One foot planted in “Yeehaw!” the other in “yuppie”.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Even on Windows, Proton drive is hot garbage. It never syncs my files correctly. Has a tendency to leave half encrypted uploads just lying around. Eating up desk space.

    Don’t even get me started on how long it takes to upload anything. Got a 1 GB file? Good luck!

    And that’s before getting into the fact that it’s proton’s third product. It was announced in 2019. 5 years and they still don’t have proton drive as a working product.

    Another gripe I have is that the Linux VPN client still doesn’t support wireguard. Sure, you can download wireguard configuration files. And they work just fine. But changing servers is a pain in the ass because of it.

    It’s made me seriously consider dropping my visionary plan and moving to a more competent provider.

    That being said, proton mail has been fantastic. And I have a ton of domains on it. So it would be a pain to move. I guess I’m just in a stalemate.


  • Oh yes, totally understood. I’ve seen families destroyed from sports gambling and other, less boisterous forms of it.

    If I like anything, it’s scratchers and it’s because they’re soooooo satisfying to “play”. But it’s only something I indulge in occasionally.

    Anyways, I tried to get into MMO’s back in the early days with all my friends. I tired of it fairly quickly. I guess the novelty seeking part of my brain overwhelmingly rejects typical “gambling” mechanics. Loot boxes don’t do anything for me and never have.

    More recently I’ve grown completely frustrated with franchises like Forza Horizon and their little slot machine / skinner box mechanic. I love racing games, but it made me stop playing.

    I can be addicted to things, but it just isn’t gambling for me somehow.

    I do resent MMO’s for destroying so many of my friend’s lives though. Weird to lose people to that ecosystem, it’s the video game equivalent to losing someone to an MLM.

    Also fuuuuuck, MLMs, almost did the “vector marketing” (cutco cutlery) and “rainbow vacuum” thing - the only thing that saved me was that Youtube had existed for like 5 years by then and there was enough people out there with their stories.












  • Lived there for 7 years - I think I got it.

    Step one, do not be in downtown, inner SE, inner NE, Gateway, or anywhere near a Max line or bus station after dark. Step two, carry mace and a stun gun. Step three, leave Portland for good and only return if I must << We are here.

    We got a lot of hate from certain left leaning folks in Portland for leaving “because of the homeless”. It’s like, "No, dude, I’m leaving because my wife was assaulted by homeless no less than 3 times (twice physically, once was almost a rape), and that’s even when she was “safely on TriMet. You can ‘but not ALL homeless’ all you want. My wife is traumatized and we want nothing to do with this shithole of a city”.

    Yeah, after the 3rd one we left, and we can say with certainty that we’ll never ever come back to live in PDX.




  • I’m of the opinion that bots are okay if:

    1. They provide value to the community - A news-bot seems to be well received at tucson.social and it helps people get all their Tucson updates in one place without having to share it themselves.

    2. They assist with moderation. Auto responding to new posts that reminds thread participants of the rules could be one use-case.

    3. They enhance the dialogue of the thread or provide useful and important corrections. Perhaps there’s a bot that looks up species names and provides useful links in a reply of a zoological based post? I say that’s great and what we want!

    As for ChatGPT bots:

    1. All bots must disclose they are a bot.
    2. All bots must not fake engagement. As in, it’s okay to be other bots because of their relatively strict use-cases and minimal ability to hallucinate and no ability to respond to further queries. ChatGPT makes it appear as if it’s a person at times and can be subtly wrong - we have people that do that just fine.
    3. ChatGPT content should go into their own relevant subs. A MachineLearning community might be good at first, but perhaps eventually a dedicated LLM/ChatGPT Writes type community would eventually be needed for peoples more creative impulses. It’s not exactly relevant for someplace like tucson.social, but might be for a place like BeeHaw.



  • I’m the instance admin of Tucson.social and I support this message.

    You see, Lemmy is steeped in what I like to call “Tech bro culture” - maybe not the original devs, but definitely the community that espouses these “tips”. These folks, despite their education, often fail to understand how non-technical people think, or even just how less technical (but completely competent) folks think.

    Let me tell you what it requires to host an instance:

    • Intermediate Linux Skills
    • Basic to Intermediate Docker Skills
    • Intermediate to Advanced Networking skills
    • Intermediate to Advanced Information Security Skills
    • LOTs of Time, especially when no one else wants to moderate or administrate.

    And that’s just the TIP of the iceberg. Sure you can run a completely private instance that negates the need for heavy moderation, but you still need to protect that instance and make sure it works from a wide range of devices and networks.

    So yeah, we see many instances that were created that are now dead or dying because the instance admins didn’t know they needed DDOS protection, or CAPTCHA, or any number of security tools, and now they are at the whim of bad actors or simply couldn’t keep up with the poorly documented changes that have now broken their instance.

    Then, once you get past that issue, and you have a popular instance, then Regulatory Compliance becomes an issue. This is intrinsically linked to the ability to moderate the content. Sure, there are ways to automatically report illegal content, but in say, a NSFW community that’s a never ending battle that could could end up with a subpoena or 10.

    So yeah, I recommend anyone who isn’t a seasoned Infrastructure / DevOps / InfoSec / Full Stack Engineer stay away from creating their own instances for now because those that do end up creating “Bot Bastions” that make the fediverse worse, not better.