IANAP but it seems like it would be trivial for a client app to do. Look at the combined vote weight (e.g. -8 + 4 = -4) and if it’s below user inputted threshold, don’t display it.

That said, Lemmy isn’t Reddit. When I see a post with a negative score, I can sometimes see why it’s not popular, but it’s seldom straight up garbage, and I can still vote accordingly. Never used the feature on Reddit because I’ve been brigaded by entire communities for acknowledging that their favorite show’s latest season exists (it’s not Game of Thrones, but similar energy), and I don’t think people should have the right to censor others; I believe each person should have the right to choose what they see.

What resistance? It seems to me that there is not one big organised resistance that is taking members.

Find a local event and network but be careful about it. The US had that “no kings” thing early in the summer (or before?). That was just a bunch of people against tyranny. No real organisation to it. So you’d go to something like that and just talk to people.

It helps if you have an anonymous way to chat. Something like Signal or Matrix or one of the others. Even Telegram would be better than using something public or corporate-backed, like SMS for the former or WhatsApp for the latter. But be careful with Telegram, read up on it, it’s not a solid recommendation but it’s better than nothing. Fortunately there are alternatives. Even if the other person isn’t tech savvy — you probably are by being on Lemmy. So, show them the way.

Occasionally contact them through anonymous chat, just see how they’re doing, and discuss future plans.

Also, aside from demonstrations, places where like minded people meet. For the authoritarians and conservatives, that’s church, the local BBQ spot, and other, more obvious groups. I feel like they feel they can operate more openly since the US president is one of them. Used to be, these guys wore masks and were hidden, joining them wasn’t about finding them, they’d find you, that kind of thing. Nowadays it’s all out in the open. But I think liberals and progressives have meeting places, too. In response to church, for example, you should know that The Satanic Temple is not about devil worship, they’re about resisting Christian imperialism. They’re the ones fighting churches trying to get the Ten Commandments posted in every classroom. I’m religiously neutral, so they do not interest me, but they’re certainly an option. For the anti-theist/“hard atheist,” they’re a good option.

Might be niche, but I was reading the manga for The Promised Neverland and said they should get Erica Mendez for the voice of Emma based on her performance as Konno Yuuki from Sword Art Online II. Lo and behold they cast her!

Also when Fallout 3 or maybe New Vegas was the newest Fallout, I said they should add a settlement system. I said after the main story the existing settlements should face ongoing assault from raiders, ghouls, and other enemies and you should be able to shore up the walls, add turrets, hire more guards, and outfit them with better weapons and armor. A lot of people said that would be too complicated. Then Fallout 4 came out and they did just that.

About a 5. It’s close to 50/50. I don’t like talking to people who steal energy. Maybe you know what I mean. I have no problem striking up a conversation with a stranger and maintaining it if it’s interesting. I sometimes have a problem dipping out when it stops bringing me joy.

Can’t get into them for the most part. Two exceptions: Strategic Conquest for the Macintosh in the 80s (long since abandoned) and Warcraft 2. Both fun without being too complicated.

Wondering if any modern strategy fans remember Strategic Conquest. Game didn’t get nearly enough love.

The Sims business model.

Except it was “we know you wouldn’t spend $400 on a game so here’s a $50 game and we’ll release the rest in pieces over the next year.”

That was also like 25 years ago.

Yes it does.

Sometimes I miss the shooting. The best gun in the game is locked behind the pirate quest line, but that’s buggy AF. From getting the guards shooting at you for silently KO’ing the guy you’re after on the luxury cruise ship to the three beacons you have to protect (pirate side) or destroy (navy side) just not showing up… and the developers having people report these issues on a dedicated issues channel on their Discord and just not caring enough about their game to fix their shit… it sucks. Now I can’t even remember what it’s called. I just remember pointing at something in my way and clicking or maybe double clicking and it getting erased. Oh yeah. Revenant. Something like that.

Oh yeah, or how the hot Asian pirate chick has this stupidly convoluted maze of a ship and her Captain’s Locker always has like 25k credits in it and she does not care if you take it. That was funny to me.

