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Chinese coast guard ram and puncture Philippine military boats in disputed shoal
  • It reminds me of this tradition. Especially this quote from a modern incident "Successfully counting coup disgraces your opponent. It’s a way of publicly shaming them. We believe that if you are shamed, you must admit defeat." It makes me wonder how much of the motivation for the incidents is internal consumption. Acting aggresively, but in a carefully crafted way to avoid an escalated response. The message sent internally that the other side restrains themselaee not out of reason, but fear.

  • Reminiscing about the "Reddit migration"
  • It's been wonderful to find a home here! Hoping for many more cake days for all of us here in this friendly little corner of our beloved blue marble!

  • What is your country's "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear"?
  • You can't polish a turd; you can roll it in glitter.

  • Advice on finding a partner?
  • This seems pretty sound advice - https://youtube.com/shorts/JhQI06_V6NQ Source: Single/dating for ten years, now married for ten years.

  • Ukraine updates: Russia orders nuclear preparation drills
  • Huh? Checks Woozy's profile Oh. Well that makes sense.

  • Boeing hit after new whistleblower raises safety concerns
  • "One's a backfire, three's gunplay"

    • The Way of the Gun
  • The DMA already having an impact. Brave Browser installs surge after introduction of browser choice splash screen on iOS.
  • That's new daily installs though, so cumulative number. I don't think they're trying to draw a comparison, just show the increase.

  • Help me make a "MechaMatrix" 2030 #keyboard, please?
  • Oddly enough, I have the same neglected side project for the same reasons! I'm at work at the moment but will post what I have so far later. I'll also walk through my aporoach to be noob friendly and cost effective.

  • Looking for better ways to search for jobs.
  • This may be a good place to start. Most states (that I'm aware of) have workforce development programs with both online tools and physical offices with available assistance. For most state governments it is beneficial to retain high skilled and high paid workers as part of their tax base, and provide employment opportunities to low skilled and low experience workers to increase their contribution to the community.

    You should be able to find automated notification tools on their web offerings (or even an available api), and their physical locations can be excellent resources for developing soft connections with the proffesional community in your field.

    Best of luck in your search!

  • Consumers are tired of inflation. But some retailers fear falling prices
  • What are the root causes of that deflation though? I would posit the over extension of the Chinese economy in an effort to mimic "Number go up" results without the required fundamentals (see evergrande).

    I see "inflation is good" parroted a lot, without much analysis as to why. I understand how continual inflation is a major driver of modern western economies, and those steering those economies require it to support current polocies and the general status quo. However, that being said, I fail to see how that makes it required for things to be "OK".

    The price of a raspberry "inflates" in the winter, and "deflates" when in season. The price of commodity consumer electronics is in a continual state of deflation, as new teohnology emerges. At the microcosm prices move in both directions frequently, and are just deemed adjustments. Why then, at the macro scale is a continual increase in pricing considered a sign of economic health?

  • Consumers are tired of inflation. But some retailers fear falling prices
  • When's the last time the US saw significant deflation? The 30's? Can't say I blame them for their fear. But they'll see no sympathy from me! We've seen two whole generations born, raised, and passing away in the age of "Number always go up!" business. At least the greatest generation grew up hearing stories of difficult times when it was the unions and collectives that brought them through the darkness. I'm sure current business leadership has no clue how to face this. It's passed out of living memory.

  • Judge cuts law firm's legal bill in half after it used ChatGPT to calculate "excessive" amount | ChatGPT thinks lawyers don't get paid enough, apparently
  • Reminds me of using graphing calculators back in highschool. "Can we use it on the test?" "Sure! But remember, it will only help you if you know how to check your work and bother to do so." Automating anything blindly carries the risk of unending buckets of water or a universe of paperclips. Trouble is, it seems like a fair number of folks are confusing automation with delegation.

  • Your username has suddenly become your only means of staying alive. How bad is it?
  • I'm more worried about innocent bystanders tbh...

  • It's so much easier to comment on Lemmy because it isn't a toxic cesspool waiting to tear you apart
  • We have the momentum now, and that makes a world of difference. Lemmy isn't beholden to any "engagement" metrics, so all the dark patterns that infect other social media have no incentive here. The internet wasn't always toxic (as a general statement). People engage more in conflict than in an interaction with no winners and losers, we're just hardwired that way. The "Web 2.0" crowd hijacked that to keep us in front of more ads for longer, "Hur-dur, number go up." Without those institutional incentives I'm very hopeful that the strong foundation of the Lemmy community can "hug it out" with the few rage baiters that are bringing their bad habits here.

  • It's so much easier to comment on Lemmy because it isn't a toxic cesspool waiting to tear you apart
  • Exactly the same here! I lurked on Reddit for yeeears (like, the pre Pao days). I made one post in a very specialized sub, and three general comments elsewhere. The post went well, I got a quick answer but it really could have been an e-mail or forum post. The general comments were absolute DUMPSTER FIRES, and so I never did engage or contribute.

    Lemmy has been so different, the community is smaller, but every post interaction I've had it feels like the folks I am engaging with read what I wrote and are making a good faith effort.

    After the last ten years of social media, it's a little... weird. But good weird. "Oh, this is what it's supposed to be like."

