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Boozilla

@Boozilla@lemmy.world

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Lemmy is a failed Reddit alternative

I first joined Lemmy back during the big Reddit exodus of last year. I like many others wanted an alternative to Reddit, and I thought that this might’ve been the one. I made two accounts, one on lemmy.world and another on sh.itjust.works, in the June of last year that I used on and off for about 4 months....

Boozilla,
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Lemmy is missing:

  • Bots
  • Karma farmers
  • Ads
  • Insane mods
  • Fucking Spez

You know you’re right, we’re nothing like reddit!!

Boozilla,
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Niche <> bad.

Boozilla,
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Good advice already replied. Definitely have a business-only phone and a personal-only phone. I’d consider two different phone OS’s if you can. Keep crossover data as minimal as possible.

Would love to read a follow-up post from you 6-12 months down the line. Best of luck. It’s absurd how difficult this is in 2024.

Boozilla,
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I don’t have kids, and I haven’t gone to school in…checks calendar…a very long time. WTF do some parents drive kids to school when there are school busses? What am I out of the loop on? We either walked or took the bus when I was a kid. Don’t the parents have shit to do?

Boozilla,
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Thanks for the explanation. I should have known it’s the usual lack of proper infrastructure.

Boozilla,
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Took me a while. If you need a hint…think subject of a sentence, not object.

Boozilla,
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With MS you never know. They are pretty arrogant and aggressive about assuming you want things running in the background. Something you can try: Install ShutUp10 and look for things like Office Telemetry being turned on. You can switch these things off (permanently or temporarily, your choice) and see if that stops the traffic.

www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

(There are other ways to do the same thing but I’ve been using ShutUp10 for years and love it)

Boozilla,
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Glad you found it useful! Love your username.

Boozilla,
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I’m pretty aggressive about switching things off, too. I will never use OneDrive, for example.

Boozilla,
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Yes. If it was an opt-in feature and we knew beyond all doubt that it was stored locally-only, and for the user only, it could be a useful feature for some folks. Unfortunately, Microsoft has a long history of doing stupid and/or evil shit ‘for’ the user, with the attitude of ‘Clippy knows best’.

Boozilla,
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I know a lot of indy game developers do their thing hoping to get rich from it. And there’s nothing wrong with that. And they don’t all do that. Some people just really love coding and creating, and just want to make a cool game. Nothing wrong with that, either.

But for once, I’d love to see some brilliant founder create a game studio that has some kind of poison pill clause that prevents it from ever going public or it’s IP ever being purchased by a large mega-corp. And in my wettest of wet dreams, that idea becomes a meme.

Something tells me that here in the United States of Greed, such a thing is ‘un-possible’, legally speaking. Our whole corrupt system is set up to make half a dozen business bros get wealthier. They won’t tolerate anything that jams a wrench into that machinery.

Boozilla,
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That’s true. I would like to hear about them…

Boozilla,
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TIL Valve has a poison pill clause. Cool.

Boozilla,
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I had heard of this, and I appreciate the link to the paper. It’s one reason I used the term. My understanding of it is that these seldom actually work in practice. It did not help Twitter, for example. I appreciate the counter-argument. I definitely want this to be a thing.

Boozilla,
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Yeah, I love Gabe, and I love Steam. Even if it was created because he dropped that installation disk on the floor.

My dream is that the poison pill thing becomes very effective and very common, and I think some folks kind of missed the nuances. Which is fine, that’s why we have a forum to hash this stuff out.

Boozilla,
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Glad you brought up worker cooperatives. I have watched a few Richard Wolff videos and they sound awesome to me.

There’s also this guy, who looks legit on paper, but I can’t figure out if he really is legit or not. I hope he is…

cbsnews.com/…/employee-ownership-life-changing-fo…

Boozilla,
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I’m driven by convenience, FOMO, and peer pressure, so go ahead and destroy my privacy and security, Google!

Snark aside, it seems like a really neat useful little idea that will 100% be used for some creepy corporate shit.

Boozilla,
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It is clunky and I am also old, slow, and uncoordinated. I did manage to finish it, and I ended up liking it overall. I didn’t care for the Batmobile stuff, and I was never good at it. But once I got “good enough” at the Batmobile sections and could solve the puzzles, etc, I have to admit I found it satisfying in the same way you feel after getting your taxes or colonoscopy over with.

If you decide to walk away from it, you aren’t missing anything super fantastic. I love the series, but there’s no requirement to complete all of the games. Life is short, there are lots of other things to do. No need to beat your head against the wall on it.

