You got a typo for mastodon (mastadon)

I don’t really have any input on how it is to self-host, but I’ve been playing around with friendica a bit and I think that has a lot of potential and may be worth mentioning. I think it has a lot of potential as almost a unified fediverse portal in addition to its obvious purpose of being a Facebook alternative, from what I’ve seen it seems to play pretty nicely with a lot of other fediverse services, and also supports RSS feeds

It needs some polishing, I think the default UI is pretty wonky, but there’s a lot of functionality there if you can be bothered to figure it out.

I work in 911 dispatch in the US, in addition to my local callers who come from a variety of backgrounds with various accents and speech impediments, I also get calls from alarm companies and a lot of them seem to be outsourcing their call centers or at least hiring a lot of non-native speakers (looking at you, Johnson Controls)

When their accents are so thick that you can’t even understand a basic address, like 123 Main St in Springfield, and you’re counting on a timely dispatch for a fire alarm, that’s a problem.

We also have access to a translation service, but that really slows everything down because everything has to go through the interpreter, so off the bat it’s taking twice as long, and often significantly longer because I can’t know when to cut my caller off because the interpreter can’t really start until the caller finishes talking, so I don’t know if the 3 minute rant the caller went on actually is pertinent information I need to know, or are they just rambling and repeating the same useless details over and over again.

I sometimes have to use that translation service when the caller actually speaks pretty decent English but their accent is just totally incomprehensible to my English-speaking ears (especially when you throw in a bad phone connection, I swear some of my callers have found a way to make a phone call from a kazoo.) I’ve gotten a pretty good ear for the more common accents we get- Spanish, Korean, Hindi, Haitian Creole, Arabic, etc. but every once in a while a curveball gets thrown at me, I legitimately don’t think I’d ever heard someone speak Berber or Albanian until I got a call from someone who did, so I’ve never had a chance to train my ear to those accents.

You even get some situations where due to different dialects and regional accents, even the interpreters sometimes have trouble understanding the caller. For example, different Arabic dialects for example can have a lot of variation, and there’s some variation in Spanish dialects. If the interpreter is mostly fluent in Egyptian Arabic or Castilian Spanish, they can sometimes have a hard time understanding a caller who speaks Saudi Arabic or Guatemalan Spanish.

I’m not convinced that the AI tech is ready to be inserted into a 911 call, but if it ever does get to that point it could be a very useful tool for some of my callers. If we can sort of neutralize their accents, we may not need to use translators as often when the caller speaks OK English, and I may not have to ask the alarm to operator to repeat themselves 3 times to understand that they’re saying the alarm is at the “Wendy’s” (I would have sworn that they were saying “Landis,” we have a couple businesses by that name in the area, but none in that shopping center)

Even people who are native English speakers can be kind of hard to understand because of accents. Once in a while I get someone from the UK, or the US south, or hell, even just certain neighborhoods of the city I live just outside of, that can be hard to understand.

And don’t get me wrong, I love all the different accents, I’m proud of my own local linguistic quirks, I’m sad that my own ancestors didn’t keep their native languages alive with their children (I would be able to speak at least 4 or 5 different languages if they did) and these people who speak English with a heavy accent speak more languages than I can, so I can’t really talk shit on them. But it does present a significant barrier to communication and being able to smooth that out would be really useful sometimes

Funny thing I noticed today when I did some grocery shopping.

For most of my life I’ve always just purchased store brand large eggs. I’ve never really looked at the price, I need eggs and they’re cheap, but of course I took notice today that my usual eggs are now something like $5.49/dozen.

Then I look next to them to the fancier organic cage-free eggs and they’re 4.99/dozen.

Almost like if you don’t keep thousands of chickens crammed together in cages they’re less likely to pass bird flu around.

The idea of pain doesn’t really factor into my issue with needles, I’m not worried about it hurting, I’m just skeeved out by the needle itself.

If it were an option I’d gladly take needle-less vaccines and blood draws that hurt 10× worse (which still wouldn’t be that bad, needles really don’t hurt much)

Hell, if they hurt more I’d probably have less of an issue with them. I’d rather have an actual reason to dislike them instead of just a random case of the heebie-jeebies for no particular reason.

Without knowing the content of the training or the actual intent of the people who decided to pull it, it’s pretty hard to say whether it was malicious compliance, or just plain-old compliance.

