There are a lot of subreddits which routinely award hundreds or thousands of upvotes for repetitive low value posts. … This is a cog in the well-tuned machine of new-accounts being created and matured to look ‘real’ for when they are later used for advertising / manipulation later down the line.

In the early months of a new account, it is easier to spot. Eg. If you see a post on a game subreddit with a title like “Exciting to try this game, any tips get started?”, you might click the profile and see that their entire history is a bunch of low-effort discussion starters. “Name a band from the 80s that everyone has forgotten”; “What’s the most misunderstood concept in maths?”; “What’s the most underrated (movie / band / drug / car / tourist attraction / whatever suits the topic of the subreddit)?”

A heap of threads like that, on a new account with a very generic name (adjective-noun-numbers is a common pattern); posting on a variety of subredits… is highly suspicious. But it gets harder to recognise as the account gets older and has a longer history - at which point it is ready to be sold / used for its next purpose.

A typical ActivityPub+Lemmy post.

I’m sure Microsoft would be supportive of that point of view. And with their wealth and lobbying power … … Lets not mention it again, and hope for the best.

Hey, no one is trying to stop you from doing that. I’m sure it is very convenient for you.

My point of view though is that automatically uploading my personal files to some corporation computer on the other side of the world should not be the default when I try to save something. Maybe sometimes I’ll want to use that feature, but there are a variety of reasons why I don’t want it most of the time. And I definitely don’t like having to jump through hoops just to avoid it.

To me it is weird that every day on lemmy I see new posts complaining about all tankies… but I never actually see any of the content they are complaining about. And outside of lemmy, I never see or hear the word ‘tankies’ used at all. I’ve asked a couple of people I know in real life if they ever seen discussions about it in their parts of the internet, and none of them people I’ve asked have ever heard the word before.

So… like I said, I find it weird. It’s like some kind of lemmy boogieman.

Forced accounts are evil - including Android. Here’s my Android story:

When I got my first Android phone, my intention was to not have an account - or at least have as much isolation between any account and my actual usage as possible. So I decline account creation when I first started using the phone, and told the phone to only store all contacts locally. That worked, and I was pretty happy with it. But later, I wanted to download a couple of basic apps from the app store - and that required an account. So I created a bogus account to download the apps. …

After creating the account to download stuff, I noticed that the contacts had automatically associated themselves with that new account had automatically uploaded all my contacts and personal info to google to sync with this account. This is precisely the thing I was trying to avoid in the first place. So, I immediately logged into that account via google’s website and told it to not store any contact info, and to delete all existing info. Which it did.

But then some time later… the account again decided to sync with my phone - this time to delete all the contacts from my phone (presumably because I’d deleted them from the online account). So although I’d gone to some deliberate lengths to tell my phone to only store data locally and to not upload it, what i ended up with was all personal data uploaded, and then purged from my phone. I had to try to restore my contacts from an ancient sim-card backup from my old phone.

Since then, I’ve decided that I will not use a google account for my phone for any reason, ever. I’ve use F-droid and the Aurora store instead. (But actually I very rarely use any apps anyway.)

Sure. I agree it won’t change unless citizens push for a change. But choosing to not participate is not pushing for a change. That’s just capitulation. Choosing to not vote is not a signal of protest. It’s a signal of someone who doesn’t care what the outcome is.

Voting is the first and most basic step in pushing for change. Doing more is good, but you definitely can’t skip that step.

Whenever I see this gif I think of this SSBM version.

Someone has been feeding you some weird bullshit about 15-minute cities. The concept of 15-minutes cities has nothing whatsoever to do with the things you wrote.

That has happened. But clearly that is not how chat-bots and image generating AI work. Even putting aside the style and peculiarities of the results, the AI programs are far too fast for that to be done by a person. Even if a person just read a message and then did a direct cut-and-paste from wikipedia, that would take far too long to be convincing as a chat-bot.

I’m sure you’ll be thinking about this conversation for longer than it took to make the original post.

Look, I don’t know exactly. I don’t think it’s an easy problem.

But I think the first stages would try to help the aliens understand how we communicate with each other. If people are waving their limbs around and breathing and poking at devices, and making all sorts of noises, it may be unclear which of those actions is meant to be communication. So the first thing is to have very clear correlations and patterns that are easy to recognise. Bring in the white-board to write words is a decent idea; but writing the word ‘human’ and then just standing there doing nothing with no follow-up is pretty much useless. There needs to be a couple of different words shown with very concrete context. ‘Human’ is not terrible, but it isn’t a great choice because you can’t really draw attention to what a human is when there is literally always a human there while you are trying to communicate. So it might be a decent word if the aliens already have the concept of words - but as a starting point… not really. Better to just say nouns for concrete things and point while doing it; with repetition and clear patterns. Writing just a list of counting numbers wouldn’t be a bad idea either. If you write all the numbers up to 100 or so I think there would be a clear pattern, so that at least the aliens would know that you are trying to communicate by writing stuff.

