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ggtdbz @lemmy.dbzer0.com
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France Is Headed Towards Its Most Feral Right-Wing Regime Since the Nazis
  • Which is partially felt more because and is exacerbated by the fact that companies and their shareholders feel entitled to capture every drop of money you have, to the point that buying a pizza comes with the option to spread the cost over four months just in case there’s 10$ from a person that they could only capture by offering the option.

    I live half a planet away from America and even I’ve seen it. Disgusting.

    Remember when we looked at phone apps that cost more than .99 and thought the developers were greedy?

  • BLOOD IS BLOOD
  • Yeah we don’t really mix blood types at all here in Lebanon, and I really doubt they do anywhere else. Universal donor and universal recipient is just theory, in practice it’s easier to receive O- than AB+ because AB is really uncommon (as is the case everywhere).

    AFAIK the A/B and Rhesus antigens are not the only markers and there are more blood compatibility components that are taken into account if possible.

  • The numbers 0–99 sorted alphabetically in different languages
  • Huh. That’s exactly how we do it in Arabic.

    I’ve always rationalized it as n + a set, so 43 is 3 and the 40 that we’ve added up before it.

    But then we do the same thing you do with 100. 100 and 3 and 40. So we list everything from largest to smallest order of magnitude except for the last two digits.

    I don’t think I’ve thought much about this since I was like ten years old (with a blip thinking about it in uni, when learning the different ways computers represent numbers). I remember getting tripped up with numbers as a kid when saying them in Arabic specifically because of this.

    For another layer of headache keep in mind that we write from right to left but numbers are left to right just like in European languages. Funny.

  • Canvas is coming Back! (July 12th)
  • I only ever participated in the original Place years and years ago, putting down maybe two or three pixels.

    Maybe where you’re from it’s easy to separate your government flag as its own symbol that doesn’t represent real people but when you’ve got like 20x30 pixels it’s hard to represent a local community online with something better than a flag. I think we ended up with less than ten pixels inside of a heart iirc.

    At least for me, in my own country, I associate flags with popular protests and other symbols make me think of the government. Law enforcement uniforms and mismatched old automatic rifles from fifty years ago. Crippling bureaucracy that operates four hours a week that stretches five hours of paperwork errands into a six month chapter of your life (not a symbol but when you say government that’s what I think of).

    Point being I don’t find it weird at all that people wanting to represent themselves will default to a national flag. My understanding is that in like Germany there’s a line where nobody wants to seem too proud of the flag, and in the US people are so desensitized to seeing every McDonald’s have 4000 flags on display, in England the red and white flag has different connotations if it’s in a football context or not, etc etc etc

    A lot of flagpoles here are faded and tattered and often with one of the stripes almost separating off the flag. Might be doomerism but I think it looks cool, I think it very much is an appropriate representation.

    I’m from Lebanon, this flag is for me, and when the government uses it, it’s using it deceptively to pretend it has any interest in our lives and our problems

  • Mapping for people, not cars
  • Shame it’s not on iOS. I’ve corrected a few things on local maps directly on Google’s platform (hilariously, it keeps rejecting some of them which are clearly visible from the satellite image), but I’ve always wanted to fix up the local OSM map. It’s just really intimidating as someone with only a very surface level understanding of how GIS works.

  • Depending on how you count
  • It’s kind of nice how everyone is in on the joke now? Like I think if you told the average person 15 years ago that a lot of history “documentaries” are racially motivated drivel you’d get a funny reaction.

    I think I could show this to my (quite conservative) parents and get a good chuckle out of them now.

    Granted I’m from the Middle East and the racist theories we have here have some of the roles swapped around. We don’t have 24 hour electricity but the average person genuinely believes we are the god-chosen enlightened people who are only held back by some combination of hubris, western empire, and “western empire” (this one should have a bunch of parentheses around it, several sets, I don’t want to get caught in some spam filter).

  • It's time to stop thinking plastic phones can't be premium
  • I remember seeing people mod the iPhone 4 to replace the glass back with a nice wood back.

    Metal and wood can’t be a worse idea than glass. Grippy too. Although without the right treatment it can get gross I guess.

  • Civilization VII Banner Appears on 2K Games Website Ahead of Summer Game Fest
  • I have the opposite problem weirdly enough. I played a ton of Civ V, and have had a lukewarm aversion to Civ VI knowing it would be a huge time sink when I could be playing other games. Such as KSP. Which I also haven’t been playing for the same reason.

    I’ve had it in my library from some bundle or sale for years now but it still feels like it’s much newer than it is to me. I’ve just played one or two games of V when I have to scratch that Civ itch.

    There’s just too many games and too little time

  • It's been around a year since a lot of us quit Reddit, myself included. I'm happy with Lemmy, but I still feel a bit lost online since leaving the old site. Discussion?

