I’ve been off Reddit totally since 2023, so part of my understanding may be out of date, but before that I was on for many years and watched how powermods became powermods.

Thus this situation is very unusual. Reddit never did anything about the powermod situation before, but now, suddenly, it’s a big deal. For years (over a decade, at least) users have been screaming about the worst abuses on the site being from powermods, and time after time Reddit bent over backwards to not only avoid doing anything about it, but seemed to grasp every opportunity to enhance the problem any way they could, shutting down complaints rather than the power trippin’ bastards that were regularly creating the problems.

Note that powermods very frequently mod the largest subs, which is how they became powermods to start with: modding a sub that got big and then being invited to help mod new subs that then also grew in popularity.

For myself, I don’t think anyone would give two shits if “powermods” only had an aggregate total of 500 users each, but very frequently they have millions, even tens of millions. Looking at the largest subs on the site and the powermods on those subs, and how many of those powemods are crossovers on equally dominant subs, you see the same core group of powermods across all the top sites, give or take a few individually here and there.

Strangely, this is the group Reddit is now disbanding.

Another thing to consider is how many powermods went on to become admins over the years. At least a handful: I don’t know the exact number anymore but it’s non-zero. Powermods who are admins are especially useful to Reddit, because they ensure that the c-suite has direct control over some of the largest subs without ever appearing to do so.

All this is to say that the powermod situation has been mutually beneficial to Reddit admin for ages, which is why they never changed it or even really acknowledged it.

But now, for the first time since 2005, Reddit powermods are suddenly a problem. So what’s changed? Cui bono?

My guess is that Reddit admin is about to a) yank the entire site to the hard right by removing pretty much all effective human moderation and thus preventing powermods from being able to stand in their way across the largest subs (some of which we’ve already seen and the article addresses), and/or b) introduce some other vile change or policy that is certain to piss off EVERYONE, including every non-bot mod on the site, to the point that admin expects a general revolt even among the powermods and need to dilute the individual power of mods in advance.

One very hypothetical change that could do the trick is Reddit forcing mods, including powermods, to quietly engage in collecting evidence of and reporting users and content that admin would like to sell to the current US admin, for example: intel which Reddit is well situated to provide and for which the current administration has already been calling in the wake of a certain recent death. What if Reddit decides to go all in with the present political trajectory, looking for political power as well as the payout they’re usually in it for, and in so doing force mods to comply or lose their subs? It’s not like Reddit hasn’t already done it for less.

Again, these are just my own musings. But whatever the reason, Reddit admin calling it quits with the powermods suggests something much larger than just another light rehabbing of Reddit power structures.

I have nothing to add, just to say that I wish you peace.

Oh, and that your ex-bestie gets an incurable case of crotch rot that burns with the fire of a thousand suns. That too.

What you need is a curved needle: it will allow you to sew from the top without ever needing to have access to the underside. They are cheap and widely available. When you use one to sew your patch to the pocket, you can use your hand to keep the pocket expanded, or even better put something small and solid in it to keep the two layers separated while you whipstitch the patch down from the top. Watch a video on how to use curved needles for repair.

Going by name, there are two kinds of curved needles sold: upholstery and embroidery. You absolutely want the embroidery kind: the upholstery needles are huge, made for much larger projects, and would make the fine work you are trying to do very difficult. Also, if it’s there (doesn’t look like it is on your patch) you can pare down any hard coating on the underside of the patches around the edges without disturbing the patch itself, which will make it easier to get a needle through the patch when you go to put it on.

And wax your thread: pull it lightly across a candle to coat it a tiny bit, then pass it between two fingers to soften it into the thread. (There are also commercial products that you do not have, but a candle is fine in a pinch.) This keeps your thread from tangling more than it has to, and lubes it a bit for the sewing. It’s not essential, but it makes everything so much easier that I never hand sew without it.

If you get a thread that closely matches the beige of the patch it won’t matter how sloppy your stitches are, because they won’t be seen. But if you can, wash it and clean the grime off as much as possible before you do this, because it’s hard to match thread to dirty fabric. Also, when you are trying to match thread, sometimes value (light and dark) matters more than color. Because you’re sewing a lighter colored patch, if you can’t find an exact match, choose the closest one but go a shade lighter: the dark will stand out more on a lighter background. (It’s the opposite for darker materials, where you err toward the darker thread instead.)

If you have any problems or questions, feel free to hit me up. I’ve been doing my own hand and machine sewing for decades.

EDITED to add: Here’s a brief video on whipstitching a felt patch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NLr1r5ZMAM - she’s not using a curved needle, but this is the stitch you want.

A video showing how to used a curved needle for repair is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJUuPHDPTyc. He’s using an upholstery needle with pliers, you can see just how big and unwieldy that thing is, but that’s essentially how you use a curved needle to sew from the top only on pretty much any project.

After I didn’t see the mentioned content I looked around Zdnet, and I think you might have meant to link this article instead:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/rebooting-your-phone-daily-is-your-best-defense-against-zero-click-attacks-heres-why/

Bad click, it happens. Good article, though. Thanks!

