“I ever tell you about the time my buddy Keith and I were on the top of a burnin’ building, and we had to fight our way down like five floors of zombies and― Hey, wait a second…I guess that was you guys. Oh, shit, man, I can’t wait to tell Keith about that one!”

Agreed. I’d also like to add that intelligence != wisdom != experience, and you need all three to achieve real understanding.

I avoid this by not watching porn that makes me sad. There’s plenty of consensual, happy, joyful sex-positive porn out there.

While your point is valid about this particular situation (which is horrible and criminal on multiple levels), your overbroad generalization of porn and the implied assumption of guilt in the viewers is what’s led folks to react negatively to your statement.

On a larger level, this kind of statement plays into the puritanical doctrines towards sex that paint it as a negative force, and subsequently leads to the twisting of a positive, creative act into a negative expression of power and rape in those that accept those doctrines.

Porn is not at fault here, nor are its viewers. Those at fault in this crime are the producers and publishers, who were well aware of the abuses happening under their watch, and deceived their viewers into believing they were observing consensual performance acts. I hope that these women get every cent and more, and it would be excellent to see a class action suit from Pornhub’s subscribers arise in tandem to and in support of their complaint.

Find your representative by zip code here

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, Kbin is the Jamaica of the Fediverse, a land of special people where champions grow.

I’m not Indian, but coming across Gaddaar by Bloodywood gave me hope that the left hasn’t lost its voice over there. If you ever wanted hear Rage Against the Machine in Hindi, check these guys out.

The dish was named after Count Alexander Grigorievich Stroganoff, who lived in the late 19th century in Odessa. There are two versions of the dish’s origin. According to one of them, Beef Stroganoff was invented by the French chef Andre Dupont for the elderly Count, whose teeth were no longer strong enough for chewing large pieces of meat. According to another, more popular version, this dish was prepared specially for the guests of Count Stroganoff. Being a wealthy and childless person, Stroganoff often invited people for so-called “open tables”. Everyone could join these dinners, the only condition was to be properly dressed and fairly educated. Beef Stroganoff was a tasty meal that could be easily divided into portions. Therefore it was ideal for such “open tables” provided by Stroganoff.

That’s what the deal was then. Now it’s $1.66 at Walmart.

I think the Fediverse.observer stats for the 19th are off - it’s showing that drop across all software categories - Mastodon and Kbin show the same dip.

Why looky there - love to see a post get legs… have a boost and an upvote, matey!

Woot Kbin Gang! Holds the best parties by far. You get lemmings and mastodons all rocking out as Reddit burns. This occasionally gets messy (mastodons get pregnant, lemmings get flat), but damn is it fun.

Being able to follow other users makes a huge difference to content discovery - there’s a lot of immediate content you’re missing out on if you’re only on Lemmy, and Mastodon users miss out on most of the long form content and discussions.

It’s always wise to satisfy the requests of time squirrels. Keeps them away from one’s nuts.

Excellent news. This law will save lives.

Agreed. Spez’s support of The_Donald was the beginning of the end (although as he was a mod of jailbait before it was banned, it was clear that Trump wasn’t the genesis of Spez’s sickness), and now there’s nothing left of the communities that made it great. There’s hasn’t been anything rewarding about contributing there since about 2014.

10k will last you about 3 months comfortably, 6 if you’re single and willing to scrimp or live in your car. That’s your time limit to get a new job.

I had about 3x that saved and took a year off after working a decade at my previous position (I was pretty burnt out and hadn’t been able to take more than a week off since I started). Having that padding gave me the time and peace of mind to look for something I really wanted, and gave me the freedom to turn down offers that would have put me back into the burnout cycle.

I ended up with a full WFH position with a 50% bump in salary. Within a year, I made back what I had spent simply by maintaining my budget from my previous salary.

If I hadn’t had the cushion, it would have been pedal to the metal and accepting the first position offered, and I would have likely hit burnout before a year was out.

Infected Mushroom

Zircon

Eskimo

The instance owner determines what’s on their “public” tagged activity feeds. If they remove the “public” tag from a post or user account, it’s restricted from non-authenticated requests from outside servers. You’re correct that this shouldn’t grab user IP addresses, but they could if an instance owner is including that information in what they mark as “public” profile feed data. I should reiterate that I know of no instance that does this, but the capability is there in theory (and I do know that certain forum software packages outside the Fediverse collect and publish this level of information, although it’s a dying practice).

I’m not advocating instance owners turn everything private, but it’s clear they’re going to have to examine what they’re providing through their feeds to Threads if they’re serious about their users’ security and privacy. The safest bet is to defederate from Threads until it’s clear what Meta’s intentions are (aside from their rhetoric, which is always deceitful when it comes to user privacy).

