In the fediverse? Same as outside. It’s a solution looking for a problem. We generate our own content here, everyone is here because of the rest of the automated bots everywhere else. Look at lemmit online, it’s an instance dedicated to mirroring reddit subs for us here, but it’s a ghost town because we all pretty quickly realized it was boring interacting with bots.

A bot has to have a good purpose here. Like an auto archive bot so people click a better link, or bots like wikibot. I’m not saying AI is useless here, but I haven’t seen a good actual use case for it here yet

The meanest people I have ever known were church people. My dad left us when I was young, my mom was left a single parent. Seeking refuge in the church, we started attending regularly. In that time I felt things from others, ranging from genuine kindness all the way to pity. However, as things progressed and my mother became more involved with the church, the more people started to talk. From casual mentions, to annoyance that she would show up, to talking behind her back.

Was she super pleasant to be around? No, I think she can be awkward and has a hard time making friends - and those people picked up on that and ran with it. It wasn’t so long until she was excluded from certain events, that there were more “special” bible studies that she would her invite would be “forgotten”. She wanted so much to be included, but she didn’t fit their paradigm of… I don’t even know what.

Oh they preach of acceptance and forgiveness, of not judging, but they are some of the most hurtful people out there. I don’t know what I believe personally, but I’ll avoid going into a church for as long as I can.

Me? Yes, but I am an outlier, and it’s not because I’m doing “well”. It’s more because my parents were both horrible with money. 2 mortgages on the house, multiple car loans, mom was part of an MLM, and we were a family of 4 on a government worker’s salary. One of my dad’s complaints was that he couldn’t go out to eat once a week with coworkers because we couldn’t afford it. In addition they were horrible with credit and loans, took out as much as they could and then paid off things routinely late. I have no idea where they are now but last time I checked their credit score (for them, because they don’t know how), it was in the low 400s.

We grew up poor. Well, I hesitate to say poor because I know there are those who had it worse, and I do blame them for their choices for a good chunk of it too.

Americans have been so conditioned for the car, yet don’t realize that lacking transit is one of the largest drivers of wealth inequality.

Cities are expensive, so people move to the suburbs. Suburbs though being all single family we only built roads. Roads only have so much capacity, so traffic is terrible and there’s a limit for how large our cities can get before commutes are over an hour. Prices go up because the jobs are in the city and people have to figure out how long they can tolerate commuting.

Or, we built transit, which would create more housing further away from the city with fast connections into the city. Housing near the city is of course still worth more, but people can choose to live even farther away, so there are many less housing shortages.

Vs Portland/Vancouver WA, where Vancouver WA is a smallish town on the outskirts of Portland. They need to replace a highway bridge that’s already decaying. Portland is happy to pitch in more than their share to pay for it IF they can extend their light rail network across it to connect Vancouver to transit. Vancouver is screaming they don’t want it because homeless! Thugs! (Black people). Shooting themselves right in the foot. I’ve asked them how long it takes them to five in. “Well sometimes over an hour”. Morons.

Yes, we get that, but I think they mean that when incels call women “females” it’s cringe as hell, because we know it’s coming from a place where they don’t think of women in a healthy way, so this comes off as stooping to their level

I’ve definitely noticed an uptick in anger, but that’s happened every time Reddit has pushed users away - nice thing is that they mellow out pretty quickly here

Covid made it especially bad. Covid started five years ago. Started, like we first heard the term “Covid”

Holidays are a blur. I don’t remember individual years anymore, and every year I’m started at how quickly it became Christmas already.

Ffs we’re halfway through February already. I was just putting up the tree like 3 days ago.

This afternoon: Password has been set to “Password123”

Just you wait, gov is trying anything they can to change that

Whenever I see this “opinion” I think of how out of whack the person’s taste buds must be. Fizzy waters are great, they just don’t have sugar.

I agree. If the mod is the only one posting it likely means there are a lot of lurkers and no one else is posting. It doesn’t mean that we should fragment the community more, it means you should jump in and start posting yourself!

I was going to use that exact cheat! The other one I used was to explode cars if you even barely tapped one

Jon Stewart has actively said he would never want to do that - which makes him one of the best candidates.

Someone who doesn’t want it, who tries to refuse honestly. That’s who deserves power.

Understanding their workers and excels at the simple things.

I worked retail in college and most of the managers werE constantly having arguments about scheduling with their employees because most were in college and had odd schedules. My manager came in and first thing they did was sit down with each of us individually to come up with our availability. She then did something inconceivable to the other managers. She made a set schedule for the semester for all of us. The other managers said “they’re part time, that’s not what they do”. Immediately tension with scheduling was gone. We also didn’t have confusion with why I had to work Saturday but so and so didnt.

Throughout her time there she made other simple things like that easier. Want time off? Just first one to ask for it would get it off. Christmas and holidays? We are retail so it’s tough, but she made sure everyone got enough time for families.

Of course then everyone had no idea how she had the best performing department and why her worker happiness, retention, and sales were up. Gobsmacked. Almost like we were motivated to work harder because of the simple respect we received

Is it false? Even if it is dumb, here we are 15 years later talking about it. Still, after hours we’re still going back and forth about it.

I brought up a story about a red square, of which you are, 15 years later, still trying to convince someone that it’s not art. Something that is still being debated on 15 years later is pretty interesting, especially for it being just a red square. The more we talk about it, the more it legitimizes it.

Yet here we are talking about it.

This is a very nuanced question, because art isn’t always about skill.

I remember I was one of those guys who thought modern art was stupid. My family took me to MoMA and I remember I was looking at a painting of a red square. It was a large 2 foot by 2 foot red square. I remember saying “but anyone could do this” to my aunt. She replied:

But nobody else did.

Stopped in my tracks and it clicked. The fact that they had done it, and we were there talking about it and discussing it, that right there proved it was art.

So it’s not just quality. I’m sure AI could spot out 1000 red squares, and some would consider that low effort, but no one would ever discuss them.