The Matrix really made me understand where Descartes was coming from. When we say something is “real” it’s always subjective and cannot be objective. That’s an incredibly difficult concept for most humans to truly grasp.

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I’m always using the word “infer” when I obviously mean “imply.”

I know you’re joking, but it made me think.

On platforms like Twitter I never felt seen. I felt like I was talking to myself for the 30 seconds I actually engaged with it (I never could stand the format or the interface really).

On Lemmy I do feel seen, because it’s so much smaller. I know people read what I write and I get way more feedback here than I’ve ever gotten since (maybe) 2010-era Reddit.

But important? Anyone who can use the Internet to make themselves feel important must have been a sociopath to begin with because as near as I can tell the Internet is a misery machine designed to make you feel like a dumbshit.

Come to think of it, that’s probably why I hate the entire concept of “influencers” and the human toilets who call themselves that.

And yet not a single word in that entire article about bots being used to post on Internet forums to engineer public opinion, which is certainly what came to my mind when I read the headline.

The closest it comes is the section where it admits that because they’re all spoofing known Big Tech scrapers, they can’t actually say how much of any particular activity is actually going on beyond some broad generalizations.

I can confirm though - my web server was positively getting hammered until I locked it down with fail2ban.

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It was different, there was more of what at least looked like cause->effect. People were irrational, but not directly belligerent about their irrationality. Round table talk formats didn’t seem so useless, there being people who were more learned than you giving useful explanations about what was happening in the world (that made sense). Watching them now seems like the blind leading the blind. The world was more coherent and the incoherent parts of it seemed largely marginalized and sidelined. This marginalization seemed fairly permanent, like you could count on society making progress in science and technology without regard to your stupid uncle’s sexist bullshit or your crazy aunt’s vitamin therapy and aversion to aluminum cookware. Now all of them are wrapped up in one Super Saiyan called “Secretary of Health and Human Services.”

TIL you can grow radishes in pulled pork

taps_head.jpg can’t scan my camera roll if I don’t have one.

They were called broadcasts back then.

They still are. I get 50 channels OTA and I have a DVR to record them if I need to. I stream nothing but my own media off Plex. All this costs me $0/mo.

The character is real but sadly, the poster is not.

This is their wet dream, but I’ll never participate.

Edit: I don’t participate now. I pay for no subscriptions, no streaming services, and I use no cloud services. Oh, and I’m now completely Microsoft-free since October last year.

Which won’t matter at all once they start losing market share to Microsoft’s stupid decisions. The world will not sit on its thumbs because of Fortnight players. And good riddance in any case.

I came here looking for this answer. I’m actually replaying it right now on my Steam Deck via Cemu and having a ton of fun. It was also my first Zelda game and I had zero expectations. It just blew me away and it still does all these years later.

Technically correct.

This is a cute exercise in lateral thinking and all but will past me know that it is future me talking? Won’t matter what the fuck I say otherwise, the little shit won’t be listening to any authority figures.

Windows? Facebook?

lol

Well I’m not going to call 1024, people might think I’m some kind of nut who thinks the market is algorithmically controlled.

I’m calling it now: up 1,000 on Monday.

I’ve never once posted on the Internet using a real name. I’ve never been a member of any social anything other than Reddit and Lemmy. I only even found Reddit because an IRC link aggregator I used to browse for news/memes went tits up.