• 11 Posts
  • 72 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • It basically is saying that if you have more money then you have more “votes”.

    That’s simply true. It doesn’t do anyone any good to disregard the facts.

    Or to put it in another way: If you have more money you matter more.

    That abstraction doesn’t help much. And first of all, it’s more accurate to derive the statement “If you have more money then you have more influence”.

    It’s still a shitty status quo, but it is what it is. The worse thing you can do is tell people not to boycott shit products on the basis of rejecting reality. It’d be like telling people not to vote in elections because their vote is a drop in the ocean.

    Some people vote for democrats, then they cancel their own vote by getting their internet service from Spectrum, buying fuel from Chevron for their car, shipping their packages using FedEx, getting their phone service from AT&T, banking at PNC Bank, flying on Boeing planes, shopping on Amazon, doing their web searches on a Microsoft syndicate’s site (e.g. DDG), buying Sony devices… etc. They either have no clue that most of their voting is actually for the republicans, or they think that drop-in-the-ocean vote that comes once in 4 years somehow carries more weight than the daily votes they cast with reckless disregard.

    Greg Abbott’s war chest is mostly fed by oil companies. If you buy fuel for a car, you help Greg Abbott and other republicans. And if you buy from Chevron, you give the greatest support to republicans (Chevron is an ALEC member).




  • Ending capitalism is not the /only/ way. Within a capitalistic system, you can boycott shit. Most consumers are pushovers but it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m boycotting hundreds of shitty companies. Off the top of my head:

    • Amazon
    • Cloudflare
    • Microsoft
    • Facebook
    • Google
    • Apple
    • (surveillance advertisers in general)
    • (all closed-source s/w)
    • HP
    • Proctor & Gamble
    • Unilever
    • all ALEC members (American Express, Anheuser Busch, Boeing, CenturyLink, Charter Communications, Chevron, FedEx, Motorola, PNC bank, Sony, TimeWarner)
    • many shitty banks
    • Paypal
    • AT&T
    • GMA members (Coke, Pepsi, Kraft - Heinz, Kellogg’s, General Mills, McCormick, Hormel, Smucker)
    • BetterThanCashAlliance.org members (visa, mastercard, unilever) – war on cash
    • Bayar-Monsanto
    • Dupont
    • Hershey
    • Nestlé
    • Exxon/Mobil
    • Comcast
    • Koch
    • Home Depot
    • Lowes
    • …etc

    Those are all shitty companies that significantly worsen the world. Giving money or data to any of them contributes to enshitification of the world.

    Of course it’s an option to stop supporting assholes. Become ethical. Be the change you want to see.



  • 🎉 Great news! Glad we can access past threads.

    This episode has made it clear Lemmy software needs to improve in several ways to be resiliant to the problem. The possible #LemmyBug/enhancements:

    ① the fix was apparently not just flipping a switch— it required hacking the db, correct? Shouldn’t admins have a simple undelete button?

    ② what if a rogue admin had deleted the community, and perhaps even destroyed the db? In principle it should be possible to rebuild the community on a different node using data from all nodes that have data. Sometimes a whole node goes down. The plug gets pulled when funds run out. We are hosed when that happens.

    ③ each user’s subscriptions panel should not simply quietly cease to list the deleted community. The community name should remain and have indicators to signal issues (e.g. 💀, ⚠).

    ④ msgs users write are stored in their profile & responses are stored in their inbox. But this is poor organization on its own. It only serves to quickly see new msgs/reactions, but users are overly dependent on the server’s representation of the community to show threads in a coherent way. Clients should have that capability too. I should be able to click “context” on any msg and the client should be able to show me a sequence of msgs regardless of the state of the server host.








  • Better or worse depends on who you ask.

    I boycott Cloudflare and I avoid it. Some CF hosts are configured to whitelist Tor so we don’t encounter a block screen or captcha. For me that is actually worse because I could inadvertently interact with a CF website without knowing about the CF MitM. I want to be blocked by Cloudflare because it helps me avoid those sites.

    The CF onion (IIUC) cuts out the exit node which is good. But CF is still a MitM so for me that’s useless.

    Some users might not care that CF has a view on all their packets - they just don’t want to be blocked. So for them the onion is a bonus.


  • W.r.t CSAM, CF is pro-CSAM. When a CF customer was hosting CSAM, a whistleblower informed Cloudflare. Instead of taking action against the CSAM host, CF doxxed the ID of the whistleblower to the CSAM host admin, who then published the ID details so the users would retaliate against the whistleblower. (more details)

    There is no way to “disable” cloudflare if an instance has chosen to use it. It will sit between you and the server for all traffic.

    Some people use CF DNS and keep the CF proxy disabled by default. They set it to only switch on the CF proxy if the load reaches an unmanageable level. This keeps the mitm off most of the time. But users who are wise to CF will still avoid the site because it still carries the risk of a spontaneous & unpredictable mitm.







  • emphasis mine:

    Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don’t understand.

    First of all anti- #GMO stances are often derived from anti-Bayer-Monsanto stances. There is no transparency about whether Monsanto is in the supply chain of any given thing you buy, so boycotting GMO is as accurate as ethical consumers can get to boycotting Monsanto. It would either require pure ignorance or distaste for humanity to support that company with its pernicious history and intent to eventually take control over the world’s food supply.

    Then there’s the anti-GMO-tech camp (which is what you had in mind). You have people who are anti-all-GMO and those who are anti-risky-GMO. It’s pure technological ignorance to regard all GMO equally safe or equally unsafe. GMO is an umbrella of many techniques. Some of those techniques are as low risk as cross-breeding in ways that can happens in nature. Other invasive techniques are extremely risky & experimental. You’re wiser if you separate the different GMO techniques and accept the low risk ones while condemning the foolishly risky approaches at the hands of a profit-driven corporation taking every shortcut they can get away with.

    So in short:

    • Boycott all U.S.-sourced GMO if you’re an ethical consumer. (note the EU produces GMO without Monsanto)
    • Boycott just high-risk GMO techniques if you’re unethical but at least wise about the risks. (note this is somewhat impractical because you don’t have the transparency of knowing what technique was used)
    • Boycott no GMO at all if you’re ignorant about risks & simultaneously unethical.




  • If the message is edited for typos/grammatical errors, then there’s really no need for a notification as the message displays the posted time in italics (e.g., ✏ 9 hours ago).

    I’m not sure why the relevance of the posted time in this scenario, but indeed I agree simply that typos need not generate an update notice, in principle.

    If the message is so reworked as to say something else, “Bob” (your example) should do the right thing and post a new, separate reply to “Alice” in the same thread, donchathink?

    This requires Bob to care whether Alice gets the update. Bob might care more about the aesthetics, readability, and the risk that misinfo could be taken out of context if not corrected in the very same msg where the misinfo occurred. If I discover something I posted contained some misinfo, my top concern is propagation of the misinfo. If I post a reply below it saying “actually, i was wrong, … etc”, there are readers who would stop reading just short of the correction msg. Someone could also screenshot the misinfo & either deliberately or accidentally omit Bob’s correction. So it’s only sensible to correct misinfo directly where it occurred.

    I get what you’re saying though, that there should be some real integrity toward post/reply history, like diff maybe.

    It would be interesting to see exactly what Mastodon does… whether it has an algorithm that tries to separate typos/grammer from more substantive edits. I don’t frequently get notices on Mastodon when someone updates a status that mentions me, so I somewhat suspect it’s only for significant edits.

    (update) one simple approach would be to detect when a strikethrough is added. Though it wouldn’t catch all cases.