This was years ago, but I was driving around listening to music with my windows down and a couple guys in a van pulled up next to me and asked if I wanted a deal on stereo equipment. Being the naive idiot I was I followed them into a parking lot.

They claimed to be home stereo installers and had accidentally received two premium stereos for a customer order instead of one. They wanted to get rid of the second one for beer money and asked for like $200. They had a magazine that showed the stereo was worth several thousand and I thought I might make a quick buck by reselling it to a pawn shop or online.

I didn’t have $200 but I had overdraft protection so I thought I would pull that money out anyway and pay it back once I had sold the stereo. The guy at the pawnshop was the one who told me I got scammed and I have never felt more embarrassed.

It’s small, but this is definitely a win worth celebrating.

Broadcast and cable news are today’s newspapers. Tomorrow they will be gone and no one will miss them. I’ve tried watching news programs, but it seems so pointless. They cover half a dozen stories, if that, none of which answers any real questions. I get better information more quickly by spending 5 minutes flipping through my rss feed or 10 minutes scrolling through tiktok.

Oh for sure, especially with the ghost and alien abduction stories, but I always got the sense a lot of the callers were either, bored, lonely, crazy, or some combination of those three.

The only time something would become unforgivable is if it were done with intentional malice or becomes a pattern of behavior. I’m willing to forgive quiet a bit, if the harm an action caused was not the intent. When it becomes the intent, such as physical violence or repeated trauma, that’s where I take a hard line and will not forgive. For less spectacular transgressions, repeat events are where things become unforgivable. I am willing to give grace on that more because I’m bad about not communicating to others how their actions hurt me, but if we’ve talked about how their behavior is a problem and they keep doing it? No sorry, we’re done.

For me it was a call on Coast To Coast AM. I used to be suuuuuuper into all that shit. I was a regular listener to C2C and believed 70% of the crap they shoveled. The 30% I didn’t believe (ghosts and the supernatural) were because I had personally tried astral projecting, recording evps, ghost hunting, etc. and none of it worked for me.

Anyway the call was in the early 2000’s and Art Bell was hosting. The caller claimed to be a scientist working for a secret government lab working on portal tech and had accidentally opened a doorway to another where filled with hostile beings who took control of the facility. When the caller identified themselves as Dr. Gordon Freeman I realized anyone could just say any bullshit and these idiots would believe it.

It took like 10 years to fully flush conspiracy thinking out of my brain and I overcorrected hard by becoming one of those obnoxious skeptics for a while.

Though given the times we live in today I’ve seen a few theories online that have an uncomfortable amount of truth to them and have to admit I have been tempted.

Apparently Digg is trying a comeback?

Even Reddit fifteen years ago had active niche communities, which Lemmy does not (because they’re all still on reddit). Lemmy has to compete where reddit didn’t. There was like a bbs before there was /r/spooncarving (or whatever).

Reddit is not going anywhere anytime soon. Their stock price might not be doing great at the moment, but there is no reason to think the platform will die. Lemmy has a chicken and egg problem. In order to draw users away from Reddit it would need sufficient content, but to get that content it would need more users.

Reddit will definitely see some shakeups soon, especially when they introduce paid subs, but I’m not sure Lemmy has what it takes to capitalize on that. I love Lemmy, but at it’s core it’s a more difficult to use, federated, reddit clone.

The fediverse deserves something new. Not a clone of a commercial network, but something novel that takes advantage of the federated nature of the network. I still very much believe in that 90’s internet dream of a democratized social space for all humans, but we’re not getting there with janky clones of anti-social media.

If anything, the fierce backlash shows how effective the movement was. What no one could have seen coming was that the mis and disinformation that bombarded the internet around the same time would eventually create a fractured reality where the basic facts of existence are a matter of opinion. In a world like that, the efficacy of name and shame is reduced to near zero because you can simply switch to a reality where sexually assaulting women is socially acceptable and continue on with your life.

Maybe this is a dumb question, but how does the day to day health of the reddit community affect the stock price? Wouldn’t a simpler explanation be that reddit stock is in decline like most other stocks right now because of the overall market uncertainty?

… Republican lawmaker Tony Bacala told his colleagues, “Some of these kids are already lost when they’re two years old.”

How ghoulish and completely divorced from reality must one be to look at a two year old as a criminal?

Probably when they’re tried in the Hague after it’s all over?

“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement provided by his lawyer Marc Toberoff to The Wall Street Journal. “We will make sure that happens.”

I’ll believe that when I see it.

Ordering things that aren’t on the menu, custom items, telling it to forget precious instructions. I very much confused it.

I went to taco bell the other day and they had an AI taking orders in the drive thru, but it seemed like they had the same number of workers.

They also weren’t happy I tried to mess with the ai.

Realistically, no. You need luck more than anything.

Besides, what value does telling him that have?

The Affinity suite is a suitable replacement. It’s not quite as advanced as the creative suite, but it serves 90% of most professional needs. I switched about five years ago and haven’t looked back.

I dunno, y’all burned down the white house once, so maybe start there?

I realized shortly after posting that comment there would be a low chance that canada would be a state. It’d probably be more like Puerto Rico, pay taxes, but not vote for anything that matters outside of the territory.

I was aware of the maga nuts in Canada, I didn’t realize they had enough votes to actually matter though. Plus y’all burned down the white house once, I’m sure even the craziest canadian would be made about losing their sovereignty. Surely?