It’s helping! I’m not someone that really does art so it’s been fun making silly stuff for myself. It’s nice change of pace getting to approach it without any expectations.

BlueSky’s block/mute lists are some the best new tools we have against bots and misinformation. Lemmy could implement those same tools if it becomes an issue. Currently, Lemmy uses the risk of defederation to hold server admins accountable for cracking down on bots and bad actors.

The music mixing capabilities are very solid if you’re looking to use your new laptop as a creative outlet. The default software is solid for journaling and writing as well. You can set up shortcuts to run some custom automations as well. Hope this helps!

2025 feels like the year of Linux to me; I’m glad to see more Linux and SteamOS support.

I don’t know if it’s winning force so much as it’s being spread by bots and bad actors, although the result is more or less the same. Flooding the zone with their rhetoric makes it look like it’s well supported, which in turns convinces some people that it might not be nonsense.

Of course! Most companies deserve to ghosted imo. It should not take weeks for them to assess if a candidate could be a good fit, and they should be prepared to discuss your starting salary then and there.

Many companies will not pay you what you’re worth initially and still won’t after you negotiate for more, as they don’t really fully commit themselves to a candidate until they’ve proved themselves a little over the first 90 days. If you’re blowing their expectations out of the water, you can usually negotiate for more after the 90 day starting period.

Really, anything other than FPTP is fine. RCV only has the same outcome as FPTP, where the least liked candidate can win, in ~10% of outcomes which is fairly uncommon. Really we should be okay with promoting most of the alternatives since they can be modified down the line as well. I personally promote Ranked Robin, STAR, and Score more but RCV is always worth supporting if it’s on your local ballot vs FPTP. Most people are more familiar and accepting of RCV if they have heard of some of these alternatives.

If we keep growing interest locally, people will become more familiar with the alternatives. The more cities and counties that use alternative voting systems, the easier it gets to pass these alternative systems statewide.

While many state lawmakers are determined to push back against alternative voting systems, there is always the possibility of flipping the rules back down the line, especially if more states in general flip blue, progressive, or independent.

I believe the job market dictates some of it. It depends a lot on your company’s structure here in the USA for if this is the standard or not as well. Plus different states have more protections for hired on workers which could further complicate how picky organizations get.

If it’s a mid to large size employer this becomes more common practice to do multiple interviews, I believe.

There could be time conflicts for organizing an interview, such as the need to hire someone during a busy season vs slow season, or when different key decision makers are out on PTO. The company could also be having a difficult time making a final choice between two or more candidates so they are trying to find anything to help weed some of them out. I think that last one is pretty pathetic though since it is wasting everyone’s time if can’t make that determination from the initial interview.

From my experience it’s usually because management doesn’t want to meet the applicants until person A, B, and C have all individually thought the candidate is worth the upper management team’s time.

Corporations don’t care unless they are regulated to care, but it’s also mixed with some corporations getting lots of flakes for the interviews. A hour wasted of upper management time spent studying up on someone that doesn’t show up for the interview could be a few hundred or a thousand dollars down the drain in “missed productivity”. Still, if they cared about the candidates they would do a team interview, and bring the executive team in right after if they thought the candidate was solid.

“That was the turning point. Since that day, I’ve lived a lie. The lie of living. My name too was a lie. My personal history, a lie. Nothing but lies. I was sick to death of a world that couldn’t be changed. But even in my lies, I refused to give up in despair. But now this incredible power… it’s mine… Well, then…”

I did. You’re taking an uncharitable reading of my comment. Nowhere in my comment did I assign blame. My comment is about the need to change the voting system, which enables more progressive and third party wins ultimately. I also included some pragmatism, as I’ve seen progressives in my state struggle to win. I did not say anything about any sort “progressives are too left for the country and party!!!” because that’s not a very nuanced take and doesn’t reflect reality.

That’s not something I would say or agree with. My statement is separate from that type of perspective and not what my comment was talking about.

Thank you for your reply! That makes sense that it would be more the wider Lemmy to look into it.

