Carl

The em dashes always give it away tbh. Anything “coded” by this user would 100% be slop. If they can’t even be bothered to think of a pitch for it, why would they think of the code?

• Instances have disappeared with user databecause admins had no usable backups.

Some of us consider that a good (or at least impartial) thing. Many Reddit users discovered how difficult it is to actually delete your data when they migrated to Lemmy. Lemmy’s userbase tends to be very privacy-focused, so harping about “it’s easy for your stuff to get deleted” isn’t the win you think it is.

Admins can ban you after 10 posts because they decide you “look like a bot.”

I mean… I thought you were a repost bot when I first saw your content. And I don’t mind reposts, but I do mind untagged reposts. Leaving your stuff untagged feels deceptive at best. Like those “tales from Reddit” YouTube accounts, that just read old Reddit posts verbatim and call it “content”.

• Media uploads are ridiculously constrained on all instances. literally all. Tiny file limits mean you can’t even upload normal modern photos, GIFs, or videos. 5Mb limit on lemmy.world - and thats the largest instance.

I haven’t personally experienced any file size limits, but I mostly use external media uploads for in-comment images. But at least for me, (and I’d say I’m a fairly average user) the file size limit has been fine.

Admins can ban you after months of posts too. Just because - they didnt know hosting can get expensive. Months of contributions can disappear with the account. (already happened to me )

I’m actually a little confused by this one. Are you suggesting that people with post history should be immune to bans? Or that posts shouldn’t get deleted when a user gets banned? Because either one fundamentally breaks the reasons for a ban system existing in the first place. Imagine if you were an admin who banned someone for posting illegal content… But banning them didn’t delete the illegal content.

• Defederation can suddenly make you invisible to entire groups of users.

I don’t concern myself with who can see my posts. I post for myself and my own entertainment. If other people don’t want to see my posts, that’s fine with me.

• Users usually have absolutely no idea what infrastructure they’re trusting with years of their content.

Again, “content” is ephemeral. Lemmy doesn’t track your total karma like Reddit does, so what are you actually losing? I can see an argument if someone is a longtime troubleshooter. Because that kind of “help I’m having an obscure problem and the only Google result is a Reddit post from six years ago” content drives a lot of traffic to Reddit.

But I’m not worried if my shitposts vanish. In fact, I burn my Lemmy accounts after about a year and start fresh, specifically to avoid any accidental buildup of info that could be used to dox me. I even use red herring info in my “personal” posts. On this account, I live in the southern US and work as an audio technician for live events. You think that’s actually true though? It may be based on shreds of truth, (I have enough experience to be a competent audio technician, for instance,) but it’s not actually true. Every single new account gets a new persona. Having my old posts vanish is a benefit, not a drawback.

I’m not trying to say your complaints are invalid. On basically any other social media platform, your complaints would be perfectly justified. But you may be barking up the wrong tree, because the “drawbacks” you are complaining about are the exact reason many of us are here. I want my posts to vanish eventually. I want my old content to be purged after a reasonable timeframe. If a hurricane six countries away kills the server this is hosted on, and there are no off-site backups? Cool, I’ll take it as a chance to start fresh like I do all the time anyways.

The lack of tagging on OP’s account has been the biggest reason I considered blocking them. I don’t mind reposters, but tag your shit so people who don’t want it can filter it. I quickly gave them a bright red user tag instead. So I can at least see at a glance when a post is from them, to then decide if I want to engage.

Especially when a lot of their posts have been old Reddit content, (often from several years ago) which was clearly just meant to grab attention. Their posts always felt like the “tales from reddit” types of YouTube channels, where someone just reads Reddit posts verbatim and adds a few quips as “content”.

Oh, I agree. My point was simply that if a restaurant is trying to ditch the “mom and pop” vibes and get professional photos for their menus, it’s not something that is done on a whim. It’s not just a “snap a pic with your phone and post it on your menu” type of thing if a restaurant is trying to look like more than a family owned joint.

And that’s before we even get into the actual menu design, because a well-formatted menu is designed to draw customers towards the most profitable items. All of those highlighted and “chefs special” menu choices that are in big bold bright letters in the center of the menu, with accompanying pictures? Yeah, the restaurant has done the math on the raw ingredients and prep time for each menu item, and those featured choices are the items that are most profitable for the restaurant to make. The goal is to encourage people to buy the things that make the most money. Those small menu options that are tucked away in the bottom of the menu like a footnote? Those are the least profitable. A good menu layout can increase dine-in profits by upwards of 10-20%, simply by encouraging people to order the most profitable items.

And while I don’t agree with using AI for the food images, I can see how a restaurant manager would balk at a $10k professional food photographer bill. Especially when that also requires closing the restaurant for a day, (meaning a day of lost profits) so the photographer can work with the cook staff for the photos during a dedicated photography session. Why would they eat that massive cost, when they could generate a “good enough” (meaning the majority of people won’t notice or care that it is AI) image for free in a few minutes? Again, I don’t agree with it, but I can see why a restaurant manager would see it as an attractive alternative.

I used Google Timeline to prove I was at work one time. This was back when I was freelancing. My client tried to say I was stealing time, because I had an off-site meeting that ran long. They were threatening to withhold a few hours of pay, even though I was at the worksite the entire time. I pulled up my timeline and used it to prove that I was, in fact, at the meeting site for an extra few hours. Being able to de-Google that functionality has a lot of value to certain people.

