Welcome to Incremental Social! Learn more about this project here!
Check out lemmyverse to find more communities to join from here!

andros_rex

@andros_rex@lemmy.world

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

andros_rex ,

This kind of behavior mystifies me. I get that it can be frustrating to deal with lazy folks, but especially with how shit google/ddg are nowadays, when people are looking for help and are met with this kind of treatment it’s pretty discouraging! I’ve been an Arch user for about a decade, and sometimes I run into problems that should be googleable but aren’t.

It’s especially concerning, considering how tech illiterate the next generation is. They’re very used to walled gardens, and if they can barely manage a MacBook, they’re going to really struggle starting with things like the command line.

Lighting a candle leaves you with two lit candles. There’s no reason to gatekeep knowledge.

andros_rex ,

I thought it was hilarious how redditors fell for some guys bait/fetish post. Iirc the guy admitted to making it all up in some dm’s

andros_rex ,

Yeah, if you want a governor abandoning his people, look to Kevin Stitt (Oklahoma) last year when Tulsa was without power for about a week. Lieutenant Governor was out too, literally no one had any idea who was in charge of the state.

andros_rex ,

When I was in college working in a lab, we were worried about accidentally killing frogs with our equipment because we didn’t have anything filed with the IRB about frogs.

Everything with Elon bewilders me. I thought this is why we had regulatory agencies.

andros_rex ,

Had a class with some ABA techs who gave a presentation about Autism Speaks for their final project - they had no idea that criticism of AS/their entire field existed.

andros_rex ,

It’s hard to get away with “your presentation and profession is shit and you didn’t bother looking into any information other than your first google search” as a peer unfortunately. I did manage some gentle questions about AS’s one autistic board member’s exit….

It is fascinating that “behavioral health” seems to be just torturing/drugging kids until they get “better”/learn to comply. I didn’t get ABA, but very similar treatment.

andros_rex ,

In the states? At least in mine, parents have to give permission for the school to paddle. Most districts don’t want the liability or the paperwork. At least in public ed.

andros_rex ,

I mean, it is fucked. But when we advocate against things that are fucked we have to be precise with the facts or else everything we say gets disregarded. [I speak up against this professionally - I am 100% on your side mate]

After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year (www.billboard.com)

When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not...

andros_rex ,

Spotify seems to be trying to transition to podcasts anyway - it’s harder to get it to recommend music. My guess is that eventually the Spotify and the record labels will have more disagreements about royalties, and that Spotify will pivot more towards podcasting - independent folks who have far less power in negotiations.

andros_rex ,

I’m never buying a Honda again after buying a 2018 Civic model. Less than 10k on it when I bought it and the A/C went out. There’s an issue with the condenser on the 2018/2019 Hondas. They offered to pay HALF of what it’d cost to fix - I’d still be out more than a thousand. And from research online, apparently the replacements tend to fail too.

Pretty much every time I see the same model I ask if the owner has AC. They always have the same problem. It’s going to be real wonderful driving when it gets to the 100’s this summer…

andros_rex ,

Probably “graduated college” the same way as Elon too

andros_rex ,

“The Congressional Record (1994) stated that the compiler of the original list, Linda Thompson, admitted she had "'no direct evidence' of Clinton killing anyone. Indeed, she says the deaths were probably caused by 'people trying to control the president' but refuses to say who they were."

“Several sources have discredited the conspiracy theory, such as the Congressional Record,[4] the Lakeland Ledger, the Chicago Tribune, Snopes and others, pointing to detailed death records, the unusually large circle of associates that a president is likely to have, and the fact that many of the people listed had been misidentified or were still alive. Others had no known link to the Clintons.“

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_body_count_conspiracy_theory

Can we let Vince Foster rest you fucking ghouls.

andros_rex ,

Why didn’t they kill Monica? This conspiracy theory is actual garbage.

Both of the Clintons are garbage human beings who didn’t/don’t deserve to be in office (which is true of most politicians). Bill definitely coerced women into sex. But when the loudest critics of the Clintons are tinfoil loons, it takes all of the air out of the room.

andros_rex ,

It’s not “rules for thee and not for me,” unless you consider that true for things like drinking alcohol.
It’s protecting children from something they are not cognitively developed enough to be dealing with.

andros_rex ,

I use TikTok routinely. I actually spend time on Chinese parts of TikTok, because I know a little Chinese. I’ve seen content that the CCP would be very much opposed to - including discussions of the Tank Man from Tiananmen Square and homosexuality in Chinese history.

TikTok has censorship certainly, but it’s more targeted towards the Gaza conflict.

andros_rex ,

I think the line is, TikTok pulls a video at random it thinks you’ll want to watch. This means that you may be exposed to basically anything a person felt like filming. This includes violent or pornographic content, which children should not be exposed to.

Being a parent is telling your children no sometimes. Being a parent means that you should vet the media that your child is being exposed to, which is impossible on a platform like TikTok, and sometimes make the decision for them that they are not old enough to be exposed to certain material.