  • Moderation needs to be better on Lemmy.
  • Unfortunately, it motivated people to post content that would be upvoted, which, given the state of popular posts on Reddit over the last year or so on Reddit, has become very different from "good" by which I take you to mean "valuable".

    Give time for the dust to settle, and the shitposts and memes should congregate to a few communities, which can be filtered from our feeds if desired.

    It seems (given the beans) that the newly enlarged user base is in the "spaghetti against the wall" phase of posting, just trying to see what sticks.

    This to shall pass.

  • Suggestion and comments regarding the influx of troublesome users due to the current Reddit and Twitter issues.

    I've seen a few posts today mulling over possible solutions to some of the issues caused by Lemmy's explosive growth in the past few weeks. I'd like to walk through the situation as I see it, point out a few differences I've noticed in the federated model vs. what users of other social media may be used to, and offer a suggestion for the way forward.

    As I see it now -

    • Most of us who have setup an account in the last couple of weeks are refugees of various corporate run sites where planning and decision making took a very top down approach. An individual, or small group would survey their domain and, by executive fiat, declare "A will now be B, and C will now be D! This is the best way, because I have seen it is so."

    • Those of us who quiet liked A being A, and C being C, ruminated, fumed, posted about the disadvantages of B and D, lamented the loss of A and C, commented on the shortsightedness and perhaps stupidity of any leadership that would try to implement B and D, packed our things, and left.

    • Trolls beneath a bridge over which billygoats seldom pass, go hungry. And so like rats in the age of sail, it seems we may have brought some of our trolls with us. Whether they are ban evading by setting up accounts on different instances, spamming new community setups, or just refusing to shed the toxic mentalities previous communities fostered, these trolls are scrambling beneath the bridge we are trying to build between what we once had, and what Lemmy could be.

    A different world -

    • Lemmy, and the Fediverse as a whole, lack the top down structure of our previous abodes. There is no executive, let alone fiat. There is no ruling council, no C*Os, no board of directors, no share holders, no employees, and no customers. Anyone with a few free weekends to learn can spin up a small instance for friends or family, those with the calling to lean into it have given us all what you see here. No gods, no kings, just people, people like you and me.

    • People, by their imperfect nature, make beautifully imperfect things. The Fediverse sells you nothing, reaps from you nothing, asks only for what you care to give, and in return provides only what you ask of it. It is, of course, far from perfect. From both a technical and organizational point of view there are rough edges and sharp corners. It lacks the commercial "polish" we've come to expect because, well, it's not commercial.

    • Lemmy and the Fediverse were born from the FOSS movement. For the uninitiated, FOSS stands for Free and Open Source Software, one of the founding ideals of which was "the economy of abundance", the idea that usable and valuable software can be produced in such quantities and of such a quality currently, that the effort and costs for maintaining it could be met using only volunteers and donations.

    • Carrying this ideal in their very DNA, Lemmy and the Fediverse discard the idea of catering to or capturing a large audience, providing content to the "least common denominator", or the idea the metrics are numbers to be run up on some imaginary scoreboard. The Fediverse, it seems to me, aims for "deep" at the expense of "wide". This ideal isn't just reflected in the technical side, but also how its systems are organized. There is not one group of admins, but many. Each instance is free to decide on its own rules and best practices without a half dozen marketing MBAs fretting in front of a white board over how this will affect things with the 19-25 male demographic. Perhaps more salient to current events, there is also no overarching authority vested solely in an individual whose singular decisions can significantly impact a user base of millions.

    My suggestion is this -

    Embrace what makes the Lemmy and the Fediverse different. This is a brave new world. For once we all here have the freedom to lean into it. There are issues, but these issues are being addressed not by some stuffy room full of suits sweating how they will pull their numbers out of the red by the end of Q3, but by regular, beautiful people like you and me. They will make beautiful mistakes and we may yet witness spectacular failures. Give them the freedom to do so, in the same way you have been given the freedom to be part of something bigger and brighter than what has come before.

    Throughout the fediverse, there are many dedicated and hardworking folks whose part time hobby has exploded nearly overnight into almost a second job. The beauty of the FOSS framework is that they are free, with little restriction, to address their community's growing pains as they see fit. Like a live action Monte Carlo simulation, scores of instance admins are applying themselves to the problem of "How?" As the community reaches for and shares the solutions they find the system will improve upon itself. This process my involve stumbles, and may take more time than many you anticipate (nine women can't make a baby in a month), but it will come. When it does, each instance will have at hand the tools they require tailored for its particular communities. Most beautifully of all, we will do it together.

    We are all in this together, across instances and communities. I suppose all I'm suggesting is we have the same strength of faith in the folks who built this place as they had in us when they opened their doors to us when we needed a place to shelter from the cold.

    If you made it this far, thank you for your time, this carried on longer than I intended, but that is something I am prone to and one of the reasons I was not a frequent poster elsewhere. For the Fediverse grognards who made it this far, thank you especially for sharing your home with us, I hope we'll try and collectively keep our feet off the furniture.

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    the_kung_fu_emu the_kung_fu_emu @lemmy.world

    If you think your opinions don't matter, that the world in front of you is too great of a mountain to move, that you are struggling against a mighty machine too powerful and too organized for you to stand against, keep this in mind - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War

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