Game absolutely sucks. And it’s worse because the developers do not care.

For what it’s worth — and keeping fully in mind this is a meme and therefore not serious — Starfield (crappy Xbox/PC game from the people who made Skyrim) did this. A particle accelerator experiment (albeit involving an alien artefact) caused reality to split apart. So I’m gonna say, it’s possible!

On a Mac, it’s pretty easy. Shift+Option+Dash. Option and Shift+Option plus a lot of keys does a lot of different symbols. With letters, you can hold the letter to open a menu of accents, so it’s ridiculously easy for me to type Pokémon correctly. I hold the E and hit 2 to get the correct accent.

On a Windows computer, yes, it’s an ALT code. ALT+0151. I’ve committed it to memory so it’s nothing for me to type that if I’m using a Windows machine. 0150 is the en dash, which is a little shorter, and has a different function.

I’m on a US keyboard right now, but it’s a Mac keyboard. I think the only difference is, instead of Ctrl-Win-Alt I have Ctrl-Opt-Cmd. And then Cmd-Opt-Fn-Ctrl right of the space bar. I think the rest is basically the same. Except my F keys do different things, like F3 isn’t search (that would be CMD+F) it’s Mission Control, kind of like Alt-Tab in Windows but way, way better.

On some phones you don’t have to go into the number/symbol section. HOLD that button and it makes that keyboard pop up; now DRAG to the symbol or number you want and LET GO, it’ll type it and bounce you right back to the ABC keyboard. You can also linger on a symbol to get the alt symbols. So, in practice, hold the ?123 or whatever key, drag up to dash, but don’t let go, linger for a couple seconds, then slide over to the em dash and release. Should take you back to the ABC keyboard.

From back then? The Lonesome Jubilee by John Cougar Mellencamp.

These days I just use Apple Music. Costs less than Spotify, pays artists more, and doesn’t finance the alt right. (Well except for that dumb participation trophy Tim Cook gave Trump.) Anyway, I pay for music because I love music, and I neither smoke nor drink, so it’s like, my vice, I suppose. That and coffee.

Anyway, I have access to all the music I had back then and since on the handheld Mac phone I carry in my pocket.

We didn’t think about the absence of things we’re didn’t have. It’s easy to look back and say “I could have gotten away with so much” but we didn’t think about it.

Your whole life being recorded was a thing for my generation (X)… if you were rich. Rich families had video cameras and they did record all kinds of things. Birthday parties, holidays, vacations, and so on. We saw cameras. We either tried to avoid them, or tried to flip them off — so the cameras avoided us. They didn’t wanna see the poors anyway. And for the most part, they were, and mostly did their filming, in places you couldn’t go if you/your parents worked for a living.

GenX here. Before computers… that’s a lie, my father always had computers, long before computers were cool. What we didn’t have was the Internet. Before the Internet, I read books. My father had a couple encyclopedia sets. One was more for kids and had colorful bindings. The other was the Encyclopedia Brittanica. So yeah, books were our Wikipedia. (Wikipedia is based on the encyclopedia concept. It’s right in the name!)

It seems to me that Intel themselves aren’t doing anything wrong here by letting the government take a stake in their business.

They never promised you privacy, they sell complex tiny calculators that add and compare ones and zeros trillions of times per second.

As a Mac user, I feel that it affirms Apple’s choice 5 years ago to design their own silicon. Apple made the right move.

Owners of current Intel chips should be fine. It’s future Intel chips I’d worry about. AMD is probably still fine. PC builders and enthusiasts still have a lot of good choices.

As for the government, I don’t really see how. 10% doesn’t give them enough clout to ask for a back door. The UK didn’t ask chip makers anyway, they went straight to Apple and asked for the encryption keys. Apparently they’ve dropped the request, but that’s not something that needs to be done at the CPU level. It’s also the government — they’re not gonna do it the best way. They’re not gonna do it the way a mad Linux geek would do it if they were a fascist dictator. Governments are still run by Boomers.