It really feels like folks don’t want to be parents - they want to hand the iPad over to the screaming toddler so that they can be babysat by their own phone. I don’t understand why one would have children, if they weren’t interested in doing the work of parenting those kids.

andros_rex ,

As can/do Facebook and every other social media platform. But I find it hard to take this idea that TikTok is an arm of the CCP seriously when I routinely discuss Ughyur Muslims and Tiananmen square with folks, and see depictions of Chairman Mao as Pooh Bear.

The more shady shit is the shop and how every third video is an unlabeled ad. TikTok wants to make money first and foremost. I don’t think TikTok is some force for good in the world, but what they are doing is no different from what Meta and Google are doing.

andros_rex ,

I think it’s harder to post to Reddit as a human being than it is as a bot. You have to read like six paragraphs of text (which doesn’t show up on old Reddit) to make sure that your post is formatted correctly, and then a mod will look through your comment history and ban you because they read everything you’ve ever posted and discovered that you own a car or something.

andros_rex ,

SpaceX is a fucking trashfire too.
The fact that NASA has contracts with them disturbs me greatly.

Instagram Advertises Nonconsensual AI Nude Apps (www.404media.co)

Instagram is profiting from several ads that invite people to create nonconsensual nude images with AI image generation apps, once again showing that some of the most harmful applications of AI tools are not hidden on the dark corners of the internet, but are actively promoted to users by social media companies unable or...

andros_rex ,

Middle school boys could not create realistic depiction of their classmates engaged in sex with photoshop. At least not without significant time and effort. Now they can generate hundreds of photos in a matter of minutes.

andros_rex ,

For as long as it lasts. It’s clear they’re neglecting it - features like chat don’t work well. Not that the app isn’t a broken glitchy mess either.

andros_rex ,

Isn’t it wonderful that google SEO algorithm updates essentially killed off independent forums and blogs? Half of my search results are Reddit and completely irrelevant AI spam.

andros_rex ,

IMHO, it was an elevator ride that killed r/atheism…

andros_rex ,

The best thing about those ads is that they’re mostly “AI” generated. You know none of the people making those ads would actually wash the feet of a queer person.

andros_rex ,

Reddit from the beginning had bot accounts to artificially inflate its number of users.

andros_rex ,

Why has that sponge been shilled so heavily? I see it being marketed on TikTok of all places…

andros_rex ,

Rebecca Watson had some guy proposition in her in an elevator at a conference, felt uncomfortable and talked about it during the conference. This blew up the internet atheist/skeptic community around 2011 or so, led to a big split. “Elevatorgate”

andros_rex ,

That was a killing blow + “the professional quote maker.”

But it was a good place for some decent discussion back in the day. I learned enough biology from arguing with creationists there + youtube to test out of college biology….

andros_rex ,

I used these kinds of apps when I was a teenager. I could not keep up with a calendar - I tried but my cycles were too irregular to be predictable based on the calculations I could find in books and the internet. I’m transgender and found the entire experience unpleasant in a fairly intense way.

Those kinds of apps helped me immensely. Most of them offer some sort of discreet icon or password system - my parents were the type to read my diary/calendars. My periods are all over the place, and I was able to safely log a pattern in related pain/duration/quantity… most of them included links to places to find medical information. I found one that wasn’t pastel pink and just treated me like a person keeping track of their medical statistics. I got to feel neutral about a part of my body which I despised.

The problem is not that people are naive enough to hand over the information to a third party they can not trust. The problem is the paucity of information and resources for menstrual health. Periods are complicated and scary. When you’re a teenager, you’re not worried about data security - you’re worried about trying to make sure you know when your next cycle will start so that you don’t experience the hell that is bleeding through your pants in math class.

andros_rex ,

It’s really hard to find a car to buy that doesn’t use touch screens - they slap them on everything. Car quality in general has declined tbh - my modern Honda Civic was a fucking lemon.

andros_rex ,

To be fair, most Tyler Perry movies could be replaced by minute long clips of stock footage with some filters stuck on them.

OpenAI wants to raise 5-7 trillion dollars. Yes, Trillion (decrypt.co)

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in talks with investors, including from the United Arab Emirates, to raise between $5 trillion to $7 trillion in funding. The goal, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, is to increase the world's chip manufacturing capacity and enhance AI capabilities....

andros_rex ,

I’m pretty good at math, I think I’d make a decent Mentat.

andros_rex ,

Part of this is that idiots will predictably react and cause a distraction. Rey and Rose Tito are not what made new Star Wars bad, but the discourse was ruled by WOM BAD for months. Or Ghostbusters or whatever. Going out of your way to attract bad faith criticism so that you can conflate the legitimate with the ridiculous.

andros_rex ,

Are you going to allow copyrighted content? You’ll get downranked in searches, and probably wrecked by the DMCA.

Advertising also isn’t as lucrative as it seems. YouTube was a money pit for years - that’s probably tied to the decision to push Premium so heavily. Videos are big.

andros_rex ,

God I miss pre-Digg Reddit.

andros_rex ,

Isn’t Winky’s alcoholism also played for laughs? As is Trelawney’s.