However, it got at least one republican’s feathers ruffled (the one who called it malicious is a Republican)

So if they knew it would get that kind of reaction and did it specifically to do so, that would be “malicious”

I could certainly imagine someone in the airforce deciding “You know, Alabama has pretty much nothing to be proud of except for the Tuskegee Airmen. I bet if word gets out that we’re stopping this training, some Alabama politician will make a stink over it, and make us roll it back. Then when they get on our case about other ‘DEI’ training, we can point to this as an example and say ‘well we tried to stop that one and you got butthurt about it, and these are more of the same kind of thing, so either make up your fucking minds or get off our fucking backs and let us do our god damned jobs’”

Again though, without knowing their actual intention it could just be plain ol’ compliance or even just incompetence that led to this.

I think it depends on how you use those different sites

I transitioned from Reddit to Lemmy pretty seamlessly like you did. Around the time it became clear they weren’t backing down on the API thing and other bullshit, I looked up some reddit alternatives, chose Lemmy, and kept right on doing what I was doing on Reddit.

On the other hand, I’m having a bit of a hard time ditching Facebook.

The difference is I know the people I’m friends with on Facebook, I have actual relationships with them, I’m there to interact with those specific people. Leaving Facebook without finding a decent alternative and getting those people to switch with me (which probably means they’d also have to convince their other friends to switch too) means losing contact with those people.

On Reddit and now Lemmy, I’m basically here to read articles and have conversations with strangers about those articles. I don’t really form lasting relationships here, I don’t recognize usernames outside of maybe 2 or 3 big names. If they weren’t full of the worst kinds of idiots, trolls, bots, and scammers I could pretty much get what I’m looking for from the comment section on a news site.

Some people do build those kinds of relationships here though, they come to Reddit or Lemmy, at least in part, to interact with specific users and communities that they have some sort of connection to, and when you have connections like that, it gets pretty hard to leave that platform. Unless all of your friends leave at the same time and go to the same platform, you need to either lose some friends, split your time between the two platforms (neither of which may be as good as what you had because not everyone is there) or you have to find some other way of staying in touch and keeping the friendship going (which is often much easier said than done)

I’m not at all ashamed to say I don’t like needles. I’m not an overall squeamish person, blood doesn’t bother, I’ve gotten all kinds of nasty cuts and scrapes and I just clean them up, throw some bandages on, and continue about my day. But something about needles specifically really skeeves me out. If the process was to stab me with a scalpel and rub the vaccine in there I wouldn’t mind it nearly as much.

It’s probably part of why I’m not great about going to the doctors for a regular physical and such, in the back of my mind I think that they’re gonna find some new excuse to stick me with a needle, and I’m even worse about getting blood work done (also there’s a part of me that feels really strongly that they should just be doing it as part of the physical. Surely this dude who went to medical school can handle a quick blood draw, so why should I have to go carve more time out of my life to go sit in another waiting room at LabCorp or wherever?)

That said, I can still suck it up and get my flu and COVID shots every year. Definitely helps that my work (county department of public safety) has someone come in to do it at my workplace so I can’t psych myself out of scheduling an appointment, I’m gonna be there anyway so i might as well get it done.

Yeah, fuck me for having an opinion on something I frequently find myself needing to use.

No, in an ideal world, a truck shouldnt be anyone’s primary transportation. Privately owned passenger vehicles in general should be a rarity and most people’s needs should be served by public transportation.

However, sometimes you need a truck, they do exist to serve the purpose of moving large or bulky things that you can’t with other vehicles, they’re not just for idiots to waste gas driving getting groceries or for idiots to go play in the mud. And people tend to develop opinions on the tools they use. I have a favorite hammer, I have opinions on computer operating systems, a preferred style of cabinet hinges, and opinions and preferences on countless other things.

And it happens that I like trucks. I don’t own a truck, it’s not a practical vehicle for my everyday needs, but I borrow them frequently from friends and family and rent them on occasion. And the maverick is my preferred truck for when I need one.

I don’t think it’s so much that western social media “won’t allow” leftist content, you can certainly post it and share it, but the algorithms aren’t going to do anything to help it gain traction.

Pretty much all of my Facebook friends skew liberal, leftist, even pretty hardcore socialist and communist. They share their memes and post about politics, and I like and interact with that stuff in positive ways. The few political pages I follow myself are pretty much all left leaning causes- environmentalism, pages devoted to voting out Republican candidates in my local elections, LGBTQ rights, atheism, etc. and I actively block, unfollow, and when appropriate report (though of course the reports never seem to go anywhere) any sort of of homo/trans-phobic, racist, bullshit and any misinformation I come across.

I’m just about the furthest right of anyone on my Facebook, and I’m still pretty far left. I have a few hobbies and interests and such that tend to skew right-wing, like hunting, fishing, guns, etc. but I don’t really interact with any pages relating to any of that on Facebook, don’t post about those things, etc. and the way I approach and interact with those sorts of activities is very different than the way most conservatives do.