Food photography is actually an entire branch of photography, and a lot of the photos you have historically seen haven’t been real edible food. For example, the milk in the bowl of cereal on your cereal box? That’s usually white Elmers Glue. Because real milk won’t sit below the cereal, and will be too watery. It also allows them to precisely set the individual cereal pieces (rings, flakes, etc) in place and the glue will help prevent it from floating around.

The ketchup on a burger is usually thick red paint, applied around the edges of the rubber pickle with a syringe. Because they want to make sure the ketchup looks like it’s squeezed around the pickle (rather than being squished into the burger bun), and they want to make sure the ketchup is showing around the pickle juuuust enough to be obvious, without obscuring the pickle.

The funny part about food photography is that the methodology is largely regional. For example, Japanese audiences largely expect a burger photo to have the bun sliding off of the burger, like so:

Originally it was done to prevent the bun from obscuring any of the ingredients. But now it is a sort of cultural thing, where lots of menus do it simply because that’s what the other menus do. But it also means that Japanese burger photography is done using different materials and methods than western burger photography. But to use the second image as an example, that runny egg yolk on the right burger is probably some sort of inedible yellow paint. Because the photographer wants controllable color and consistency, and cooking is rarely consistent enough for that. The glaze on the meat is probably some kind of clear-coat rosin or spray. The egg was probably cooked hard and then sliced with a scalpel to create that perfect wedge slice for the yellow paint to be added. Etc…

The TL;DR is that gold prices spiking is a major sign that people are completely losing faith in the dollar, and are attempting to buy assets that will hold value better. People expect major inflation, and are attempting to buy gold (which will hopefully hold its value) instead of keeping all of their funds as dollars (which will lose value when inflation happens). But this sudden surge in gold demand has caused the recent price of gold to drastically spike.

Yeah, pretty much this. In regards to tech, the fediverse often suffers from the average familiarity problem:

The average user barely even knows how to check their email.

The TL;DR is that there is a voluntary system that tracks court cases and will alert CSAM victims when it suspects images of them (either known images, or new ones) are the topic of criminal investigations. A Jane Doe was repeatedly raped in the early 2000’s to produce copious amounts of CSAM, which was broadly shared among pedophile groups. Her images were apparently very popular and prolific. Doe was alerted that Grok was producing new explicit images of her as a child. The images in question are novel (generated by AI, and not matching any known existing images) but are undoubtedly of Doe as a child. Meaning it was using Doe’s images as part of the training data for the images it generates.

Essentially, if Grok was trained on CSAM, Doe’s popular images were almost certainly included. And now Grok is producing new images of her. It would be like asking Grok to make an image of a popular egirl, and getting an image of what is undoubtedly Belle Delphine. And then X goes “no no no, we didn’t use any images of Belle Delphine in our training data. We promise!”

I think you’re actually the first person to notice (or at least the first to mention) the reference! Always good to see another crawler in the wild.

Super weird it’s basically College Humor legally, but they’re doing a really good job.

Yeah, the transformation from College Humor to Dropout is honestly a masterclass in business (and marketing) management. I fully believe that it’s the kind of thing that college marketing majors will be writing papers on in the future.

Let me save you some trouble: It costs $20 to make an account.

Pretty much every supermarket near me sells prepaid phones. And yes, they work exactly as you described. You buy minutes or data to add to your account, and then it sits in your account until you use it. Before the memory shortage price gouging BS, I could go get a burner phone for like $75 at my local Walmart or Target. No clue what they’d cost now, but they’re likely still pretty cheap as far as phones are concerned. The phones won’t have great hardware, but they’ll at least be able to run Android and can do all the things that modern smartphones can do… Albeit much slower than a flagship model.

As far as privacy goes, that will largely depend on your local laws. Drug dealers have historically used prepaid phones to avoid being tracked, (buy a phone card with cash, so you never have to use a debit or credit card to pay,) so governments started passing Know Your Customer laws that require the phone companies to verify and log your ID (tying it to your prepaid phone number, the same way a regular phone bill is tied to you) before they can sell to you. That way when the cops subpoena the phone company to see who owns a specific phone number, the company can actually tell them.

I’ve joked about finding unopposed spots and running against them. Not because I want to win, but just because I want to force them to actually work for their spot.

It’s probably not the tech making the decision. It was probably the tech attempting to request one, (because they were out of/low on stock,) and being told by management to send it back as-is instead.

“Replacing that stick of RAM will cost more than the entire original purchase price of the laptop, so just say it’s faulty and let them figure it out. Never mind the fact that we sold them a laptop with faulty RAM.”

They make sprung flip-top covers specifically for this reason. It’s just a little adhesive square/circle that you stick over the power/reset button, and it has a flip-top that automatically springs closed again.

I mean, would you want it to serve clients outside of your subnet? I guess maybe if you had something like a guest network. But I tend to take the “fuck it, you get basic service and nothing else” approach to things like guest networks.

Isn’t it a potential security issue to have your pihole serve things on any subnet, because it allows an improperly configured firewall to stab at your pihole? I think you can specify any additional subnets it will serve in the settings somewhere. But IIRC, the default behavior is to intentionally drop traffic from unknown subnets. But that’s just off the top of my head.

The dude committed suicide two days after the cops raided him. So at most, it would be his estate suing people for libel/slander. But you usually need to prove damages (like losing your job, or being forced to move) to win a slander lawsuit, and it’s hard to claim that a dead guy was monetarily damaged by someone saying things about him.

Pretty much this. I’d copy anything I want to keep onto a temporary drive, (cloud storage, a USB drive, second SSD, etc), then use it as an excuse to refresh my install. Then just copy everything from that temporary storage after my new install is finished.