To extend your metaphor: be the squirrel in the digital forest. Compulsively bury acorns for others to find in time of need. Forget about most of the burial locations so that new trees are always sprouting and spreading. Do not get attached to a single trunk ; you are made to dance across the canopy.

To suggest some things not directly related to the workplace:

• look into things like community pantries and community gardens, https://www.detroitagriculture.net/ is a good example of what can be achieved over several years
• try to match up within your neighborhood unemployed adults and low-income parents who need babysitters on weekends or outside of school hours
• try to convince the (relatively) more wealthy members of your community to help organize free breakfast for the neighborhood kids
• organize study/homework sessions for the neighborhood kids and/or adult learners

These are all ways to increase the resilience of your community and reduce their dependency on their paychecks. These will also increase trust and reflexive solidarity between community members. This in turn starts making unions and strikes feasible.

A second good read is her follow-up/response post: Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization

I think downvote anonymity is the bigger part of the problem, not downvotes in general. Unless I’m misunderstanding, what you’re proposing amounts to “if you want to downvote in a community you’ll need to make an account on it’s instance”. This would be a nice option to have, but it should also remain an option.

In your +50/-90 example, showing at least the instance provenance for votes allows more (sub)cases. If I can see that 55 of the downvotes come from the instance hosting the community, that’s potentially a very different situation than if only 5 do. Or if 70 of the downvotes come from a pair of instances that aren’t the community host. The current anonymity of these downvotes flattens these nuances into the same “-40”, which I agree isn’t great when it can lead to deletion - but I’d argue that’s also an entirely separate problem that might be better addressed from a different angle. I find that disabling downvotes from other instances entirely flattens things just as much if not more, just not in the same manner. Instead of wondering how representative a big upvote or downvote count is, I’m now wondering how representative a big upvote count is, period. That might seem like 50% less wondering but with no downvotes at all it might also only be about 50% less votes.

I’m not convinced silencing negative outside contributions won’t just shift the echo-chamber-forming to one that’s more based around a form of toxic positivity and/or reddit-style reposts and joke comments, either.

Revealing from which instances downvotes come from doesn’t prevent opinion downvotes but it allows dulling their bite. The same is true for opinion upvotes.

From my understanding votes are more-or-less already somewhat public on lemmy between it’s implementation and what federation needs to function properly. At the very least, each instance knows how many votes they’re getting from the other instances. We should embrace the nuances federation brings to the problem instead of throwing them away entirely.

So much thought has been put into “how do we convey the different instances’ character and their relations to each other to new (potential) users in a way that doesn’t a) overload them and/or b) scare them away with content that rubs them the wrong way” in communities and posts like these, when potentially we just need to render more visible the data that is already present on the instance servers.

I’ll acknowledge up-front that the “just” in the previous sentence is carrying a lot of weight; data viz is not easy on the best of days and votes have so little screen real-estate to work with. On top of that, any UI feature that can make what I’m suggesting palatable and accessible to non-power users would also need to be replicated across most popular clients. They’re written in a motley assortment of programming languages and ecosystems, and range from targeting browsers to native smartphone OSes, so the development efforts would be difficult to share and carry over from one client to the next. Still, they’re called votes: there’s a lot of prior art in polling software and news coverage of elections from the past few years that should be publicly accessible (at least in terms of screenshots, stills, and videos of the UI, if not a working version of it to play around with).

On top of this, I don’t know how much effort this would require on backend devs for lemmy (and kbin/mbin I forget which is the survivor, and piefed, and any other threadiverse instance software I’m currently unaware of). I wouldn’t expect keeping track of vote provenance to prove immensely difficult, but it could cause some sort of combinatorial explosion in the overhead required by the different sorting algorithms proposed (I’m ignorant on how much they cache vs how often they’re run for lemmy, for example).

I can’t foretell if this would “solve” opinion downvotes on it’s own, but I do think it would contribute to the necessary conditions for people to drift away from the more toxic forms of it. It could also become another option for viewing feeds on top of “subscribed”/“local”/“all” + the different vote rankings.

From what I understand its origin in street racing was because japanese drivers (specifically? might have been Asian more generally) were souping up cars to look pretty but still not run great. I’m hazy on the details and my google-fu is failing me - I wish I had a more precise answer but overall I recall being bummed out at how even the origins of the term weren’t as clean as I had hoped.

