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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • Technically this is already the law (in the US at least). And while Churches are generally careful about not donating, the rallying thing gets bent quite often. Arguments I’ve heard are generally of “free speech” and/or “churches are above the law, and we shouldn’t bind God to the laws of man.” Occasionally there are high-profile cases where the IRS does go after a church for boldly breaking the law, but it’s rare.


  • But what qualifies as social media? We can all probably agree that Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, etc. count, but what about say Discord or WhatsApp? How about browsing older forums (like open ones where you don’t need an account to read them)? What about news articles or blogs with a comment section? Is a wiki social media? Depending on how you define it, the majority of the internet could be considered social media.

    Plus there are plenty of sites that just won’t ever bother to try to comply. For example, I live in one of the more stupid states in the US that has required age verification for porn sites, PornHub has complied by just blocking their site in the state with a notice that they won’t implement a system like that for privacy reasons. But they and their sister sites are the only ones I’ve seen that have bothered to make any changes. The same will inevitably happen with social media. You’re just going to push kids to shadier corners of the internet that don’t care about laws, and they’re gonna end up radicalized by nazis, or taken advantage of in worse ways.

    The whole problem is parents who don’t want to be parents and tell their kids they can’t have a smartphone. And I get that the dumbphone market is kinda limited, and that some parents just don’t care what their kids are exposed to. But trying to fix this problem by changing the internet is never going to work. The only way to fix the problem is to have a spine and make appropriate changes IRL - like banning smartphones for underaged kids in school, or show your full distopian side and prosecute parents who let their kids use social media.


  • Yeah, check lists in Notes could really use some improvement for sure. Honestly, just now looking through the Github for the Android Nextcloud Notes app it looks like there’s a good deal of technical debt that has been stacking up over time from trying to bring more modern features to what started as a minimal text-only notes app.

    There is a way to enable “grid view” in the app settings for the more post-it view that shows the first part of the contents, but doesn’t seem to show on notes with markdown formatting, so anything with a list doesn’t show a preview.





  • Also bombing Yemen is a presidential tradition that every president in the past 25 years has done. Yes, Trump probably bombed them more in his first term than all his predecessors combined, but no matter what kind of president is in office, American’s are very normalized to hearing that the president bombed Yemen. And because they are generally just periodic attacks, it gets hard to keep up the push to get the government to stop because the answer is always “well, we’re done now anyway, national security reasons, bla bla bla.”

    So instead Americans vote for candidates who say they’re going to get us out of foreign wars, which Trump knows to do on the campaign trail, and he talks about it more than any other candidate and people keep believing him, even though he’s lied before.


  • The thing is, I think our attention spans are too cooked to be overwhelmed like that anymore. A new crisis every 20 minutes? I can get through 40+ tiktok videos in that time, and half of them will be about something they are trying to terrify with (trans rights, science defunding, bird flu, racism, palestine, the oligarchy, luigi, etc.)

    The old media can’t keep up, but I’m in my mid-thirties and even my old brain can handle being pulled in dozens of directions and still think about/remember Luigi, unprompted, multiple times a day.






  • Same, but I’ve also seen a bunch of people both on Reddit and Bluesky say they don’t like Lemmy because the interface feels dated, “like Reddit 10 years ago.”

    To each their own I guess. But maybe there should be an instance that sets their default theme to something that feels more modern so those who want a simpler, less usable, experience can easily have that too.

    And yeah, they’d probably become the new instance everyone complains about for being too “normie” but if we actually want the fediverse to catch on and take down corporate-owned social media, we are eventually gonna have to appeal to every part of those sites’ user bases.



  • I saw a tiktok of a Brit talking about this with the upcoming ban in the US, and he made an interesting point. The Americans who can afford to travel and take time off work, are more often the ones who have lived privileged lives, and as a result act more entitled than the average American. He commented how interacting with regular Americans on tiktok changed his perception of what they are like, because only interacting with the tourists makes it seem like there’s a higher percentage of entitled a-holes.




  • This article seems more written from the perspective that AI is bad because it doesn’t work. And while I don’t know what kind of Photographer this was who had this happen to him - maybe he’s just a hobbyist - so I’m trying not to judge him too harshly.

    But as someone who went to school for photography (technically cinematography but we still did all the photography classes the school offered), it bothers me that the art of even doing your own edits in photoshop is being replaced by lazy use of AI. Why give up control of your art, and turn it over to a guessing machine?

    Anyway, probably just having an old-man yells at cloud moment, but real artists who use “professional” software like this don’t want the AI in there either. It’s not a tool I’d ever want to use.