As to what Meta will do, they absolutely will scrape that activity data for marketing use, if they aren’t already. It’s what their entire business model on Facebook is built around - targeted ads based on user activity. Anything they say about protecting that data is lip service at best given their past performances and lawsuits. It also very likely that they’ll merge it with their existing data hoards, and do their best to de-anonymize accounts so that they can increase their data accuracy and thus their profit margin.

Looks like there’s a lot of FUD around this, so I decided to jump into the ActivityPub spec and see exactly what they can and can’t get with the spec as is.

First off, they cannot get a users individual IP unless the instance owner publishes it in the profile data as part of a “public” activity stream. I don’t know of any instance that does this currently (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong).

It looks like what Meta is looking to do is scrape the information in the “public” tagged activity streams:

In addition to [ActivityStreams] collections and objects, Activities may additionally be addressed to the special “public” collection, with the identifier https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public.

Activities addressed to this special URI shall be accessible to all users, without authentication.

This is similar to what most instances do to show the posts of a user or community - they send a request to get “public” tagged data to publish to their end users. Within this data is all the activity information on that post - who upvoted what and who, and who commented. Again, this is the same way federation works now - your server has an activity stream of all your followed and followers that it can make available to view by tagging their activity as “public”. Many instances have this information tagged as “public” as a default.

Now, this system works fine if you’re dealing with small actors that don’t have nefarious designs on the network, or the resources to dominate it.

When you have a digital behemoth with grand AI designs that’s already embroiled in lawsuits where it was grabbing your medical data and regularly allows law enforcement to stroll through its records, it’s an entirely different situation. Meta has the power and capacity to not only engage in an “embrance, extend, extinguish” campaign against the Fediverse, but also to seriously threaten the privacy and well-being of Fediverse users in a way no single instance owner can.

I think the solution here will be for individual instance owners to harden their security and if not outright de=federate from Threads, ensure that posts are private by default and that their users are made well aware in the TOS that following a Threads user will result in sharing data about their profile that could (and most likely will) be matched back to their Facebook account.

Instances that don’t allow visibility control on posts, like Kbin and Lemmy, should look at adding an option to post only to the local server, or have the capacity to block threads.net outgoing publication based on user profile settings.

Instances that don’t allow follow request filtering probably should look at adding it (Mastodon has it implemented - Kbin and I think Lemmy would need to catch up) - otherwise users could be unaware that they’re sending their data to threads.net when someone from that service follows them.

I think it goes without saying that any data Meta gets will get the AI treatment - both to identify users and to sell your activity to marketers. That activity is the real goldmine for them - that’s a stream of revenue for marketing that rivals what Meta tracks on its own platform.

As such, it may be worthwhile for instance owners to look at removing voting and boosting counts from the “public” activity feed. This would mean more fragmentation for communities whose populations span instances (vote counts would be more off than they are now), but it would prevent bad actors from easily scraping that data for behavioral analysis.

All in all, though, I don’t believe it’s going to be a positive event when Threads does start federating. One of the nice things about the Fediverse is that the learning curve is high enough to keep the idiot count down, and I don’t really see our content or commentary here improving once Meta’s audience enters the space.

Working fine on my end - sounds like ISP filtering or possibly a firewall setting. With an ad blocker to handle popups, you could also try g o k u dot s x - not quite the same server collection, but you might find what you’re looking for.

The greatest challenge with AI is not how to make it, but how to make it better than us.

It’s not just the Russians and Chinese. In rural wine country where I grew up, more than a third of the properties have been bought up by millionaires that visit maybe two weeks out of the year, hollowing out the town, and gentrifying anyone who was middle class or lower out of the area. Another third of what used to be rental housing is now air BnBs. Teachers and EMTs can’t afford to live within an hour drive, so public service quality has cratered. None of the kids I went to high school with still live in the area (although many commute in, as they tried to make their careers where they grew up).

While recently we’ve seen more Chinese, the Russians haven’t really made an impact. The trend (in this locality), however, was absolutely started by New York financiers, and had been ongoing for at least 15 years before foreign investment capital showed up.

This is what irritates me when people say there isn’t enough housing supply. There are 16 million vacant homes in the US. It’s not a supply issue. It’s a class and economic issue.

I know it sounds radical, but I support a law would force landlords with property that has been vacant more than six months to offer it to section 8 recipients as a rental. I think this would cause a significant positive adjustment in the market, making housing more affordable and expanding access to those who need it most. Many landlords refuse to rent to section 8 whatsoever, so if they still want to avoid those tenants, they’d have to ensure their property is rented, opening up more housing and driving down rents.