Similarly, platforms that default to a massive CREATE AN ACCOUNT box centered on the screen and make you play Where’s Fucking Waldo trying to find the size 8 “Log In” hyperlink.

Man that’s sad. The AV Club was my go-to site for TV/Movie reviews for years, it’s unfortunate to see them degrade into the same kind of low-value content farm that their (former) sister site ClickHole makes fun of.

Jean Paul Sartre would vote to defederate:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge.

But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.

They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.

Hexbear, as an entity, exists to troll and disrupt discussions, not to participate in them.

“I’m a helpful AI and automation tool,” reads the Auto News Desk’s bio. “I collect, analyze, and deliver information like high school sports scores and real estate transfers. My job is to help the newsroom deliver lots more useful information while freeing up their time to do important human-powered journalism.”

You know, it’s bad enough that they’re using these godawful services to the detriment of both writers and readers alike, but what I particularly dislike is that all these shitty LLMs are being humanized with biographies and cute little names. Like little cheery mascots celebrating the death of human-powered industries.

So I do analysis on this type of data as part of my role at an online job board. Based on our data, a couple things stand out:

• Overall job volume is down about 40% year-over-year. So the market in general is a lot tighter.
• The proportion of remote roles is dropping, but slowly. A year ago about 70% of our roles were fully remote; now it’s about 60%.
• The proportion of fully in-office roles has actually remained relatively stagnant, generally floating around 15%-20% at any given time. They’re also very difficult roles to fill because A) they’re limited to actual geographies and B) they are nobody’s first choice
• Between February 2023 and now, the median # of applications we get per role has spiked sharply; particularly with remote roles. These roles unsurprisingly remain jobseekers’ first choice, and since they’re not limited by geography, tend to pull in a_much_ wider talent pool, especially since the overall number and proportion of remote roles continues to shrink.

So what I’m seeing is many of these remote roles becoming supplanted by hybrid roles, which has pros and cons. They’re still limited by the same geographic constraints as in-office roles, since you’re not going to be applying to a hybrid role across the country, after all. So you’ll see less variety of employers. The advantage is that if there is a hybrid role that looks appealing to you, that you’ll be facing a lot less competition than you would for a fully remote role.

That’s what I’ve been thinking. I can’t even recall the last time I heard of anyone I know taking a PCR covid test.

And that makes it challenging trying to manage behavior. I’ve definitely noticed a marked uptick in people I know that have gotten covid in the past couple weeks, but when I try to look at the data to validate my anecdotal experience, it’s difficult to find compared to two years ago. Oregon, for example, has wastewater monitoring, but the page used to convey the data doesn’t work on mobile and is confusing to use at best.

I dipped out of r/politics on Reddit because over the past few years the general trend there has been:

Reliable news outlet posts article > Partisan clickbait site posts their incendiary “take” on the article > Redditors post their hot takes based on misleading clickbait title without reading either article

There’s just no value to reading hot takes from uninformed teenagers seeking only to validate and amplify their worldviews based on clickbait titles alone. It’s important to stay informed, but there’s such a diminishing return for getting news from a subreddit vs. a legitimate news outlet, and it’s definitely not worth the mental health hit. And I don’t think it’s a Reddit-exclusive thing. Personally I’d rather stick to reading news from the sources, and keep my social media focused on other things.

I would caution some patience and suspicion on this story.

• Zillow says that the sale information was a mistake and has since been removed.

• Meanwhile, this headline is sourced from a straight-up clickbait site reposting a story from a news website with a history of mixed factual reporting.

We all get the fun brain chemicals coming out when a big juicy story like this appears and validates our worldviews and we can’t wait to share and amplify it, but spreading misinformation is bad, m’kay?

It doesn’t need to have a use case. Use cases are for users and our priorities don’t really rank near the top anymore. It’s mostly cargo cult follow-the-leader product management at this point, so it needs to have the latest buzzwords tagged on like blockchain or machine learning or something-as-a-service so investors will get hyped for it and maybe generate some buzz in the tech industry.

free as in beer yes, but not free as in the amount of time you will spend trying to install drivers for all your peripherals and then find yourself being castigated for asking for help in a GNU/Linux forum and being criticized by forum oldheads for not using the search even though you did use the search, but it only led you towards other threads which also all ended with terse messages to use the search, and then you’re directed to a 1200+ page megathread on driver issues and told to spend the next three months parsing through it repeatedly before daring to post again.

This is community-evaluated content, and downvotes are a tool used for evaluation. So I think they make sense.

That being said, I don’t believe they should be public by default. People are nuts these days, especially online, and I don’t want to catch an online stalker or some nazi sliding aggro into my DMs because I downvoted their post.

Kinda, yeah. I mean I don’t really identify myself as a “retro gamer” but I’ve got an Atari with a bunch of games and a newfangled TV. Every once and again I think it’d be fun to hook it up, but there’s no easy way to get it working without buying some doohickey. In this case if the doohickey is the machine, and it can use the OG controllers & games, that’s certainly appealing. Maybe a steep price for it, but definitely appealing.

