My main social media app is Mastodon (technically Firefish which I will soon migrate to Iceshrimp… but those details are less relevant)

I consider Lemmy less so of a “social media” and more of a link aggregator/discussion forum… but yeah otherwise I try to use Lemmy a bit too. I still browse Reddit quite a lot, but only for individual communities that don’t have equivalents on Lemmy, and I no longer post there

I never used much social media to begin with tbh… I feel pretty decent about the Fediverse. Despite all the drawbacks (blocklists, fedi drama, etc), I think people collectively managed to make an objectively better social media platforms compared to the previous corporation-dominated ones (at least by my personal metrics)

… which is why I never considered French press “inconvenient”… but from what I’ve heard from other coffee enthusiasts, they all found French press inconvenient precisely because they don’t just pour the grounds down the drain & had to dispose it in the trash bin (and deal with the mess). Maybe I’m ill-informed somewhere, maybe something else… I’m not against just flushing the grounds though.

Currently live in a condo, I think every unit in the building came with one

The biggest advantage I could find is that they are insanely convenient for making French press coffee! French presses are otherwise a pain to clean (since there’s no filter to aggegate the grounds), but having an in-sink disposal means I can just flush the coffee grounds directly into the sink. Besides this though I’m pretty indifferent to them

So this is a bit counter to the news article’s point, and apologies for linking to Reddit… but there has been a fairly hot post on the subreddit r/USCIS. A practicing immigration attorney was sharing some thoughts on how feasible the promises are https://www.reddit.com/r/USCIS/comments/1glflxy/so_what_now_an_immigration_attorney_perspective/. Some quotes:

IMO, no-- the economy makes way too much money from DACA folks. I do believe that they will dangle it like a carrot to appease right-wing voters. Major corporations employ DACAmented folks. The SSN from work permits have allowed more tax revenue to come in. Too much is at stake. Legally, the legal arguments at the courts surrounding DACA involve constitutional rights, which themselves aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. It’s honestly just a topic that is often talked about, but hardly understood by many.

I want to put this into perspective. There are 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US. Currently, DHS has about 92,000 officers, and ICE has about 21,000 officers. It is asinine to try to achieve this.

Let’s say it actually does begin and people are getting rounded up. Guess what? Not all undocumented folks are just undocumented-- many have TPS, pending asylum applications, pending T/U Visas, and work permits (see my point regarding #1). Unless a migrant has an expedited removal (not likely), DHS/ICE still needs to process each deportee, assign them A#s, and follow basic procedures. If they don’t? That’s a very easy way to reverse a deportation order. It’s the equivalent of convicting someone of murder using a confession made under a very obvious 4/5th amendment violation. Slam dunk case.

Oh, and you know who has to handle all of these deportation cases? Federal DHS attorneys. They’re already overworked, and they tend to exercise discretion. If no discretion, the overworked ones tend to gloss over cases and provide weak arguments. Only major attention is paid to serious crimes. You’d be surprised the amount of times DHS attorneys have gotten my clients’ names wrong or made procedurally embarrassing typos.

… assuming the administration still follows basic social contracts, that is. If the Trump administration actually uses the military to forcefully enforce mass deportations, then I feel the US is going to be fucked on so many different more levels… and there would be way more to worry than just the deportations

I… think this question is a bit more complicated for this community. Following are only my personal opinion

Prescribed medication? I think so, I’d rather be physically and mentally healthy rather than have the other alternative. And usually medication (even ones with noted negative effects) are meant do do more good than harm so…

Recreational drugs… the line between this and the above is surprisingly not as clear-cut as it seems. I believe there are active lines of study of using various psychedelic compounds to treat mental disorders or other conditions… Personally I would take medically prescribed psychedelics if I am 1) under medical supervision and 2) based on evidence it would help my mental health (maybe that’s the answer to the question?)

Hard drugs: I don’t see how they can make anyone a better person, and no

Reminds me of this post of the same community: https://lemmy.world/post/4492190

Probably in K-12? Like seriously everyone in my “friend” groups and half of my classes knew something about me was off, and I believe I was known as the eccentric genius throughout middle/high school (and my HS had a lot of smart students). But the broader culture I was in didn’t believe in mental health so…

Other than that… there were two people I relate to very well on Mastodon (when I first joined), one of whom is very openly autistic; hence why I got tested. That’s probably as obvious as it gets

Not great… I’m not a US citizen yet so voting isn’t possible. Only thing I could do is vote with my feet… so I moved out of Texas for good earlier this year. I think my current location is as safe as it gets in regards to avoiding political violence (since I’m not exactly in a group that the right isn’t threatening) so there’s that

Other than that? Nothing… If the worst happens I’ll just hole-up in the building and ask my boss for permission to work from home

I looked at their individual page (https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/4/psychological-dark-patterns.html)…

If deleting the game and starting over from scratch sounds like a horrible idea and a waste of your investment, then the game has Endowed Value for you. The more time and money that you invest in the game, the more value it has over a fresh copy of the game.

