People behave very differently digitally compared to what they would do in person. It’s much easier to slam the door digitally and not having to explain why they did that. People are also insecure and do irrational shit, especially while dating. And some people will just troll you if isn’t a setup to defraud you. You just have to stop yourself from assuming best intentions from everybody.

Ghosting is just part of the ephemeral experience online now. In a way, people who ghost you do you a favor. They are not worth the effort.

Ich glaube beinahe, dass die Drogen-Anklage nur vorgeschoben ist!

… back button hijack is starting to rear its ugly head again.

Are you basing this statement on this alleged case alone? I don’t get any of this behavior on this page on Vivaldi. Another person has done more of a deep dive and also came up short.

You can describe yourself any way you like. It’s helpful to provide context, like you did here. Without it you may not be understood. So know who you’re speaking to and provide it, especially when puzzled faces stare back at you.

The Anerican political theater has twice as many viable parties as North Korea. Contrast that with virtually any other democracy where there are at least a handful of parties fighting to be in charge. That doesn’t mean though that you don’t have enough different opinions to fill a party-political spectrum like that in the US. The dominance of the two parties just forces most people under one of the big tent roofs. So you have more conservative Democrats (and there used to be more liberal Republicans) in the party that are bigger in relative numbers compared to what you’ll find in the social democrats in Germany (or among the conservatives in France). The Democrats are nominally the more left leaning party. But if you compared the party programs they would align more with the conservative parties of Scandinavia. Everything is further to the right in the US thanks largely to gun laws and lack of social security. And that explains why you have non-lefty people in the nominally lefty party. And while bigotry and hatred are certainly not a new thing, there is a culture that permeates down from the political leadership. And if name calling and pouring oil into the fire of social issues are the new MO, and admissions and convictions respectively of sexual assault don’t keep candidates out of office, many people feel they are now also allowed to say the quiet part out loud.

You are applying the thinking of wholly owned platforms and how to judge their success. They have to grab a sizable and hopefully growing number of users who keep coming back to be successful. Because they need the data from their users and/or their eyeballs on ads for commercial success. None of that applies to the fediverse really. It can grow as slowly as it wants to or not grow at all. As long as there is a small percentage of people who spend time and money to keep the instances going. This laced corsage of economical necessities is much tighter for a centrally hosted platform which will have a thirsty boardroom to answer to. Popularity isn’t so much the factor why reddit is/was more of a success, it is/was the quality of information others got from it and it definitely used to be the ease of getting to it. People who got pissed off at reddit will slowly add to our numbers here (or another iteration of a service like Lemmy) as the idea of becoming your own algorithm becomes more normal for the non-techy minded users as well. We’re playing a long game that we don’t even want to win.

Let’s be realistic and not console ourselves with rosy fantasies.

Let’s take the most pessimistic view instead and project we’ll all get plugged into the Matrix.

It’s not a foregone conclusion that so-called AI and automation will replace all of those jobs. It’s also not a foregone conclusion that all these people will be destitute because they cannot be put in other positions. This is not the first time we as humanity have faced this big a structural change. We have largely gotten pretty good and are not dealing with a lot of bloodshed and poverty in the wake of such a big change. This transition will probably not be great for everybody but it won’t be a big human tragedy of the proportions you imagined. Worry more about our climate. The bigger threat of mass destitution will come from that clusterfuck.

On top of that you could argue that Latvia and Germany are probably more favorable regardless in terms of them enjoying largely functioning rule of law.

When reached for comment, White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly told the Daily Beast in a statement, “It’s sad that Daily Beast interns cannot grasp the concept of pro-growth policies that create jobs. Their minds are clearly warped after cheering on Joe Biden as he wrecked our economy for four years.”

The pettiness is unreal.

English and Swedish are common examples of where gender neutral pronouns have developed that sometimes meet ideological opposition from conservative thinkers but otherwise work largely fine in common parlance. They don’t make a lot of people look up and wonder what was said. They and hon don’t cause a fuzz because they are established to a sufficient degree. Now imagine that wasn’t the case and in English we wanted to land on “shup” as a pronoun. I talked with Billy and shup didn’t want to go fishing. You hear that and you’re almost taken out of the conversation because it doesn’t feel natural-in-the-language. Language being a cultural construct. (Don’t misconstrue me here as saying members of the LGBTQ+ are not natural. Because they are perfectly natural.)

