Blindsight by Peter Watts. it’s a really unique take on first contact, but wow is it dark

how so?

i wouldn’t go with ranked choice voting. all the systems i know of have their own flaws: IRV can have really weird results with more than three candidates, Borda count disproportionately favors the moderate, and the Condorcet method can completely fail to select a winner. instead, what about approval voting, where instead of ranking candidates, you just check as many boxes as you want?

conspiracy theories i agree with, but religion? organized religion, definitely. joining a religion with a hierarchy signals that you want someone else to give you all the answers, which is very much a mark of poor education. but religious beliefs are not an automatic marker of poor education, as long as they’re sincerely held, don’t supersede science, and are frequently revisited and revised based on personal experience and knowledge. even basic, broad frameworks like animism or some parts of Buddhism can help you make sense of the world when science can’t help you

taking Ayn Rand’s work seriously. five seconds of critical thought and her entire philosophy comes crashing down

not forbidden, just difficult to make work. you’d have to create a fork of Lemmy with support for ads, and you’d have to convince people to come to your instance when there are so many ad-free instances out there

one night while i was laying in bed wide awake, i felt myself fall. like a quarter inch. i was lying flat on the bed and i wasn’t moving at all, but somehow i fell as if i like teleported a quarter inch into the air

they mass-report and/or mass-downvote people they don’t see as communist enough and drown out any good-faith discussion in the comments

Lemmygrad has a history of brigading communities, targeted harassment towards admins and prolific political posters, and as i mentioned before, sealioning (defined by Wikipedia as “a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity (‘I’m just trying to have a debate’), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter”)

if a liberal/anarchist/not-ML instance popped up and started behaving like Lemmygrad does, they’d get mass-defederated too. like i said, it’s not their views they got defederated for, it’s their behavior

it’s probably something like remote control, which is handy but ultimately not worth it imo

Fedora, because it’s constantly up to date and it f a s t (except when updating)

i know, and i’m really ticked about it

yes exactly. there’s so much tech that it’s literally impossible to make a new browser engine from scratch

not only that, but “smartness” and longevity seem to be inversely correlated. your grandma’s alarm clock she bought in the 70s most definitely still works and will still work fifty years later, while that fancy smart display your rich neighbor has is going to break after three

let me see:

• physical media is Just Better (cds, game cards, etc.)
• the Internet is a technological dumpster fire
• devices are too “smart” nowadays

they would have to go out of their way, but it’s bad practice to block because of guilt by association. most instances have internal federation guidelines that are somewhat looser than their own rules, but still include a baseline level of decency. so an instance that doesn’t allow nsfw content would federate with an instance that does (even if they wouldn’t allow images to federate) as long as they don’t go all freezepeach or harass everyone

Lemmygrad isn’t blocked because of their views, it’s blocked because it’s a massive troll farm. the posts that you see don’t include the replies they make to posts which they deem not communist enough, where they sealion and argue in bad faith until the op is driven out

probably not, but you’d get the same amount of horrible stuff as you’d get if you turned off all the security precautions on an email server. the point i’m making here by quoting Maloney is that blocking is a security precaution. less is more, and by joining an instance that doesn’t block anyone, you’re exposing yourself to a lot of terrible stuff. besides, instances that don’t block get blocked themselves, so horrible stuff would be all you’d see

Some folks think that defederation is a bad thing. OK.

Here’s a little experiment you can try at home.

1. Stop using GMail, Hey, or whatever email service you’re currently using.
2. Set up your own mail server (there’s instructions on the internet).
3. When the instructions say to use a Remote Black List just ignore them.
4. When the instructions say to validate domains, ignore those too.
5. When the instructions say to set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC just let those slide.
6. Try to send / receive email
7. Also try to read your inbox. For added benefit turn on all notifications for received mail.

Voila. Now you have an unfettered email experience.

And this, class, is why defederation is useful.

Please send your comments to the overworked TA in the back of the room.

— Craig Maloney