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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • It’s not copium, it’s just an acknowledgment that I, and presumably many others, don’t care or need to care if it’s popular- it is already useful to me as is. In the same way, I’ve never given much of a shit about “the year of Linux on the desktop”; Linux has been useful to me as a daily driver for the past 28-ish years and neither my enjoyment of it nor its utility to me were in any way hampered by its failure to achieve supremacy of numbers.

    It’s fine to use something other than the most popular service.

    Now, if you think the purpose of federated social media is solely to supplant the corporate, centralized platforms, then I understand, but disagree with, your position.


  • Revv@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlIs Lemmy actually growing?
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    11 days ago

    I think the premise is flawed. Most of us have been brought up in a world that preaches “if you’re not growing, you’re dying.” That mindset is harmful in a whole host of ways. I have no idea if lemmy is growing or not, but it’s quite possible, perhaps even preferable, for a service/site/mom-and-pop shop to be sustainable without unending growth.



  • I try to avoid Amazon for my personal shopping, but I’ve bought literally hundreds of renewed/refurbished laptops and Chromebooks on Amazon for work. I have not had a single DOA or switcheroo in over 200 laptops from different sellers except one that has a broken screen, which was ready to return. You are very likely not throwing your money away by buying via Amazon, though that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the best place to buy.



  • Same here. Fuck the naysayers who say cold turkey or nothing. Do what works for you.

    For OP: One caveat to the vape plan is you’ll likely need to get a vape that’s refillable so you can customize the nicotine level. Juul/vuse/disposables typically only come in one, or at best, 2 nicotine levels, which prevents effective tapering.

    Also, don’t fall into the trap of vaping places you wouldn’t have smoked (e.g. in your house/car). That can increase your nicotine dependency.

    Good luck!








  • It’s no fun though. I had an old tracker that the clutch cable broke on. It was my only vehicle and it took a couple weeks for the replacement to come in. Switching between gears was okay once I got the hang of matching RPM. Starting, however, required me to turn the engine off at every stop, putting it in first, then letting the starter pull the car along a few feet until the engine was turning fast enough to run. It was a miracle I didn’t burn the starter up. Thank god I lived in a pretty rural area and only had a few stops between home and work.

    Overall, I’d rate driving manual without a clutch 1/10.


  • I have no doubt that China can and does buy data from data brokers. I think it’s unlikely, however that any of the major players are going to be willing to sell all their data on anyone- being able to target ads to individuals is their entire value proposition after all. On top of that, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have fallen pretty heavily out of favor with folks in their teens/early 20s (i.e. the demographic most ripe to be sources of bad OPSEC).

    But even assuming that an adversary could buy all the data they could possibly want, doing so could tip off anyone who cared to be watching about the sorts of data they’re interested in. This is generally not something you want as it can reveal your own strategic concerns/intentions.

    Having your own app that can collect whatever you want, where you can promote whatever information/view that you want is a pretty big advantage over buying data.

    If the argument is about privacy, I think banning tik tok is complete bullshit. If it’s about limiting intelligence gathering and influence campaigns, I think it makes more sense.


  • Yes and no. Without endorsing them, the arguments for banning Tik Tok are subtler than Chinese = security risk. The fears, however reasonable you may find them, are largely that it presents a danger of foreign information gathering of detailed behavioral/location/interest/social network information on a huge swath of the U.S. population which can be used either for intelligence purposes or targeted influence/psyops campaigns within the U.S. When you look at the history of how even relatively benign data from sources not controlled by foreign adversaries has been used for intelligence gathering, e.g. Strava runs disclosing the locations of classified military installations, these fears make a certain amount of sense.

    Temu, et al., on the other hand are shopping apps that don’t really lend themselves to influence campaigns in the same way (though, if they are sucking up data like all the other apps, I wouldn’t be surprised if folks in the U.S. security apparatus are concerned about those as well.

    Ultimately, I think the argument fails because it assumes an obligation for Congress to solve every tangentially related ill all at once where no such obligation exists.


  • For a company, it’s essential to be able to monitor/review employee communications for legal/compliance reasons. That said, while you should assume that any communication made with your official email/slack/teams/whatever can be seen by the company if it needs to be (e.g. somebody sues for something, even something potentially unrelated to you, that creates a need to search for relevant records), it’s unlikely that Slack is actively reporting your conversations to your boss.

    As others have said, if you don’t want your company to see something you’re saying, don’t say it at work or on their platforms. In the U.S. at least, you have no expectation of privacy at work. If you’re worried about something you’ve already said, you might just be screwed. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