It’s more likely exactly what Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders say it is: the government is investing in Intel so their investment through the CHIPS Act pays off. It’s just good business sense. Set aside the president’s nationalism and look at it strictly as a business decision. It actually makes sense, hence why Sanders is behind it as well.

I’ve been using the em dash online for decades. If AI is trained off of human-written posts (it is) and it’s trained on sites I’ve posted on (it has), and if em dashes are a telltale sign AI wrote the post (seems that way), then logically speaking, I am partially to blame.

I’m still going to use them, though.

And I’m still going to teach people how to use them.

I won’t believe any of this “woke Barrel” shit until Cracker Barrel opens a location in California. As I understood it, they were avoiding CA because of its civil liberties.

Outside CA, you can find a CB at every other exit off the highway, it seems like. More so in the South but they seem to operate everywhere else but CA.

Before I’m willing to even entertain the notion that CB has “gone woke,” I’m gonna need to see them open a few locations in the Golden State.

I don’t much care either way. They make good breakfast food, but so do I. The plumber doesn’t call a plumber and pay them to do what he can do himself, so why should I go to Cracker Barrel? Same reason I don’t go to burger places. I can, in fact — or at least, in my opinion, make a better burger than they can. So, firstly, I don’t use American cheese, I use pepper jack. Better flavor, melts just as good, costs a little bit more, but worth it for my burger. Second, I make my burgers thicker. When I eat out it’s to get food I don’t know how to make or can’t make as well.

That makes a lot of sense! I haven’t done it, but it occurs to me that you could do this, and teach yourself how to run a community, at least on the technical side, in case you want to make one folks can join!

They say it’s locked and are directing people to… let me see if I have the format right … !fedigrow@lemmy.zip … okay Voyager autocompleted it! But that’s the place they said to go! You can fact check me by going to the link in the post I replied to and checking the top comment! It may be unlocked at some point making this post no longer true, so please check me if you’re skeptical.

Wouldn’t “GPT it” be easier/more likely to say?

I generally don’t use these, but Copilot (in Windows) uses one of them (I’m not sure which) and I’ve thrown a few questions at it when I’m bored. Nothing that matters. We have Windows 11 machines at work. I find AI amusing but I don’t take it seriously, and I don’t use it at home or on my mobile. It’s really not for me.

I don’t like Grok but they have a good name. I mean I don’t “like” any of them, but I like that one less because of its… the stuff it’s said. Mostly because of who’s been training it. But “Grok it” sounds better than Chat/GPT it and sounds almost as good as “Google it.”

Some people say you can use a de-Googled Chromium browser to enjoy the fruits of Chrome without supporting Google’s ad business. I say just use Firefox.

By the same token, when some people say to buy an Android phone and deal with CFW, I say just get an iPhone.

I mean either way, Google gets your money and you contribute to Google’s market share by buying one. Not using Google Play Services as an individual does not hurt them nearly as much as their efforts to keep you from doing so implies it does.

Of course, switching phones can be costly, but if you’re in the market for a new one, I would say if you’re going to pay roughly the same price, let it be the more private one, albeit the one that is further from open source. I mean it runs iOS, which is a stripped down version of macOS, which is UNIX certified, but you can’t run a few apps that Apple doesn’t approve of. Fortnite is back and emulators are back though, so a lot of bases are covered.

That said… the keyboard sucks. Sometimes if I’m gonna be typing (e.g. using Lemmy), I’ll actually turn on my old Galaxy S10, just to use Gboard (which is on iOS but sucks there). I like my 16PM for a lot of things, but typing isn’t one of them.

So yes. You can stop rewarding Google’s bad behavior by not buying their phones. Draw a hard line between your personal data and their servers. But in doing so, consider getting in bed with a different monster rather than “the devil you know.” It’s not an easy decision. And, as a guy who’s been mainly on iPhone for almost 10 years… I kinda want a Pixel. Maybe not the newest one, but I mean, I’m using a 6-year-old Galaxy phone and it’s fine. I like both platforms. Both have their strengths. But I personally trust Apple more than Google. To each their own though.