Still vividly remember the day I saw and plated Space Invaders (1979) for the first time. I was walking home from primary school and there was a new machine, that Was Not Pinball!, in the arcade (called pinball parlours then).
I watched for about 30 minutes while I waited my turn, played 2 games and was hooked and still am 45 years later.
The algorithm wants engagement first and foremost (positive vs negative is irrelevant), after that it wants to push view points that preserve the status quo since change is scary to shareholders. So of course capitalist/fascist propaganda is preferred especially if the host is wrong about basic facts (being wrong drives engagement.)
I say this as someone who considers themselves a leftist…
The lack of civility shown by left leaning people online is almost certainly pushing moderates into more extreme communities and the unhinged takes are perfect meme fodder for those with a bad agenda. Instead of channeling your anger at the person you’re corresponding with through your keyboard, channel it at a lack of empathy and understanding in society as a whole and respond with kindness and disengage when the conversation is not honest.
Repeat above for the use of “nazi”. The use of the word has become devalued because people like to fling it at folks with milquetoast centrist opinions, save it for people who are legitimately evil.
Repeat above for the use of “nazi”. The use of the word has become devalued because people like to fling it at folks with milquetoast centrist opinions, save it for people who are legitimately evil.
Yup, I said the same thing to people around me, when the use of the word “fascist” became a thing in my country. Even clearly moderate opponents were being called fascists left and right. I told people around me that the word would lose its meaning and power. That’s exactly what happened, and when an actual fascist came up, you had nothing against him and its supporters transformed the term into a joke.
So I just got here to Lemmy, and only briefly have checked out some of the apps, but Connect is my favorite so far. It looks good and let’s me hide posts.
I think a lot of us are still getting accustomed to Lemmy and finding our flow. For me, personally, the move exposed a bunch of new communities and topics I didn’t know / or forgot I was interested in and am now excited to be a part of!
It’s basically old reddit. It feels like I just left Digg and I def enjoy it much more. I’d have left back when they changed to new reddit if Lemmy was around.
Likewise, I’m finding my feed is once again filling with things I am actually interested in. Reddit had drifted slowly towards mindless content but here on Lemmy I feel back in control.
How do you find communities here that are analogs of the ones you enjoyed on Reddit? I see big communities here like 196 that is basically the same as the Reddit community, and lemmyshitpost is a new type of meme community - but let’s say I’m interested in math and history. How do I find communities with in depth discussion of those topics?
When you think about data it actually gets really scary really quick. I have a Master’s in Data Analytics.
First, data is “collected.”
So, a natural question is “Who are they collecting data from?”
Typically it’s a sample of a population - meant to be representative of that population, which is nice and all.
But if you dig deeper you have to ask “Who is taking time out of their day to answer questions?” “How are they asked?” “Why haven’t I ever been asked?” “Would I even want to give up my time to respond to a question from a stranger?”
So then who is being asked? And perhaps more importantly, who has time to answer?
Spoiler alert: typically it’s people who think their opinions are very important. Do you know people like that? Would you trust the things they claim are facts?
Do the data collectors know what demographic an answer represents? An important part of data collection is anonymity - knowing certain things about the answerer could skew the data.
Are you being represented in the “data”? Would you even know if you were or weren’t?
And what happens if respondents lie? Would the data collector have any idea?
And that’s just collecting the data, the first step in the process of collecting data, extracting information, and creating knowledge.
Next is “cleaning” the data.
When data is collected it’s messy.
There are some data points that are just deleted. For instance, something considered an outlier. And they have an equation for this, and this equation as well as the outliers it identifies should be analyzed constantly. Are they?
How is the data being cleaned? How much will it change the answers?
Between what systems is the data transferred? Are they state-of-the-art or some legacy system that no one currently alive understands?
Do the people analyzing the data know how this works?
So then, after the data is put through many unknown processes, you’re left with a set of data to analyze.
How is it being analyzed? Is the analyzer creating the methodology for analysis for every new set of data or are they running it through a system that someone else built eons ago?
How often are these models audited? You’d need a group of people that understand the code as well as the data as well as the model as well as the transitional nature of the data.
Then you have outside forces, and this might be scariest of all.
The best way to describe this is to tell a story: In the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were the top candidates for the Democratic and Republican parties. There was a lot of tension, but basically everyone on the left could not fathom people voting for Trump. (In 2023 this seems outrageous, but it was a real blind spot at the time).
All media outlets were predicting a landslide victory for Clinton. But then, as we all know I’m sure, the unbelievable happened: Trump won the electoral college. Why didn’t the data predict that?
