EnglishMobster

joined 2 years ago
[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 17 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Based started on 4chan. People stole memes from 4chan, where it spread and became Zoomer slang.

Cringe I think has a similar but slightly different etymology; I don't know if it necessarily came from 4chan or if it came from Reddit.

[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 7 points 2 years ago

/vp/ used to be really good at good Pokemon info back in the Black/White days.

That said - I haven't been back in quite a while, but even back then you did occasionally see folks who obviously were from /b/ or /pol/ posting. I'm sure it's probably gotten worse over the years, as people start growing out of 4chan...

[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 4 points 2 years ago (4 children)

To be fair...

There are alternatives to Lemmy. Kbin, I'd argue, is superior in most respects. (Kbin is still obviously young and rough around the edges at times, though.)

I don't like the Lemmy maintainers, and that was a big jump propelling me onto Kbin. It just made me feel squicky knowing that I was tacitly endorsing their software by using it when there was an alternative available that did exactly the same things. I also don't like using communities on Lemmy.ml because the admins there have a history of removing stuff that doesn't suit their political views.

I don't think these two situations are equivalent, mind, but I do think there is more weight behind "avoid using Lemmy" than "avoid using Calckey/Firefish".

[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 32 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Notably, Vine was created by Twitter.

And then Vine was axed by Twitter. (One of the dumbest mistakes Twitter ever made - look how successful TikTok is, and think that Twitter literally had that a decade ago and decided to shut it down.)

So really, Vine was just video Twitter, instead of Twitter being text Vine.

[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's really a shame it's Wayland only. I always have issues with Wayland; if one Wayland app crashes it effectively brings down my entire machine.

[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago

Xehanort literally malding right now

[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 4 points 2 years ago

I believe it would also extend to anything that can be confused with the white and blue logo in the context is social media.

I can't take the Android droid logo, make him blue, give him a squiggly antenna, and then try to make him the logo of my new phone company.

While Meta doesn't own the letter X, if the government says "People might get confused between these two marks" that's a valid reason to reject the trademark or prevent the company from calling itself that. See https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/search/likelihood-confusion:

Likelihood of confusion exists between trademarks when the marks are so similar and the goods and/or services for which they are used are so related that consumers would mistakenly believe they come from the same source. Each application is decided on its own facts, and no strict mechanical test exists for determining likelihood of confusion.

So basically it would come down to a judge deciding if the marks are too similar to each other or not.

To determine whether a likelihood of confusion exists, the marks are first examined for their similarities and differences. Note that in order to find a likelihood of confusion, the marks do not have to be identical. When marks sound alike when spoken, are visually similar, and/or create the same general commercial impression in the consuming public’s mind, the marks may be considered confusingly similar. Similarity in sound, appearance, and/or meaning may be sufficient to support a finding of likelihood of confusion, depending on the relatedness of the goods and/or services.

So I could use something similar to the Android logo to sell fishing supplies, since the likelihood of confusion is small - Android doesn't make fishing supplies. We only have an issue if I start selling phones or if Android starts selling fishing supplies.

[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I daily drive KDE Neon.

Sometimes install scripts don't work as expected, since things check if you're on Ubuntu or Mint or whatever specifically and "Neon" doesn't match their regex. It's usually not a big deal and fairly trivial to solve.

Regardless, I've actually started to get away from the command line and have embraced the app store. Discover is actually pretty darn good and has lots of the things I want to install. I can choose if I want to install from Discover via Apt, Flatpak, or Snap.

I usually install Flatpak stuff. The Steam Deck has taught me that Flatpak is generally as good or better than actually installing via apt - you don't need to wait on your distro to update sources, and you aren't adding random PPAs. Sometimes you need to fudge the permissions with Flatseal, but it's a one-and-done thing.

I use Microsoft Edge as my browser (yes, really - the Chromium version is just as good as Chrome, it has nifty vertical tabs, I get news on my "new tab" page, and all my settings are saved there). I use Thunderbird for mail, plus Steam, Zoom, Discord, etc. Surprisingly few KDE apps are preinstalled, to be honest - the only KDE apps installed are the ones I want anyway.

[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 9 points 2 years ago

A lot of users push for Discord. Very few (comparatively) push for Lemmy/Kbin.

I was a mod of a 500k+ subreddit. We wound up basically being forced to make a Discord a few years ago because users wanted one so badly. It wound up becoming more active than the actual subreddit itself, and has a bigger mod team (most of whom aren't even mods on the subreddit, just Discord).

[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

Have you ever moderated somewhere of any significant size?

I was once a mod on a 500k+ user subreddit on Reddit. Without AutoMod, the place would go to shit within a month. AutoMod caught so many things that would otherwise disrupt the community.

It's not "authoritarian" to automatically remove posts of people spamming the N-word, especially when you can easily tell the users are trolls. Nor is it "authoritarian" to remove spammers trying to shill their T-shirts or sending links to scam websites. Or those annoying bots that would copy user comments and then try to pose as "real" users so they could build up karma and get around spam filters easier.

At a certain point, it is impossible to keep up with everything happening in your community. While reports are important, mods do have to sleep. We do have lives, and we don't pay attention to the communities we help run for every waking moment of our days.

If I wanted to ban every person who used the letter "e", I could do that without a bot. A modbot makes it easier, but simply having a tool available doesn't make the person using that tool more or less authoritarian. Not to mention both Kbin and Lemmy have open moderation logs, so you can easily see if a place has a moderation style you disagree with.

[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 36 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Can you please stop spamming this everywhere?

We don't care about Reddit. There are places you can share that. Posting it to every community on every instance you can think of isn't helping; it's just pissing people off from the constant amount of spam.

[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 208 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Your phone doesn't listen to you, but it builds a fingerprint and uses that fingerprint to serve ads.

It also serves ads for things based on who you've been around recently. The example given was the guy's wife asked for a power drill for her birthday, and then the guy started seeing power drill ads.

This wasn't because of the conversation, but because his wife had looked up power drills and opened herself up to ads about them. Because the husband had been around the wife, the ad algorithms thought he might be into the same sort of things she is, and so they started serving him ads based on what they think his wife would like.

The article takes issue with this and considers it an invasion of privacy. It's the same sort of story we've seen dozens of times before; John Oliver did it better.

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