OpenStars

In all likelihood, your molecules will end up in both... :-)

I mean, it does help to be handsome, yes. :-)

Fwiw, I think you are also right too:-). I understand somewhat what the OP is trying to say here: you need to get over yourself, and put in some WORK to get you through the cognitive dissonance that reading is likely to cause. However, try saying that in ANY other context:

• a white person to a black person: "uh, have you tried just getting over it? slavery was hundreds of years ago now, and it's not like *I* ever owned any slaves" (note that there is just too much wrong here to even begin to unpack in a short space, but here I am focusing on how insensitive it is: even though black people would LOVE to simply "get over it", especially for it to STOP HAPPENING, as in right this very moment, that is a PROCESS and they cannot simply snap their fingers and wish away an entire history built upon it, e.g. how police - and employers - will treat someone different based on color of skin)

• an old man (or woman) to a young girl: "you know you would look prettier if you smiled more, right?" (okay... first, this is objectively true, but once again, it's nowhere near the point - if she is frowning or whatever, simply telling her to plaster over her emotional state and "be pretty", for the sake of the external viewer and once again, regardless of how she feels about the whole thing - is again extremely insensitive?)

• a man to a woman: "sexism is a thing over the past, maybe if you want a higher salary you should just work harder?" (as is the theme here, this is like 90% untrue, even if it contains a germ of truth - some women can rise up, despite the shackles, and indeed you'll never know if you do not try and all that but... dayum, how insensitive to phrase it like this?)

In all of these, the packaging seems equally as important as the message itself, if not more so. Now, my own reply did take an unnecessarily aggressive stance, though it was intentionally modeled after the one I read out from OP's wording, in an attempt to highlight it better (since some people can see some things more clearly when they are repeated back to them, perhaps they are too close to fully see the implications of their own stance?). And I dunno, sometimes that works... but it does seem far more likely that a gentler approach might result in a better chance of reception?

For instance, each of my above instances could have been rephrased:

• I hope that one day you find the peace to move beyond the hurts of the past. I know that you can't right now b/c it's still happening, but I do have hope that one day we can get there, together.
• I am sorry that you are having a bad day - is there anything I can do to help? If not, I at least hope that it will get better for you.
• You cannot control things beyond yourself, but if you want to make the attempt, I support you - go get it girl! :-P

Rather than shame the already-victims, putting the onus on the receiver to do ALL the work, wouldn't a true leader (or at least encourager) inspire their audience to do the desired task, as in empower them to do what they should want already to do? (dayum, that sounded really profound, - I better write that down!:-P)

Oh absolutely. And this being in academia, they likely will lose their job over it - like that Harvard professor who was accused of a highly similar form of plagiarism (borrowing long stretches of text while failing to cite the original source material). I was pointing out the absurdity of not doing that for politicians and CEOs:-(.

They might literally have had some psychological issue, where they were trying to see how far they could push it without being caught.

Or this whole article could be a hit job - maybe the original thesis literally wrapped these sections with text saying "here is an example of a plausible attempt at plagiarism that would not get caught today - please do not quote me out of context here, m'kay?". The devil is in the details, and I for one am not volunteering to put in the amount of effort it would take to properly judge this person.

Although I bet their bosses are, now.

Lolz how about "no".

Now, if you bothered to continue to read past that, note that I am a STRONG advocate for reading. Not only that, but I read a lot myself. In fact, whenever I encounter something BEAUTIFULLY written, I literally cannot put it down (sometimes I just force myself, especially to eat, then continue) - a recent example is https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb, which I read just at the time of the Reddit protests and it really hit the spot. Nor was it mere intellectual masturbatory exposition either - it convinced me to drop Reddit, and if I ever did join something else (at the time, Kbin, before I gave up on it and switched to Lemmy), to make sure that I did not allow it to become what Reddit had started to be for me: an addiction. Yes, my community needed a moderator if it was going to survive - but why should that be me, in perpetuity? (especially with the mod tools going to shit)

"Flatland" was another that was just... chef's kiss, I literally dreamed about it, and it ignited in me a renewal of my desire for reading after grad school had me too read-out. It has a sequel too btw, Sphereland. If Flatland offends people, look it up - it was ancient satire (in all likelihood).

So I READ, muddafucker, I DO. But when someone tells me that I HAVE to, I nope out, instantly. Ironically, I know that *I* am the one being true punk here, whatever words people may want to throw at me.

How about drawing people in by making a product that encourages people to want to read this shit?

It makes sense - he spent so much time learning how the system worked, enough to get around it, so now he makes a living continuing the exploit. Many politicians and CEOs do the same.

