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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)SK
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4 mo. ago

  • It sounds ridiculous now with everything that's happened in social media in the meantime, but I can see that being a thing in 2006 when the vibe of social media was very different to what it's become now. Back then it was just a tidy little PHP site for you to chat and share photos with friends and family on. Literally nothing appeared in your feed that wasn't a post from a Friend. It was basically a Whatsapp group with a photo gallery feature.

    Since Facebook didn't have the baggage it has now, it's much easier to read refusing to join your girlfriend's circle of friends and family back then as a wider rejection of her as a person, same as if you refused to join her family Whatsapp/Telegram/whatever group chat.

    I'm not taking her side here, but I wanted to give a bit of perspective for people looking at it through the lens of 2025.

  • It’s not uncommon for some sects to write G-d instead of God as a handy workaround, and even then “God” is already a euphemism for the Tetragrammaton rather than His actual name. So in that vein using “G” on its own is probably safe.

  • Thanks for that. It looks from that like a relevant detail OOP missed out is that these thing (purportedly) claim to produce as much oxygen as 15 trees, which isn't nothing.

  • I think the problem is putting them in those dumb tanks where a tree would be, as if to say "do this instead". The principle would be fine if they got a bit more creative with it and played to its strengths, e.g. if you make a train platform out of it, or the railings of an overpass, or the external wall panels of buildings etc.

    Ofc OOP didn't actually provide a source so we've no idea what the creators were actually thinking...

  • Russia are every bit as active in leftist groups whipping them up into a frenzy too. There was even a case during BLM where the same Russian troll farm organised both a protest and its counter-protest. Don't think you're immune to being manipulated to serve Russia's long-term interests just because you're not a conservative.

    They don't care about promoting right-wing views, they care about sowing division. They support Trump because Trump sows division. Their long-term goal is to break American hegemony.

  • Yeah I was thinking exactly this.

    It's easy to point to reasons why this study was unethical, but the ugly truth is that bad actors all over the world are performing trials exactly like this all the time - do we really want the only people who know how this kind of manipulation works to be state psyop agencies, SEO bros, and astroturfing agencies working for oil/arms/religion lobbyists?

    Seems like it's much better long term to have all these tricks out in the open so we know what we're dealing with, because they're happening whether it gets published or not.

  • As a European watching the news, sometimes I have to remind myself that lots of other countries also go to shit from time to time, it just doesn't get reported on as much. We get a massively disproportionate amount of reporting from the US as a result of how the English-speaking internet works.

    In fact even writing this I just noticed the sidebar's description of the community I'm posting in, guess I should probably just block it (no offence).

  • The frustrating thing working in a big company is wanting to pay for something that costs 0.0000001% of the company's annual revenue, but not being able to because big companies are always divided up in hundreds of small teams with their own budgets, and your boss is already over-budget for the quarter because the team's cloud bill was 20% higher than predicted.

    This is, of course, working exactly as designed.

  • Just to put a downer on things, looking at the final results I do worry that Canada may have won the battle but lost the war.

    The situation in the US came about because an entrenched two-party system drowns out most viewpoints, and is what allowed Trump to seize control of a party of politicians who almost universally spoke out against him ten years ago. It's also responsible for the Democrats' constant and unrelenting shift towards the Right, enabled by the knowledge that most left-leaning voters are still too cowardly to vote third party.

    And what did we see this election? All the smaller party seats drifting to the big two "to stop the wrong guy getting in".

    Be very very careful not to continue down this slope. It does not end with the bad guys staying defeated once and for all.