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[Breaking Points] Harris Momentum Stalls As 2024 Race Remains Neck and Neck
  • It might not end the Gaza genocide. It will also not cure cancer, end climate change, or stop political violence in the United States. However, electing Harris will produce a hugely better outcome on all of those fronts than will electing Trump.

    If you care about the Palestinian people, and you’re risking Trump getting into power again, you don’t actually care about the Palestinian people. You just enjoy grandstanding gestures, and while you’re making your gestures, you’re flirting with making their already horrifying situation absolutely infinitely worse.

  • What's the best licence for sharing content with an organisation while keeping my rights?
  • You can use Creative Commons. You'll still have the copyright to the work, so you can relicense it or do whatever you like with it, but they'll have a particular and proscribed set of things they are guaranteed to be able to do with it into perpetuity.

    Choose whichever license suits what you'd like to be able to grant them, in terms of whether they have to credit you for it, whether they're allowed to modify it, and so on. CC BY lets them do whatever they want, as long as they credit you, which is a common permissive option.

  • Is there any good, free search engine left?
  • What are you talking about? I just tried two test queries on DDG, and neither one had LLM-generated nonsense, and the one that was in double-quotes returned only five results, all of which had the double-quoted phrase and one of which was the thing I was challenging it to find.

    Can you give an example of a query where DDG returns LLM results or doesn't respect your double-quotes?

  • An interesting reddit thread
    old.reddit.com Just my suspicion but want to put it out there.

    If she loses we have 4 years of destructive reagan-esque policy from cheeto dictator. If she wins we have half-assed measures and "better, but...

    Just my suspicion but want to put it out there.

    I was very surprised by the nature of the comments, until I got near the end and found a lot of:

    > [deleted] 3 hours ago > > [removed]

    > A-CAB[M] 1 point 2 hours ago > > Rule 6, no lesser evil rhetoric. This includes encouraging people to vote for any capitalist political party and any capitalist politician. There is no harm reduction in supporting either of two parties headed by genocidal fascists. The extent to which any elected official of a Capitalist Party in a Capitalist state can enact evil is the extent to which that official is allowed to do so by Capital. As such, neither candidate is the lesser or greater evil. See more on our position here: Rule 6 "no lesser evil" rhetoric - is it accelerationist or doomer? Is it intended to discourage voting?

    0
    How to turn down lunch with a fascist
  • Nah. You have to follow your own style.

    Bertrand Russel had his own style, and it's complete, formal, heartfelt and true. If he tried to add a bunch of cursing to it, it would become inauthentic, just as it would if someone whose natural mode is to start cursing and punching decided to try to talk like Bertrand Russel. Everyone's got their voice.

    For an equally complete, formal, heartfelt and true example which does include cursing, see:

    https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cleveland-browns-letters/

  • Microblog Memes @lemmy.world PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat
    How to turn down lunch with a fascist
    40
    Why votes for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein won't count in Ohio
  • You need to check directly on lemmy.world, since not everything will be federated to your instance:

    https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk

    They have 1.69k posts and 3.75k comments.

    For some reason, almost all of their activity is during non-working hours in a US time zone. They have bursts of activity in the morning, during a short window in the middle of the day that could be a lunch break, in the evening, and around the clock on weekends. We're currently in their morning burst, and then there will be a lull, and then there will be another short intense burst around lunchtime.

    It's very unusual. What I mean by that is that posting only outside work hours is pretty normal, but the absolute firehose of activity every day during any non-work hours including lunch is abnormal. From outward appearances, it looks like a person who has a full-time job but devotes almost all of their waking hours outside that job to shitposting at full speed on Lemmy about Jill Stein.

    Rule 7 on !world@lemmy.world says:

    We didn’t USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you’re posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.

  • Why votes for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein won't count in Ohio
  • I didn't especially "want" to brush my teeth last night, but I did anyway. Because I know that the alternative is opening up the door to things I don't want, even more than I don't want to brush my teeth.

    If someone woke up and said, I'm proud I didn't brush my teeth, because I didn't want to, I would have trouble looking at them as a source of wisdom about how to accomplish the goals they're trying to pursue.

  • Why votes for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein won't count in Ohio
  • in Ohio

    If you want your vote to count, you're going to need to vote for one of the major party candidates.

    If you want to move towards a future where third-party candidates are viable, you need to support RCV, so that they can get electoral support without producing the opposite impact on the election that is intended. And then, vote for one of the major party candidates this time, ideally the one who won't destroy the machinery of democracy which we will need in future elections to enact RCV, or elect Green Party people or Democrats.

    If you wanted to mark the box for Jill Stein and accomplish nothing, you can still do that. Nothing has changed. I don't recommend it, but it's definitely still possible.

