Nope! My company is private after getting bought last year and they are definitely fucking it up with “ai all the things” and “ai makes us more human” and strip mining out our actual work culture and replacing it with an even more soulless grind

Yeah, here to say, as bad as my childhood bullying was, the adults are worse.

They’re the ones who, in the background, were creating the circumstances for this by talking shit about you or instilling within their kids a bloodthirsty competitiveness that only lets them see others as targets.

And in the foreground, letting the kids who instigate the bullying, especially when it gets physical, get away as the victims - by equally enforcing punishment & loudly saying that you’re both at fault, or just punishing the kid being bullied only for fighting back.

In K-12 in the US? Yeah. I’ve been bullied past that too, but K-12 was the worst of it.

• I had to leave my kindergarten class due to someone who was acting out. We became good friends in school bc we ended up being into the same nerdy things, but he had bullied me a ton until about 6th grade when it became just joking instead of bullying. He credibly threatened to kill his wife a few couple years ago, whom we both grew up with. I’m still processing this in therapy.
• I remember once one of the people who hated my guts growing up, I accidentally walked into him because our class was crowding and I mistook how much space I had. He pushed me to the ground and said, “stay away from me, faggot”. I’ve brought this up in therapy more than once.
• Everyone in my class picked up I was gay before I did. I had to fight it a lot, because when I wasn’t fighting against the bullying from it, it was worse. I even went as far as starting a rumor that the guy I was sleeping with was sexually assaulting me, because he was a giant piece of shit to me & bullied me a lot too and it was socially convenient. He wasn’t really affected because he’s mostly straight and was just using me to get his dick sucked, while I thought I had romantic feelings for him (and didn’t realize they were that). I’m still processing this in therapy.
• At some point someone started a rumor that I was a pedophile in 10th grade. Being a minor myself, I didn’t understand this, but I think it was a rumor from my work with middle schoolers cub scout group. I haven’t discussed this in therapy.
• In college, I had my ability to trust people on the basis of religion shattered in a Bible study. I got brought into a group that I thought was good, but as I started developing relationships, we had a session where the leader of the group singled me out during a “share your favorite passages” section and just completely railed into me, saying things that invalidated my choice and trying to put me in my place by arguing against my interpretation of its meaning. I’m agnostic now, even though I have a great relationship with my childhood church. I’m still processing this in therapy, it comes up quite often.

This is all just top of my mind, and there’s a lot more, but hopefully it gets across - being bullied is something that can affect you for your whole life. I’m in my mid 30s now. I’ve been treated for depression, and gone in and out of therapy since I was 20. It’s pretty easy to say being bullied fucked me up a lot.

At least I’m better than I was before starting therapy. That’s all I can really say.

that’s the one i settled on!

I’ll check em out, thanks

two minutes, wow

i knew a director of eng from axon for a while. he tried to exploit my husband’s stalled career to get him to work on racial profiling ai. last i heard he got divorced (due to his abuse), tried to hide money from her, and ran away to vietnam to set up an office. used to brag being related to famous mafia people. weird company, weird leaders.

It’s all good

So if you’re worried about that, shouldn’t you rather just not post that stuff to the public?

To me this feels like the same logic as “If you have nothing to hide, why do you care?”

I mean, you’re right, people shouldn’t post stuff publicly if they truly don’t want it to be indexed, but that doesn’t mean that whatever we want to say or do publicly can’t be used against us in some way even if we think that what we say and do is ok. Like existing while being queer online, for instance

If someone wants the ability to control how their data is used, it should be their right.

Who gets to survey the data? There are companies and governments who stand to profit of our existence being thrown into their machines.

There is a violence in that I still haven’t figured out how to describe, but people lose their lives over this stuff. That should be enough to warrant such a right

That’s fantastic news, glad to hear it

It’s better than phpbb for sure. Much easier to manage updates since it uses docker.

It’s honestly pretty hard to set up though, they don’t have great docs on it imo, but once it’s running it seems pretty good.

I like how customizable it is - you can change a lot of functions, and while I haven’t done much modding yet, it is nice that it has proper modding support- i added a dice roller and was able to modify it pretty easily.

I think my main complaint is that there’s some assumptions about use - for instance, you can only have a single draft at a time (there’s a workaround- dm yourself your drafts) and there isn’t great multi-account support, which makes it hard if you’re doing character-based writing or just want to have different posting profiles - ive been trying for a while to find something like pluralkit for it but it just doesn’t exist i think.

Overall, pretty decent. I thought to myself, I could actually see myself replacing discord with this, outside of voice chat

anyone remember when it was intentional that search wasn’t a thing and people defederated from instances that catalogued other instances’ posts for search? just me?

started up a discourse forum recently and it’s definitely better than my historic experiences with running phpbb

i know someone i used to work with who went there because he was effectively their employee bc of how much he contributed via open source and in community

capitalism bullshit strikes again

hi nora!!! i miss it too but i’ve found that keeping up with specific groups of people is more fun and keeps me less stressed than being subjected to Algorithm, so keep doing what you’re doing where i see ya elsewhere!!! sometimes it helps to make space in those communities for talking about news but make sure you aren’t just subjecting others to awful stuff just cuz it’s happening- be more intentional with what you share, make sure what you share has purpose beyond just “keeping others informed” cuz that’s just the friendship equivalent of doom scrolling. hope it helps!