Pigeon @ Lowbird @beehaw.org

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10

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205

Joined

2 yr. ago

I feel like a lot of peacoats, and even more so whatever you call those grandmotherly women's overshirts that drape and don't have buttons, are really close to this already.

Also, of course, traditional Arab clothing, like hijab. Light, really flowy, and complete with hood or a scarf that serves the same purpose. I know Muslim women who look way more comfortable than anyone else in the summer.

Or pants or shorts plus a windbreaker, or a poncho.

Tldr: I agree, they can be practical; they just also potentially make you look nerdy or edgelordy compared to existing and socially accepted similar options, depending on how well you coordinate the outfit and such.

It might be hard to make one equally practical to similar options as well, honestly. With a light jacket, you can take the jacket off easily and drape it over something, or tie it around your waist. But a light cloak might be more difficult to make while preserving the aesthetic you want, since it's more material all in one piece, and lighter material might flap around or tangle in the wind goofily instead of flaring dramatically? Maybe if you weighted it just at the end, and more toward the center than the edges? I wonder how costume departments do it for movies.

Tiktok actually has (or had, last I looked at it) a lot of value for marginalized groups finding content made by and for each other. I used it for a while before the ads got to be too much, and I had NEVER seen so many regular trans and nonbinary and ace and aro people getting to talk to each other about whatever instead of only about gender and orientation (and seeing them existing as regular people in video form is just really fucking comforting if you're not around others like you in real life), nor so many informative videos by and about disabled folks. T

he platform has (had?) an incredible ability to enable discovery of niche communities, and I rapidly learned a hell of a lot about accessibility (from videos by actual disabled people about their struggles and solutions and day to day lives), about modern Native American cultures (especially there were a lot of Native American amateur comedians that were very funny) and concerns (f the pipeline), about ex-mormon experiences, about autistic people (yes, there's a lot of misinformation on tiktok about neurodivergence, but there's ALSO a lot of actual neurodivergent people talking about what their day to day experiences are actually like in a way that's really damn hard to find in other places that are dominated by Doctors and parent-directed articles), and people/culture from India (before India banned Tiktok), and so on and on, that I wouldn't have learned about otherwise.

And there were more successful female and Black comedians than I've ever seen elsewhere. I had more videos by Black people and Asian people and women then I've ever even come close to having in my youtube feed; it's not even comparable in that respect, really.

All of which long-winded paragraphs is to say, don't ban Tiktok, or other specific platforms. Especially not when the bills that are ostensibly to do that hand absurd amounts of power to government to do the same to future platforms with little to no oversight and with little to no justification. And more platforms just like them will crop up out of the ashes anyways.

Instead, ban individually-personalized advertising, aka the root motivator that makes companies want to peel every scrap of information out of their users in the first place.

Individually targeted advertising hasn't been a thing for that long, even though it feels so ubiquitous and unstoppable now, and for decades companies did just fine with population-level targeting like newspaper ads used to be.

I don't think the individualized ad targeting has added anything of value to society.

Having typed all that, I re-read your comment and, yeah, I suppose schools could at least block social media sites on their school wifi. That can only do so much when they've all got data connections anyways, though.

Anyway I agree that phones shouldn't be banned. It's infeasible, inadvisable, and counterproductive.

The absolute last thing I want to do these days is to try to remove kids' ability to call for help in emergencies.

Phones are also important so that kids can receive emergency alerts, like earthquake and tsunami and tornado alerts, depending on where you live. Such emergency alert systems provide only a little bit of warning, but that can make all the difference.

You think it should be disallowed even in cases like the one described, so a parent can tell their kid pickup will be late or to catch a ride with a particular trusted adult or to walk to xyz place to wait, etc?

And they can be used to help academics, too, such as for taking notes, recording lectures (when allowed), looking up an unfamiliar word (especially for kids whose first language isn't whatever they're being taught in), taking photos of the whiteboard. And more and more, boosted by LLM tech, they're becoming helpful for things like live translation and auto-transcription (great for deaf or hard of hearing students especially, but also just for anyone who finds subtitles make audio easier to follow along with, as many people apparently do).

A school can tell kids to mute phones, and not to look at them during class (and that part's hardly new - even before phones it was games on calculators and books and magazines and passing notes), but taking them or even forcing them to be turned off (except perhaps during tests) is too much imo. Especially when kids will absolutely bring them in anyway, and the whole thing will just create more of an us vs. them dynamic with the teachers and students. And especially now that phones have become such personal devices for so many people, like an external brain filled with your secrets.

I feel like both things are true with this one. I mean, at least they could be more creative with the paint, surely? Or detailing? Maybe some fun etchings? Fun car interior designs?

It's a mass-market product so I do get why they don't, but man, there are way too many boring gray and white cars that just match the pavement.

Yeeeah I sure wouldn't want to be trans on the internet in the 90s. Or a woman, either. Or Black.

I think it's easy to remember the good parts over the bad, and to not see the empty spaces where people weren't allowed into the club at all back then. At least some of the lost civility was just a facade, and limited to a very specific in-group.

But I do think social media algorithms that prioritize rage for ads are a real problem that makes everything feel worse, too. I'm glad Twitter is going down fast.

Also I agree with you in that I could do with more happy media. But of course only the best/most popular media from prior decades is preserved and remembered and celebrated, so I think any seemingly loss of quality is likely survivorship bias + personal taste + the difficulty of finding things when there are a lot of things.