Thank you for clarifying this, I was not aware that the Fediverse put pressure on instances to moderate or risk defederation, but that does make sense.

My worry was long term risks for Federated spaces such as if bad actors climbed up to admin or moderator roles, which I have seen happen on Reddit even for big name subs. Although in those cases, it doesn’t guarantee that block/mute lists would be helpful. Your comment does give me hope though since even if one of the bigger instances was taken hold of by bad actors, it could be defederated by the rest and other new instances could take its place which are not operated by bad actors.

I agree that defederation is a powerful tool. I don’t think those outside of Lemmy know a lot about this yet as an added benefit of the Fediverse system. I had a difficult time articulating just how Lemmy and the Fediverse was a better long term system compared to Reddit since I really liked the block/mute list idea from BlurSky which was not on Lemmy. But your comment really puts it into perspective of how we can keep this space thriving.

You can adjust the filter or even disable it.

I’m not personally someone that knows what criteria their filter uses, but I do see what a difference it makes when I compare how my feed looks on BlueSky compared to when I used Twitter.

I believe accounts are flagged for spreading misinformation by users, those accounts then get reviewed. You can opt to show all accounts and content that post misinformation and can optionally choose to have the tag attached to their profile which indicates this profile is one flagged for spreading misinformation.

Personally, I think some states are close to center, some are further left and others are further right. Rather than splitting the party and the vote share, we can grassroots organize, get signatures for a ballot initiative, and change the voting system away from First Past the Post. Our voting system is what ultimately prevents viable alternative parties from appearing and is causing the “safe incumbent” neoliberals to win out over “risky” progressive picks since people only get one vote and they don’t want to have their least favorite candidate win over their favorite and their safe choice.

Organizing now matters a lot. If we change even a few more states away from First Past the Post voting, like we did with Alaska and Maine, then third parties will have much more stable ground to actually form and win elections on the state and federal level. I still think supporting incumbents in many cases make sense until we act to change the voting systems. Although rallying around potential candidates which are pushing for change can make a difference in some races.

We can try to change the voting system on the county level and city level if trying to get the state as a whole to change has not been working in your state.

I would say that Reddit’s problems are enhanced by complicit admins. I feel that Lemmy instances can get just as bad as any subreddit power tripping mods can be. The good news though is that users have much more power to start a fresh instance and get it popular as the main name of the instance before the @ can stay the same. This is a big deal compared to Reddit imo, as the ability to hold the name of the community gives a lot more leverage over legitimacy. Take r/manga for instance, I believe most of the mods over there are now inactive. Another head mod has not come in to fill the void, and the subreddit has not posted things like applications for new mods. The userbase feels stuck to that subreddit due to how impactful the name is in attracting users to the community. Sure can offshoot can slowly grow in popularity, but it may be missed by the people that stop their search after typing in ‘manga’ to the search bar.

TL;DR Lemmy has it’s issues, but it is much harder for any one instance’s mods to be overly harsh on their rules as the risk of users jumping to a new instance with the same name is relatively low.

I 100% was sold on the hype, but I think it’s still interesting having had my expectations tempered. I don’t think it could be argued they are original dire wolves. Maybe it could be argued they are a modern rendition of what those researchers believe a dire wolf would look like.

I think it could be argued to be its own unique species now, which could be named as a dire wolf for lack of a better name. Whether or not the changes they made have made them unable to breed with grey wolves is probably also an important question on what these animals are exactly.

The stated goal of the company seems to be to reintroduce similar extinct animals to the best of our ability and help introduce genetic changes to threatened species to better adapt to climate change.

I think the company calling the animal they made a dire wolf is mostly for marketing purposes at the end of the day though. Still really cool research! I hope they continue to get funding for this and other projects.

Thank you for you detailed response! I think something like Bazzite would be more up my alley based on what you said. Something that is hard to mess up is something I’d be more comfortable with for sure.

I appreciate your offer for troubleshooting help as well!

Is there an easy way to port all my stuff to Linux? I would not have made the switch in the past, but all the good will I attributed to Microsoft is pretty much gone. I’ve heard Mint is petty easy to hop onto?