So I guess they are referring to is something more transactional… for example, if I spent $100 on a gacha game or loot boxes to get a bunch of ultra-rare SSRs. I’d be pretty compelled to keep playing since I’ve already spent so much money on it.

They are not counting, for example, that I get hooked on some weird roguelike game because I genuinely want to get better at it but can stop any time. And if I lose my save file I would still happily start from scratch again (which, hilariously, a pattern named Infinite Treadmill is marked for both Slay the Spire and Balatro… https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/14/infinite-treadmill.html)

Me personally? No… I haven’t been celebrating much of anything at all for the past several years, not even Thanksgiving/Christmas/other ethnic holidays. Depression & lack of friends have been rough… and the area I live in now is mostly consisted of high-end restaurants, so I don’t anticipate getting a discount for costume either

However the building I moved in seems to do lots of events, including an annual trick-or-treat for kids in the building! I’m kind of curious what the kids in the building will be up to, there is a sizable number of people in the building who have children so there’s that

This again??

This time once archive.org is back online again… is it possible to get torrents of some of their popular data storage? For example I wouldn’t imagine their catalog of books with expired copyright to be very big. Would love a community way to keep the data alive if something even worse happens in the future (and their track record isn’t looking good now)

Had a fairly important work deadline that was supposed to be end of this month. Unfortunately, I didn’t read institutional policies carefully enough, and institutional fuckery mandates that they receive all the documents one week prior. So my actual deadline is like next Monday

So yeah, I’ll be working this entire weekend… at least the good news is I can probably get two free days off by the end of this month (which I wanted to do anyway)

I am not joking; the only thing I can imagine is for some bizarre reason a bowling ball noise followed by a comical noise of striking pins. I know there is a person but I couldn’t imagine that person

This is a good point… I strongly prefer nonfiction over fiction, but it could just be Autism. I really only read fiction if it is really, really good… but I read them in the same way as I would read a nonfiction book as well, I’d be more interested in the themes of the book

Oh my! I didn’t know what to expect, and I have to say… I was quite surprised by some of your answers. Also confirmed to me that I am definitely not normal

Not many replies that are indicative of Aphantasia so… here goes nothing. I tried really hard at this okay

I feel… weird. Bowlero Corporation reorganized one of their arcades close to where I live and apparently removed the only arcade cabinet that kept me going there in the first place. This also means that there is only one rhythm game arcade cab left in my city, and that arcade is also managed by Bowlero…

I was already half-seriously contemplating opening an arcade myself, and this incident is getting close to pushing myself over the edge, but I just couldn’t make the idea work with how ridiculously expensive it is & understanding that the type of cabs I’m interested in basically make no money, so… yeah

On unrelated note, work is highly stressful this week, two doctors appointment, so yeah! (cries inside

I don’t believe anyone mentioned this yet so… here goes nothing, there is a suspicion that this is due to A/B testing

This is a bug report from the Invidious project; this is back in June 6 (so four months ago), but the hoster of a fairly large instance noted a very bizarre error message on the Invidious project…

Conclusion is that Youtube is very likely rolling out A/B testing of requiring all clients to login before viewing videos

Refreshing will probably work considering this is most likely result of an A/B test, but unfortunately I don’t see a way of this problem going away

I genuinely don’t know… there doesn’t seem to be any ongoing discussion of who or why are these people targeting IA. There are other people who are trying to rescue data stored on IA

Hope this would be over soon…

So it was the physics Nobel… I see why the Nature News coverage called it “scooped” by machine learning pioneers

Since the news tried to be sensational about it… I tried to see what Hinton meant by fearing the consequences. Believe he is genuinely trying to prevent AI development without proper regulations. This is a policy paper he was involved in (https://managing-ai-risks.com/). This one did mention some genuine concerns. Quoting them:

“AI systems threaten to amplify social injustice, erode social stability, and weaken our shared understanding of reality that is foundational to society. They could also enable large-scale criminal or terrorist activities. Especially in the hands of a few powerful actors, AI could cement or exacerbate global inequities, or facilitate automated warfare, customized mass manipulation, and pervasive surveillance”

like bruh people already lost jobs because of ChatGPT, which can’t even do math properly on its own…

Also quite some irony that the preprint has the following quote: “Climate change has taken decades to be acknowledged and confronted; for AI, decades could be too long.”, considering that a serious risk of AI development is climate impacts

Oh my… I had a slightly similar incident. New phone number, had a bunch of random strangers texting me (some even calling!) asking for Ethan. My name is not Ethan, I didn’t know who Ethan is

No idea what was on my mind back then, but I somehow got the contact info of this mysterious Ethan, called him (hilarity ensued since he got a call from someone on his contact list named “Me”), confirmed his up-to-date number, and promptly referred everyone looking for Ethan to the real person for over a year…

Life is strange sometimes