  • Featured
    New rule on Aggregators/Forwarders:
  • Sounds good. If you redid the import, I think you’ll want to make some manual fixes to the .json. Off the top of my head, I think you just need to add bbc.co.uk and aljazeera.com to the URL lists for those sources.

  • !world@quokk.au, world news without a bot
  • I never abused the report system. That was the mod of News abusing the rule, I only ever reported stuff hurled at me which never ever got removed even when it was very obvious personal attacks or other people doing exactly what I had a comment removed for.

    Can you link to some examples of people abusing you? You don't have to spend a ton of time on it if you don't want to. I'm just curious.

    Moderation is never completely fair. It can't be. I'm just saying that by some coincidence, the moderators that interacted with you are some of the only ones who I tend to agree with a lot of the time.

    And I 100% will admit that I’ve called for the removal of Israel. I don’t view that as the negative FlyingSquid does.

    It's not just FlyingSquid. I think calling for "removing" Moscow, or Washington, or Israel, or Gaza, or Ukraine, for whatever reasons of geopolitical argument, would lead to your removal from most communities outside of the instances that tend to get defederated.

    You can hold whatever views you want, but surely breaking the community rules on purpose by speaking about them, and then getting banned, isn't a confusing outcome.

    I moderate differently than I comment. Moderation for me is only about removing spam etc or obvious bad actors, people voting are what determines what’s visible not what I’ve decided should be allowed.

    Maybe so. It could work fine. Definitely having you be a member of the community instead of someone coming from above, and open about what you're doing and why, is a step in the right direction. I'm just saying that moderation is hard and thankless work that is going to bring you into contact with a lot of obnoxious people, and refraining from becoming obnoxious or unfair yourself, as you deal with that day in and day out, is a lot more difficult than it seems like it would be.

  • !world@quokk.au, world news without a bot
  • My guess is that a good portion of that comes down to the quality and breadth (or lack thereof) of the Lemmy built-in moderation tools. Combined with volunteer moderation and a presidential election year in the US, and I’m sure the moderation load is close to overwhelming and they don’t really have the tools they need to be more sophisticated or efficient about it.

    I completely agree. I have a whole mini-essay that I've been meaning to write about this, about problems of incentives and social contracts on Lemmy-style servers in the fediverse that I think lead to a lot of these issues that keep cropping up.

  • !world@quokk.au, world news without a bot
  • Your actor (https://lemmy.today/u/tal)'s public key is:

     -----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----                                      
     MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEA1VR4k0/gurS2iULVe7D6
     xwlQNTeEsn0EOVuGC2e9ZBPHv4b02Z8mvuJmWIcLxWmaL+cgHu2cJCWx2lxNYyfQ
     ivorluJHQcwPtkx9B0gFBR5SHmQzMuk6cllDMhfqUBCONiy5cpYRIs4LBpChV4vg
     frSquHPl+5LvEs1jgCZnAcTtJZVKBRISNhSp560ftntlFATMh/hIFG2Sfdi3V3+/
     0nf0QDPm77vqykj2aUk8RnnkMG2KfPwSdJMUhHQ6HQZS+AZuZ7Q+t5bs8bISFeLR
     6uqJHcrXtvOIXuFe7d/g/MKjqURaSh/Pqet8dVIwvLFFr5oNkcKhWG1QXL1k62Tr
     owIDAQAB                                                        
     -----END PUBLIC KEY-----                                        
    

    All ActivityPub users have their own private keys. I'm not completely sure, and I just took a quick look through the code and protocols and couldn't find the place where vote activity signatures are validated. But I swear I thought that all ActivityPub activities including votes were signed with the key of the actor that did them.

    Regardless, I know that when votes federate, they do get identified according to the person who did the vote.

    In practice, you are completely correct that the trust is per-instance, since the instance DB keeps all the actor private keys anyway, so it's six of one vs. half dozen of the other whether you have 100 fake votes from bad.instance signed with that instance's TLS key, or 100 fake votes signed with individual private keys that bad.instance made up. I'm just nitpicking about how it works at a protocol level.

  • !world@quokk.au, world news without a bot
  • That's not quite true. If a community was resolved but no one's currently subscribed to it, for example because someone searched for it or subscribed and then unsubscribed, you'll see exactly the situation that you're looking at. You'll see partial content and almost no votes.

  • !world@quokk.au, world news without a bot
  • !globalnews@lemmy.zip and !politics@sh.itjust.works are the best news communities I'm aware of.

    Especially with "scaled" sorting, there's no real downside to subscribing to any number of them, but if I had to pick one for each category, those would be the ones. Mostly, my metric is that interesting stories reliably come across the feed without a lot of dreck.