I just had a discussion this past week with Lvxferre who convinced me that I was wrong and this is actually true, but I still think it is not equally distributed everywhere. Some communities are more known for it than others - in particular, Hexbear and Lemmygrad are so bad that I just outright blocked them, personally, and lemmy.ml (edit: I don't personally know the deal with lemmy.ml, it just seems to often get floated as the name of an instance whenever things like "witch-hunting" come up, though I am not sure if that is an admin-level deal or more like users who happen to be on it, or what - or maybe it's just its large size that makes it inevitable to come from there? at which point you would think lemmy.world too...) I put up with it. You cannot avoid all of the nonsense, but the fact that I am able to have a proper conversation with someone sometimes already puts Lemmy LEAGUES ahead of Reddit, where that just became outright impossible, near the end (even before spez ignited the protests).

And if someone wants to put in the work to moderate a place where we can have more fair & balanced conversations, I think I would like to join it? But I am not willing to moderate it - I did that on Reddit, and I am just done with that. If we want nice things though, we need to put in the effort to build them. :-)

Except Florida will fudge the numbers, and nobody will even know anything beyond "excess deaths", unless they take to hiding even those. Also, I still think "experiment" bespeaks of some intentionality, while simply being watchful and mindful of one's surroundings does not raise to that high bar. But you are correct: mindful people can learn from just about anything ("the sun has risen today, again, mark that on the recordings please, that is one more day in which that observation has occurred").

Anyway, I am giving you a hard time, but yeah I see what you mean: they wanted to lose herd immunity, so here goes nothing...

And no, I doubt the Florida government is willing to do much of anything at all, and the federal government is incapable. The Supreme Court is distracted, the upcoming Democrat Presidential candidate won't win Florida no matter what and the Republican Presidential one is likely to just egg the situation on further, and Congress hasn't even passed a budget yet, almost into the third month of calendar year 2024, but remember that this is the sixth month into the fiscal one - that's right, HALF THE YEAR HAS PASSED already without one yet, and they STILL are threatening another showdown when they come back from their weeks-long vacation. And even with such gridlock on all sides, the state government of Florida that is not struggling with a 2-party system at all still cannot hold a candle to the high level of functioning that even our entirely inept and broken (and corrupt) national government ends up having to do (see e.g. the Disney situation, making the state lose out on a BILLION dollars, and that is only one of the various ENORMOUS disasters that is just CURRENTLY going on in that state - the migrant worker crisis is another ofc, and there are far more besides).

This is why I say that this "experiment" of seeing whether and how democracy itself will work as a viable government strategy is currently underway. And so far the grim reaper seems to be winning:-(.

There is one MAJOR difference: here you can make not only your own sub/community, where you can be your own mod, but you can spin up your own whole entire instance, and become your own admin. Oh Reddit, you serve The Man (spez) or you can GTFO - so we did the latter:-P (some perhaps due to being kicked out of their former mod role bc of the protests) - but here, nobody can tell us what to do, in the end.

Ofc there are limits even there, like someone can defederate from you if you refuse to control yourself, even unintentionally like if you don't follow basic security and constantly get hacked.

It's like being able to own your own home. When you visit a community on someone else's instance, you are their GUEST, and you have to follow THEIR rules. The homeowner owns the community while the mayor or governor or President or Prime Minister or whatever controls the entire city / state / country or in this case "instance". Right or wrong, it's THEIRS, so your options are limited - you don't get to just walk into someone else's HOME and tell them what to do!?

But here, unlike Reddit, on your own personal computer (desktop machine even, doesn't need a whole "server") you can make your own place. From there, you could invite others... or not, as you choose. Inside your own home, unless you do something that may cause the police (like FBI) to come knocking, you control yourself, and also you have the responsibility and right to kick off anyone you choose who refuses to play by the rules that YOU set forth.

So do whatever you want. Ofc others have the same freedom too.

One problem with using Extensions to forcibly alter webpages - e.g. to convert them into a dark mode - is that they may have unexpected side-effects, which means that you cannot use it in your "main" instance that you use daily, or at the very least then you need to have a "backup" instance that always just works. I think I even have a couple (one was dedicated specifically to things like Google Docs), but I cannot trust them to work reliably so I do not even think of them anymore, plus they keep falling behind and not updating their code and after that do not work whenever the browser updates its own mandatory standards, and then I have to go hunt for another one, or else just find some other way to deal with it (reduce screen brightness and make sure not to work in a darker setting).

