Compared to say the Meta networks, reddit always felt to me like a platform where I can still control what I see. The feed is only filled by stuff I actively chose to subscribe to.

Sure it is a part of the problem - it’s the reason I joined Lemmy. And I wonder how long it will take to become the same kind of wasteland of trash. Not sure that the “smaller community and less viral incentives” approach will be enough to keep it more civil than the “offers” by the commercial attention economy.

Just as a reminder, before the internet was privatized, people were on self hosted forums. Some were good places and some were toxic shit holes. Really depends more on the moderation and community than anything else if you ask me.

That said, surely I am distrusting any platform owned by some oligarch to have policy in the interest of the user base.

I’m in multiple ways part of minorities, but luckily invisibly so, so I perfectly understand what you are saying with being “white” helping.

This year I started to learn some self defense, together with my wife. My gut feeling says we need to toughen up for whatever times are coming up, because in any case they won’t be good, that is for sure. I must say, no idea how much it would help in practice, and I hope to never find out, but it at least does help psychologically.

Having to watch all this insanity unfold on one hand slow motion (compared to movies) and also on ultra high speed (objectively / historically) and seeing where this is going without any ability to stop it leaves one feeling pretty helpless. Enact change… But how? Ultimately even hundreds of thousands protesters do not change a thing. We saw the same thing with climate change. Everybody knows what’s going on, nobody is really doing anything. Sadly, not only for such abstract threats but also very concrete and personified evils.

I think all we can do is try staying calm (but prepared) and remain decent human beings. I hope when the time comes I will have the courage and trust to help people who need and deserve it. Decent people helping each other could at some point be the only thing that remains, when all institutions have crumbed or gone rogue, and it’s crucial. Little actions by regular people can mean life or death. We cannot stop the storm, but we gotta try what we can in whatever sphere of personal influence we have. That’s all we can do and the best we can hope for. Everybody with a mind and heart keeping going and trying to do the right thing.

I wish you the best of luck to get through all this. Stay safe, stay sane.

Good one. I am the frame of reference myself… And we rewind time around me, kind of.

Okay, that at least does not sound so wrong like the “teleportation-style” approach!

What you say is like the extreme form of how time travel worked in Primer (the movie), which in fact is an interesting variation.

My condolences from Europe. Most likely we will follow into the abyss like lemmings as usual, with a few years delay. US was always setting the trends for Europe, and I already worry about what happens in the old world pretty soonish as well.

German chancellor announced his crew. Blackrock and the gang. They will already start to strip social systems down, and the openly fascist party will use the growing discontent to seize power next time. Then fascists and oligarchs will finally kiss and unite, like in the US.

The whole “Western world” has this Virus right now, there is literally no escape. Because rest of the world has it even worse.

What a disappointing timeline to live in.

I managed to be 10 years on reddit in niche hobby and nerd communities and it feels like I lived in some parallel reddit all the time, reading about how toxic and broken it is supposed to be.

Same with YouTube. There are nice channels with less than 100k Views per Video or even just a fraction of it, producing amazing informative videos.

Gotta find the gems in the dirt.

I have a nagging feeling the platform is not or only a part of the problem, but collective human nature is. When enough people join a platform to be a representative sample, you get the representative shittiness of the literally median person on the internet.

It’s the saddest part. He always said exactly what he was going to do. And Thiels plans were also known for years, in the open in obscure edgelord blogs. They all never made a secret out of their plans.

I wonder what else from the “crazy stuff he says” he will actually do at some point, like the famous “shooting some random person on the street” without consequences or something. Maybe in 2028.

I like https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe

Is ReVanced having any features I’m missing out on with NewPipe? (Serious question, never bothered trying ReVanced)

This is the way.

In some areas of theory, all the cool stuff happens on https://arxiv.org/ months before they end up being officially published and “paywalled”.

And in my area (theoretical computer science) we mostly publish short versions in conferences and put the full versions with proofs on arxiv. Of course everyone is downloading and using the latter. The rest is just for the “metrics”.

Absolutely. In these times it is probably the only way to survive and stay sane. Being terminally online and informed is just leading to overdose of the shittiness of like everything. Create a soft bubble of bliss and steer away from noise and trouble. Before, I always thought that escapism is despicable but it feels increasingly like I’m not strong enough mentally to look in the face of reality for prolonged times these days. It’s like staring into the sun, it burns you.

This. Once you understand enough about the universe how all coordinates are relative and everything is moving relative to everything else… Like, how the fuck is time travel supposed to work it it was anywhere like this naive movie idea of it? Time travel Hollywood style is literally not a continuous operation and as such absolutely unphysical.

“Turning culture into an expensive amusement park” - made me think of Mark Fishers Capitalist Realism essay. He articulated well how capitalism absorbs everything and sells it back to us as a monetizable commodity, only that its version is a replica, it has no soul, only a form. What remains is an aesthetics, looking close enough to the real thing for a person who has actually no idea. Even “counter-culture” is absorbed and emptied of all content to become just another flavor of the “mainstream”.

AI is the perfect tool for capitalism, because it works in a similar way. A kind philosophical zombie, a parrot that can replicate the buzzwords and mannerisms, one that wants to convince the customers they get a certain value or quality, without truly having it. It’s just as real, meaningful and authentic as green- and rainbow- washed marketing campaigns of huge corporations.

In the previous phase, capitalism absorbed our cultures and values and made a corrupted version into a part of itself, and now it tries to absorb the human soul and thought, to sell it back to us as a service.

I’m not against AI as a technology in principle, I’m no luddite. The problem are those who currently control this power, and what they do with it.

A beautiful answer, our trajectory was pretty similar, only that we were together and building it for over 10 years before we finally got married last year :)

My wife is my home, my constant, my safe harbor, the anchor of my sanity and peace of mind.

Two planets orbiting each other - I could not have said it better. We’re a unit that is greater than its sum and we grew and continue to grow together as individuals and into each other.

Haha absolutely, I’m also one of the people who always said all this rainbow and green washing is bullshit. As if they ever cared for anything.

Capitalism has no values, except for one: shareholder value. Yesterday they help sending people to concentration camps, today they help saving the world and increasing diversity, yeah, totally convincing.

There is one thing to rely on with capitalism - if you convince people you can make good money with it or it is good for the brand, they will jump onto it and squeeze the shit out of it. An abstract, amoral force, made from a large number of concrete shitty people.

Yes, exactly. To make America great again, Americans first have to take their country back from the oligarchs that are destroying it and sucking it dry. Noone else can or will do it for them.