The issue isn’t just local. “This is predicted to cascade into plunging property values in communities where insurance becomes impossible to find or prohibitively expensive - a collapse in property values with the potential to trigger a full-scale financial crisis similar to what occurred in 2008,” the report stressed.

I know this isn’t the main point of this threadpost, but I think this is another way in which allowing housing to be a store of value and an investment instead of a basic right (i.e. decommodifying it) sets us up for failure as a society. Not only does it incentivize hoarding and gentrification while the number of homeless continues to grow, it completely tanks our ability to relocate - which is a crucial component to our ability to adapt to the changing physical world around us.

Think of all the expensive L.A. houses that just burned. All that value wasted, “up in smoke”. How much of those homes’ value is because of demand/supply, and how much is from their owners deciding to invest in their resale value? How much money, how much human time and effort could have been invested elsewhere over the years? Notably into the parts of a community that can more reliably survive displacement, like tools and skills. I don’t want to argue that “surviving displacement” should become an everyday focus, rather the opposite: decommodifying housing could relax the existing investment incentives towards house market value. When your ability to live in a home goes from “mostly only guaranteed by how much you can sell your current home” to “basically guaranteed (according to society’s current capabilities)”, people will more often decide to invest their money, time, and effort into literally anything else than increasing their houses’ resale value. In my opinion, this would mechanically lead to a society that loses less to forest fires and many other climate “disasters”.

I have heard that Japan almost has a culture of disposable-yet-non-fungible homes: a house is built to last its’ builders’/owners’ lifetime at most, and when the plot of land is sold the new owner will tear down the existing house to build their own. I don’t know enough to say how - or if - this ties into the archipelago’s relative overabundance of tsunamis, earthquakes, and other natural disasters, but from the outside it seems like many parts of the USA could benefit from moving closer to this Japanese relationship with homes.

Slight question/nitpick over the prequels’ CGI; is the opening space battle [over Coruscant] of Revenge of the Sith somehow not up to par with its contemporaries? That sequence still holds up in terms of visual spectacle that takes advantage of its medium (3d rendering in this case vs practical effects) to do specific shots and set pieces.

Or am I just ignorant of how much the original trilogy pushed things?

I suspect the foreign sanctions will indirectly prevent a healthy video games ecosystem from forming in Russia, on top of everything you’ve already cited. With these sanctions, there is even less incentive than before for Russia to crack down on (software) piracy (of foreign games). So their game devs are competing with essentially free and high quality games made by everything from indie devs to huge studios.

Thanks

🎶 Just a pair of Hitler fanboys, preparing to enter the white house 🎶

I can’t believe it just clicked for me that we shouldn’t be watching out for the “next Hitler” (which I was getting ready to assign to trump based on the past 9 years) but a group of fetishizing copycats.

Reminds me a bit of how Robert E. Lee and much of the confederacy saw themselves as real-life Misérables (https://boundarystones.weta.org/2019/05/13/how-les-miserables-became-lees-miserables).

The common point between Lee, Hitler, and the Misérables is they were all lost causes in the end (thankfully). Hopefully today’s regressive shit-stains-of-a-human-being will go the same way.

My reading of the article is also that the anode is bonding with the protons (aka hydrogen nuclei) as part of the redox process to generate current.

I was going to try it out, and then the website asked me for my email :(

I don’t want a feed aggregator that has its own account, I want one that just lets me use my existing network/feed-specific accounts.

I imagine (/hope) that the email-for-signup is only while the software is in alpha/beta/unreleased, to help them get user feedback.

Good luck and don’t forget to bring heat pipes!

(More realistically, given you posted this 11 hours ago; hope y’all weren’t stranded!)

The most infuriating part of the exchange for me is the initial response to the maintainers’ guess of “slop” is to act hurt, betrayed, and to threaten to spread negative press about the project.

Another day, another person using LLM/“AI” to waste the curl project maintainers’ time…

A tweet thread I found:

link to first tweet: https://x.com/SyeClops/status/1866189782419984714

Not the most clear lineup with “left” or “right”, but this person is clearly a product of our times.

I don’t want to be a downer, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_deed has a long history of doing that and so far it kind of culminated in world war 1.

Interesting how this resembles what I was taught in school about the roles that coffeeshops played in the European “Enlightenment”.

Also, just with Mario alone Nintendo has long had a heavy jazz influence.

“What was Windows even doing for us?”

Beautiful 🥲