• 0 Posts
  • 46 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
Cake day: April 10th, 2025
  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Massive internet outage reported: Google services, Cloudflare, Character.AI among dozens of services impactedEnglish
    3·
    5 days ago

    Yeah, a great part of Lemmy’s fundamental design is that it gives the user so much ability to block specific toxic users and communities and even entire instances from being seen by that user.

    A user who is interested in self regulating or limiting that potential adrenaline overload … is aided by Lemmy in doing so.

    This is significantly different from how its nearest equivalent, reddit, operated untill about 2 years ago, when they finally added an actual block user ability.

    Still don’t think you can block the entire user group of subreddit communities, the way you can block an an entire Lemmy instance, if you want to.

    (At least not without some third party script or software… which are probably all broken by now given how hard reddit is cracking down on its API?)

    Also, moderation and admin logs are significantly less opague than on reddit.

    To the best of my knowledge, on lemmy, you can’t admin edit the post of someone you are arguing with to frame them, basically, and then turn them into a strawman of themselves, and then win that argument with them, and then ban them… as has happened on reddit.

    Also Also, … lemmy at least not yet does not appear to have a problem with a massive flood of ai bots posting god knows what % of the actual content.

    …

    Not saying Lemmy is perfect.

    I’m saying its better.

    And I guess I’m also saying there’s a difference between being an alcoholic and enjoying an occasional drink from time to time.

    Generally: Yes, of course, approach any online messsge board or social media with caution and skepticism… but different platforms can be significantly more conducive to generating negative mental health outcomes than others…

    … short form video platforms collapse your attention span, anything that allows advertisements or ‘influencers’ who are basically just walking talking brand ambassadors lie to you to sell you all kinds of bs…

    Thats not present on lemmy, at least not that I’ve seen… so in those ways, lemmy is the marijuana to say Tiktok’s fentanyl.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoFuck Cars@lemmy.world•build walkable communitiesEnglish
    201·
    5 days ago

    I’m gonna have to keep saying this until it becomes common knowledge:

    Yes.

    You are basically correct, yes.

    ~30% of adult Americans are functionally illiterate, 2nd grade or worse reading/writing/vocabulary skills.

    The mean, average American has between a 5th and 6th grade literacy level.

    Despite the fact that almost 40% of US Adults have a Bachelor’s Degree or better… less than 10% can critically compare and contrast multiple news articles about the same topic.

    We are very, very stupid, compared to any country with anywhere near the same GDP per capita.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoFuck Cars@lemmy.world•build walkable communitiesEnglish
    61·
    5 days ago

    This is … imo, not satire.

    It is simply an example of the opposite of a walkable neighborhood/community, literally framed at such an angle as to capture the ludicrousness of it.

    It is an illustration of the absurdity of car-brained NA city design.

    But it isn’t exaggerated.

    These kinds of developments, neighborhoods, are absolutely everywhere in the US, they are very common.

    Even the use of ‘walkable’ may noy be satire: If there are sidewalks the whole way, well that would actually be uncommon, and many US policy makers and local city urban planners would actually, seriously, class this as walkable.

    I am guessing folks from more civilized parts of the world are reading this as satire, because this seems unfathomably, beyond belief stupid.

    … Welcome to America, we hate it here.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.world•Oh YeahEnglish
    3·
    7 days ago

    Autistic people do not struggle with empathy.

    They struggle with being perceived as expressing empathy, and they struggle with others not being empathetic toward them, instead just feigning it or using it as a manipulation tactic, which autists are much more likely to recognize as such.

    People tend to sympathize, not empathize, with autists.

    These are not the same thing.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.world•Oh YeahEnglish
    17·
    7 days ago

    As a corollary:

    “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”

    • Edmund Burke

    This seems to have been bastardized by history into the following much more well known, but never actually directly stated:

    “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•[Deleted]English
    2·
    8 days ago

    I disagree that ignorance can be bliss in this case.

    Look up the Carrington Event.

    There is nothing, absolutely nothing that would prevent that from happening again at literally any time.