If you looked at my ads and recommendations though, you’d think I was some kind of truly insane redneck. Gun stuff, weird Christian tradwife quiver-full homesteader shit, very thinly veiled racism, homophobia, etc, muscle cars and big trucks (I think muscle cars are stupid, I do like trucks but not the big lifted monster trucks that it’s always showing me, I think a stock maverick is pretty damn close to perfect)

The only left wing stuff I see is stuff my friends are sharing themselves, and mostly it’s stuff they’ve posted themselves and not shared from anywhere else on Facebook. Their stuff’s mostly not getting taken down, but it’s not getting promoted to any wider audience by the algorithm.

The general concept of Facebook I think is fine

I don’t have any problem with the idea of a website where you can go to share things with your friends, family, coworkers, etc.

For me, the biggest problem is that there’s way too many opportunities for you to interact with people you don’t have any real connection to.

Unless you have mutual friends, you shouldn’t see anything someone else is posting, sharing, liking, or commenting on. The only thing you should see from them is a name, profile picture, and a short bio when you search for them.

There shouldn’t be public pages for businesses, celebrities, etc. Everything you see on Facebook should be there because someone you actually know thought that it should be shared with their friends.

And if, for some reason there must be public pages, then you should only see what your friends are commenting on those pages, not complete strangers.

There shouldn’t be public groups that just anyone can join. Groups should be limited to people you’re actually connected to in some way. Not that you necessarily need to be friends directly, but you should be able to trace a clear line of mutual friends connecting any two people in the group together. There shouldn’t be a public “we love bowling” (for example) group that anyone can join, but if you started a bowling league and wanted to start a group for it, you might start with Jeff, Walter, and Donny who all know each other, then Jeff adds his friend Smoky who also wants to join, and then Smoky adds his friend Liam who adds his friend Jesús, etc. Jeff may not be directly friends with Jesús, but they’re connected by actual people so they can be in the same group. And Jesús and Jeff wouldn’t get to see anything each other do outside of that group because they’re not friends and don’t even have any immediate mutual friends. Their entire relationship is through the bowling league.

Want to talk to, follow, and share things with strangers? Go join a forum, get on Lemmy/reddit, use Twitter, start a blog, publish a book, send an op ed into the local newspaper, etc. That’s what those platforms are for. Facebook is for talking to people you know.

Friendica and other Facebook like platforms don’t really solve those problems, but since they’re smaller and less businesses and such are on them it kind of feels like they do.

That’s my 2¢ on the matter anyway.

I know the things you’re talking about, basically a thread adapter to screw an off-the shelf oil filter from auto zone or wherever onto your gun, and the first shot punched a hole through the other side.

Also those adapters are legally considered a silencer and you still have to jump through all the same hoops to get one.

That’s not the thing I’ve been getting advertised to me on Facebook as an oil or fuel filter

The things I’m getting are a long thin metal tube with baffles inside and threads on one end that look basically like a textbook silencer/suppressor

I also see them getting advertised as “solvent traps” for gun cleaning, which I suppose is marginally better than they’re advertising it for some sort of firearm use, but I know a silencer when I see one.

Also if you’re using so much solvent that you have it oozing out the barrel while you’re cleaning the gun and feel like you need some sort of device to contain it, that’s a pretty sure sign that you’re using way too much solvent.

Unless maybe you’ve just pulled a Soviet surplus Mosin Nagant out of a crate and need to clean 50 years of caked-on cosmoline off of the whole damn rifle. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mosin with a threaded barrel though.

And I can’t think of any good reason that trap would have a hole at both ends, kind of seems like that defeats the stated purpose of trapping the solvent.

Al Qaeda has always been pretty clear on their Intentions in Iraq, in 2005 they specifically outlined a 4 stage plan

Step 1: expulsion of US forces from Iraq
Step 2: establish an Islamic Caliphate in Iraq
Step 3: extending the jihad to surrounding countries
Step 4: “the clash with Israel”

So yes, they were in opposition to the US occupation, but that was more of a means to an end, not exactly altruistic Iraq freedom fighters. And around that same time they were also carrying out attacks on Iraqi tribespeople and clashing with nationalist insurgents. Yes they got somewhat more extreme over time, but like you said a lot of that can be attributed to them growing in power, and arguably dealing with the US occupation was more pressing to them at the time so that’s where most of their resources went.

And step 3 definitely seems to be in line with expanding operations into Syria.