    Been thinking of making a post like this for some time, apologies if some of this is not completely relevant: this community seems more like it's about Reddit the platform/product than Reddit the social "thing", but I'm sure a lot of people have similar experiences to mine. Maybe on some instances more than others.

    Here's the one of the last comments I wrote as a regular Reddit user, on the eve of the blackout (almost a year ago to the day), under a post titled "Will your participation in Reddit change":

    My comment

    >I will keep searching Google for Reddit help threads, but as a cultural and news aggregator I think this is the end for me. Maybe I will check it every so often. On desktop. On the old site. Until they sunset that too. I wouldn’t be against using the first party app if it wasn’t so awful to use. It’s a massive shame that we’ve all collectively agreed that Reddit is the de facto way to create open communities online. There were so many forums that could fill the void left by Reddit for things like tech and art and they’ve all shut down in the past decade. I try not to be too negative about the evolution and constant growth of the userbase of the site and of the internet as a whole, but I’ve really felt like things are moving in a direction I can’t even be cautiously optimistic about lately. I think of all the mod tools that will be defunct. The commonly cited example is that people who comment excessively on adult subs are automatically barred from commenting on the teenagers subreddit. Sure the admins can whip up functionality to do this, but this site was built on custom tools and custom CSS and all that. I think the API was one among the many secret sauces that give Reddit this staying power. These sites and forums I talked about - I used to hop from one to the next year after year. Until I found Reddit a decade ago. I like that I choose my subs and that I don’t get algorithmically ordered sludge designed to game the algorithm on my homepage. Yes the sensibilities of the lowest common denominator redditors are gamed by people posting, but that’s (in my opinion) acceptable. Frankly if they kept the old Reddit Gold pricing (4 bucks per month/30 annual) and gated unrestricted API access behind it I would have been inclined to finally give Reddit money. I use it a lot, I don’t mind paying now that I can afford it. But something about how it’s all going down really doesn’t fill me with confidence. I’ve been trying to write a post about this for a while now, but I haven’t felt like it was relevant. Thanks for asking here

    Reading through this is a bit funny, in retrospect, seeing how Reddit-centric my understanding of the internet had become at the time. I am happy to report that I have checked the home page maybe a half dozen times since the blackout, instead of once or twice a week like I expected. I suppose the disgusting state of the heavily astroturfed worldnews sub was a big part of it as well: for me Reddit was the one big online platform where the average visible user didn't seem to be very misinformed about Palestine (at least not by default), and it was frankly very sad to see where it got in the past few months.

    I do miss Reddit, I haven't been able to replace it outright. I'm from Lebanon, and Lebanese Twitter is (if you can imagine it) even more of a toxic cesspool than regular Twitter. I'm not on Facebook (also cesspool here), I'm not on Instagram - my point is I don't get anything about my country on ostensibly user-curated social media. /r/Lebanon was very far from perfect, but it was nice to get a trickle of local news with users who were more in line with my own politics. The local news outlets focus on a lot of irrelevant crap, the sub's news feed was a bit more interesting.

    One thing I loved about that subreddit was that users with more mainstream views in my country (eg. transphobia-as-default) were allowed to spout their bullshit in the subreddit with little mod pushback (if it's just JAQing off etc, not harrassing people obviously). Then the regulars would dogpile on that user's post - very refreshing! And very validating I would imagine for anyone who is used to hearing this shit everyday.

    I was applying to be a mod to help keep the sub moving, at one point, but hey. Maybe that headache was never worth it. Still, I felt like I lost one of my online homes.

    More generally, I have enjoyed my first year on Lemmy, although the experience has been lacking in many ways. For one, while Reddit has a reputation as a meme cemetery, the memes here are generally a bit moldier. But that's okay. The fact that there's fewer posts I think isn't necessarily a bad thing either, I think we all preferred Reddit's slightly slower homepage in 2013 than the one we left in 2023, that would regurgitate more and more from the bottom of the barrel if you were willing to keep scrolling.

    I've toyed with opening a Lebanon community here on dbzer0, having opened one on FMHY that nobody used. But it wouldn't be the same, and I wouldn't know how to populate it. I posted maybe 2 non-question posts on Reddit in my decade+ of being a regular user, but I wrote tons of comments. It also helped keep my English sharper, I think.

    I've reactivated my old Instagram account and it's pretty ass out there. The ad/post ratio is just egregious, and they'll just serve you random posts from random pages. I want to see my friends goddamn it, isn't this what your platform is supposed to be for? For those of you who don't know, the app will also send you a notification once or twice a day suggesting you look at "today's top reels". I have never watched a reel of my own will, fuck off.

    Point being, the main platforms people use online haven't been up my alley. I can only hope the zoomer dumbphone pushback keeps expanding, and that social media starts being seen as something for older generations. Wishful thinking?

