Bremerton just makes me think of the Shadowrun game for SNES.

Where is this? I set up my piefed blahaj account and have spent like the past 3 hours blocking communities after setting up filters that should already be blocking those communities.

It is an absolute slog trying to get a feed that isn’t all just depressing or toxic shit.

Lemmy is toxic as fuck. Decentralization is a good thing, but it doesn’t magically fix social media.

Honestly if I remembered what I did to have something to poke at before Lemmy I’d probably just do that. It’s a mostly unenjoyable compulsion at this point. The whole thing seems to be just childish bickering and depression bait.

They have a damn good reason to want to impeach him. He’s threatening the economy and the remainder of our relevance internationally. The Republicans have to live here too. If he yanks down all the load-bearing structures in our house, it’s going to collapse on them too.

I mean, step one is not turning the entire opposition into defeatists via constant steeping in negativity and hopelessness. We need to get our energy up and keep it there so we can actually get some traction. We have to believe that we have a chance to change something before we can actually work up the gumption to do it.

That won’t happen if half the left is busy telling the other half we’re cooked. It certainly won’t happen if they convince more of us to become defeatists or to try to take our ball and go home as if our homes aren’t literally in the country in question.

I would be surprised if it got that much support, but that’s not the point. The vibes on Lemmy are absolutely terrible and actively cultivating helplessness. There are so many people here who immediately decided we’re all cooked and spend their time trying to demotivate people and push any resistance to admit defeat that it’s absurd. That’s not how you push back, it’s not how you make things better, and it’s literally the kind of shitty helpless attitude that got us into this mess.

Something isn’t right? Don’t take active steps to try to fix it or give your support to anyone who is. Stand on the sidelines preaching this loser shit. We’re all doomed and there’s no point fighting. Don’t run new candidates, just refuse to vote. Don’t create networks of support, tear each other down. Don’t for a second allow a glimmer of hope to go unopposed.

Seriously, how can anyone ever be expected to accomplish anything with that kind of attitude?

I’m honestly starting to think this platform is just as toxic as Reddit or Facebook have ever been, without the help of any shady manipulative algorithm.

Despite the defeatist angles that are constantly posted on Lemmy, this is not what I’m seeing from actually reading the news.

Congress could literally be voting to impeach with 90% of the house and senate in support and y’all would still be banging on about how nothing will ever happen. I’m over it.

🤞

I think there’s a good chance. He’s shown both parties that the result of him being able to do whatever he wants unchecked will be the crumbling of our alliances and our economy and the steady erosion of all the good things about our country. Even conservatives can see the damage he’s doing.

If there were an election today he wouldn’t even come close to winning. Hopefully those who are responsible for his potential impeachment see that if they allow this to continue they won’t have a shot in their next elections either.

Might as well end your career by burning any good will you’ve developed with the rest of it.

I’m just hoping there’s eventually some form of private server similar to FiveM so I can have my Dune roleplay.

Personally? The vast bulk of my interactions with people online. Voice chat, DMs, servers for pretty much everything. Being involved in roleplaying communities in DayZ and Conan, the vast majority of the behind-the-scenes stuff is taking place on discord. Servers for particular game servers as well as groups make up a pretty big portion of my list, along with smaller private discord servers of networks of players from various other servers. It’s how I stay connected with dozens of people I’ve known for years.

I’m also in quite a few discords related to modding and game development. Nearly every modder has their own discord, which is extremely useful if you’re running your own game servers and need to be in contact with them or if you make mods yourself and want to seek advice or information for compatibility. The same is true of a lot of other non-gaming software, with many developers having their own servers where they post updates and where you can find advice or post suggestions.

I’ve got a few queer community servers on my list, which were particularly helpful when I was early in my transition before I really had gotten around to rebuilding my social network and finding accepting people. There’s even a discord for a group of animators I used to spend a lot of time with back in the mid 00s; back then we were using forums and IRC mostly, and a little bit of Skype, but these days it’s been a good way to keep in touch.