Al-Julani did serve between 2003 and 2006 in AQI/ISI

Which brings us back to the root of our disagreement

We’re in agreement that he was part of ISI. I think we’re also in agreement that ISI became ISIS

So do you consider ISI/AQI to be substantially different enough organization from ISIS to be worth drawing a distinction?

To me, I’d consider the distinction to be similar to quibbling over whether a software engineer worked for alphabet vs google, or Facebook vs meta. It’s essentially the same organization with most of the same leadership, goals, methods, etc. just with some restructuring and a name change. A useful distinction if you’re talking shop about the specific details of their structure and operation, but for the average layperson having a casual discussion on Lemmy they can be generally understood the be the same organization.

Again, you can really get into the weeds here about which group splintered off from where, and what name they were operating under at what time

ISIS evolved from ISI (Islamic State in Iraq,) which was also often also known as al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)

Al Nusra started as an offshoot from ISI/AQI who went to establish an Islamic state in Syria around the outbreak of the civil war in 2011 with the authorization and backing of ISI/AQI (and later ISIS) leader al-Baghdadi. al-Julani had already been active in ISI for several years at that point when he went to Syria.

By 2012 they had officially established themselves as al Nusra, and kind of started doing their own thing pretty quickly and regarded themselves as a separate affiliate of al Qaeda instead of a subsidiary of ISI, but that seems to be how ISIS regarded them. Regardless of what its status was formally, I think it’s pretty safe to say that al Nusra can trace its lineage at least partially to ISI.

In 2013 baghdadi tried to bring al Nusra formally under his banner and rebranded ISI as ISIS/ISIL (the S or L being al-Sham, the Levant, or Syria, al Nusra basically would have been the Syrian branch if things had gone according to al-Baghdadi’s plan) but al quaeda opposed that merger and like you said, al nusra continued to regard themselves as an al quaeda affiliate, and one separate from ISIS. This is where the conflict between all nusra and ISIS began and part of the split between ISIS and Al quaeda

Terrorist organizations aren’t exactly doing things by the book with notarized contracts and such. It’s a tangled web of shaky alliances and different cells operating mostly independently with lots of internal conflicts. There’s a lot of room for interpretation here, but I feel pretty comfortable simplifying things down to saying that al Nusra began as an affiliate or offshoot of the terrorist group that would later become ISIS.

That is literally false

Yes and no

When we’re dealing with terrorist organizations like ISIS, things aren’t always totally clear-cut, there’s always going to be groups merging and splitting off, alliances between different groups being made and broken, people switching sides, internal power struggles, name changes, etc.

So yes in the sense that he was not specifically part of the organization known as ISIS when it was known as ISIS

However, al-Nusra Front was at least very closely tied to or even a part of ISI, and ISI would later essentially become ISIS (or ISIL, IS, Daesh, whatever you want to call it)

Personally I’d consider making a distinction between ISI and ISIS to be uselessly pedantic hairsplitting. And depending on how you regard the relationship between ISI(S) and al-Nusra Front, I think it’s fair to say that he was either part of or at least very closely-allied with them.

Now as of right now, al-Sharaa/al-Julani seems to be doing an alright job as leader of Syria all things considered, he could certainly be doing a lot worse. But it’s still a new and evolving situation and it’s hard to say exactly what his intentions are/were, how his thoughts, beliefs, and allegiances have or have not changed. It could be that his actions with ISI were part of a means to this specific end to be a decent leader for Syria, it could be that over the years he has genuinely had a change of heart from being a jihadist, or it could be that the current situation is just a facade to keep international heat off of himself while he consolidates power in Syria and once he has he’ll go right back to full-on islamist extremism.

I hope for the best, I’m not really qualified to offer much of an opinion on him beyond that, and I suppose only time will tell.

There’s going to be a lot of bias when you try to go off of people you know

Personally, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of anyone in my circles who doesn’t read at least a couple books a year.

And not everyone who reads necessarily does it when you’re around and may not talk about the reading they do for any number of reasons like they’re just not interested in talking about books, are embarrassed by the books they read, etc.

It kind of sounds like that article is about the “hey Siri” feature getting activated accidentally, like if it picks up something that sounds similar to the trigger phrase and starts recording

Which is still a big security/privacy issue, but not exactly the same as if they’re just turning the microphone on whenever they want to listen to you and serve you ads

I’ve had a mix of different vaccines, but slightly more moderna than the others

My first dose was moderna and was the only one I had any real noticeable symptoms besides a sore arm. Mostly fatigue and chills.

