Maybe I worded that poorly. Yeah, we generally trusted the news, but for the most part the TV was the “idiot box” and was not to be trusted. At some point, the news — I think, largely, FOX News at first, but the others weren’t far behind — became “news entertainment” in the same way WWE was “sports entertainment.” It was either not real, or at the very least it was heavily biased. Whenever The Newsroom came out — what a lot of people know for a 3 minute YouTube edit about why “America is no longer the greatest country in the world anymore” but was really more of a love letter to the way the news used to be. They told real news in a way that was entertaining, but through a character (portrayed by Jeff Daniels) who was trying to tell the news the old way. Give people the facts and let them make up their own mind. But by that point, I think most news on TV was fake/heavily biased.

I’m religious neutral (I don’t like the term atheist), and I’m fine with the Ten Commandments.

Work within the system to bust it open.

The first commandment says “thou shalt have no other gods before me.” In a monotheistic religion (one god), that seems nonsensical. What He’s really saying is you can’t put anything before God. Including money. Or greed.

Another one says “thou shalt not bear false witness,” which is to say “don’t lie,” but they can’t stop doing that.

“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s…” I forget. Ass is in my family’s KJV (meaning donkey of course) and that’s funny. But this is another good one. They need to stop coveting our freedom and what little we have left and stop stealing from the poor.

Why should we live by these rules if the people in power won’t? In that case the rules aren’t even arbitrary.

Can’t tell what they are, but they don’t appear to be waifus. That would be funnier.

Or if it was all kid characters… e.g. Eleven and Max from Stranger Things, Anya from SPYxFAMILY, Wednesday from… Wednesday… I dunno, I’m sure there are others.

Time dilation.

Imagine you go to prison for a year. That’s one year you’re without your family and friends, and a year they’re without you. 1:1 time.

Now imagine you’re put to sleep and kept in a coma like state, fed by tubes. A computer or similar machine induces a dreamlike state that is indistinguishable from reality in which you will be imprisoned for 100 years. You never sleep. You never eat or drink. You never need to. And you can’t relax, you’re constantly being hunted or otherwise threatened. In the real world your family never left your side because in the real world, you’re only under for an hour.

Something similar happened to a guy on Star Trek (O’Brien on Deep Space Nine). Black Mirror did it a few times. And the fourth season of Sword Art Online (an anime) did it as well. Probably some others. Oh yeah, Interstellar. So you may have seen it.

End of trust, not truth.

Back in my day, we assumed that if it was on TV, it was a lie or likely not the whole truth. When the Internet began to rise up, we extended that mistrust to the Web.

Lately, people have become too trusting of the Internet and I’m glad that trust is starting to roll back.

Thanks! I went and followed the discussion link the other guy posted. I saw one concern — the handling of voting. But someone/some people are going behind a lot of those comments and saying they fixed it based on user feedback. So that’s good. I also feel I understand the two (Lemmy and Piefed) and their relationship a bit more.

If it sounds like I’m a bit eager to learn, it’s because I like to help others, but to do that I have to understand things first.

So let me see if I understand you correctly. The “one I’m on now” you refer to in the third paragraph, meaning dbzer0, is an instance of Lemmy (along with others) that are federated (loosely united) together in the same feed.

You’re on piefed.social, so you’re federated with dbzer0 and the other Lemmy feeds. So it’s not like you’re on a whole other federated social network like Bluesky (which is more like Twitter whereas Lemmy is more like Reddit). But it has different programming, so you can access more/different features from your end than I can on mine, but we still have access to the same communities?

Still kinda struggling to understand how fediverse stuff works.

For me it’s chaotic good vs lawful good.

D&D divides character alignment along two moral axes, good vs evil, and lawful vs chaotic. Both can be neutral, and if you’re neutral in both you’re True Neutral. Heroes are good, but most are lawful good, like Superman in American comics and All Might (My Hero Academia) in Japanese ones. For chaotic good, that’s someone like Batman. I think that’s an anti hero.

Whereas villains can be lawful evil or chaotic evil, that doesn’t seem to matter as much. Darth Vader is lawful evil — he is evil, but he follows a set of laws. The Sith code or whatever. Trump is more chaotic evil, he makes his own rules and just wants to see the world burn.

I think most of us are close to true neutral. We might lean towards good but I don’t think most are pure good like a hero would be. Some of us lean toward lawful but aren’t pushing it like lawyers, judges, good cops I suppose… and some lean toward chaos (like say movie pirates) but they’re not trying to make the world burn, they just wanna watch stuff for free. The four extreme alignments are really reserved for heroes, villains — the movers and shakers.

Thank you! Subscribed to both and found a few things to sub to in the second one.

Thank you! I’m mostly treating it like “Reddit but for left leaning people” and enjoying learning the differences.