  • !world@quokk.au, world news without a bot
  • It's very obvious that someone is doing deliberate astroturfing on Lemmy. How much is an open question, but some amount of it is definitely happening.

    The open question, to me, is why the .world moderation team seems so totally uninterested in dealing with the topic. For example, they're happy for UniversalMonk to spam for Jill Stein in a way that openly violates the rules, that almost every single member of the community is against, and that objectively makes the community worse. Why that is happening is a baffling and interesting question to me.

  • !world@quokk.au, world news without a bot
  • "This magazine is not receiving updates" is why it's out of sync. It's no different than a Lemmy instance which isn't syncing updates from a community. You'll be able to see the community, and sometimes see some content on it, but it'll be missing most of the votes. Also, when you first subscribe to a community, you'll get a handful of recent posts, but none of the votes, so you'll see content with the voting all wrong.

    Mbin might also be flaky about syncing with Lemmy instances, but that's not the reason in this case that the votes are out of sync.

    I looked over the votes for a couple of the posts in !world@quokk.au. I've seen voting in that past that seemed faked, but nothing in this community jumped out at me.

    As much as I'm in favor of a !world community that isn't on lemmy.world, because there's clearly some kind of rot going on there, I'm not sure how good an idea it is to have someone who's habitually gotten their own stuff banned in the past be the boss of a new community. He didn't get banned for tangling with the mods, he got banned for advocating violence, abusing the report feature, and things like that.

    Of course, diversity is good, obviously. Let's see what he does with it.

  • Movies and TV Shows @lemm.ee PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat
    When film critics clearly just do not get the movie
    0
    !communities@ponder.cat - Yet another community for finding new communities to subscribe to

    It's another bot that watches for communities that you might want to subscribe to, and posts them so you can subscribe if you want their content.

    Enjoy.

    !communities@ponder.cat

    9
    Add any RSS feed to any Lemmy community

    Hello everyone!

    If you moderate a community, and you want to get automatic posts from an RSS feed, now you can. It can be used for release posts for a FOSS project, infrequent blog postings that are relevant to your community, or things like that.

    To do this, send a private message to bot@rss.ponder.cat. The commands are:

    • /add {rss_url} {community}@{instance} - Add a new RSS feed
    • /delete {rss_url} {community}@{instance} - Unlink an existing RSS feed from the community
    • /list {community}@{instance} - List all feeds for a community
    • /help - Show this help message

    Please don't spam. You need to be a moderator of the community to modify its feed settings, but it's still possible for moderators to spam the rest of their instance with nonsense. Be a good Lemmy. If you'd like an RSS feed that's going to post a lot, and you want to separate it into a place where it won't invade the rest of Lemmy in a flood, send me a message and we can work it out.

    Enjoy! Have fun.

    6
    Why Appalachia Flooded So Severely from Helene’s Remnants
    www.scientificamerican.com Why Appalachia Flooded So Severely from Helene’s Remnants

    Inland flooding from tropical cyclones, even at high altitudes, is a major worry—and one that scientists don’t know enough about

    Why Appalachia Flooded So Severely from Helene’s Remnants
    2
    I didn't know HOW bad Google search has gotten.

    For some reason I was back in Chrome today, and I searched Google, without meaning to, for:

    get channel id for a youtube channel

    Here's what I got:

    ---

    > ✨ AI Overview > Learn more > … > To find a YouTube channel's ID, you can: > Use the YouTube account settings > Sign in to YouTube, select your profile picture, then Settings, and then Advanced settings. You must be signed in as the channel's primary owner to see this information.

    That's great, but I am not the channel's primary owner, and surely the majority of the time the person seeking an answer to this question will not be, also.

    > Use the channel's URL > Click on the channel's name under any of its videos, and then look at the URL of that page. The handle will appear at the end of the link, preceded by the @ sign.

    ?

    That is not the channel ID.

    > Use the page source code > View the page source code of any video from the channel, and look for the "channelid" keyword.

    I felt a little stingy at this point, because this sounds like a real solution.

    I opened the source for the channel page, and searched the source code for channelid, and found nothing.

    Then, while typing this complaint, I noticed that I was supposed to do that from a random video's page, so I opened one of the videos, did that, and found nothing.

    > A YouTube channel can have multiple URLs that direct viewers to the channel homepage. These URLs can look different, but they all point to the same channel.

    Irrelevant information. How do I find the channel ID?

    > Generative AI is experimental. 👍 👎

    Thanks Google! I know.

    > Sign in to YouTube. Settings . From the left menu, select Advanced settings. You'll see your channel's user and channel IDs. > > Find your YouTube user & channel IDs - Google Help

    Yes! I know. However, this isn't my channel. I want to find someone else's channel's ID.