German is not only a three-gender grammatical clusterfuck but also a language where different neo-pronouns (similar to “shup” which I invented just to make this point) exist, none of them feeling as natural-in-the-language when in use, and none of them getting majority support from the relevant LGBTQ+ community. So the general suggestion is to use the name when known or to ask for the pronouns when required. In my very limited experience, German speakers who don’t want to risk mis-pronouning people will sooner adapt their speech to avoid any use of third-person singular pronouns than to use “dey” or “sier.” Which in itself might be an indication of where this road is going. German has a larger gap than English between societal progress and understanding and having that reflected in the language. German has embarked on a journey to get rid of a masculine-as-default mode since the 70s just to include the other majority gender in speech and visibility. And more than 50 years later the conventions around that are still subject to change and adherence to those still piss off conservative thinkers. So that gives you an idea of a timeframe until gender-neutral language can cement itself in the German language.

Another language that may have an easier time with gender-neutral speech is Japanese. People are more used to using the name of the person as a stand-in where an indoeuropean tongue screams for a pronoun. And most nouns that are titles to give to people, such as a professions, are never gender-neutral by default.

Wir müssen alle mehr fürs Stadtbild tun.

Kleiner Spaßfakt: vor 1970 hielt der Bundesgrüßaugust die Neujahrsansprache und die Kanzler die Rede vor Jesus sein Geburtstag. Nur für den Fall, dass ihr mal irgendwann, wie ich hier, den Leuten mit unnützen Wissen auf die Nerven gehen wollt.

Because I swipe typed it and didn’t give it another thought. I’m gonna leave it as is so your comment continues to make sense here and thank you for the correction.

In my Venn diagram, “advertize” is a smaller circle wholly surrounded by “promote.” “Advertize” suggests to me there is a marketing effort with paid ads or something like that behind it. It’s simultaneously promoting whatever but promotion can be much broader. Preference doesn’t really come into it.

The commenter before me described the solution, give cops an override, as easy. I wanted to highlight that it isn’t that easy. Unintended side effects ought to be considered before coming up with seemingly easy solutions. And this problem is not dissimilar to the one about encrypted chats and law enforcement wanting a backdoor into that. If you build a backdoor, it’s not guaranteed that only the good guys use it. And that raises questions about privacy on the encryption front or questions about abuse, safety, and liability on the self-driving car front.

If you give police a backdoor to control self-driving cars, somebody is going (to hack it and) use it to kill somebody.

I find none of these arguments convincing. You have the right to vote. Unless you’re in Australia that means you can just not go vote also. That’s your choice.

Voter turnout has an influence on the vote share the extremes of the political spectrum get. If you’re on the extreme, you tend to go vote for your cause because you found your calling. So if enough people in the middle choose not to participate, you’ll end up with difficult majorities and/or more extreme governments. The latter is also true if either extreme is convincing many of the people in the middle. And that’s where tactical voting comes in. That’s why I would personally lean towards a “go vote and vote for the best of the worst if nothing fits well” approach. But I wouldn’t elevate this to the level of an ‘electoral imperative’ because it is a personal choice.

Microsoft chose to make a Chromium based browser with edge. They gave up on the idea of building an engine of their own. It goes without saying IE was shit but at least they tried. It’s also an example of why you want some competition in the market because when IE was dominant it was the focus of all hackers everywhere. The way chromium based browsers are today. (MS just made it too easy for them at the time.)

I don’t think OpenOffice is an apt comparison here. Every other browser with a modicum of market share is Chromium based. When even Microsoft folded, there is basically only Firefox. And the libres and the waters who piggyback on it. If Firefox is gone I think we’ll soon be in a complete monoculture of Chromium based browsers. No one should want this.

You don’t have to like what they do (I don’t either btw). You can predict all the opt-ins will be opt-outs (although I don’t necessarily buy into that). You can switch to any other browser. On desktop they ask for your feedback when you uninstall it so give them a piece of your mind. If you call for a crusade against Firefox you have to put more meat on the argument bones than the half-baked stuff in this overshared post. And if you can’t do that, kindly change your browser privately, is all I’m saying.

While I wouldn’t want to argue that Firefox hasn’t become more shit it doesn’t fit the Doctorowian definition of enshitification. And while they screw up stuff, to not an insignificant amount in communicating to the public what they’re doing, I do think their desktop browser is still better than most other browsers, all Chromium based ones included, and most of the terrible things are opt-ins. You don’t want them to install shit without you knowing? Then don’t participate in their experimentals. You don’t want the so-called AI crap in there? It’ll be opt-in as well so don’t opt in. If your standard was zero tracking then vanilla Firefox was never your right flavor. And virtually all mobile shit is trackable. So let’s take a chill pill and also appreciate if we push Firefox out of business, all the libres and waters will probably not be far behind.

Everybody is free to switch to any browser they like. Not every switch needs public announcing or result in a call to arms.

I think you’re onto something here. It may have to do with containing RAM.