I mean, the main place i observe this is people commuting on the metro. If they didn't have phones they'd be reading tabloid newspapers.
I don't really see anything wrong with using your phone on the metro. Some will look up art and crafts, some bird photography, others makeup tutorials or video game content. If they can explore their interests rather than just waste their time completely that's fine by me.
Of course it's also a dopamine trap, and Instagram use trends to get a bit out of hand. Still, it seems to me some Lemmy users are a bit too quick to write off "normal" people as broken down zombies.
If anything the George Carlin-imitating AI serves to highlight that the brilliance of Carlin was in his thinking, not in his shtick of delivering cynical jokes in his signature fashion. The AI captures the cynicism and the voice and at least in part the delivery, yet it just left me bored. Carlin on the other hand I can listen to again and again.
I guess it's like training a moral philosophy bot. Sure, you could train an AI on everything Immanuel Kant has ever written and it would be capable of delivering an endless series of platitudes that sound like something Kant could have written, but it's not going to become a Kantian philosopher, and you'll be better off just reading Kant.
I feel like any time anyone is using their phones in public they're scrolling Instagram.
If you want to give an appearance of normalcy while maintaining a living soul, just get a Pixelfed account, follow a bunch of photographers, and scroll endlessly.
For me, German humour is at its best when it's using subtitles in the German language - not really through puns, but by using language to highlight contradictions and absurdities. Obviously, this humour does not translate well at all.
After learning German and re-reading some Kafka stories I was struck by how stories I had read as somewhat somber in English were actually full of a weird sense of humour in the original German. It's still absurd and unsettling, but somehow Kafka is also funny.
In short, anything you publish here will, by design, be broadcast all around to whatever service is interested in listening. Collecting data about fediverse users is as easy as setting up a federated service designed to collect data, and observe what comes in. In some countries there are regulations for what kind of data you're allowed to store, but you could always just go somewhere else and do it.
Nobody is going to buy user data from sh.itjust.works or any other service because why the hell would they do that when they can just collect everything for free.
This is not unlike everything else on the Internet. If you publish something, it can be used. Maybe not legally in all countries, but as we have learned from the AI revolution nobody really cares about legality anyway.
Nothing you post here, or anywhere else on the internet, is private. It's all public, and if companies find a way of profiting off it chances are that they will. If they can't do it legally in the US they will do so somewhere else. The only way of avoiding it is by not publishing in open forums.
If you're worried about your user data, the best you can do is probably to jump around between different accounts.
Of course the victims are different, but as for the people like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, I am going to judge people by the company they keep. I doubt anyone in his circles were unaware that Epstein was a complete creep, though some of them might have been unaware just how much of a piece of shit he really was.
Not saying Clinton raped children, just saying that I'd be reluctant to shake his hand.
It's all too easy to imagine the mental gymnastics.
"She was 17/16/whatever, not a real child anyway"
"There is no sign in the video that she is not consenting, this is a private matter"
"The democrats are sick for obsessing over this"
Phil Spector. His wall of sound bullshit caused decades of potentially amazing albums to sound like shit, and he's a terrible person who has brought nothing on the world that's worth keeping.
Not exactly a new one, but I listened to S-town with great enjoyment. It's a little story about an alleged murder, a truly original American man, and rural Alabama. I was never bored, and I certainly learned something. And you get to hear an amazing Alabama accent.
I mean, the main place i observe this is people commuting on the metro. If they didn't have phones they'd be reading tabloid newspapers.
I don't really see anything wrong with using your phone on the metro. Some will look up art and crafts, some bird photography, others makeup tutorials or video game content. If they can explore their interests rather than just waste their time completely that's fine by me.
Of course it's also a dopamine trap, and Instagram use trends to get a bit out of hand. Still, it seems to me some Lemmy users are a bit too quick to write off "normal" people as broken down zombies.