It feels like people are upset about running into users who are politically left-leaning… on federated social media.

That’s like being upset about encountering queer people in the arts, or chuds in the weightlifting space, or conservatives at the gun range. What the hell did you expect?

I once drove an hour with a pretty severe concussion because I planned to just go home and sleep off what I would later learn was a small crater in the front of my skull. After I got home and was poking at the injury in the bathroom mirror, I realized I could feel pieces of my skull moving around so I decided I should probably go to the hospital…

The process of getting my skull fixed with extremely shitty insurance was a whole other set of horrors that in some ways sucked even more than the skull crater.

As I gain a better understanding of how federated social media works, I just find it even more confusing. This dude appointed himself batman of lemmy, but he’s just a single dev of a single frontend. Don’t most instances have multiple frontends? Even if a secret block list was the key to getting lemmy to finally go mainstream (it’s not), implementing it at a frontend level is simultaneously both way too wide and way too small of a net. If tesseract was the only way anyone could access lemmy, maybe a secret block list could actually change the winds, but it’s such a small slice of the fediverse. It’s like if batman was only beating up jaywalkers and was like “You’re welcome, Gotham. The city is saved.”

What was the point of any of it? Someone was inevitably going to discover it was happening. There were so many people on the block list. Was he just going to personally defend against the ranks of people he found annoying forever? Keep adding more and more regex as the list grows to multiple thousands of users?They’re still on the platform, dude. It’s just one filter on one frontend. What the hell are you trying to accomplish?

I’ve said for a long time that the primary means of American education is advertising. He was advertised as a competent businessman on TV, and so that’s what a lot of Americans believe. The guy’s a walking advertisement. A flim-flam man.

He wins because he’s the best at lying in a country that prizes lying for money as the best skill set one can possess.

One detail I’m still not fully clear on is how widespread the effects are. Say an instance uses the tesseract frontend. Does that mean that everyone who accesses lemmy via that instance was having all of this filtering applied? Does it only apply if they were accessing it via the web? If they logged into the same instance via a smartphone app, would it still be applying all of the hidden tesseract filters?

Idk, I could probably bear to hear about him exactly one more time after he gets sent to prison.

The A.V. Club used to do a series where bands would come on and choose from a list of songs to cover. As the season goes on, the list shrinks and the covers get more exotic. You can search “av undercover” on YouTube to watch through the back catalog of old seasons for some pretty great covers. I don’t think they do it anymore, but it ran for several years.

Funny enough, this is the exact reaction of the person from the poop knife story.

Kinda sounds like the imperialism has turned inward now. We should have a term for that…

I read this with the cadence of the “Curved. Swords.” dialog from a Skyrim guard.

Any content that was produced with the primary intent of making people angry.

Problem is that’s really hard to identify unless you know the original author’s intent. Just because it makes someone angry doesn’t necessarily mean it’s rage bait, but if it was explicitly made with that goal in mind, that’s what I would describe as rage bait.

With all these “IT can see when you connect a USB device” comments, I must ask has anyone ever actually worked for an IT department that made you micromanage/snitch on people like that? It all sounds like a bunch of hypothetical scare mongering to me. Granted, I’ve never been company IT for a fortune 500, but I’ve been outsourced IT for dozens and dozens of other companies all across the spectrum, and the notion that we were monitoring USB devices connected to each workstation is laughable. We monitor for the presence of malicious files, files with names like passwords.txt, and suspicious logins to your account. That’s pretty much it. People change mice all the time. I’ve used an arduino-based jiggler on my own work PC.

Furthermore, and this is the more important detail for myself, I’ve known many many different IT people working at every level and I don’t think I’ve ever met a single one who gives half a shit if employees aren’t being productive. Just don’t break your computer please, and if you do, for the love of God don’t try to fix it yourself. Personally, I’ve never seen any instance of any worker ever trying to circumvent arbitrary productivity metrics with easy workarounds because I’m not a fucking snitch. In IT, we also have bullshit “productivity” targets that are completely decoupled from actual productivity. We get that it’s bullshit. If there’s an IT department out there that’s full of snitches trying to catch workers slacking, that sounds like a genuinely awful place to work.