*pissing into

I suspect my ongoing emphasis on individuality and use of words and phrases like “one by one” and “personally” and “different for everyone” may have escaped you.

I don’t see groups as masses of fungible humans; I see them as a collective unit of individuals like myself, each one with a separate history and a separate set of decisions to make about their lives, and for that reason I tend to avoid all-encompassing generalizations of “people” as homogeneous units – to the point that statements such as your own strike me as propagandistic, more intent on changing my view and laying down a law on a subject than on considering any evidence to the contrary.

When I read your reply to me, so confidently wrong about what I see around myself in terms of phone usage, I wondered if asked the same you’d even see anyone not on their phone, because you seem to have decided that everyone everywhere at all times is glued to it by choice, permanently and without exception.

For myself, I’ve chosen to be off technology for long stretches, and I see more and more people making their own decisions to do the same even if their individual choices don’t look exactly like my own. And yeah, when I go out, I see plenty of people both off and on their phones. When I make eye contact in a store aisle, I see plenty of eyes making contact back. When I eat dinner out, I see as many phones face down on tables as I do in hands. Mostly I don’t pay attention because I don’t need to: others being on it or not is their own battle to fight.

And they will.

The future of computing is corporate controlled siloes people simply cannot escape

Lol, no. To remain in a prison of choice requires the consent of the imprisoned. I am not bound to engage in computing on demand, nor am I addicted to it, and if it comes down to it I’ll just turn the shit on only when absolutely necessary. I’ve done it before and every time it is great; I’ll do it again in a heartbeat.

Some may have to participate by necessity in corporately-controlled computing structures to some degree depending on work needs, for example, but most of what is booming now is entertainment, not business: social media, streaming, subscription services. Entertainment is a matter of individual choice and again, I find myself in no prison not of my choosing.

I can escape those silos simply by walking away when I am not contractually obliged to interact with them, such as in a work scenario, and so can everyone else. Even you.

Ah, I see your point. It is a particularly rough crowd. Try commenting how well a disfavored Linux distro works for you and watch the downvotes fly, lol.

c/Technology is the preferred nomenclature I think, or I guess the full community link if you want to distinguish it by instance (there are several).

Orange is a highlight of red and purple a lowlight or shade of red, both analogous colors to red, so honestly that sounds genius. (I’m not an artist, I’m just sitting next to a color wheel and see it all the time: I’m trying to work on my own color theory.)

There’s also the fact that an internet full of bots, AI slop, and privacy risks is making more people pull away from the online world. In our poll, 97% of people said the internet today was a hellscape compared to its early days, and it looks like things are only going to get worse.

Looks like the cure is inherent in the disease. Anyone else remember the early 90s when Usenet was just text-based fun and then some motherfucker thought it was a grand idea to run ads? I do, and it’s been downhill ever since.

It’s sad that it has come to this, but as usual a handful of greedy fuckers have ruined it for the rest of us. (My personal opinion is that big tech could have arrested this downhill slide at any point, even from back in the first days of email spam, but have chosen to monetize it every step of the way instead.)

Real humans are already individually opting out, one by one, as we each personally get sick of the slop and realize it’s just not helping anymore. For myself I’m only on intermittently, I’ve ditched all social media, Lemmy is all I participate in regularly now beyond the odd comment here and there, and that seems about right for me at this time.

I adjust it regularly, often just by going offline for days, but I had to see the problem before I could change it. I think that’s where a lot of people are, just now seeing it for the first time as a real problem affecting their quality of life directly.

But like any other addiction, the point of turning is different for everyone. These fuckers on the other end, filling everything with slop and running bots without end, are just speeding it all up.

I can’t even remember them all, but it’s usually one of the following, in no particular order:

– Someone who started well but whose channel is now just ads for paid content elsewhere, OR whose content is clearly only there to serve as a vehicle by which to present all their merch, affiliate links, new products, paid collaborations, etc., and/or where the content itself is merely a series of reminders about “check the link in the description!” every two minutes to the extent that even Sponsor Block can’t keep up (the art communities tend to have these more than others do)

– Someone who is casually cruel, or if they mock others in a way that could even be remotely considered serious (Cam Anderson of Blacktail Studios is my sole exception here: mouth like a flamethrower but it’s hilarious and clearly not meant seriously except in regard to his ex-roommate, iykyk)

– Someone who draws me in on content but turns out to have an incessant whine or series of gripes or is embroiled in unending conflicts

– Someone who leans heavy on religion, or uses voiceover to deliver extended essay-like monologues on some unrelated subject

– Someone who turns out to be right-wing/fascist or strikes me as a propagandist, and/or delivers propagandistic content that seems to rely on emotional interaction or visceral response from the viewer

– AI content: I can live with a splash screen/intro or other minor bits, but otherwise I don’t want to see it or hear it

I am genuinely envious. My senator is one of the most widely reviled.

(Even more unfortunate is the fact that I can say that without even coming close to doxxing myself.)

Trump escaped from serving in the Vietnam war by claiming he had bone spurs. Avoiding getting a sexually transmitted disease, he told Howard Stern on his radio show, “is my personal Vietnam”. He described women as “landmines”. “I feel like a great and very brave soldier.” He told Stern: “You know, if you’re young, and in this era, and if you have any guilt about not having gone to Vietnam, we have our own Vietnam – it’s called the dating game … Dating is like being in Vietnam.”