One of my own personal sources of media joy is ao3, and that wasn't founded until 2008, and only entered beta in 2009. That alone means heaps and heaps of well-organized (so well organized!) fanfiction - including humor and fluff and other happy stuff - that I love to bits and that didn't exist at all until recently. Every time ao3 goes down a crowd of distressed people flood Down Detector and exclaim about how they were just in the middle of their [insert hyperspecific fanfic here] and got left on a cliffhanger - it's kinda adorable.

It seems like yes, but also:

To make matters worse, it appears that the admin targeted in the raid was in the middle of maintenance work which left would-be-encrypted material on the server available in unencrypted form at the time of seizure.

Spacey had previously denied 12 charges – seven sexual assaults, three indecent assaults, one count of causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent, and one count of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.

A further charge of indecent assault was added mid-trial, taking to 13 the total number of alleged offences listed on the indictment.

Last Wednesday, the four indecent assault charges were struck off by the judge because of a “legal technicality”.

I don't know anything about this, and I wish the article went into a lot more detail about the accusations and why they were found not credible, especially since there were so many from separate people.

Like, did they find some evidence against the accusers, like happened with the Michael Jackson cases iirc, or did they just decide the accusers didn't present enough evidence or witnesses to be believed?

Spacey might well be innocent, of course. I just worry because society is often disinclined to take male sexual assault victims seriously, and I feel like if the alleged victims were female the press would (since "Me Too") at least give them a little more coverage than this? This article feels like it has a "the accused is found not guilty, and everyone knows that sexual assault cases are always decided correctly, so he is 100% innocent and we can all wash our hands of this" vibe, but meanwhile Bill Crosby walks free, so I can't personally trust it with so little information.

Especially not when it's about a rich, powerful man with a huge fanbase, aka exactly the type of person nobody wants to believe would be a predator (and maybe he isn't! But I need more info here, darn it!)

Ah well. I'll google more later I guess.

At least it doesn't seem to have turned into a media hellscape circus like what happened to Amber Heard.

... Gosh, that has much potential to make everything sound dirty or sleezy, too. 🤦 xxx

X.x

I like this compromise solution.

Or, if one wanted a more permanent community instead, we could split a, idk, "Corporate and Billionaire Drama" or "Web Drama" community (something along those lines) off for this type of thing going forward, so "Technology" could stay more specifically about tech and not about all the crap around it. But maybe that line would be too hard to draw I guess.

I like "active" sort specifically because it biases new comments on posts, instead of new posts, so that if people keep talking on a post, or if an old post gets an unexpected rush of comment activity, it'll stay on my homepage. It makes the homepage move slower, makes post success much less dependent on its exact timing vs peak lemmy usage, and it lets discussions last longer, and lets people participate in discussions longer than immediately after the post goes up. Gives everything a more patient feel.

And imo may indeed mitigate the problems some are fearing with megathreads based on how they could be on reddit sometimes.

I read an article just yesterday about Brace selling AI access "rights" to other peoples' copyrighted work that gets pulled by their search, too. Like they have an equivalent of google snippets, but with much longer "snippets" of copyrighted books, and they explicitly sell "rights" for people to scrape that and other things for AI datasets, as if their search engine indexing a thing gives them ownership of it.

Also there was that one time they put a link to a neo-nazi website into their list of defaults on their homepage. Yup.

It's all to the point that I don't actually trust a word they say about their privacy protections either, really, even if I were willing to ignore everything else.

Idk, that might even be worse imo. I don't want to go back to the days of surprise bills like you'd get because you went over your alotted minutes/texts/GBs, or to have to think about whether or not a particular search is worth $.

Most of the Musk and Twitter posts don't even have many comments as it is anyway. And when they do it's people saying the same thing over and over in multiple splintered comment sections.

Besides, I don't think lemmy is that way for megathreads yet like reddit can be. Partly because the userbase is smaller and more engaged, and partly because "active" sort exists.

I love the show and Witcher 3, but absolutely cannot stand the books, so perhaps yes? Maybe it'll be the other way around for you, if it can be this way 'round for me.

The fact that this actually acknowledges that room and board and textbooks has to be included for it to be truly free and accessible to the recipients is incredible. Wonderful news!

Because he's a rich fuck who inherited emerald mine money to get his start, and he got lucky with his first buys and got an in with other rich fucks, and he buys good companies and sometimes he doesn't wreck them?

He didn't build any of it.

I agree, but can we not with the r word?

One of the worst parts about all this to me is that the AI and the dataset used to trained it are kept secret as proprietary information, and the police and governments buy it anyway despite that nobody can even try to check the code or dataset to see what biases or errors it might have (and definitely does).

I think it just depends on whether you feel like the game is respecting your time or not.

A long game that's eating up time with boring random encounters, fetch quests, grinding that you don't enjoy, and so on? Ain't got time for that, I'll play something else.

But a long game where I'm enjoying near every minute and every aspect, like an RPG that's been crafted absurdly well and isn't filled with bloat and has fun combat in every encounter? I'm all in for that.

I think the issue is mainly that for obvious reasons there are FAR more of the former than the latter, even before accounting for personal taste.

The money-saving depends on your ability to not buy more games, though. This doesn't seem to be actually doable for most people. For me it isn't because I find I need variety in my games or else I lose interest in the medium altogether.

There can definitely be a magic in living in a good game, though.