    > ❓About featured snippets • 💬 Feedback

    I have some doubts whether you would accept my feedback, if I decided to give it. Why is this here?

    > Learn what words mean as you search > Select words to get definitions & translations without leaving the page > (Got it)

    Thanks! That's really useful to know. Do you know how I can get a channel ID though?

    > People also ask > * How do I get a YouTube Content ID? > * Does YouTube have the ID channel? > * How do I get my YouTube channel name? > * How to find YouTube channel gmail id?

    Fascinating!

    > Stack Overflow > https://stackoverflow.com › questions › how-can-i-get-a... > An easy answer is, your YouTube Channel ID is UC + {YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID}. To be sure of your YouTube Channel ID or your YouTube account ID, access the advanced ... > 23 answers > Top answer: > To obtain the channel id you can view the source code of the channel page and find ... > How can I get YouTube channel ID using channel name URL? > Feb 7, 2023 > Is there any way to get youtube channel ID ... - Stack Overflow > Sep 14, 2023 > How to get a youtube channelid from the channels link ... > Jan 11, 2023 > I can't get channel id using YouTube Data API v3 > Mar 25, 2023 > More results from stackoverflow.com

    I clicked on Stack Overflow, closed several popups. The top answer wasn't useful. I did find a couple of answers down:

    > "To obtain the channel id you can view the source code of the channel page and find either data-channel-external-id="UCjXfkj5iapKHJrhYfAF9ZGg" or "externalId":"UCjXfkj5iapKHJrhYfAF9ZGg". > > UCjXfkj5iapKHJrhYfAF9ZGg will be the channel ID you are looking for.

    I tried that, and it didn't work.

    Back to Google:

    > Comment Picker > https://commentpicker.com › Tools › YouTube > YouTube Channel ID Finder is a free tool to help you find a YouTube channel ID, along with other related channel information and statistics.

    And it worked! I get 2 free channel ID queries per day. Fortunately I only needed the one. But it worked! It only took several minutes of scrolling past multiple screens of things that didn't work.

    ---

    Now let's compare that to DDG.

    > Videos for get channel id for a youtube channel > 1:28 > How to Find YouTube Channel ID - 2024 > 263K views > YouTube1yr

    I skipped this as I didn't want a video.

    > https://www.streamweasels.com › tools › youtube-channel-id-and-user-id-convertor > YouTube Channel ID Finder - YouTube Username to ID Convertor > Simply enter any YouTube username or handle below and click Convert Username to ID. This tools makes use of the YouTube API to make the conversion. You can check out our other API tools here. Select YouTube handle, username or legacy: YouTube handles are now considered the default for Y

    And there we go! It works.

    ---

    When did it get this bad?

    74
    Lemmy Support @lemmy.ml PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat
    What's wrong with the stock lemmy-ui, aside from it being not actively worked on right now?

    I've heard that the standard Lemmy UI is not under active development because the Lemmy UI developers are working on a rewrite. I looked at it for a while though, and I thought that, aside from some missing features and polish, it was fine.

    I'm trying Photon right now, and it is also fine, and a little more feature-complete, but it is visibly janky in some respects. Maybe it is my biases, but I also much prefer the model of clicking on things and getting a new page over a single-page app that you interact with via controls.

    What was so terrible about the vanilla Lemmy UI? Do people really have a strong level of dislike for it? It seems to me like it just needs some love to smooth down the rough edges and awkward spots, but the core doesn't seem in any way terrible such that it would need to be abandoned.

    5
    Combating Misinformation Runs Deeper Than Swatting Away ‘Fake News’
    www.scientificamerican.com Combating Misinformation Runs Deeper Than Swatting Away ‘Fake News’

    “Fake news”-style misinformation is only a fraction of what deceives voters. Fighting misinformation will require holding political elites and mainstream media accountable

    Combating Misinformation Runs Deeper Than Swatting Away ‘Fake News’
    0
    The Last Days of Mankind: Today, each one of the assumptions that underpinned western policymaking and journalism for nearly three decades lie shattered
    www.nplusonemag.com The Last Days of Mankind | Pankaj Mishra

    Today, the war on terror is widely accepted as a military and geopolitical failure. But it is still not fully understood as a massive intellectual and moral fiasco: an attempt by the Western media as well as the political class to forge reality itself, which failed catastrophically, but not without ...

    The Last Days of Mankind | Pankaj Mishra
    12
    I rank Tiktok brain rot

    If you aren't familiar with people addicted to Tiktok, this is a fascinating and terrifying glimpse into how it operates.

    It is the evolution into the adult world of the toy-opening videos for toddlers that give them stimulation, which they then start to crave to the exclusion of all the world's real stimulus.

    0
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)PH
    PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat
    Posts 34
    Comments 154