Ron Wyden is one of a handful of senators who has spent his many years on Capitol Hill actively working for the betterment of his constituents and the country. His report is the result of several years working to get access to Epstein’s financial records, not just for the public but to investigators who already have the legal right to see the full, unredacted versions but are actively being blocked by Blanche at the DoJ and Bessent at Treasury.

Meanwhile, Bari Weiss is a person whose resume does not begin to support her appointment, who seems to have failed upward, and whose tenure at CBS has been marked by the departures of veteran reporters and producers all saying she has no real interest in reporting news and uses her position to scupper anything critical of the administration.

Who to believe, hmm. 🤔

I dislike how disenting opinions get downvoted on Lemmy/technology probably more than even on reddit.

That almost makes it sound unfair, but the technology on Lemmy is doing exactly what each one of us tells it to do every time we cast a vote. It is, as far as I can tell, an exact representation of our own individual votes cast.

I could almost see your point on Reddit because of all the vote fuckery that goes on there, but here on Lemmy blaming a mass downvote on the tech and not on the users casting the votes is a misdirection of blame.

Yup. And it’s an embarrassment to see. At this point anyone who has done the bare minimum in actual security work can run intellectual rings around any of these tech bros.

They’re not geniuses when it comes to real-world application, just moneyed dreamers so immensely out of touch with the real world they don’t even know the basics of the industry they claim to be innovators in.

Meanwhile, those of us who are even superficially acquainted with the basics see it immediately, like you did and so many in this thread. It’s the same old thing of peddlers of tech not actually having to know their tech as long as they know just enough to sell it to those corporate IT decision makers who also don’t know their tech.

I cannot wait for this tower of shit to collapse under its own weight.

Yep. It’s rich given that the article says she “strongly objected” when WaPo publicly identified her as the founder behind the Libs of TikTok account in 2022. Just like all bullies, she can’t bear even a fraction of what she dishes out on the regular.

No problem. Thanks for taking the time to do these, much appreciated.

You’re probably right about the “stable after resuscitation” thing. I assume that means independent breathing and heartbeat. I don’t know much about emergency medicine, though I have always heard a body can maintain independent life support with only minimal brain health. (This is probably before your time but I was around when the Karen Ann Quinlan thing was going on with all its endless debates.)

But it’s not just that. In an interview with Katie Couric last month, Gov. Andy Beshear said,

Well, Mitch McConnell’s boss are the people of Kentucky. There are constituents which deserve honesty and transparency. It had been a month before anything had been put out, not even an official statement from Senator McConnell. In fact, I’d gotten two calls from different agencies, not state agencies, suggesting he’d passed. So, this rampant speculation that was out there, it needed to end.

That’s McConnell’s governor himself saying he got calls “suggesting” that McConnell was already dead, not from individuals but unnamed and “not state” (presumably federal) agencies.

Most importantly, McConnell himself still hasn’t ended the speculation when to do so would be easy enough if he were conscious and alert. Instead, AI press releases come out of his office with “proof of life” photos that are both problematic in their own right, strongly suggesting that his people are already going to extreme lengths to keep his actual condition a secret, already remaining silent on the truth, already creating false evidence to support a fraudulent pretense of not just life but ongoing improvement. Yet he personally never shows.

So for me, I don’t think it’s a stretch to consider that people already committing that kind of fraud on the public would stop short of a job well done. But that’s not a slam on someone that doesn’t want to go there; I can understand why anyone would want more proof. It’s not like a hearty set of lies has never come out of the US govt before, lol.

If a friendship will be over because one party to it is pursuing a goal they genuinely believe in, that is not only to the betterment of their community but because of who they are as a human being, I think it’s safe to say there was never actually a two-person friendship there.

Or to put it another way, I am certain that of the two, Alice Wade was a real friend and thought she was in a real friendship.

Link to actual Newsweek article (original source, more readable):

https://www.newsweek.com/judge-rules-ice-coerced-legal-migrant-to-sign-deportation-papers-12285581

Lol he is

He’s not even the first. Tom Kean, a Republican rep from NJ, stayed absent for just under four full months earlier this year without explanation and then blithely explained it as “treatment for depression.” But he’s still running for reelection in November.

McConnell announced his retirement in February 2025 and was not seeking re-election this year, meaning that Kentucky was always going to elect a new senator for his seat this November anyway. Otherwise your point is well taken, and it was McConnell himself who pulled that “too close to an election” shit with Obama’s Supreme Court nomination.

Same here. When the video by his DC neighbor came out showing the ambulance, the EMT was standing in the back with the doors open, McConnell’s feet clearly visible behind him on the gurney, and the EMT was casually doing something else in no hurry to get going. Other witnesses also mentioned that when it left there were no sirens.

So yeah, dead or brain dead like you say, but clearly not coming back.

Personally I think his people are gonna give it a bit of time, anywhere from a couple days to a month, and then announce some kind of downturn that has now resulted in his “sudden and unexpected” death. But he’s been gone all along, IMO.