    This is just a post about enshittification, everyone's favorite word, but every time I think about it for more than 2 minutes I can't help but miss a simpler internet. Some part of me was hoping it would kickstart me "growing out" of spending this much time online per day (not everyone spends a ton of time online), but it hasn't.

    Also every time I ask something longer than 20 words on Discord some middle schooler will reply "yap", even in the channels designated for questions. Discord has had its uses (yes I know there's privacy concerns), but it's hardly a replacement for Reddit, or forums. Both of which are/were searchable. But enough yapping from me.

    Thoughts? How has the exodus been for you? Is this how Digg users felt?

    188
    Life is pain
  • Well, there used to be a Spotify feature where you could tell it to generate a “radio” (algorithmic playlist) based on an existing playlist you have.

    You have all your favorite songs of x mood in one playlist? Let the algorithm help you find more of this stuff!

    Thankfully the execs at Spotify rightfully noticed that this was a good feature and immediately fucking axed it in the past year or so.

    That was my favorite feature. That was why I used their damn service.

  • ‘FUCK the LAPD’ Shirt Maker's Entire Shop Sold Out After Cops Threaten Him
  • A lot of cool designs actually. Thanks to the LAPD for their endorsement or I wouldn’t have known about it.

    I’m not American so maybe different ones appeal to me (Lucky Once is fucking hilarious and the Cantona Kick is very much up my alley)

  • Vaporwave office [3840x2560]
  • It must have been edited afterwards, the scanline effect is probably some kind of filter. And while I don’t have a particularly keen eye for recognizing ML slop I don’t think I’ve seen any machine generated image with that kind of effect.

    Cool image I guess, although it would be nice to see this scene redone by someone with some intention. But there is also a counterpoint to that: I’d expect this scene to have a ton of little references and Easter eggs crammed into it, especially all the shelves, and at least as a wallpaper that might be too cramped information-wise.

  • Are there any household gadgets you found unexpectedly useful after you'd gotten them?
  • I’ve seen those, and while the appeal of something I can set and not have to turn off at an exact time is there, I always felt like cleaning it looks like a bigger hassle than cleaning a small pot.

    The one I remember seeing had you puncture the base of the eggs, and then they sit on a plastic tray over a heated metal pad. The metal pad is attached to the heating element so you can’t just scrub that with soapy water if any egginess sticks to it. The plastic tray also looked like it had a lot of nooks and crannies where all sorts of eggy proteins can get stuck.

    That and single-purpose appliances don’t really appeal to me as I don’t have much space. Not to discount how helpful they are for people with different physical needs than me, but I don’t know.

    I eat enough hard boiled eggs that I consider getting one every so often, which is why this comment is as unnecessarily long as it is.

  • Apple crushes creativity and its reputation in new iPad ad
  • I did get shown the ad, I thought “huh, it’s not like Apple to do ragebait marketing”. I thought that was just what that is, and that everyone can see that. The “Newphoria” marketing tagline I think was verging on it as well, but I didn’t see anyone moaning about it online. Much harder to avoid for me because it was on giant billboards and shop signs.

    I guess it’s just working as intended if people are recycling it every day into news fodder, not like there’s anything else going on in the world (ongoing genocide? No we have four tweets about Apple’s new ad and boy are these tweets strongly worded!)

  • Seinfeld says that far left woke mobs have killed comedy. He also dated a 17-year-old.
  • It’s also funny because It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is still airing too, and that is massively more edgy than anything seinfeld ever did.

    And that’s always been my argument when it comes to this particular dead horse. I don’t think any jokes are off the table, you just really have to make whatever discomfort you’re summoning be worth the punchline. The edgier something is the more it has to be funny to compensate, the point of offensive humor is to be funny not to offend, right? This has to be common sense. I don’t get how it flies over the head of so many people.

  • 26 April 2024
  • I think having it in the post body would be helpful.

    I found these to be a bit offbeat until I read a comment a week or so ago describing these comics as “boomer absurdism” and amazingly those two words gave me something to grab onto to find the humor in the weirder ones. That’s the what made it click for me. A date would help too.

  • Thousands of European flights reportedly affected by suspected Russian jamming
  • This has been happening on and off for months in Lebanon, the pilots have all been landing without GPS lately in case it cuts out again while they’re mid-landing. Utter chaos when it first happened, delivery drivers especially were very lost, and people in general had a tough time dealing with the loss of GPS. We don’t have a rigorous address system so sending locations to each other’s phones is really important here.

    I think “sounds more like” is a weird thing to say though for this kind of thing

  • IYKYK
  • Can’t say I miss the toolbars or IE7 but I do miss the world they came from. I really wish I explored more of that internet instead of just the endless Dragon Ball Z fan sites and pages and pages of crappy HTML with photos of papercraft creations. Although I am glad I got to see those.