It’s weird how casually Harry accepts slavery. All Hagrid has to do is say that Dobby is a weirdo and the slaves like being slaves, then he’s okay with putting Christmas decorations on decapitated slave heads.

andros_rex ,

The problem is that the first four books are “monster of the week” children’s books. Everything operates on good guy/bad guy because the world building is a shallow pond - which is fine, they’re fun children’s books. Addressing the systemic issues would have required her to actually plan out her universe, and you can really see it start to fall apart by book 5.

andros_rex ,

It’s worse in that regard too. I’ve had to turn to Abe a few times because they didn’t have something, and I’ve also started to notice that Amazon doesn’t always have the cheapest price. Prime is useless for books most of the time too.

I really miss the days where you could get used books for <$1 or so plus shipping. Lots of penny books.

andros_rex ,

Isn’t disabling bad blocks of memory chips and selling them at the lower capacity pretty common?

They’re doing that too. The real problem with these is that they misrepresent the storage size, and the firmware is set up to lie to your computer about the storage size. You can format it and it’ll seem normal. Maybe you buy one that claims to be a terabyte but only stores 100 gigs - you’ll see a terabyte in there. You copy 110 gigs or so over, you’ll see the files show up and it’ll tell you it successfully copied. No error messages, it'll just drop those last 10 gigs. There’s not really a way to notice without using a read/write program to fill every block.

It’s a shitty way to lose your data, and you might not notice until way later. Screws over the tech illiterate - probably no idea where their homework went. It would be much less harmful if they were just selling them as reject/lower capacity.

andros_rex ,

All social media platforms are toxic platforms that rot your brain out, including this one. TikTok is not uniquely terrible, like every other platform, you have to curate a quality feed. My feed has a lot of language learning, history, and fiber arts. I prefer long form content, but sometimes I learn about California redwoods while praying on the porcelain throne.

I have concerns with children being on TikTok, but before it was TikTok it was iPad kids watching Elsa and Spider-Man pregnancy videos on YouTube. The problem is parental supervision.

andros_rex ,

Okay, let’s think about this for a minute - do chickens and human beings have genetics that are at all compatible with each other? (I’ll give you hint: chickens have a ZW chromosome sex determination system, humans XY). I’m not an expert on chickens, but I’m pretty sure the eggs are typically fertilized before the egg fully forms.

And then if we read the article:

In other words, it’s most likely the Russian guy was just entertaining everyone with his video. Whatever he did to make his “homunculus” appear alive worked on his target audience. It captured the overactive imagination of so many netizens. In this sense, his experiment succeeded.

Funny that it’s at the end, after a random bit about Paracelsus and a tangentially related real experimental process for making genetically modified chickens.

Let’s not take 2016 SEO clickbait garbage seriously :)

andros_rex ,

Except for the last several years it’s becoming harder to file for free. TurboTax’s free service developed some worse and worse dark patterns every year, where it was very easy to click the wrong thing and end up being charged. Iirc the fact that they provided a free service at all was to keep control of the market and prevent the IRS from stepping in with a service like this. ProPublica did some good investigations on this.

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the moderator]

    •
    andros_rex ,

    Is it really that necessary to creep on someone without their consent? Porn exists, there are lots of women who are happy (at least consent) for you to look at them naked.

    andros_rex ,

    I understand the reference. It’s still a shitty joke.

    andros_rex ,

    This but unironically. In my neck of the woods, we are hemorrhaging kids to private or charter. That means losing money. Superintendents and administrators view parents as customers. They don’t want a parent to get pissed and move districts because the dollars follow the students. If education is babysitting - if a teacher allows students to do nothing but watch videos on their phone - parents hear nothing and assume everything is fine. If a teacher is calling home about behavioral issues, or a school has “high” discipline rates, then that becomes a visible issue.

    andros_rex ,

    Is your kid going to save the day with a cell phone? Do you think in that situation there is not going to be another adult who can call 911?

    When you tell your child “just get in trouble and I’ll take care of the rest” you are telling the child that they don’t have to respect school rules. And having dealt with parents like you, your children turn out to be absolute terrors. (“Im texting my mom!” as you hear the fucking Rizzler song for the sixth time)

    As part of my teaching training, I was in a program where I was not allowed to have my cell phone on me at all. 6 am to 9 pm, for almost two weeks. I survived.

    andros_rex ,

    The cell phones do not stay in the backpack. They don’t. Sorry, a fourteen year old does not have the capacity to ignore the absolute barrage of notifications they get.

    Also - every class room I have ever taught in had a phone. The classroom next door has a phone. The lab cabinet has a phone. If it’s really that important that you have 24/7 access, get a dumb phone. They’re cheaper anyway.

    That’s great that you work with kids, but a classroom
    Is an entirely separate context. I invite you to go substitute in a classroom to get a better understanding about how my job differs from your job.

    andros_rex ,

    504s exist for kids who need them for medical purposes. (Had a diabetic kid - her mom made sure she knew the phone was only for monitoring) While there aren’t pay phones; there is a landline in the office at every school that students will be able to use.

    The office workers are hourly and are already scheduled to stay for at least an hour after school. That’s part of their job.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • incremental_games
  • meta
  • All magazines
    •