Turning people into passive consumers of unthought thoughts

Interesting contrast to the church itself, which has the capacity of turning people into passive consumers of thoughts that have been painstakingly processed for centuries.

I’m using Busuu, originally Spanish but hq in London. They have implemented some AI stuff recently though. :/

Arte is great if you speak French or German. A lot of European countries have similar things. BBC iPlayer with a VPN is also amazing.

The melody isn’t catchy and the instrumentation is generic. The vocals are worst part

Welcome to folk music dude. Some of us like it.

If you want an overly produced pop track with 15 vocals stacked on top of each other in perfect harmony you’re not gonna get it released two days after the song was written.

Yeah, I was initially going to object that his best work was surely 44 years ago with Nebraska, but then I realized it’s only 31 years since Ghost of Tom Joad and it’s a crazy good album. But that was 1995.

Personally I’m a huge fan of his latest albums as well, but each to their own.

Past his prime is doesn’t really say much in the case of Springsteen, his new albums are still great and his concerts are incredible. But I appreciate that you’re attributing his prime to the period around the Ghost of Tom Joad, which is one of his most underrated albums for sure.

Of things I dislike, people accusing real artists doing real art of being similar to the AI slop generated by stealing their work certainly makes the list.

State of the internet. Ugh. Well, happy to hear it’s not being abandoned. :)

I also really love https://quokk.au/. It’s slightly more quokka than anarchy themed, but I find the two to make an appealing duo. Seems like a friendly place as well.

Happy to have you here of course, but I hope midwest.social is doing alright! I like that crowd.

For sci-fi purposes of human settlement I think size and speed are probably more important. For human settlement purposes the planet needs to be dense enough that we don’t drift away and that we can reasonably create a society on its surface, while light enough that we don’t get crushed. We evolved for gravity on earth, and so did all the crops and whatever we’d like to bring with us. So size/gravity close to earth is good.

And then speed relates to distance from the nearest star, as the article touches upon. Move faster and it gets warmer as the planet is spinning close to the star, move slower and orbit is further away and too cold. So if the planet is earth-like and the star has similar qualities to our sun, we’d also need it to move at a similar speed.

If we had the technology to settle in this place we would probably also have the technology to engineer a decent atmosphere.

That said, it’s all fiction anyway. I’m pretty sure we’re permanently stuck on the piece of rock that we’re currently busy making unlivable.

That’s the network effect though, no fun being alone in a social network.

Mastodon in particular has this problem, as it is built so much around emphasizing genuine human interactions and being a true social network, rather than just a social media broadcasting information. If your network is not there you have little reason to be there either.

Commercial social media increasingly replace connections with engagement, which makes it easier for them to attract new users who don’t have their friends and family there. TikTok has taken it to the extreme it seems, judging by my very outside understanding.

What makes me hopeful is that it is to a large degree a problem of first movers, and Mastodon did manage to get past the initial hurdle of just being a tiny group of FOSS freaks. The first million users are the hardest million when fighting network effects, and the Fediverse has made it that far.

And piefed is fine?

If so that’s really good news, a lot of people around here seem to interpret “Lemmy is too complicated” as meaning "anything decentralized and not big tech is just too difficult’. I suspect the reality of the matter is that Lemmy is just not extremely user friendly.

I think newcomers won’t post unless there’s sign of life, and there won’t be signs of life unless newcomers post.

Maybe a weekly thread posting boring stats or something could be a nice way to indicate it’s not a dead community?

Edit: Or what sunshine said, I’m not familiar but that sounds like a problem.

I mean, the stationing of US soldiers in NATO bases in Europe is pretty much an echange program, hopefully some of them learned something from it. I for sure think there are more reasonable people in the US military than in the government. But that’s a terrifyingly low bar.

Yeah, but they have the state apparatus by the balls, so that’s legal. Hitler also came to power legally.

The legal/illegal distinction is a shit normative indicator in the best of times, and a terribly dangerous one in the worst.

This is plain wrong. Nazi germany was super legalistic. It’s all about having awful people in power making awful laws. A good Nazi in Hitler’s Reich would be very rule abiding.

I guess it’s not supposed to be an actual comparison to the third reich and more a commentary on the failure of America, but it’s worth taking the lesson from history that whether something is legal or not is meaningless under authoritarianism.

Edit: also it’s an interesting exercise to place stuff like slavery, Latin American coups, CIA drug experiments, rocket scientist Nazi import, and the native american genocide on this axis of denialism.

Face scanning rather than tanning I assume.

I’ve seen the phrase around, I always assumed it was just short for “video log on youtube” or something. I’m too naive for this world.

Mojeek is the only usable engine I know of that’s European and truly independent at the moment. But the results are not nearly as good as in Qwant.

SearXNG also runs on Google and Bing in the backend, and I can never seem to find an instance that works reliably.

I think the Qwant/Ecosia index focuses primarily on the French (and German?) speaking web to begin with, but I’m hopefull it will get good in all languages eventually.

For sure.

It really sucks having to admit that the French were right all along, though.