EldritchFemininity

Because the ml stands for Marxist-Leninist. They live in a world of communist theory where nobody but capitalist pig-dogs suffer.

The point is, I don’t care about the process so much, I care about the end result

And here a lot of artists would disagree with you. Because for artists, the act of creating is as important as - if not even more important than - the end product. To quote a smart college student’s musings I once heard: “Art is how artists process life experiences.”

The rest I agree with, AI is a tool and the biggest issues with it are the people who are creating it and the people abusing it and making life for artists worse. Adam Savage once said that someday some film student will do something really amazing with AI (and then Hollywood will steal it and copy it into the ground), but that hasn’t happened yet. He said that what he cares about when he looks at a piece is what he can see of the artist in that piece, and with AI, you see nothing.

As an aside, there’s a real conversation to be had about how the word “consumer” has replaced all forms of interaction in our vocabulary. We no longer enjoy or appreciate art - we consume it; we’re not customers, we’re consumers, etc. But that’s not really relevant to the conversation except as a comment on how companies have pushed all forms of enjoyment down to the level of eating a fast food burger.

I honestly have no idea, that would be going much farther back in Reddit’s history than I was on the platform for. It reminds me of Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto, though. It’s true until somebody realizes that there’s a lot of money to be made doing the thing that you said you wouldn’t do.

Most likely because they care less about the idea of federated platforms and more about “not Reddit” and “not Twitter.” I’m one of those users personally (not that I don’t care about the idea, it’s good to have a return of what is effectively 3rd places of the internet). Most of them, like me, probably came here during the Reddit migration and moved to BlueSky when that took off in popularity.

If I didn’t dislike the Twitter format as much, I’d probably spend more time on BlueSky than forgetting about it until one of these threads appears, and I’d probably be on Tumblr still if I didn’t only use social media from my phone and Tumblr didn’t have such a horrible app.

People are going to go where the people are, for better or worse, until something pisses them off enough to go somewhere else. I originally created a Twitter account to follow a bunch of artists I followed who left Tumblr during the porn ban. I didn’t care for the platform (I hate the tweet format) but that was where all the artists went so I followed. Similarly, when the 3rd party api fiasco hit Reddit, I left and immediately went looking for where the people from the subs I read by “newest posts first” went - except the communities fractured and disappeared. It was the possibility of them reforming here that made me go through a GitHub to figure out how to make an account (spoiler: they never really did reform). I had no idea what a federated platform was supposed to be or do.

The fact that Lemmy is so niche is its biggest advantage and its biggest curse. You either love how small it is, like Reddit back in the day, or you suffer the lack of population for the things that you’re into, and the very nature of the federated platform makes it that much harder to centralize enough people in one niche to form a community (there we go again - centralization). Lemmy is the Wild West frontier town to the big social media giants’ company towns.

Because Bluesky claims that they want to develop their relay tech into a standard like HTTPS or something, and then hand it off to a nonprofit to maintain so that it’s usable by everyone. The tech has the possibility to be decentralized/federated baked into it, but whether or not it will be anything other than a pipe dream/marketing hype has yet to really be seen.

They present themselves as basically a Lemmy.world equivalent to those who care about decentralization, which is not a significant portion of their user base. For most people it’s just a buzzword, I believe.

No, you’re absolutely right. Discord is incredibly impermanent. Besides the lack of being able to search for things or split conversations into separate threads for every topic because it’s a chat tool, not a forum, as soon as a server disappears, everything hosted on that server goes as well (as far as end users are concerned. I’m sure Discord can pull stuff from their backend).

We need a return of niche forum communities and the like for the sake of the preservation of information.

You’re thinking of Gandalf Big Naturals. Easy mistake to make.

Here’s a fun one: Anemoia - nostalgia for a time you never experienced (from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)

Air quality is getting worse everywhere thanks to wildfires and the like, but my point was that you don’t look at a city like NYC or Boston and see an orange haze from the smog and leaded gasoline emissions anymore.

The biggest issues with cities largely come down to cars, and having grown up in a summer beach hotspot, I can tell you that it can be just as bad out in the countryside. From noise pollution to emissions to traffic, you can largely thank cars for all of it. Road noise is actually one of the loudest things in a city. In places that have limited access to cars, you can immediately tell the difference.

The homelessness epidemic is a problem everywhere in the US. You just notice it in cities because of the population density.

Cape Cod, the famous summer vacation hotspot south of Boston, has the highest rates of drug addiction and homelessness in the entire state. The same is largely true of any vacation area, actually. They often have the highest rates in their state due to high CoL and poor job opportunities outside of low wage jobs in the tourism industry (all of which are seasonal jobs as well, meaning they close when the tourists leave).

But out of sight, out of mind.

Smog hasn’t been a problem in US cities since like the 60s…

The King James version was also written to specifically reword the Bible to include as many references to a monarchy as possible in the hopes of propagandizing the population during a time when kings were losing their heads at an alarming rate in Europe.

“If God truly does exist, he more so loves the atheist who questions the world around him than the Christian who blindly follows.”

Thomas Jefferson

50% of the Founding Fathers were agnostic or atheist. My question is: why does she hate America?

I knew there was a reason I kept this photo around.

In the end, possibly the one good thing to come out of Overwatch.

Medical malpractice is a huge issue for LGBT people - especially trans people who require specific care and are therefore much easier to spot. It’s honestly a big issue in the sciences in general, and it’s definitely not a new issue, but more likely against specific groups. Women are much more likely to have to be their own advocates to get proper care, often being denied pain medication, told that they’re just making up their symptoms, or having their agency denied or choice of treatment being deferred to their husbands (generally when it comes to things that might affect sex, such as surgeries to constrict the vagina after giving birth or having their uterus removed due to medical issues).

And it’s not just that trans people often have to understand HRT at a doctorate level in order to fight for their right to the proper care and treatment that they deserve. I have read plenty of stories of trans people being denied care by bigoted healthcare workers - even a case of a woman in New York who only found out she had an aggressive form of cancer after the technician who diagnosed her tests called her to ask her how her chemo was going. Her doctor simply never told her the diagnosis and the only reason that she’s still alive is because of that technician who made sure that she got proper treatment after the shock of hearing that she didn’t even know that she had cancer.

Bias affects medicine all the way up the chain, from how nurses treat you to what gets taught in schools and even what fields get research funding. I taught my therapist pretty much everything he knows about transgender people, for example - because he’s older and they didn’t teach about trans people. And I have no qualifications in the field other than being trans and therefore having to teach myself to ensure I get proper care. Many doctors don’t know about trans specific medical care despite HRT starting to be researched in the 1920s in Germany (and only reappearing at the end of the 20th century after the Nazis burnt all the research). The medical field is taught based on the white body of a specific weight, which leaves out the differences in care that black people and people above or below that weight require. We only really started looking into what exactly female ejaculate is in the past 30 years or so. AIDS research was denied funding by the US government for at least a year while roughly 120 Americans died of AIDS every day, during which time all bottled medication was pulled from stores and the safety seal was developed and implemented over the course of 3 months because somebody poisoned a couple of bottles of Advil with cyanide.

It’s not a new issue, but it’s become more prevalent in recent years as people like the student above have become emboldened by recent events - like the rulings that say that doctors don’t have to treat certain people if it would “violate their religious beliefs.”