arts, so I think they’d at least be respectful enough of my knives not to fuck with them at all. But other people’s kids? You get a ten year old bored at a gathering, and it’s just better to keep shit secured

Besides, the adults like to grab my really nice knives and do horrible things to them in the name of food prep lol. So even if it wasn’t something I do with every knife, the case would still be there, so it isn’t like there’s any extra hassle involved

Yeah, that’s not on the app/service.

Could the kid have found another way? Absolutely. But there’s a fucking reason guns stay locked up and out of access for minors, even if that means the adults can’t access them quickly. Kids literally can’t exert full self inhibition of urges, so you make damn sure that anything as easy to make horrible impulse decisions with is out of their hands.

Shit, my kitchen knives stay in a locked case. Same with dangerous chemicals. There’s a limit to how much you can realistically compartmentalize and keep locked up, but that limit isn’t hard to achieve to the degree that nobody can reach things on impulse. Even a toolbox with a padlock on it is enough to slow someone down and give their brain a chance to inhibit the impulse.

My policy? If the gun isn’t on my person, it’s locked up in a way that can only be accessed by the people I want to access it. Shit, even my pellet guns stay in the main safe. The two that are available for the other adults are behind fingerprint locks. Even my displayed collection of knives is locked up enough to prevent casual impulses.

I’m not trying to shit on the parents here, but it isn’t hard to keep a firearm locked up and still accessible to the owner rapidly. Fingerprint safes and locks have been around long enough that the bugs are worked out. They’re not cheap, but if you can afford a firearm in the first place, you can damn well afford keeping it out of someone else’s hands without your permission or a lot of hassle.

You know, I tried a lot of tactics to get the spam calls and texts to stop.

What ended up working so far is telling them that I’m sick of the spam, and that because of it, I’m staying home instead of voting.

Mind you, I’m lying, but they don’t need to know that. But it worked, so far. Haven’t gotten any in a few days now, and they were coming in multiples each day before that

Well, once you have a room full of long boxes, you kinda have to either become rich enough to build a new house with dedicated comic storage, or you start looking at digital.

Half joke aside (because good luck affording a house nowadays), reading comics digitally is actually very nice, but being able to have and store an entire published history of a comic on a single drive instead of taking up multiple boxes is too damn nice to ignore. And that’s assuming you’re paying for the digital version. If you pirate, the money issue is a major decrease in resources needed to enjoy comics. Hard to pirate physical copies of the very old and rare stuff, but easy to find digitally.

Someone needs to cook up a bot that flags every post on Twitter, Facebook, or reddit with a DCMA takedown.

Well yeah, but a hedgehog can never be buggered at all, so he should be happy

I mean, if you don’t mind solar cell production also taking a hit, yeah.

It isn’t going to doom the world or anything, but if the mines aren’t recoverable in a fairly short amount of time, it will put a major crimp in solar deployment. That includes driving up the price (which, unless we’re willing to kick off a revolution, is a major factor in a capitalist system) of solar right when it’s really starting to be so much cheaper than fossil fuels that it can be a big shift for energy.

Short term, it isn’t going to do anything at all. Even a few months would be a blip. But if the mines take much longer than that, it’s a big problem for everyone.

And, as an added problem, you’ve got the people that do the work now displaced. They’ll only be able to just sit idle for so long before they have to move on to other jobs, likely well away from the area. So you have a talent drain involved that can ripple out just as badly as the production drop for solar.

I don’t think anyone legitimately gives a fuck about the semiconductor makers taking a hit financially (well, assuming it doesn’t fuck the rest of us down the road too), but the “tech” industry isn’t just companies churning out the next GPU model or AI scam.

I’d almost bet money it’s the otterbox. If it’s one of their older models, I would bet a small amount that’s what it is if it could be an anonymous bet and a good way to confirm. I’ve had a few otterbox cases over the years, and the older ones always degrade and get sticky, and it transfers. Their newer ones and colored ones don’t (or haven’t yet anyway), but I’ve stopped buying them because of it.

You can’t fix it, you just have to toss the damn things.

Ikr? I can imagine the slightly surrealistic hands sticking to things

I agree, 404 is legit journalism. No org is perfect, but they’re as good as it gets.

Yeah, just search up right to repair farm equipment, just linking one or two articles won’t give you the scope of the problem the way seeing how much it has been covered, but not changed.

I got family that farms independent, and it’s pretty much the single biggest factor in profitability over time. Those machines can cost as much, or more, than a nice house, and you’re locked in to inflated service and parts costs.

Enraging doesn’t honestly do the problem justice.

This isn’t a “google it” thing, it’s really about actually seeing the search results first hand. We’re talking pages of hits going back decades.

Yeah, Ubuntu overall, but it depends on which version of each.

Windows 7, I’m so familiar with and have a collection of programs for without having to download anything, it would be fine for my needs, neither better or worse than Ubuntu. The only inherent improvement for my use case is the up to date security of a newer, supported OS.

I don’t game on pc currently because it just fucking hurts to sit in the chair long enough to play anything worth playing. I don’t do anything that requires Adobe products. That means Linux is going to be as good as an out of date windows on any version from the same time as when 7 lost support, and likely older versions too. There’s no functional difference in the kind of use I’d put either to. Again my use case.

So it comes down to security between versions.

Now, if I’m forced to pick between any more recent windows versions and any Ubuntu version, no way am I using windows unless it’s via VM. 8 was bad enough I wasn’t willing to move from 7. 10 jumped the shark and made me start using Linux to begin with. 11? Fuck no. Just no. Won’t do it. Won’t buy anything that has it and can’t be immediately loaded with something else.

However, canonical can fuck itself with snaps. Ubuntu works fine, I have no issues with anything other than snap really. I prefer mint w/cinnamon for my debian offspring, but that’s a different subject.

Ubuntu was the first distro I tried back when windows 10 came out and it became obvious what Microsoft was really trying to do. It was good enough that I dual booted with it and windows 7 for a long while, until I tried mint/cinnamon.

That computer still dual boots 7 and mint, it’s my media player. No internet connection, and whatever version of mint was on there when I got my newer box. I would have moved out to mint only, but musicbee. Can’t stand the available music players for Linux. I’ve tried them all over the years, and they can’t hold up to musicbee’s features. I also haven’t had success with the available ways to use musicbee on linux. I try every year or two though.