Regarding my criticism of the movie, it’s not so much that the whiteboard idea is bad, or that their attempts were bad; but rather that these are supposedly the attempts of experts - after other experts have tried and failed; and then the meetings with the project coordinators have weird discussions like “this method will take too long.” - as if they think you can somehow side-step the need to establish a common language. And the description of the plan from the scientist talk about teaching the different meanings of the word ‘you’, and some grammar rules - as if that’s somehow a core priority. I just think it’s a really shallow level of discussion. Their strategy is super basic (but not unreasonable), and the criticism of it from the other characters is somehow even more shallow. They were even questioning why the scientist wanted to bring in the whiteboard. Like, isn’t that extremely obviously? Do you really need to have a discussion about that? I really just felt like it was not a convincing set of smart people talking about the problem.

When I said anyone off the street could do a better job, I guess what I had it mind is that people would typically just point to things and say what they pointing to. They could bring in props and talk about the props; and perhaps try to give something to the aliens to interact with - if possible. Just basic ideas like that would be a decent start. I reckon that would be better than just holding up a whiteboard with a single word on it then just standing around. Like, how are the aliens meant to even know that it is a word at all - let alone what it might mean?

I stopped watching this movie after this scene (which is pretty close to the start). The way the scientists and world leaders were discussing how to communicate was just so absurdly shallow that I couldn’t take the movie seriously.

Like, I can easily suspend disbelieve to watch a movie about aliens doing all sorts of weird things that are inconsistent with basic physics; but it just really bugs me when a movie makes a point of bringing together the smartest and most capable people to solve some issue, and then utterly fails to show even a faint glimmer of that knowledge or intelligence in what they do. I reckon a random person picked up off the street would do a better job of first-contact with aliens compared to these clowns.

Perhaps you just have a different view on what is or is not an ad. For example when I see a link in the start menu for an app that I did not install, I consider that to be an ad. The most common time this happens is for Office. (Or Microsoft 365 or whatever it is called now.) Also, when I see a ‘suggestion’ to sign into a Microsoft account to use OneDrive - I consider that an ad. Microsoft aren’t telling me about OneDrive to improve my life. They are telling me to improve their profits. And when I type something in the start menu to launch an app, any result that comes up that is not something I put on my computer is an ad. It often will suggest particular websites for example.

These are the kinds of thing that we’re talking about. I’m sure if you’re using Windows on a home computer you will have seen these things. (I assume you’re talking about ads in Windows. It would be quite something else if you’d never seen any ad anywhere.)

Yeah, I’ve seen that a bunch of times. Some subredits seem to be a particularly popular places to karma-farm to make convincing sock-puppet accounts to sell. Often someone in the thread points out that it is a bot repost - but the fake post and fake comments are easier to engage with compared to the accusation that someone is a karma-farming bot.

(And of course, these bots-in-training will upvote each other’s comments and posts… so it always looks pretty popular.)

There’s a cool computer game that makes this point as part of the story line… I’d recommend it, but I can’t recommend it in this context without it being a spoiler!

Yeah. It makes no sense. A totally crazy mental block. Irrational and nonsensical. No sane person would ever write like that. No chance anyone would ever want to express themselves in that way unless that had some kind of twisted sinister motive. We shouldn’t allow that kind of thing here. We need to make sure everyone on lemmy knows that it is not what we want in this community. Lets keep this discussion going to make sure this wisdom is heard.

Oh my god! You’re right! I see now! Thanks for clarifying that. It was totally absurdly juvenile and silly of them to write like that. Should we really even tolerate that kind of behaviour here on lemmy? I didn’t understand how bad it was until you explained it to me - but I’m sure glad you did, because now it is so crystal clear that the way that they expressed themselves was ridiculous and possibly even harmful to the community.

You think it’s juvenile to self-censor? Have you never heard and adult use swear-adjacent words when talking? This happens for all sorts of reasons. If you think this is a childish thing to do, then I can only assume social norms are very different where you. I can’t think of any child I know ever self-censoring in this way. They’d either swear, or not swear. But I do know of adults who do it.

Obviously the semi-censored version isn’t the same - otherwise you wouldn’t be talking about it. And the author has told you that it was a stylistic choice to use that different version. That’s enough, isn’t it? And judging by the reactions here, apparently the semi-censored version is even more hard-hitting than the full word!

Swearing is used for emphasis and to invoke a reaction. The attention it has brought here seems to show that it has invoked a reaction and captured people’s attention. Maybe that drawing of attention means it was fit for purpose - or maybe not. In any case, it was the choice of the author to do it like that.