Which is also when they regularly try and get you to mistakenly click a button to make Edge your default browser. Scummy dark patterns.

Aside from the fact that “Joe Biden’s” DOJ is correct here, the fact that both this case and this argument were originally established in 2015 under the Obama administration is what truly makes this article outrage clickbait.

This is what I believe too. With interest rates rising, companies have been under a great deal of pressure to show profitability, and especially with Reddit aiming for an IPO, it seemed (superficially at least) a great idea to badger their userbase into adopting their mobile app, where they could be monetized to a much larger extent.

So of course they made the conditions of using their new API incredibly onerous.

The whole point was to discourage developers from using it. And then by cherrypicking a handful of select 3rd-party developers to offer more amenable terms to on the downlow, they can show that they were just being reasonable good guys, and doing their best to work with everyone, and that it must be the developers at fault if they decided to walk away and abandon their users.

So yeah, they’ve managed to get their app center stage, and the only minor tradeoffs have been:

• Launching/boosting a fleet of competitors (lemmy/kbin/squabbles/discuit/tildes/etc)
• Driving their very talented 3rd-party app devs into making apps for said competitors
• Creating a massive breach of trust between Reddit Inc and its unpaid volunteer mods
• Squandering any remaining goodwill Reddit once had in the tech community
• Driving away folks who enjoy using 3rd-party apps
• Ruining the image of the CEO
• Negatively affecting the overall community to the point where it’s both a more hostile and unpleasant site, and simultaneously less moderated.

I’m just grateful to see that just when folks were beginning to doubt if Lemmy could actually serve as a Reddit alternative, we’ve been able to prove that we’re equally if not more adept at insular slapfighting over petty bullshit and assuming the worst about others’ intentions.

I cannot believe that there are companies and non-wingnuts who are still actively using that site at this point. Like maybe at the start it was ha-ha funny watching him flail about with code printouts and unplugging random microservices leading to outages, but I feel like the moment he started actively funneling money to alt-right knuckleheads and human traffickers should have been enough of a kick in the pants for even folks heavily reliant on the platform to make their exit.

I see we’ve unfortunately brought over the trend of defaulting to assuming the worst intentions from Reddit, with a side portion of baseless accusations. While I’m disappointed that the community was removed, I think it can be easily explained by:

• Speed Run the Content Moderation Learning Curve
• The reality that, right or wrong, any significant legal action brought against them would be game over for the instance and personally devastating for the humans involved. Conde Nast they are not, and if Joe SIIA decides to put them in their crosshairs, the legal situation would be financially devastating.

It’s reaaaaaally really easy to sit in the peanut gallery and talk shit about how they’re cowardly acquiescing when it’s not our neck in the noose.

That being said, I feel like recent acts of defederation are only serving to highlight that the way forward in the fediverse is going to be having accounts on multiple instances in order to get the full breadth of offerings. In my case:

• I initially signed up on lemmy.ml since that was, at the time the “main” instance.
• Oh hey, kbin looks cool. I’ll sign up there and check it out.
• Oh hey, people are saying that the lemmy.ml admins are evil commies or some shit. Welp I better make an account on lemmy.world in case anything goes sideways.
• Oh hey, now I’m probably going to also need an account on dbzer0 as well, dope.

Well, they have a podcast for one.

I can do you one better with a Tampermonkey script that will replace every reference to his name on every webpage to either “the biggest twat on the planet” or “this dipshit”, depending on which works better syntactically.

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Text Replace
// @version      0.1
// @description  Text Replace
// @author       SiameseDream
// @include     *
// @grant        none
// @namespace beepboop
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
    'use strict';

var replaceArry = [
    [/ Elon Musk/gi,' the biggest twat on the planet'],
    [/Elon Musk/gi,'The biggest twat on the planet'],
    [/ Mr. Musk/gi,' this dipshit'],
    [/ Musk/gi,' this dipshit'],
    [/Mr. Musk/gi,'This dipshit'],
    [/Musk/gi,'This dipshit'],
    // etc.
];
var numTerms    = replaceArry.length;
var txtWalker   = document.createTreeWalker (
    document.body,
    NodeFilter.SHOW_TEXT,
    {   acceptNode: function (node) {
            //-- Skip whitespace-only nodes
            if (node.nodeValue.trim() )
                return NodeFilter.FILTER_ACCEPT;

            return NodeFilter.FILTER_SKIP;
        }
    },
    false
);
var txtNode     = null;

while (txtNode  = txtWalker.nextNode () ) {
    var oldTxt  = txtNode.nodeValue;

    for (var J  = 0;  J < numTerms;  J++) {
        oldTxt  = oldTxt.replace (replaceArry[J][0], replaceArry[J][1]);
    }
    txtNode.nodeValue = oldTxt;
}
})();

In practice it looks like this