Hi - I’m a Linux newbie.

I don’t tell other Linux users that I use linux because it almost always leads to a bunch of questions that I don’t know the answer to. So let me assure you, that awkwardness is on both sides of that conversation you’re describing.

I don’t think there was much that will hurt Harris from it. She performed very well.

She was articulate, well-spoken, performed well unscripted, and next to Trump she looked like she had her shit very together.

You seem very passionate about this issue, which is great, but you also seem very bad at communicating about it, because even after reading two full paragraphs here, I still only have a vague idea of what exactly you’re lobbying for. Can you just link us to something succinct and printed explaining it?

Long term, you could impact the trajectory of the next few centuries in substantial ways and lessen the coming dark age

With a budget of $1,000,000? That seems very ambitious at best.

The enshitification is progressing nicely!

and the idea of some cop having to cut it open and go through it because you called it in is sort of funny.

“Yeah, officers, uh… I definitely saw a body, at the bottom of the landfill… If you don’t find it right away, just keep looking, it’s definitely there.”

This post feels a little like bait, but that said:

To me, this is not even a question. It doesn’t feel great to say, but the only correct response is to choose Pathway 2. There’s a lot of things at stake in this election but one of the things on the chopping block if the GOP wins is trans rights. We’ve seen what they do when they have full control (look at Florida - that’s their vision for the whole country); securing a win for them just to maintain a moral high ground on this one issue will only make things worse for trans people. Trans rights being left “in a vulnerable position” is far better than trans rights being eliminated completely. That’s not even taking into account any of the other problems this would cause.

Anyone choosing Pathway 1 is not thinking through the ramifications of their choice. That said, it’s a stupid premise for a discussion, for exactly the above issue. For there to be an interesting moral dilemma, there has to be a dilemma, and there’s only one here if you’re not thinking about it past the surface.

To be clear this is purely in response to a hypothetical and I’m not in any way suggesting actually taking that course of action in reality. I in no way believe there’s enough single-issue swing voters for the democratic party being pro-trans-rights to make a lick of difference in the actual outcome.

Everyone I want to talk to knows not to call me; I feel exactly the same. Phones used to be useful, but the sheer volume of telemarketers and scams have reduced it to uselessness. If it wasn’t for 2FA occasionally requiring a phone number, I wouldn’t even have one at this point.

Also all books you lend from the library should be public knowledge.

Terrible analogy. You can consume the post without anyone knowing. Voting is more akin to signing the guestbook.

I also exploited the living shit out of my high school’s fast connection and a friend’s Zip drive.

My school had a T1, too, but I didn’t have a zip drive, and MP3s were too big for floppies. However, old cracked games very often came in segmented zips that were floppy sized. I’d bring home games 20 or 30 disks at a time (or as many as I thought I could without drawing attention in the computer lab) over the course of a week or more.

I can’t pause it, it’s multiplayer!

-or-

If you pick up the phone, I have to start downloading this MP3 I’ve been trying to get for half an hour all over again!

I’ve definitely gotten angry about a situation while on the phone with a customer service rep, but not with the rep themself. I make it a point any time I’m audibly angry when on the phone to state that I’m angry at the company, not at the person I’m speaking with, and that I understand that it’s not their fault. It seems to help a lot; I used to work in customer service and I sure appreciated it when people made that distinction to me. It’s okay to be upset, just don’t take it out on a CSR.

“Increasing rate of decline” might be more technically correct, but we all knew what you meant. :)

There’s not much point to a 3 hour work day if you have work 3 different jobs

Not that I’m advocating for it, but… Working 3 jobs @ 15 hours a week each would mean you’d be a lot more resilient against layoffs and would be able to quit any of those jobs at the drop of a hat if things got shitty (knowing you’d only be losing 1/3 of your income, rather than 100% of it). It would represent a solid shift of power into the hands of the workers.

They can’t really make the argument that you won’t have the formula to reference in the future when you need it…

Yeah, I’ve always been a shit artist for I assume the opposite reason; I can think of a thing in a macro sense, like "I want to draw [thing], it has these features’, but when it comes time to actually draw those features, I can’t pinpoint exactly what they look like. It’s like reading a few sentence description of a tree, and then trying to draw one purely based on that description - you can get a general sense for what it looks like, but not the fine detail needed to accurately represent one visually.

Incidentally, I have a difficult time commissioning art as a result, because I have an idea of what I want, but I have a hard time communicating the finer details. AI generated art has actually been really helpful for me in this regard; I can see something and know if it’s what I want or not, so being able to give an AI art generator a broad description and get back 100 images from which I can pick a few and tell an artist which parts of each one I want has made it much easier.

It’s funny, really, because aphantasia is supposed to be fairly rare, but every time a thread like this comes up, folks come out of the woodwork saying “Oh, yeah, that’s me.” Makes me wonder if it isn’t a lot more common than believed, but people just don’t realize they have it. There don’t seem to have been any real studies done on it.

I can have conversations in my mind, but there’s no visuals associated with it. It’s like a radio broadcast vs. a TV program. I can think about the description of an object, and recite back its physical qualities, but I can’t visualize that object at all.

I remember when I learned people weren’t just being metaphorical when they talked about “picturing” something in their mind.

I had that same reaction. “You mean you can see it? No like, really see it, not just think about seeing it? What the fuck?”

I mentioned democratic decision-making around defederation but it’s likely other changes will be needed as well.

Be the change you want to see in the world. You don’t have to code in an integrated solution; all you’d have to do is set up an online poll, listing all of the other instances up for consideration (such a list can be pretty easily obtained - for example from https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list ), run a new poll on regular intervals, say, every 2 months, and let anyone who is interested vote. Then, you update the defederation list based on the results of the poll.

However, I think you’ll quickly run into the other problems I outlined which, unfortunately, can’t really be changed. You could require everyone who’s participating in the voting to also be contributing time or money to run the server, except that then you’re operating a plutocracy, not a democracy, so most likely, you’ll need to be giving up your time and money to make your desired server administration a reality.

I’m not sure why you’re giving a history lesson when I already acknowledged that point in the comment you are replying to.

It’s because, despite claiming to have acknowledged the problem, you’re still making such an incredible false equivalency - comparing joining a new Lemmy instance to moving out of an authoritarian country - that you either completely misunderstand what you’re talking about, or you’re arguing in bad faith.

Sure, I theoretically could create my own instance, but then I would have the same problem as current instance admins, even those who are sympathetic to these ideas, as I suspect Lemmy.world and my own are. That there is no structure within Lemmy to enable collective decisions to be made or executed, and I would need to build them from scratch.

You’d have full control over your instance, and could, if you built up a community, use any online voting method you wanted - of which there are plenty - to poll your userbase and gather their opinions.

However, ultimately, you’d be the one paying for the instance, and doing the work to set it up and keep it updated and running. What would you do if you attracted a userbase that had views that were completely counter to your own? What if you attracted the alt-right crowd, and what got voted into place was all hate-speech, nazi rhetoric, and intolerance? (I assume you disagree with these things…) Would you continue paying for and hosting the instance, just because that’s what was democratically decided, even though it’s no longer an instance that you want to participate in? Could anyone really fault you for not wanting to do that?

A better method might be for you to make clear your own opinions - either via a post explaining them, or via a pre-defined federation / defederation plan - and let people join your instance who agreed with those decisions. Which, incidentally, is how most instances currently operate.