• 3 Posts
  • 295 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 11th, 2023

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  • I would absolutely advise talking to a doctor about this. That very much sounds like an allergy, and although there are many meds that may help, none of us online can safely advise them for you, you really do need a prescriber with access to your medical records/bloodwork for that.

    As far as first steps go, regularly taking OTC allergy meds and developing a daily cleaning schedule + filters for the bedroom + keeping your dog off the bed at the very least, and ideally out of the bedroom entirely, will help. Also frequently bathing your dog can help keep the dander down.


  • Pretty much this. How many artists did you follow on, say, reddit? There were so few on there, and those that were there mainly linked to alternate social media and just used reddit to get engagement. Lemmy is probably the most approachable activitypub interface (we all remember trying to find the damn content on mastadon/bluesky…) and it’s just not big or established enough to be worth trusting. Hopefully that will start changing soon as more people hop over from the myriad other sites, we seem to be past the critical point for new users, but it just takes time.








  • I’m familiar with the specific attacks you mentioned

    (I made “false landings” up.)

    No, it’s not unique to the US. But we’re by far the most dependent on technology out of any country and knowing this we talk a big game and do nothing to back said game up. The frequency with which [any agency you care to name] fails information security audits is pretty much just one long interrupted string of failures, and having worked with many western non-US governmental groups, the difference in security culture is pretty shameful.


  • Yeah… this is an example of what I’m talking about. It’s the romanticized version of the wild west online right now, and whenever you talk about the need for increased security, you’re subjected to a propaganda lecture (edit for clarity:) lecture about propaganda and the political implications of fucking twitter or something. Everyone is so primed to respond along the party line to the idea of troll farms that the conversation about how they’re used outside of influencing our elections never even occurs to people. Most don’t even realize it’s an issue that could be discussed.

    So lets be clear here, while you’re absolutely correct about what you’re saying, that’s not related to what I was saying.

    The near constant spear phishing, network intrusion, ransomware, impersonation, false landings, etc. attacks that every government, medical, social and technical system in the country is being constantly subjected to is the issue I am qualified to speak about. It’s an area where the US isn’t even attempting to fight back, and as beautiful as headline-darling things like stuxnet were, the developers that worked on it haven’t figured out how to mitigate ex: the rampant identity theft throttling the country. My favorite new one has been the theft of identity and thence blackmail of recently paroled prisoners, since a bad actor can easily get them returned to prison by just, say, using their credit card at a walmart out-of-state, or applying for public benefits in a different city. This happens all the time and nobody, at all, is talking about it. It’s so common I was brought in to write a set of tools that auto-generate the letter informing out-of-state LEO agencies that the person was the victim of identity theft and should not be found in violation of their parole terms, since that was so common it was all their entire staff were spending their time doing.

    That’s just the one example that has occured to me, if you want more I can go on for very literal hours (just ask my students (who are no doubt quite stick of the topic…)). There’s no systems, or even the political or social will to investigate developing systems, that could even begin to address the most basic issues in this realm. That is the problem I was screaming helplessly into the void about.


  • We are pathetically behind in the cyber warfare sphere, though. Like at this point it’s embarrassing, we don’t even have the semblance of security education or standards for digital hardening. it’s just fucking awful, and we are being obliterated by chinese/russian/anyone else troll farms and hackers because of it. massive data breaches are a weekly occurrence.

    Its just… we’ve got the NSA, sure, and they are good at what they do. But what they do is not what we need. Right now, you can scatter some USB drives outside any gvmt office here and some poor dumb HR rep or whatever will invariably plug it in to their work desktop, and they’ll totally fail to understand why it was bad for them to do that.


  • If you’ll allow an interpetation of their comment

    How dare you offer a counter interpretation to my interpretation you terrible person (I wish I didn’t need to include this but /s, you are not a terrible person)

    Taken on it’s own that’s a fair and totally valid criticism, I think the pushback is just due to conflating the two experiences as equally out of touch. Anyone who is 59 and has had a steady white collar career is going to lack first-hand experience with the current minimum wage work life, but Harris is a great deal more likely to be able to at least accurately conceptualize and empathize with what it’s like vs. someone who’s never worked a day in their life and was given $419 million dollars by their father.

