Do you have some concrete examples of some things that corporations could do to significantly reduce (not just greenwash) their contribution to climate change that would not immediately result in all their customers picking up torches and pitchforks, or just move on to their competitors?

Ah, ok. It’s still very concerning that anyone bases identity-verification on very publicly available data.

Uh, I got bad news. If I search for my name, there are freely and publicly available online directories that show all my past addresses (and phone numbers) going back over 20 years. That’s why I had to pay a service that searches for this crap and submits requests on my behalf to have them take it down. I think California’s law where you can also ask once to be removed from all of them will go into effect soon?

I just searched amazon.com for metric tape measure right now and the entire first page of results were actual metric tape measures? The Milwaukee ones seem to be cheaper on ebay.

I totally hear you. I meant GED as in the parent would be able to pass the GED exams now, not that they passed it 20 years ago. I think it would at least be something that could act as a minimum requirement that they can at least understand the material.

This is the first I’ve heard of “a couple of devs are shutting out large numbers of contributors (frequently subject matter experts which they desperately need at this point) over relatively trivial issues” and “Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute”.

Can you give a summary or examples? I’m not trying to argue, but would just like to know more. I don’t follow Lemmy development more closely than reading the dev summaries they post, so wasn’t aware of any of this.

I know teachers aren’t paid much, but if you have the audacity to say that you can do a better job than 4 or 5 professionals at teaching your kid every subject, you should have to take a test to be certified, and your kid needs testing too. Some states require it, most don’t, and it shows.

Jesus, this makes so much sense that it’s scary to think it’s not universal. Sure, you can teach your kids. Just get certified to do so first. It doesn’t even have to be the same certification as professional teachers, but just a bare minimum, pass the GED level of education. To not have this kind of requirement really seems like society failing those kids.

They were big through investors throwing money at a money sink for years. Youtube was losing tens to hundreds of millions of dollars a year for a long time, before it finally became profitable.

A new competitor wouldn’t get such favorable support from investors.

If you’d be open to try Linux again if it were less likely to break than your past experience, look into the recent trend of what they commonly call “immutable” distributions. This should give you the ability to always switch back to a working OS if anything goes wrong (which should be much less likely in the first place). It’s similar in concept to Android or Chrome OS, from what I understand. I’m watching this space very closely because I’m concerned about experiencing the same thing as you if I switch to Linux, and not having the ability to fix the system myself.

Thanks.

I had tried multiple times over days, perhaps weeks. However, now I can’t recall if maybe I only tried with kbin communities?

No problem, I’m glad it helped. The refresh is only needed to update the status on that page, but it actually subscribes fully in the background, if you check back on your list of subscribed communities.

Interesting, thanks. I had seen mbin mentioned a couple of times, but didn’t know the story.

You’re probably right, but I just wonder where all this AI panic is coming from. There was a story on the Washington Post a few weeks back saying that millions are being invested into university groups that are studying the risks of AI. It just seems that something is afoot that doesn’t look like just a natural reaction or overreaction. Perhaps this story itself explains it: the Big Tech companies trying to tamp down competition from startups.

I was not aware of this. Sorry to hear, and I hope everything gets better for him.

Yes, I hope so too. I should add that this was just my experience. I don’t have any technical facts to back up this assertion. I had this problem for a long time after I first signed up for Lemmy in June 23. The unsubscribe and resubscribe trick hadn’t worked for me at that time. I just randomly decided to try again today and it worked fine this time. I don’t know if it’s something that was improved in the code, or perhaps just that the Lemmyverse stabilized after a while.

Unfortunately, the recommendations from most (all?) top-level officials in the US right at the beginning of the pandemic was for the general public NOT to wear masks (including Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, etc). This absolutely didn’t help matters when later they had to change their tune and recommend then mandate masks, after they had said that they were not needed.

Here’s a nice compilation video of these statements over the first couple of months of the pandemic: https://piped.video/watch?v=tRE59LJc6CA

AI, climate change, and nuclear weapons proliferation

One of those is not like the others. Nuclear weapons can wipe out humanity at any minute right now. Climate change has been starting the job of wiping out humanity for a while now. When and how is AI going to wipe out humanity?

This is not a criticism directed at you, by the way. It’s just a frustration that I keep hearing about AI being a threat to humanity and it just sounds like a far-fetched idea. It almost seems like it’s being used as a way to distract away from much more critically pressing issues like the myriad of environmental issues that we are already deep into, not just climate change. I wonder who would want to distract from those? Oil companies would definitely be number 1 in the list of suspects.

I stopped using Reddit regularly after the APIcalypse, even though I had never used any Reddit apps (I only used it on a web browser on a desktop). I still have an account that’s active there where I’ve only been using it to help and encourage people to move from Reddit to Lemmy and from Xitter to Mastodon.

I thought it was going to be harder than it actually was to abandon the many niche subreddits I was subscribed to there, but I just found other things to read. I will still occasionally visit Reddit, especially when it turns up on a search result with info I’m looking for, but to use it like that I don’t have to even have an account.

I plan to eventually delete or scramble all my posting history from there on all my accounts, but just haven’t had time to do it yet. I also haven’t found a way to do what I really want, which is to replace my comments with different random text for each message, to mess as much as possible with any LLMs. In no way will I contribute any more of my comments to Reddit, except for what I said in the beginning, to help people move here, and even that I will probably delete/scramble.

Cries in I’m in the only person in the world with my first and last name combination.