ThePowerOfGeek

I’m genuinely shocked by this. But only because I didn’t think Bessent had the spine or the personality depth to get into a heated argument with anyone. The guy comes across like a timid sloth on Valium, and has all the personality of a wet sock.

Some counter points:

• I’m not seeing a lot of mod abuse here. I’m sure some occurs, but generalizing it to all or most mods is a gross exaggeration. And aside from that, it happens on Reddit too, worse from what I’ve seen. So it’s still not as bad here.
• Again, I’m not seeing lemmy.world acting like a company (whatever that even means). You know what is a company, and one that sells it’s data and flagrantly shits on its users? Yeah, Reddit.
• Some instances block VPN and Tor? Okay. If you say so. That’s not a big concern of mine personally. At least Lenny instances didn’t go to war with their users, mods, or API developers.
• Federation doesn’t need to be perfect. It’s still better than a closed system in principle, even with its flaws.
• That’s a bold claim about no instances defending their users privacy. Where’s the proof? Either way, at least all or most of them don’t seem to be aggressively selling their users data to AI company as training material. So they are still better than reddit even if assuming they don’t defend user privacy.

Side note: reading the title of this post gave me a headache. But I know sometimes it’s easy to over-edit and have text get away from you. Or maybe English isn’t your primary language.

True. Twitter is ordered of magnitude worse than the other.

Yeah… A ‘slip up’. Suuuuure.

Wouldn’t be the first time, won’t be the last.

Talk is usually cheap. But to his followers it’s all that matters.

I’ve tried to get away from WhatsApp. I’ve got the majority of my friends off it (at least when they communicated with me). But some people just will not leave due to familiarity/fear of change. I’m still working on them, but I’m pretty sure it’s a lost cause.

You can only go so far. And cutting people off because they won’t move away from something like WhatsApp isn’t always feasible.

But I agree with you: I don’t understand why people still use those platforms. I think it’s because they don’t keep up on things, or just don’t care.

Wow. Finally this administration does something that seems like a good idea.

Nobody tell them they will be following the EU’s lead by doing this.

Not if you’re willing and able to pay an arbitrary $30 a month extra. That lifts the oh-so essential data cap. Yeah… fuck Comcast, or whatever they are calling themselves this month.

“Rules for thee but not for me!”

Yeah they have a really fucked-up way of looking at autism. There are tons of autistic people out there living great lives and contributing a hell of a lot more to society than many of these antivax ghouls.

This 100%. More diagnoses doesn’t necessarily mean an increase due to some nefarious cause - no matter how much the antivax loonies want that to be true.

MN is another victim of the lunacy inflicted on America by the swathe of red (mostly) welfare states.

Man, that’s a blast from the past! I had completely forgotten about that until I saw this post!

I wouldn’t say I ‘stole’ them necessarily. But me and my buddies did used to take them out and hide them near the desks as a prank.

Some thoughts, as someone who has used ancestry.com in the past:

• Do NOT submit your DNA to them! If all your family wants is to trace your family back for several generations, in most cases you can do that with old-school research. Not providing DNA doesn’t usually prohibit that. And as others have said, these companies are not trustworthy when it comes to being keepers of genetic information.
• You are right, the free trial on ancestry.com is a hook in to get your subscription, with the hope on their end that you will forget about it and and up paying for months on end while not using their services. It’s basically like a gym membership, but for history information.
• That said, it’s not that difficult to cancel an ancestry.com subscription. They make you jump through several screens and try to persuade your to keep it going, but it’s not insurmountable, and I’ve cancelled and renewed and then cancelled my subscription with them a few times.
• They do have an exceptional amount of genealogical information on hand, at least for Western researchers. I’ve found some surprising things about my ancestors on there that I couldn’t find elsewhere.
• For libraries and subscription level, it depends on what your needs are. They bundle them into subscription packages. If you think your ancestors have been in America for several generations I would just go with the cheaper American subscription. If you have ancestors who came from Europe a few generations back then you might want to go with a broader subscription plan that covers European sources. If you want to trace ancestors back from Africa or Asia you are going to be SOL regardless, because genealogy sources from those areas are usually very bad.
• One thing to note, in case this is a problem for you: ancestry.com at least used to be owned by or managed by the LDS church (the Mormons). And they have a pretty sordid history when it comes to the exploitation of women and girls, and (like quite a few other religions) have done and continue to do some very sketchy stuff in general.

Hope this helps.

That cartoon depiction looks nothing like Melania Trump.

I’ve found the same thing.

Whenever I ask an LLM for a pointer, I end up spending just as long (if not longer) refining the question than just figuring it out myself it’s doing a search on SO it in other online resources.

But even the IDE integration is getting annoying. I write a class with some functionality baked in, and the whole time it’s promoting me with a shit load of irrelevant suggested code. I get the class done, then I go to spin up a unit test. It knows which class I’m trying to create a unit test for, which is cool. But then the suggested code is usually completely wrong or it’s much more convoluted than it needs to be. In the latter case, the first several characters of the suggested code is good, but then there’s several lines after it of shite. And hitting tab injects all of it in, which then requires me to delete it all. So almost every time I end up hitting escape anyway.

I’ve heard a few people rave about ‘vibe coding’ - usually people with no or little programming experience. I have to assume that generated code was either for very simple atomic actions and/or it’s spaghettified, inefficient garbage.

Krita is my graphics app of choice these days. But there are many alternatives that are great (like Gimp and Photopea).

MAGA…

Musk’s

Agency

Getting

Audited

Like others here, there’s not much extra I can do. My job seems very stable, I have no auto loans, both the family cars are in okay condition, I have a fixed rate mortgage, health is okay, and aside from one small loan I am paying back the debts aren’t bad.

A bottle of things I need to revisit:

• I stocked up on non-perishable foods that my family will eat. But I need to do a bit more on this front.
• I’m trying to cut back on extra spending. This is the biggest problem I have right now. Mostly due to unexpected bills and death-by-a-thousand-cuts small purchases.

Yeah. Most recently it was a shitty site that looked like it had been built in 2000 and I had to use to pay an EMS bill: services.webillems.com

Tried several times on Firefox and it wouldn’t let me proceed with the payment. It kind of acted like it had. But when I called them to confirm they said it never went through. Tried multiple times with the same results. So I then tried on Chrome and it went through first time.

There’s have been others too. But like I said before, it’s rare. But annoying.

It’s down to these sites using stale, poorly-written legacy code and/or never being upgraded.