    And if the Carrington Event happened now, it would most likely knock out the vast majority of the world’s power systems and telecommunication systems… possibly for a very long time, depending on how much chaos ensued.

    Even without a one in a million even like that… the world is literally on fire. Climate change is out of control, and it is consistently worse that consensus projections from 5 or 10 years ago.

    Disasters will intensify, infrastructure will be knocked out, the food supply system will buckle, governments will become more authoritarian, and be more likely to go to war with each other.

    It will be a very rude wakeup call for the totally smart device dependent people when their region goes offline… they will have as much of a mental breakdown from not having access to tech and the web as they will from ‘how will i eat, where will i live?’

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•[Deleted]English
    11·
    8 days ago

    I agree with most of the points you are making, but I think the main point the person you are replying to… their point was that … younger generations simply are not able to remember things they have read, either online, or in a book.

    It used to be the case that you could not just pull up literally any information, out of your pocket, on demand.

    That knowledge had to exist in your brain.

    Historically, it gets even worse.

    Many cultures had dedicated members of their society who had memorized an ancient tale that would take one hundred pages to write out on paper.

    Of course, they did not remember them 100% accurately each time… but humans do seem to be losing a capability for mass information storage in our own brains as technology enables us to… not need to develop that capability.

    The GPS navigation example is maybe easier to grasp: Before everyone had a GPS homing beacon and navigation telling them where to go, how to navigate through a city or country…

    People knew how to read road signs. People knew how to read maps. People knew how to avoid high traffic areas and take shortcuts… all on their own.

    Now, if you take GPS away from literally those same people, 20 or 30 years later, they would end up lost even in places they’ve lived in for decades.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•[Deleted]English
    6·
    8 days ago

    I mean, imo, you got it correct with many of your descriptions:

    Fear, Anxiety, Panic, caused by the lack of access to the internet.

    Now, I thought I was going to have to coin a term here, but something pretty close already exists:

    Nomophobia, fear of not having your your smartphone.

    Other proposed terms from other people over the years:

    discomgoogolation

    abinterretephobia

    macriapodiadictuophobia

    These have all been proposed as words to mean, basically, fear of not having access to the internet.

    Now, you are describing more specifically a fear of an entire, past world without widespread internet access, which is a bit different… as it isn’t just you personally not having your internet device, but the total lack of them, the lack of societal norms built around them, etc.

    I would point out that there are still roughly 3 billion of people on Earth, right now, who live without consistent and reliable access to the internet, who cannot afford a smart phone or any kind of internet device.

    But yeah, as others have said… before the internet was widespread… we used libraries, we read books and articles and physical newspapers… sometimes, you would have to hunt down a particular rare book, or ask a library to get it loaned from another library, you could wait weeks or months.

    I remember an actual physical voicemail machine, an actual physical caller ID device, I remember having to commit my friend’s and family’s 10 digit phone numbers to memory, or carry a small personal contact list with me.

    I remember when getting a cordless phone, that would let you go sit down on the couch instead of having to stand or sit within 3 feet of the wall mounted phone… was a completely mind blowing innovation.

    And I was born in the tail end of the 80s, before the Berlin Wall fell.

    I remember being forced into typing lessons, on an actual keyboard, as one of the very few things my dad forced me into that was actually a good call, and now that the vast majority of younger folks use touchscreens… an increasing number of them have no idea how to actually type, which blows my mind because for the vast majority of my life, not knowing how to type was an extremely stereotypical Boomer attribute.

    And now its getting far worse, with an absolute epidemic of students of all manner of subjects who just do not know anything, because they are reliant on some kind of AI to answer all their questions and generate all their answers.

    It has been argued before that a human with a smartphone, which they have at all times, is functionally a kind of ‘soft’ cyborg, as the smartphone is a part of so much of their thinking, their culture, their way of life.

    So, I suppose its understandable that a ‘soft’ cyborg is terrified by the idea of having part of their brain ripped out, and cannot comprehend how a society could function with everyone not having their portable thinking and communication augmentation.