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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 29th, 2025

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  • I mean, I’m not saying that all humans are completely self-interested. I think volunteering in your local community is often a great way to meet some excellent people. And local volunteering contains a lot of the feedback loops that will encourage normal, well adjusted people to participate - you are becoming part of a real social group, a group of friends, who are doing something positive that they can see the results of in their own lives.

    And I think the pioneers in early free software had a lot of these same things going for them - they were part of a small, dedicated community, leaving their mark on the world.

    But a lot of foss software has been written by people either in non-profits, or in for-profit organizations who finagled their way into getting paid for the work. Eg, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Docker were / are mostly written and maintained by people who are being paid for their work.

    I think Red Hat probably shows the best way forward. Write the software as opensource, then sell hosting and support as a service.

    And as part of the software they provide, they should also provide an ootb way to ask people for money. Essentially, you could have a fediverse instance that has moderation and (likely at least in the beginning) content creation/aggregation/curation as part of the service. The selling point being that the feed and comments are of so much higher quality that it is worth it to chip in $1/month or whatever to participate.


  • Hot take: all this drama exposes the real problem with the utopian anarchist/communist/socialist philosophies of many Lemmy users - the philosophies assume that, unshackled from the oppression of a ruling class and the need to work for sustenance, people will naturally come together to work for the good of humanity. But outside the human instinct to help people we know in real life directly, the desire to be pro-social falls off rapidly as the necessary tasks increase in abstraction. People need some other form of motivation beyond altruism.

    In a market economy, that motivation is profit.

    It the fediverse, the motivation is getting to be the king of your own little castle where you can push your personal political philosophy on the world. Well-adjusted, happy, reasonable people don’t spend thousands of hours writing code for obscure social media sites in their free time. Those people go snowboarding. Or they hang out with their friends. Or they volunteer at a food bank. Or they raise a family, or start their own business, or hit the gym and fuck a bunch of hot people. Developing software is almost universally an exercise in frustration - broken dependencies, undocumented side effects, protecting against cybersecurity threats, unreproducible bugs, angry and ungrateful users, passive-aggressive stack overflow comments, etc. Only the truly unhinged would do such work for free - like if you desperately need a platform to shout that Mao did nothing wrong.

    The real solution isn’t to build an anarchist utopian social media site. It is to stop expecting people to do work for free. If you want reasonable people to develop a good social media site, you need to pay them. If you want mods who moderate to foster positive, helpful discussions instead of for the sake of their own egos, you need to pay them. They could be snowboarding instead! Snowboarding is so much more fun than deleting bot accounts and getting death threats from racist incels.



  • blarghly@lemmy.worldtoFuck Cars@lemmy.worldCrazy how...
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    5 days ago

    using every trick in their book to circumvent regulations and to continue building

    when the US was building highways through black communities

    The US building highways through black communities is a big part of why we have committees that can hold up rail development. And do you really want a government that uses “every trick in the book” to build railroads? No! You want a government that follows its own rules both in letter and in spirit, and one that reigns in the excesses of the market economy when necessary, and one that simply writes better laws.




  • A good doctor takes your existing lab results as data to use to generate a hypothesis about your condition in order to think of other tests to run or other things to try or other specialists to refer you to. Again, the appropriate response to “your lab results look normal” is “I don’t fucking care, I still feel like shit, do your damn job - no wonder everyone is flocking to alternative medicine and chatgpt if you don’t understand that what I want is results, not a shrug.”

    Basically all healthcare systems function like this - most doctors, most of the time, are phoning it in. They have tons of other patients to see, and a tee time to get to, and the default assumption is that if the standard tests don’t bring anything up then the patient is fine, and the condition will resolve itself, or else the patient is simply a hypochondriac. The way you get them to take you seriously is by being annoying as fuck and telling them to do their damn job, and often, doing their job for them by looking into things that could be causing your condition yourself. You could look into getting a healthcare advocate, someone who knows the system and can ask for the right things to get you to the person you need; or a concierge doctor, a doctor you pay directly to actually be a fucking doctor and either solve your problem or help you manage it. Or you could reach out in your social network to see if you have any connections in the medical field who could point you in the right direction for appropriate treatment or referrals.

    And I will note the distinct possibility that the doctors you are seeing and who are dismissing you might be right in their implicit assumption that you are simply a hypochondriac - in which case you still have a problem, and you need to see a mental health care professional.

    But when trying to figure out any health issue, it is categorically true that the more you investigate, the more possibilities you find, and the longer your list of things to try becomes. The struggle of someone actually working to solve their health problem is that they have too many things to do, too many disappointments to face, and an endless array of treatments and protocols they need to try to prioritize. If your complaint is that there is nothing to be done, then you aren’t actually trying, which is why no one wants to listen to your complaints.





  • I think that advocates are right in that, once the kinks are worked out, they will be far safer than human drivers.

    At the same time, I think the implications lead to a lot of dystopian implications for cities. Like, a properly tuned self driving car will never hit a pedestrian. So pedestrians in cities will learn they can safely step out into the street even in oncoming traffic. But this will cause the car to swerve and slam to a halt, which us a bad UX for the passenger. Enter: automatically reported jaywalking offenses powered by car cameras and facial recognition technology.


  • My take - based on everything you are saying in this thread, it sounds like you aren’t happy, but that you are balancing that unhappiness with potential unhappiness you are worried about facing if you were to try for another job.

    You talk about pay and creature comforts - but you seem to be avoiding talking about meaning. What is your purpose in life? Because if this job facilitates that purpose, then by all means, keep it. But if it undermines it, then you should ditch it.

    Like, imagine you are on your deathbed, and a young highschool boy comes to interview you about your life for a school project. He asks - what did you accomplish? What are you most proud of? What did you learn? What is a story you’d like to tell my class? What are your regrets? If you could do it all over again, what would you do differently?

    What do you want your answers to be?






  • Because I want to be. I have a few casual partners and am regularly looking for others - but I find that I typically put more into relationships than I get out of them.

    I think most people enter into relationships more out of a desire to remove uncertainty in their lives around having companionship (of whatever particular form they desire), and aren’t really being served by the relationship. But in life, uncertainty is the only constant, and we grow as people and can materially benefit by embracing it. So my take is that I will only enter into a relationship where I can reasonably expect that the relationship would serve me in achieving what I actually want in life, rather than simply being a crutch to avoid what I don’t want. And if I am lonely - then I am lonely. Loneliness is unpleasant. Good. One more unpleasant thing to work on acknowlaging and accepting to increase my inner tranquility.



  • Thanks!

    As for my partner’s appreciation - I pretty frequently seek out new partners, so I like to make a good first impression. So even if a current partner doesn’t mind, I want to be able to be ready to make that good first impression whenever the opportunity presents itself.

    And yeah, lol, I actually did a core + push up + OHP workout yesterday. Goal is press BW and dead 2x BW! Mirror check today showed some okay ab and oblique pop despite being more than 5lbs over my goal weight