It was a bummer though, I worked overnight at the time, I went and got it after my shift, probably at around 8 or 9 AM, went home feeling fine and went to sleep, woke up in the afternoon still feeling alright, then a couple hours later it hit me. I pretty much kept to my normal night shift schedule on my days off, so I was up most of the night feeling like shit.

By the time I was ready to go to bed in the morning I was feeling better. If I had been on a normal schedule and had gotten the shot first thing in the morning I probably would have slept through the worst of it and wouldn’t have noticed anything.

Haven’t had any real symptoms from any of my subsequent doses, the last one I got a couple months ago maybe left me feeling a little fatigued, but it’s hard to say because I got it at a time when my sleep schedule was kind of fucked up from some other stuff and I’d been really busy so I might have just been the normal kind of tired.

I don’t think that most of the big tech companies are listening to your microphone (I’m not ruling it out entirely, and I’m certainly there are some smaller sketchier companies that are doing it)

But I think most of the time most of the time they don’t need to

They know what ads you’ve seen on your phone/computer, what you’ve been googling, the websites you’ve visited, where you’ve used your credit card, what shows and movies you watch, and where you’ve been (from gps locations, or from what wifi networks and Bluetooth devices you’ve been near or connected to) and what ads, playlists, stores, products, etc. you were exposed to while you were there, and of course who you talk to and all of that same information about those people.

That’s all going to influence the things you think and talk about, they probably have a pretty good idea what kind of conversations you’re going to have well before you do.

And don’t get me wrong, that’s creepy as fuck.

I think most of it comes down to people not even realizing how much data about ourselves we put out there and all of the ways it can be collected and used to build a profile about you.

And honestly I think they can probably get better data from that most of the time than from trying to filter out background noise and make sense of what you’re talking about through your microphone.

A lot of times it’s seasonal, for example, in the spring and summer a store might stock a lot of patio furniture and grills, and maybe they were solid sellers all season, but come fall they still have some leftover, and not as many people are going to want them in winter, and now they need that space in store to sell Christmas lights, so they have to do something with those leftover grills and lawn chairs.

So they can either warehouse them themselves, and try to sell them again next year, which might mean added shipping costs from the store to the warehouse and back again in the spring, and also takes up space in their own warehouses that they might need for other stuff, or they can sell them to an outfit like big lots and just order a new batch the next year and not have to deal with all of that.

Especially if that item is now discontinued and they won’t be able to restock the exact same grill (or whatever) next year, or maybe their contract with that manufacturer expired and wasn’t renewed so instead of stocking Weber grills they’re going to have Blackstones next year.

Sometimes stuff does end up there because people didn’t want it, but often the real issue is they didn’t want it at the full MSRP, but maybe they do want it at the discounted price big lots can sell it at. Of course Walmart or whatever store it came from could sell it at that lower price themselves, but if the Bean counters determine that they could make even more money by getting it off their shelves and replacing it with the new merchandise, that’s what they’re going to do.

Or sometimes it might be stuff with damaged packaging, open box returns, or cosmetic defects that they didn’t want to put on shelves.

If you’ve ever gone to an outlet store, it’s basically the same idea- discontinued, overstocked, last season, etc. merchandise, except it’s all coming from one brand instead of stuff from many different sources going to the same place, and the stores are probably a bit nicer because that brand is using it for advertising and protecting their image.

Places like TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and Homegoods are also basically the same thing.

And honestly, there are some really good deals to be had. There’s a “Half Off Store” near me which is a similar liquidator/overstock store that I believe sources most of their merchandise from target, and I’ve seen and gotten some pretty good deals there. It’s always hit-or-miss what they have in stock, which is to be expected, but they usually have some decent robot vacuums, some small kitchen appliances (even some moderately higher-end brands,) etc. at pretty deep discounts, usually they’re just last season/years models, or the packaging is a bit beaten up.

You can’t really go shopping at these places with the idea that “I’m going to buy this specific brand and model” but if you go with a general idea like “I need a food processor” you’ll probably find one that will do what you need. Or if you just stop in and walk around and see if anything catches your eye.

The half off store is next to a restaurant my wife and I like, so whenever we go there for dinner we walk around the store first and sometimes we find something we need/want, sometimes we don’t. We got a fancy trash can there once that sells for like $150 normally for about $60, box was a little banged up but the can itself was fine. My wife had been looking at a similar can from the same brand for her office, but didn’t want to spend that kind of money right then, I think this one was slightly bigger than the one she was looking at, but she decided she could live with that since it was half the price.

We also get a lot of dog toys there, she’s gonna tear them up and rip the stuffing out regardless of how much it cost, and as long as it’s fuzzy and squeaks she’s not picky, so we might as well save a few bucks.