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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • If Poland were to suddenly surrender to Germany, everything would be “much better,” at least according to Donald Trump.

    During an afternoon press conference Wednesday, the Republican presidential nominee urged the Eastern European nation to submit to the foreign power, claiming that any deal, no matter how dismal for Poland’s freedom, would have been better than the current state of affairs.

    Poland is gone. It’s not Poland anymore. You can never replace those cities and towns, and you can never replace the dead people, so many dead people,” Trump said. “Any deal, even the worst deal, would have been better than what we have right now.

    It’s scary how few words I had to replace to make that work. Appeasement of a genocidal dictator does not have a good historical track record.


  • That’s what high beams are for… Cars don’t need to light the dark side of the moon, drivers only need to see the roadway in front of them. Both provide ample illumination, it’s just one allows you to see the color of a zit on a mouse 3 miles away, which is entirely not necessary for safe night driving.

    And I was saying that some higher end incandescent lamps are equivalent to some LEDs. I know there are LEDs that far exceed the lumens of traditional lamps.


  • I agree that she should be more clear on demanding a ceasefire (although she did actually partly demand just that in March, at least for 6 weeks - and again during the debate), and that this war could probably be stopped if she made such demands. The current US administration is working to end the fighting, so not voting for the party that is actually working to end the war is at the detriment to the people of Gaza.

    US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said two weeks ago that 90 percent of a ceasefire deal had been agreed upon.

    Washington has been working for months with mediators Qatar and Egypt to try and bring Israel and Hamas to a final agreement.

    Biden laid out a three-phase ceasefire proposal on May 31 saying that Israel had agreed to it.

    20 Sep 2024, Al Jazeera

    Now compare that to Trump:

    “From the start, Harris has worked to tie Israel’s hand behind its back, demanding an immediate ceasefire, always demanding ceasefire,” Trump said, adding it “would only give Hamas time to regroup and launch a new October 7 style attack.” Trump added: “I will give Israel the support that it needs to win but I do want them to win fast.”

    So he would basically allow a full scale genocide, no holds barred.

    That being said though, this is likely not going to end anytime soon due to the massive pager/radio attack on Hezbollah that’s likely going to make this whole quagmire even worse. And I 100% agree with you that the US/Kamala/Biden should put Israel in it’s place before this whole powder keg turns into WWIII, which is not outside the realm of possibilities to anyone who has studied history and the role multiple global conflicts played in the past to lead to world war.


  • It seems to me like we didn’t have this problem twenty years ago. If blinding LEDs are the problem, why not just not allow them anymore for headlights? It takes 5 seconds to pop in a new incandescent headlight on cars that have them, and well made ones can last 20+ years depending on the construction. Visibility is good and equivalent to some LEDs with higher end lamps, and it doesn’t create a superbly unnatural light that impairs the other drivers, pedestrians, or nature. It would also reduce light pollution.

    On very rare occasion, the progressive step forward, actually looks a lot like the road backwards. It would take a long time to implement, but anything worth doing is worth taking the time to do it right.

    Auto sensing technology is going to be more of a glaring headache in 20 years, when you have half of the cars with failing sensors and everyone getting blinded even worse. Adaptive Driving Beams (ADB) are not a solution, it does not properly address the issues of glare, and it will likely only make the problem worse by further removing human interaction from headlight controls.




  • No one cares about this stuff but techies/Lemmy. Regular people don’t care, like at all. They know tech companies do this stuff but if convenience>privacy, most people take the former every time to make life easier. Data privacy is not a tangeable thing in most people’s minds.

    There would have to be some sort of cataslismic event to wake people up enough for people to do anything meaningful. I don’t know what that would be, but I hope someone figures that out sooner rather than later.







  • The answer is obviously as everyone has pointed out already is enshittification.

    Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification. (Cory Doctorow)

    Profit = enshittification. It’s guaranteed as long as profit is a motive.

    An interesting concept is the idea of a distributed social web. It was the concept me, and probably a LOT of other redditors, were looking at last year, but it seems no such thing really exists. The idea that everyone’s home computer (or mobile device nowadays) could act as the client and the server. Perhaps using a firefox addon of some sort.

    Do any software devs (ok that’s like 90% of lemmy, lol) know if any existing projects are trying to do this? It does not seem like an unfeasible thing, and it wouldn’t have to grow overnight, it could possibly just be a feature in an existing addon that allows communication directly between users. No centralized servers of any sort. Distributed communication without central control. Is this possible?

    The existing social media companies own the world (literally), and they can maintain this control because they can buy out competitors. You can’t buy out 5 billion people though, so if people had the tools available to host their own web; and it was as easy as installing a firefox browser addon, a true democracy could exist like the world has never seen.


  • laverabe@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldBluesky continues to soar
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    24 days ago

    thank you for the link, it was an interesting read. I really like the idea of using a web browser, like firefox or a fork of it, as a basis point for a distributed social web.

    I don’t really understand how it would do that but it is a very interesting idea. I guess since firefox is open source anyone could create this ability. Is there a discussion about this somewhere on the web? Lemmy is a good a place as any as it’s too unimportant and tiny right now ;)


  • laverabe@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldBluesky continues to soar
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    25 days ago

    The nice thing about Lemmy is that it doesn’t have celibrities and NBA players. It’s (mostly) honest discussion for the most part, sure you have a lot of people who getting angry but at least it’s not like reddit or Facebook or whatever where you never know if a post/comment is real or a paid advertisement. Yeah it’d get more reach, more people, more popularity with thread integration, but there would also be more people. …eternal September . It would be guaranteed to happen. Like you said, it’s about marketing. Once Lemmy has more than a few thousand people, marketers are gonna do the same thing they did to reddit. …destroy it. Yeah the shareholders are making out, but it’s value is gone.

    I started on reddit in 2008, and Lemmy is a mirror image of what the community looked like back then. You don’t need inorganic growth to grow Lemmy. It just needs quality discussions and people, the organic growth will come naturally. The only thing that needs protection against is ‘linking’ with any for profit entity.

    Connecting with threads and bluesky and whatever else would grow Lemmy, but for what purpose? I’d argue Lemmy isn’t the end solution, maybe the devs can evolve it to work over the long term, but really I think if a social media solution is really going to tackle Facebook et al, it’s going to have to be self hosted servers on every computing device in the world; where no government or organization can control, regulate, and most importantly one that cannot be manipulated for gain of a nation state or corporation.

    I know of no such software, but I have a feeling such a solution would be superior to the fediverse in taking down the existing social media cartels.





  • I’d argue it’s because citizens have no voice. The media has there corporate narrative, but the public interest has very few organizations in advocacy of it.

    Support local journalism (financially), work to break any media control on the narrative.

    The first thing people could start doing is stop providing free labor to the media. It’s all over Lemmy.

    Don’t link to a corporate news outlet. Link to an .edu or PBS or NPR or a quality international publicly funded news organization. Or better yet build your own narrative, your own opinions. Discuss your opinions respectfully on !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world . Build momentum and take away the corporate medias control.

    Without a public voice advocating for the people, it will be very hard to change any legislation in the peoples favor.