I wish I had the energy to more meaningfully reply to your excellent comment. However, I am a cripple suffering burn out, so I lack the wherewithal to articulate what I want to say.

In lieu of a better comment, please accept my sympathy and solidarity. Being angry like this can feel unpleasant given how powerless we feel against systemic discrimination, but nevertheless, I am glad to see this impassioned rant — better to impotently rage against the system than to internalise it and blame ourselves for our own marginalisation.

Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives More Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Even More Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives All the Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives Knives

I am glad that he tried to assassinate 418, because the massive outcry that led to 418 being saved is something wholesome that I love.

Link with context for anyone unfamiliar with the context: https://save418.com/

Fun videos; thanks for sharing

I miss brightly coloured cars. A friend has an old, bright yellow car that probably won’t last for much longer, and they are sad that newer cars are much duller.

Something that I have enjoyed recently are blogs by academics, which often have a list of other blogs that they follow. Additionally, in their individual posts, there is often a sense of them being a part of a wider conversation, due to linking to other blogs that have recently discussed an idea.

I agree that the small/slow web stuff is more useful for serendipitous discovery rather than searching for answers for particular queries (though I don’t consider that a problem with the small/slow web per se, rather with the poor ability to search for non-slop content on the modern web)

With respect to the presentation of your site, I like it! It’s quite stylish and displays well on my phone.

When you get to silly levels of wealth, it’s less about the money and more about power. You’re right that £3000/hr is an absurd amount to spend, and that suggests that they value the power they have within this inhumane system more than the monetary cost of private security.

It’s baffling to me how customisable some fruit features can be. I know someone who works in plant genomics and cultivation and it’s really cool how they can use genomic analysis alongside selective breeding to select for traits. I imagine that imported papayas are cultivars that are easier to transport internationally.

I agree. I replied to Kris elsewhere saying this, but I am super glad to have been a part of this instance because it feels like a nice balance of being large enough to be robust and diverse, but small enough to have a distinctive culture. I don’t often interact with the communities that were on the instance, but I always enjoy seeing my peers crop up in the comments of various posts — it’s one of my favourite parts of Lemmy being federated (db0 is another example of an instance that has such a distinctive vibe that seeing it as someone’s instance is often useful metadata that affects how I parse their comment)

(speaking as a slrpnk user): Another backup communication strategy (once things are backup) might be to designate somewhere on a non-slrpnk instance as a place where people can check for updates if things go down; when I first discovered the outage, I wasn’t sure where to go to check for info/updates.

Unrelatedly, I hope that this unexpected outage isn’t causing you or other admins too much stress. Whilst the extended nature of this outage is unfortunate, I respect that you’re using this as an opportunity to migrate to a more robust solution. This kind of resilience focussed response is a key part of the solarpunk ethos, in my view.

Some people have said that such a long outage seems likely to kill an instance, but for my part, this community is worth waiting for — I have enjoyed having an account on this instance because it feels like the perfect blend of small enough to have a distinct culture and ethos, but is large enough to be robust and diverse.

I really appreciate iFixit and how they help bring the discussion of repairability to the forefront.

There’s not a straightforward answer to this because it’s far too context dependent, and even a CEO at a small company won’t have absolute control over the culture of that company; I’ve seen company culture turn from amazing to toxic after losing only a couple key employees (good managers are gold dust).

To draw a comparison: staff pizza parties are so widely scoffed at not because people hate pizza, but because, when set against a backdrop of employees not actually being respected or valued, it makes them feel worse. Good will can’t be bought, whether by pizza, extra days off, or field trips. Some of those things can help, but much more important is the cumulative culture that’s built at the company.

Most decisions like discretionarily giving someone time off to look after family are going to be made at a level lower than CEO. Sometimes great policy ideas arise from a great manager using their discretion to make a sensible call, and then going “maybe we could put [idea] in place for future”.

One of my favourite things is the one-paragraph short story “On Exactitude in Science”:

On Exactitude in Science Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.

" …In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography."

Source: https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/08/bblonder/phys120/docs/borges.pdf

The anti-benefits rhetoric is fucking dystopian. When I highlight the harms of making vulnerable people jump through hoops to get basic support, people often respond that it’s a necessary evil to prevent “scroungers and cheats” claiming benefits.

The minuscule number of people committing fraud is a large part of why I oppose this, but I would feel the same if there were 100x more fraudulent claims than there is now. Fundamentally, there are always going to be people who slip through the gaps, and the only choice we have is whether we’d rather that involve: disabled people and other vulnerable groups not accessing support they need; or people getting away with fraud and getting money they aren’t entitled to. For me, the choice is obvious, because I think by sacrificing vulnerable people’s wellbeing to prevent fraud is absurd when the entire point of the system is to help those vulnerable people. It undermines the whole concept — though I imagine that for many politicians, undermining it is the point

An interesting component here is that it’s possible that the video creator is responsible for this silly level of ads, but it’s impossible to know. Creators can select points in the video where ads will happen, which they can use to preserve the video’s flow as much as possible. In theory, you can even select to not monetise your video at all, which is a useful tool if the topic is something particularly dense or sensitive. In practice, I’ve seen plenty of creators apologizing when an inappropriate ad plays at a sensitive part of the video, despite them having tried to disable ads on the video. It must suck to have so little power over one’s own work.

In your case, I suspect this was a creator choosing to maximally monetise their video, given the regularity and number of ads. However, it’s possible that this is a 100% “Fuck Google” situation, given how opaque they are. I find it frustrating that when we have poor experiences like yours, we don’t even have a clear target to get angry at. It leads to accountability so diffuse that it’s like homeopathy. Getting angry doesn’t necessarily help change things (at least individually), but it can be incredibly cathartic even then

It often does, yeah. Not always though. I got one of the adblock warnings last night, and it refused to play the video. I fixed it by heading into ublock settings and manually updating. It always makes me laugh how rapidly the ad-blocker arms war progresses