• 3 Posts
  • 42 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • This has nothing to do with protecting Canadians and everything to do with protecting big business

    I think what no politician wants to admit is that car industry is a strategically important industry and has to be protected for geopolitical reasons alone. We need the manufacturing capability to maintain our industrial base as a hedge against any future conflict. (I lump it in with why you need domestic milk and food production, vaccine production, etc. When the going gets tough, you need that.)

    That said, I do feel the bailouts from 2009/2010 were total horseshit and these companies got off scot-free. They’ve had ages to prepare to make EVs and squandered it, and now have to be protected by moves like this. We just end up paying for it, either through subsidies (eg. battery plants) or through the inflated prices of EVs.







  • I’m a huge Doom (1/2/3/2016) fan but I’m not sure how I feel about this. Eternal just seemed like more or the same so I never even bothered playing it. The Dark Ages is starting to feel a little too Anime and just outside the whole space-based Doom universe. This just doesn’t seem like Doom to me and the gameplay looks like more of the same basically from the trailer.


  • broad, sensationalist strokes

    Can you clarify what you perceive as sensationalist about what I wrote? Based on the number of upvotes this thread has, I’m not the only one that thinks this way. (My tax dollars are currently going to fighting cybercrime sponsored by Russia, fighting Russian disinformation campaigns, and providing materiel to fight the Russian military.)

    I take great pride and responsibility in my critical thinking skills

    Me too, but as I mentioned in another thread, the issue is that not everybody is gifted with those same critical thinking skills, and the impact on those less equipped can be catastrophic. (see: pizzagate shooting)

    range of ideas acceptable to post on Lemmy were restricted to those acceptable to our mainstream media

    I do think we disagree on this here - For me, mainstream media is primarily good journalism where information is fact-checked and vetted. (Don’t forget there’s libel laws that keep journalists in check too in most countries.) Opinions and editorials represent the views of the writers or newspaper. Every organization has a slant in what they choose to cover and find newsworthy, you just need to be aware of it. With this in mind, I don’t see mainstream media as a bad thing at all or something that needs to be rebelled against. It serves a different purpose from Lemmy.

    Where I see Lemmy being useful and interesting is as a news aggregator with insightful discourse in the comments that’s not dominated by inauthentic behaviour. Reddit is completely flooded and driven by marketers and bots, where the content and discourse quality have become low and repetitive, which seems to be the end state of 2000-2010 era social media platform.


  • I can respect this take. I do worry that burying problematic content isn’t enough these days though. Even if only 2% of the visitors on this site see the content, all it takes is one person to believe there’s a demonic child trafficking ring and then you have someone shooting up a pizza joint. Not everyone who uses the internet has all their faculties and I think that’s an argument for going further than just burying the content. (I suspect we’ll start seeing more pressure on YouTube and Facebook to go further than they have too with regards to problematic content like this.)

    Edit: I also think that as platforms have become more strict about their community guidelines, the effectiveness of grand, overt disinformation campaigns has diminished, so bad actors’ strategies are switching to more subtle, softer disinformation campaigns.



  • You don’t have to be a professional to parrot Russian propaganda. How it works is they find a sympathetic ear, and then spoon feed this garbage content with them with the knowledge that someone will post it. Sometimes the content is targeted, other times it’s just pushed through these low quality / fake news sites and then gets picked up on social media and spreads. Sometimes the content starts out neutral-ish, then they build up this pro-Russian slant over time, slowly mixing in all this nonsense. No propaganda feed (for any nation) is 100% propaganda - it’s going to be 20% real news, 20% opinion, 20% opinions parroting Russian state media, etc. etc. It’s similar to the magic mix Facebook gives you in your feed.

    Beyond the main issue that this thinly-veiled propaganda community is going to attract the wrong audience and expose the existing/future audience here to utter bullshit, I take specific issue that the end goal is to undermine the security of our fucking country. Russia has been fighting a cyber and information war against us for over a decade and we can’t just look away and pretend it’s harmless. Between allowing state sanctioned cybercriminals to flourish and attack our hospitals with ransomware, to trying to undermine democracy across the globe, we need to step up our game and put our foot down against this shit because it’s going to get a lot worse, and the sooner we nip it in the bud, the better.




  • If it makes you feel better, Consumer Reports still operates like it’s the year 1990 and is completely detached from the world of media today. There are YouTube content producers who make far better content than Consumer Reports does, in every category. Sites like RTings and YouTubers like Project Farm or Vacuum Wars completely obliterate Consumer Reports in terms of quality, freshness, and usefulness.

    Look at the way cars are even rated on Consumer Reports. They post “samples of the data” from their surveys, and you get examples like somebody having an ancient phone and not being able to Bluetooth pair it to their car ending up lowering the reliability rating of the car. It makes no sense.

    Articles like the one linked are what you get when you have a clueless, outdated organization with management who have their head in the sand, feeding some SEO suggestions from ChatGPT to their writers. It’s just layers of badness and poor decisionmaking.



  • I’m a huge Solvespace fan so you had me at fillets and chamfers! Thanks for posting this.

    Played around with Dune 3D and so far some cool stuff compared to Solvespace is:

    • Chamfers and fillets (seem to work well so far)
    • Groups can be reordered! This is huge for workflow and managing bigger designs.
    • There’s a cool shortcut search menu if you hit spacebar.
    • According to the README, it solves some stuff symbolically, which should be good for performance (hopefully it’ll have fewer weird cases than Solvespace where the solver has trouble)

    The UI needs some work, and there’s some basic functionality like STL export that I could only find from the spacebar search menu, but this is an amazing start and I hope this project grows. I need to design a simple widget for 3D printing in the next couple of weeks and I will definitely be trying this for that.




  • Your post couldn’t be more true. Decades ago I was sold on MythTV, this PVR software but it only ran on Linux and you had to compile it yourself. So I gave Linux and MythTV a shot. As it turned out, both MythTV and early desktop Linux were a buggy, frustrating mess. X broke all the time. Incomprehensible, ungoogleable compile errors all the time.

    I spent so much time troubleshooting MythTV and compilation problems that I ended up learning Linux inside and out and the C programming language to be able understand the compile errors. I went on to lead a major open source project and have had a long career as a programmer, using all the knowledge I gained that started with fighting MythTV.