Block everyone! Block every instance! Block me! Block yourself!

Or maybe… just spend some time using the platform until you start to get a feel for the vibe. If you can bear to listen to opinions that don’t already align with your own, you’ll probably find that most people are pretty chill and discussions are mostly pretty civil. Disagreement is not the same thing as hostility or trolling. I’ve never blocked anything on this platform and I still find it to be miles better than reddit in terms of vibes. Rather than preemptively curating your feed based on whatever someone else’s idea of bad content is, you can form your own opinions. Block if you want, but you can also just… not engage.

Excuse me for a moment while I take this obviously serious post very seriously.

I’ve seen a lot of hysteria around “tankies” since I started using Lemmy and I gotta say I really don’t get it. Yes, there are people here who are to the left of Democrats. No, that doesn’t make them the enemy, or secretly MAGA or Russian or whatever. They just… disagree with liberals. I see opinions attributed to “everyone from a .ml community” that I’ve never seen from any of the actual users. People gleefully brag about blocking swaths of other users, yet I’ve almost never seen any .ml user actually being as toxic as they get branded. I’m pretty sure I’ve even heard people say that you are a particularly bad one, but I haven’t witnessed it.

Also, lemmy was created by ml’s right? It’s one thing to have very little tolerance for different political opinions, but it’s another thing entirely to literally just be the gray characters from this meme and still somehow think you’re in the right.

My roommate once got home as I was watching a Technology Connections video on the living room TV, and after listening to the dude explain the detailed mechanics of some common home appliance for 5 minutes, they finally uttered “what the hell are you watching?” But as we sat there for another 15-20 minutes longer, they eventually said “okay I get it now, this is pretty interesting.”

Would be pretty cool if we could build a crowdsourced network of these that do basically exactly what flock does, but just to keep a constantly updated public database of the location of all cop cars, hopefully with the ability to associate cars to specific officers with names, photos and badge numbers.

We could call them “drove cameras.” A drove is a term that refers to a group of pigs.

I was able to find it by following the mobile app instructions. Mine was pretty boring. It had stuff like “Likely lives in (city where I ship my orders)” and “Likely favors (brand of thing that I’ve bought multiple times)”. I guess the most invasive thing is that it guessed I live alone, or rather that I “likely has one adult.”

There’s a Walmart near me that I just never bother going to because like 80% of the non-grocery items are locked behind plexiglass. There are 4 self-checkouts and 2 employees assigned to just stand there watching people to make sure they don’t shoplift. They’ve made shopping so hostile that it barely makes sense for it to be a department store at all. Might as well just go back to the old model of telling the employee what you want and then they go get it for you.

The AI bubble will “burst” as soon as they figure out how to inflict all the damage onto regular working people. The housing bubble bursting is what enabled the ownership class to kick a bunch of working people out of their homes and then buy up all the recently vacated real estate for cheap. Nothing about the damage that the rich did to our economy caused any of them to face any actual consequences.

The promise of AI was that it would replace all the workers, but it’s not doing that fast enough and it’s beginning to look like it never will. We’ve been hearing that the AI bubble will “burst any day now” for years at this point, but if it happened right now, the ownership class are the ones who would be left holding the bag, and that can’t be allowed to happen. When they find a way to take it out of our hides, we’ll see that suddenly the “invisible hand of the free market” will present a scenario such that the floodgates open and the bloodbath is finally allowed to proceed. I imagine that’s why they started wrapping up so many pension funds and the like in AI investments.