If I’m home and on my computer, I’m almost always in a discord voice chat. It’s basically the modern equivalent of AIM or ICQ or Facebook, but with loads of added features and without Meta being involved. I even use it for note taking and storing images and screencaps.

Even something like Matrix, at the moment, doesn’t really cover all the voice and video chat features that Discord does. It’s close, but it’s missing essential components like push-to-talk, and it requires workarounds to enable things like screen sharing.

Discord turning to shit would be a real pain in the ass.

Do those have push to talk?

I think it’s just jabbing at our early assumptions about dinosaurs seemingly lacking much in the way of bulk. We used to interpret them as these ultra-skinny weirdly mummified looking things rather than the plumper creatures many of them probably were.

The idea is that aliens find skeletons of animals we’re more familiar with and come to the same kind of wildly mistaken conclusions about them that we might have if we’d found rabbit skeletons without having first hand experience of modern rabbits.

What is this shady, unsubstantiated, posted yesterday ass random github repo trying to encourage people to compromise their email security and why is it worth posting?

Element really needs to get push to talk. It’s an incredibly basic feature to be missing, and for me personally and I’m sure others the lack of it is a deal breaker.

GIMP is honestly fantastic. My workflow goes draw in GIMP, import to Inkscape to convert pieces to vector, then bring them into Godot where shaders get applied. I would rather draw in GIMP than any other program. I find drawing in Inkscape super awkward in comparison. GIMP is pretty no-frills, but it does the job. I prefer it over Photoshop. With Darktsble I’ve found it useful for importing high res raw images for textures too.

I don’t know why people hate on it so much. It’s all about using the tools you’re comfortable with.

That’s what I was thinking. Maybe they’re just Community fans.

… Should we be pinching our nipples at their AI?

That’s quite possible. This administration has shown that it doesn’t care about the rule of law. However, that’s a far sight from the justice system bending over and letting them.

It’s important to be precise about what’s happening right now and not to give up and admit defeat. There’s a world of difference between “this is bad, we have work to do” and “we’re absolutely cooked and have zero hope”. Trump’s administration wants you to give up. They want you to decide the fight is over before it’s even properly begun. Don’t do them the favor of making it easy.

I’m not sure that checks out. I mean, fair, I do think that someone being habitually cruel toward AI might not be the greatest indicator of their disposition in general, though I’d hesitate to make a hasty judgement on that. But if we take AI’s presentation as a person as fictional, does that extend to other fictional contexts? Would you consider an evil play-through in a video game to indicate an issue? Playing a hostile character in a roleplay setting? Writing horror fiction?

It seems to me that there are many contexts where exhibiting or creating simulated behavior in a fictional environment isn’t really equivalent to doing so with genuine individuals in non-imaginary circumstances. AI isn’t quite the same as a fictional setting, but it’s potentially closer to that than it is to dealing with a real person.

By the same token, if not being polite to an AI is problematic, is it equally problematic to repeatedly say things like “human” and “operator” to an automated phone system until you get a response? Both mimic human speech, while neither ostensibly have a legitimate understanding of what’s being said by either party.

Where does the line get drawn? Is it wrong to curse at fully inanimate objects that don’t even pretend to be people? Is verbally condemning a malfunctioning phone, refrigerator, or toaster equivalent to berating a hallucinating AI?

That is also bad, but it’s a ruling on another aspect of the issue. They ruled that the Alien Enemies Act can be used against supposed Venezuelan gang members, but they also ruled that anyone being accused of this has to be informed ahead of time and have an opportunity to contest it. It does not say that those deported in a so-called administrative error can just be left in a foreign prison because oopsies.

The ACLU even referred to the ruling as a victory.

“We are disappointed that we will need to start the court process over again in a different venue, but the critical point is that the Court rejected the government’s remarkable position that it does not even have to give individuals meaningful advance notice to challenge their removal under the Alien Enemies Act. That is a big victory,” the ACLU’s Lee Gelernt said in a texted statement.

So again, it’s not really what you’re construing it as. It would be better if they’d decided that the deportations were entirely illegal, but this also definitely isn’t permission for the administration to deport anyone they want with no due process.