I’m doing my part! Just joined a couple days ago. Thought I could stick with Reddit but it got too far to the right for me. They crossed a line I can’t ignore, but I like the format, so I’m here. I knew Reddit was going to be winding down soon so I didn’t put as much effort in. I’d like to start a couple communities here, whereas I wouldn’t have tried over there. I just hope the toxic people who run the communities there don’t see what I’m doing and try to invade. I mean we could use the numbers but not the toxicity — though I feel that that comes with any influx of new users.

When the kid can stand on their own. Some never learn. Sometimes it’s the parents’ fault, sometimes the kid is missing something (some mental or physical or maybe psychological deficit).

When I was a kid, there came a time when I wanted as little to do with my folks as possible. I’d be out until just past dark (“when the streetlights come on” was the time we’d start heading home) and from a pretty young age. Like 9-10. We’d go for a mile or two, explore the world around us. Ride bikes to another neighborhood or (later) get on a county bus and go to another town. We didn’t have cell phones, let alone pocket computers like kids have now.

I see kids as old as 8-10 still needing to cling to mommy’s skirt or daddy’s jeans. That could never have been us. And when they’re not clinging to their parents, they’re playing Minecraft or Fortnite or Roblox on a hand-me-down phone that doesn’t call (and probably has its serial blocked for non-payment so it just works on WiFi) or a tablet. And I’m not generalizing. I know kids like this. Kids in my family are like this. I have no control over it. I’ve tried to tell them they should be out playing. They won’t hear it. Family doesn’t care. I’m the old man shouting at clouds. I imagine those kids will be living at home at 30 being told when to take a shower and when to go to bed. It’s not just this generation, either. I have a couple aunts and an uncle (young Boomers/elder GenX) who were the same way. Minus the electronics, naturally.

Parents: Raise your kids to be independent, or they’ll be your babies forever.

Thanks I guess? Surely Mac and Linux users can be friends or at least allies against Windows. Linux comes from UNIX which macOS is based on so they’re very similar, only one is FOSS — which I suppose is the point — and the other is not. But another commonality — Macs and PCs can both run Linux.

If you like chicken, go to the corner of 53rd and 6th and find the halal cart with the longest line. Ask for the chicken and rice. Go around back and squirt half a gallon of white sauce and maybe a little red on it. Cover it up, walk about half an hour to work up an appetite, find somewhere comfortable to sit, and thank me later.

They have a chain now but nothing beats the OG cart. Even the pizza. Rose’s Pizza in Penn Station has my vote. May not be the best but it’s good! First pizza I had in NYC and while others were good, I haven’t found one I liked much more.

Absolutely. But to clarify, Apple Music pays more per stream than Spotify and others. Spotify trends to cut bigger checks to popular musicians because they have more subscribers.

Also — someone feel free to fact check this — I’ve heard that if, say, you put an album out on BandCamp but not streaming, and I buy it and sideload it into both services, and you later add it to both services, Spotify won’t pay you for my streams because I’m streaming the sideloaded copy whereas Apple will match it. I keep the metadata if it’s different but you’d get paid for the streams because it matches it.

Insofar as humidity exists everywhere… I suppose it is.

Speaking as somebody who’s lived where humidity is stupidly annoying… no, it’s not. And those of us who have experienced real humidity love it for that reason. We love getting out of really bad humidity.

I mean, I suppose it could get humid. I’ve only visited. I also suppose any coastal area could get humid, due to proximity to the ocean. But the South ain’t playing when it comes to humidity, and that’s what I meant.

I switched to Mac after my old Asus laptop went out. I figure why bother with a PC laptop, it’s not gonna game and let’s see what the fuss is about. Love my MacBook Air. So then our desktop dies and I give my wife 3 options. A Mac, a cheaper PC, and a more expensive PC. She’s Android, figured she’d want to stick with Windows, but she picked the Mac! So happy. I mostly game on Switch and Xbox these days so that’s fine.

I keep feeling like I left Windows at the right time.

Never lived there but I’ve visited CT. Went to a movie with my wife. The first Narnia film, so it was like 3 hours long? It was nice when we went in. It was nice when we left. However, during the film there was a blizzard, seemed like it dropped snow a foot deep! That being said, the city had cleared all the roads. They know how to deal with the snow. Of course when you get to side streets it’s a bit dicey, but the main roads? Like to our hotel? Clear as you like. The roads are twisty and windy up there, and people drive crazy — well, they drive appropriate to the state of the roads, to be fair — and I never felt unsafe despite being unaccustomed to driving in snow.

Beautiful area. Summers get hot, winters get cold. You gotta plan for each. But it’s nice and not too humid.

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.”

There’s an easy solution to this. I pay for Apple Music because I get access to pretty much all the music I want. I can sideload what they don’t have, which isn’t much. They have better audio quality, and aren’t stiffing artists to pay some right wing nutjob science denier like the other streaming platform of note. I pay because I love music and want to support what I love. Why isn’t there a similar service for TV and movies? That’s the solution. Let us pay for what we love and make it easy. Apple figured it out with music. Valve figured it out with games.

I think they don’t want to solve the problem. I think they want to solve a different problem. I think they’re making this a problem so they can push legislation to protect their profits.