You’re right. Young people are drowned in bad news. But part of this is by choice. I don’t consume any form of media in which I am unable to carefully curate my own content, meaning that Meta, X, IG, FB, and the rest are NOT feeding me that shit 24/7 because I like the dopamine hits and can’t put it down.

That’s another thing we can individually do for ourselves instead of waiting for someone else to change it for us. I do care about young people, quite a bit, and historically they as a moral group are on the right side of history. For example, it was the young people that clued the rest of us in that Israel was committing genocide, and worse still, just how overwhelmingly complicit we as a nation (US), our government and our corporations, really are in it. Even I had no idea, and I’ve been paying attention. It is the bravery of the young in openly demonstrating and protesting that has, again, showed the rest of us that there is still a sense of humanity in this nation.

But I can’t curate their media consumption for them.

And yes, I was in my thirties when Columbine happened. And the mere fact that I can pull the name of a wildflower out of my ass twenty-six years later and you know exactly what I mean by it is proof of how deeply it cut at the time. We talked about it daily and it led the news not for weeks but for months. It wasn’t 9/11, but it was close. IF anyone thinks I overreacted to the comment to which I responded above, that is nothing compared to the ostracization that person would have gotten twenty-six years ago.

That, of course, is when there was still an overriding sense of how we each contribute to our own environments, before most social media, and long before anyone got the bright idea to steer public opinion with it, much less the newest and ugliest form of the age-old divide-and-conquer strategy we’re seeing now.

I don’t blame anyone their self-preservation: as you can see from my first paragraph, I certainly engage in it myself. But self-preservation is one thing. Adding fuel to the fire with my own bored disinterest in your pain is quite another. And as you can see, I haven’t done that either.

As for my comment, to be honest I would have just downvoted and moved on, had it not been for the puppet behind them going, “Downvoted for speaking truth!” No, I downvoted because what they wrote was a lazy, dishonest, inhumane, and all around shitty thing to say, with zero truth in it at all. And instead of slinking away, I decided to say WHY I downvoted.

We can’t change the world one at a time. We have to band together. And that actually does happen, far more frequently than the “bad news” that is crafted to discourage us from starting would ever allow you to believe.

But until then, we can each think about how to improve our own experience, and take action to help ourselves that does not involve moving a Columbine-level mass killing to a lazy, bored, “just another day” comment in the language that we choose, or calling it “truth!” when someone else does it.

So let me ask you a question in return. Do you think that in general, readers are helped or collectively harmed by the normalization of horrific acts?

Old enough to know that casually dehumanizing people we don’t know is part of how we got to where we are.

We can’t change what the media does, or what society does. But we CAN change ourselves, and choose not to heap our own thoughtless words onto the pile of disinterest that makes the most horrific acts okay as long as they are done to someone else.

From the article:

Local news, Kare 11, confirmed the shooter’s name was Robin Westman, 23. Westman grew up in Richfield, and Westman’s mother worked at Annunciation school in some capacity. Westman applied in Dakota county to change their birth name from Robert to Robin because they identified as a woman, according to court documents obtained by the Guardian. That request was granted in January 2020.

so just a normal Back to School season in the US of A

For me, it has nothing to do with country. But I am disgusted by your comment just the same. There is nothing “true” about it at all.

1. Mass murder is not normal. Mass shootings of innocents, be they children or churchgoers or shoppers or clubgoers, are never normal. Even if they happen daily – and the US may well be reaching that point – they will NEVER be anything short of aberrant in the most vile way, regardless of the country in which they occur.

In case this isn’t clear, and to illustrate just how lazy your cheap potshot is, I’d like to reframe it in terms of Gaza: the schoolchildren shot in Gaza as they run toward food, terrified to go but too hungry not to run into the shooting zone, is that too just business as usual for you?

For me, the killings of Gazans are equally as evil and unnecessary as any other murder – and murder is exactly what that is – thus I do not make low-effort cracks about them, or Ukrainians, or literally anyone who is murdered just trying to live their lives. That is my genuine position on the murder of innocents, so particularly lazy and disinterested cracks like yours stand out.

2. By calling a school shooting “normal” YOU are literally normalizing it in your own language.

3. Your apparent boredom with the murder of children is revolting.

4. Your censure toward the actual villains (the shooter, the society that missed or could not adequately address the warning signs, the corrupt politicians who flatly refuse to address the problem even after DECADES of citizens begging for some level of gun control, the culture that crushes the most vulnerable among us to the point they snap, etc) is entirely missing.

Pick one. Take a lazy potshot at THAT instead.

Hence my downvote, and I regret I have only one to give.

It is repulsive to me in its entirety but apparently the vibe coders dig it.

Use the offline installer, which is for offline and airgapped machines. It turns off the AI prompt builder as well as all the telemetry shite:

https://support.logi.com/hc/en-us/articles/11570501236119-Logitech-Options-offline-installer

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