You might like the Spider-Man games better. The combo moves, power ups, suit choices, etc, are more customizable there and I think it ‘flows’ better. Zipping around a realistic map of NYC is really damned cool, too. (Though I did find myself missing the moody atmosphere and je ne sais quoi of Gotham and Bats). There is are the occasional nasty / annoying boss fights in Spider-Man (one of them early on) but once you face roll past them, the rest of the game is hella fun.

Boozilla,
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Never underestimate how far they will go to track your movements, habits, etc. It’s not even about “the gubment spyin’ on me”. It’s about how valuable that data is to corporate assholes who like to target you with customized advertising, and resell your data, etc. (And yes, as a side-effect, the police can also sometimes take advantage of this ubiquitous data capture).

We live in a time when even our stupid cars spy on us:

www.nytimes.com/…/car-gm-insurance-spying.html

It’s why they push the internet of shit so hard. Nobody needs a “smart fridge” but by god, they really want us all to have one.

Boozilla,
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Great use for an old phone! I have some lying around. This is one of those forehead-slapping moments for me.

As the Internet Gets Scarier, More Parents Keep Their Kids’ Photos Offline (getpocket.com)

Here's a non-paywalled link to an article published in the Washington Post a few days ago. It's great to see this kind of thing getting some mainstream attention. Young children have not made an informed decision about whether they want their photos posted online.

Boozilla,
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I really hope it becomes the new normal to stop posting everything about ourselves non-anonymously online in general. But especially photos and information about kids. I am hopeful that in the near future, we’ll all look back and say “What the fuck were we thinking? We all looked like narcissists exploiting our kids for likes!”

Boozilla,
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Stuff people do online is potentially public forever. WCGW?

Boozilla,
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Pitcher’s mounds. When you watch a baseball game on TV, they often super-impose an ad on the damned dirt. Also graphics at the bottom of the screen will often have an ad box.

Every available inch of visible space must be covered in an ad. It makes me resent those brands.

In particular, I stew over insurance companies spending millions on celebrities in commercials and prime time slots. That’s money that could have gone to pay claims that were denied, or lowered their ridiculous premiums.

And I’ll never understand people who purchase expensive t-shirts or caps with some corporate brand’s logo splashed across it. They are paying more to be a human billboard. Are we supposed to be impressed with their taste in something millions of others have bought?

Tools for collecting traffic data on my street?

I’m working with my neighbors to petition the city to add traffic calming measures (e.g. speed bumps, one way roads) to my street. I’m also hoping to turn it into a bit of a research project. Does anyone know of any tools to monitor or even automate data collection of the speeds of cars, number of cars going by, how many...

Boozilla,
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Would a trail cam work? Also, some localities will do a study for you if you can convince them it’s necessary. I emailed my county once about a dangerous intersection near an elementary school, and they performed a study a few weeks later. They put those air hoses across the road. Try to frame it as a safety hazard when you talk to them.

Boozilla,
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Tailgating comes to mind. It’s not that different than pointing a gun at someone, and people do it constantly.

Boozilla,
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Evil genius marketing, working as it always does. The kids don’t know any better, so they are being exploited and conditioned to think the horrible new normal is just the way things have to be. And most parents are too tired and busy to find better alternatives.

Boozilla,
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I keep hoping–perhaps naively so–for a major backlash against this. Sometimes consumers have power, and sometimes they don’t. But maybe we’ll all get fed up with this bullshit and start just dropping any and all unnecessary subscriptions from our lives. The big problem is when a brand becomes synonymous with a product (like fucking Adobe and ProTools, for two examples).

Boozilla,
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I honestly don’t care if they do or don’t add this stuff, but please make it skippable. The last thing I want is some boring corporate-approved formulaic bland sex scene that I have to suffer through in the middle of an interactive game. At least movies and shows let me 30-second skip past that stuff. All of them are exactly the same sequence. It’s tedious.

As for flirtation being more important to in-game social interactions and dialog trees that could be fun. It could also set young people up for trouble. They’d be practicing the “wrong habits” that will get charges filed against them IRL.

The reason game designers are afraid of sex is because most of Western society is. Can games help turn that around? I don’t know, but probably not. The USA is super puritanical about all things sex (but blood, gore, and violence are generally OK).

Boozilla,
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Thanks for the warning. I haven’t played it yet, and it’s on my list.

Boozilla,
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Thanks again. One of my friends keeps encouraging me to play it.

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