    Conflating the two as the same is the issue, not casting skepticism on the impact of Harris’ teen summer job on her understanding of the challenges facing modern American families, and that’s the reason they’re being downvoted (imo).


  • If I had to guess, it’s both because their comment can be read as them asserting that someone who worked at McDonald’s… doesn’t know what working at McDonald’s is like, and because they’re asserting that the there’s no realistic difference in life experience between the white male child of a corrupt multigagillionaire and the black-indian female child of a research oncologist and an economics professor.

    Were either of them poor growing up? No. Are there many steps between “poor” and “having a gold toilet” that a person can be at? Oh you betcha, and suggesting there isn’t is either myopic or intentionally deceptive.




  • Why not just block me, then? You’re the one telling other people to “Don’t bother. Trust me.” when I comment on totally unrelated to you posts, and then threatening me when I call you out for your behavior.
    That’s not just not okay, dude.

    That’s literal harassment.

    From the lemmy.world TOS:

    Before using the website, remember you will be interacting with actual, real people and communities. Lemmy.World is not a place for you to attack other people or groups of people. Just because you disagree with someone doesn’t give you the right to harass them. Discuss ideas and be critical of principles. Show the respect you desire to receive.

    For my part in this, I’m sorry? I don’t entirely know what for, but evidently you’re hurting, and that really was never my intent.


  • See, this is what I’m talking about. You’re not an authority on the topic at hand, you’re an authority figure within this community. Why are you pivoting to passive-aggressively talking past the actual person? That’s just mean, and petty, and you’re better than this, man. You clearly understand what I was saying, so how does doing this further the conversation? Why are you intentionally misrepresenting what I was saying to you?

    Is it really that hard to acknowledge even polite criticism?



  • (Deflecting uncomfortable truths with a .gif is both disappointingly insulting and pretty transparent. I haven’t done anything that warrants that kind of rudeness, you know that.)

    You can’t invalidate what I’m saying with that, and you probably shouldn’t ignore the many threads dedicated to just how poorly you treat the users in the communities you moderate. Some of them are legit assholes who I will happily watch get beaten with your Metaphorical Steel Chair, but so many of them aren’t, and I think it’s too easy for you to dismiss the commenters who have been hurt by a misunderstanding or rose to defend themselves when a topic was unreasonably escalated as all being those legit assholes, when most of them aren’t. I’m not (I like to think, at least), but I just didn’t want the kind of help you were offering.

    I moderate several things that are orders of magnitude larger and some of them so much shittier tbh, fuck I hate linux devs sometimes than lemmy.world, so believe me I understand exactly how awful this job can be. Being subjected to only vitriol from nazis objecting to your “totally unreasonable” ban while any positive actions you take are entirely constrained to invisible behind the scenes actions is awful. But when every meta thread about the site is has people saying “hey, can the admins please talk to this moderator?” it’s a sign that you should ask someone you trust to give you a real answer and see if those people are just assholes, or if maybe you need to reflect on how your behavior is being interpreted by an outside observer.

    Edit: (Yo guys don’t downvote them, they were just trying to help. Being kind of a jerk about it, but it doesn’t help anything to downvote people for sincere if misguided attempts at kindness)


  • Assuming they go through with it, it’s is a pretty clear message that diplomatic attempts are at an end. These roads haven’t been used in years because of how insane the north koreans are, but removing them only impacts civilian transit - militaries, even hilariously inept ones like the DPRK, have the ability to lay transit paths in minutes (or may not even need them, military vehicles being known for their offroad capability). And that’s not even including the famed ‘invasion tunnels’, or that a ground assault isn’t needed when 20% of your population is within the effective range of thousands (yes, thousands) of already emplaced artillery pieces.