It turns out one big element was purposeful skewing of the results. There was such a media outrage about Trump that no one wanted to be the source that predicted a Trump victory for fear of being labeled a Trump supporter or Q-Anon fear-monger, so a lot of them just changed the results.
Let me say that again, they changed their own findings on purpose for fear of what would happen to them. And because of this lack of reporting real results, a lot of people that probably would’ve voted for Clinton, didn’t go to the polls.
And then, if you can believe it, the same thing happened in 2020. Even though Biden ultimately won, the predicted stats were way wrong. Again, according to the data Biden should have been comfortably able to defeat Trump, but it was one of the closest presidential races in history. In fact, many believe, if not for Covid, Trump would have won. And this, at least a little, contributed to the capital riots.
Oh yeah. I might say some wrong stuff since I’m quite ignorant but. Statistics is messy and I tend to avoid including too much stats in my projects, although sometimes I accidentally end up blindly doing so and believing them also drawing inaccurate conclusions. Physical stats are even messier because not everybody has the competence to accurately understand what they mean, or sometimes we just don’t understand the world enough. Environmental science data is an example of that. I rely on other people’s analyses cause I can’t read them. I don’t know much about politics.
HRT is short for Hormone Replacement Therapy, a treatment many transgender people use to feel more aligned with their gender identity. It’s been proven to increase mental health, and has a low regret rate. However, it is correlated with higher mortality because trans people overall have a higher mortality rate and HRT is primarily used by trans people.
A more extreme example of the same thing would be “People on chemotherapy have a higher chance of dying from cancer than people not on chemotherapy.” It’s true, but only because people without cancer don’t tend to enter chemotherapy.
HRT was originally used to treat menopausal women at risk for osteoporosis, who are at higher risk due to being old.
I'm aware that transgenders also have a higher than otherwise expected mortality (whether taking hormones or not), but they may not be numerous enough to move the needle against millions of old women.
I still go on old Reddit on desktop. I’ve noticed the quality and variety of posts has declined a little. There are more medium quality memes and reposts. A lot of the big subs that drove the serious engagement have become quieter and not as present on the front page. It’s still busy and the front page refreshes often but it does feel different. Maybe only 10 percent different which isn’t much, but those heavy users that were forced to decrease engagement across a whole lot of subs were responsible for so much of the vibe.
Third party apps present a username and password field to log into a Lemmy instance. They can easily just steal your credentials. There are standard auth flows to solve this problem. The fact that Lemmy devs have willfully ignored this issue for years, and that they aren’t warning users not to trust third party apps, lead me to believe they don’t really care about security, which is the biggest red flag. There’s finally an open github issue that seems to be acknowledged, but it’ll be some time before this feature (if ever) ever gets implemented.
-Posted from a third-party app; yea, i gave them my password blindly.
This is something I really like Mastodon for. The good apps will go through standard OAuth authentication rather than username/password authentication, which also means you can use passkeys/2FA to protect your account which apps often don’t bother implementing in any way.
That said, who’s to say the in-app browser window you’re entering your password into is really your browser and not just a malicious Chrome build the evil app developers added to mislead you? There’s a slightly elevated risk with storing your password in every app, but malicious app developers will be able to phish you regardless.
The way Reddit did this was by just giving out a token, that could be done in the same way here on lemmy, I think that would solve the issue.
Now it’s true that you will be redirected to the site (here lemmy) but that’s the same on all services, as a user one needs to check the host name and certificate of the site they’re directed to.
There’s finally an open github issue that seems to be acknowledged, but it’ll be some time before this feature (if ever) ever gets implemented.
Fwiw, the devs seem quite open to (even directly requesting) people coding features they want and having them added into the main code in future versions. So if anyone is able and willing to make a working version of that for Lemmy, it could be added quite soon, really.
I suspect what will happen with the Federated universe as a whole is what happened to Linux - companies will start using the products, contribute to them, and it becomes this weird corporate/open source hybrid as the main devs, however good, simply won’t have the same level of resources as say FAANG to throw at these problems
Seconded. I have multiple domains on name cheap, and manage those domains with cloud flare. Even my self-hosted stuff at home. Especially my self-hosted stuff at home. Maybe google wouldn’t notice a ddos, but my shitty spectrum internet sure would.
This post is truly glorious, this should be the founding exhibit of the museum of Lemmy.
I am truly grateful to witness this moment.
In case OP is still with us, my advice would be anti diarrhoea medication, consume minimum liquids, avoid fibre, pack MREs which are often formulated to be a bit constipating. But above all, question why on earth you would be doing this in the first place!
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