In order to really make a difference, one of the big-name browsers would need to integrate a change into its main code, which would then bring large amounts of market share users into the mix, helping to make development of the code a greater ROI. Though these days, almost everyone it seems uses Chrome (at least as reported stats show), and even all Firefox users simply get ignored - like, as long as a webpage runs on Chrome, companies stop testing it. Fuck Safari, Edge, Firefox, and most especially anything even smaller than that like LibreWolf.

All that said, most other browsers besides Firefox insert a small broken-image-looking icon whenever an image cannot be loaded. Though with increased connection reliability these days (inside the continental United States anyway), the number of situations where it would even be needed is vastly reduced compared to the past. And as for other places - like maybe Hawaii - well... fuck them. It is sad, but true: when Google makes e.g. Google Docs (that also lacks a dark mode), they did whatever tinkering they felt that they had to do at the absolute minimum in order to make a profit or indirect profitable impact, then called it a day and stopped.

Though Firefox was supposed to be different - it was supposed to lean heavily into its open-source nature, to provide a level of service to its true customers, the actual people using it, rather than the "customers" being the advertising companies who pay for certain features to be developed and pay far MORE for certain features to ever NOT be developed, if you take my meaning. Case in point: how Chrome now refuses to block ads.:-(

But anyway, none of the big browsers seem to be doing much with the Alt text these days - not showing it as a tooltip, and in the case of Firefox, not even showing it at all in some cases, or if it is, then it is just a weird text out in the middle of nowhere that seems disconnected to literally everything.

For instance, if you are capable of seeing this, compare the first and second renderings of "Test" in the image below:

The top one is how Firefox renders it - just this singular word out in the middle of nowhere, where even though you see it and it is therefore potentially better than leaving the insides of the brackets [] totally blank, it doesn't really explain or convey much of anything at all. Whereas the rendering below puts the broken-icon image next to the alternative text, that helps convey that this was meant to be an image, but instead you are seeing the alternative text. Otherwise, instead of putting [Test] inside of the brackets, someone would need to go as far as saying like [Test - this was meant to be an image but instead you are seeing this text here.]. That is a lot of work to place onto people who need to consider accessibility options for each and every image, and especially on a social media site like Lemmy that are meant to be fast-paced conversations, it simply will not happen. Therefore, my point is that Firefox is letting people down, by not using the same treatment that all other common browsers choose to do - they should have upped their game, in order to stay competitive. This is just one of many reasons why I continue to use Chrome, despite how ad-blocking is now disabled, unless I specifically need to go to YouTube to play multiple videos in a row (even then I will often just use Chrome to avoid the hassle of switching), or to visit a news website, which are so annoying that trying to read them without ad blocking is not worthwhile at all - i.e. I would rather read nothing at all then have to put up with their nonsense:-(. BTW, on Android I use Firefox, so here I am just talking about desktop browsing.

About that CommonMark page: oh I see, yeah you are right. However, even given your correctness, I still think that I am right: if someone like me who knows all of HTML, CSS (a tiny bit), and JS (an even smaller bit), and cares about accessibility did not realize that fact, then something is VERY wrong with that page. And right away I know what it is: that font is TINY. Those buttons are ENORMOUS in size - the width of the "code" and "previous exericse" is more than a third and approaching half the damn page width (at a glance, as I resize the window, it looks like ~40% of the left-hand size that excludes the right-hand vertical bar area with those square buttons?), and the text inside of the left-hand box and especially the size of that M in the right-hand box is ENORMOUS, but the text of the actual "Add alt text of Logo and title of Creative Commons licensed to this image:" is entirely missable, even given how few elements exist on that page. Normally, a tiny font size is a literal trigger, an indicator that "this item is skippable, of lesser importance, a footnote only for someone who is hunting/rooting/digging deeper into the details, but not for casual inspection", and sometimes people say the phrase "legal text", like just ignore it and go on with your day, unless you have a professional reason to care about it. So for this aspect to already be buried on page 8 of not even the help document but the link from the Lemmy help document... I guarantee that something >90% of people on the Fediverse are going to not know this, even given the highly technically skilled nature of our community. Hence why I was saying: if we wanted more people using Lemmy (or Mastodon, Kbin/Mbin, etc.) to know this, then additional work would need to be done.

Likewise I have never done anything at all with Mastodon, but I LOVE hearing how they are trying to increase their accessibility - that's wonderful:-).

And at least you convinced me to start putting something there here on Lemmy - so far I have been using the short word "img", that is more or less quick to type and seems to get the job done, at least insofar as an individual can offer, without going further e.g. to offer to do a redesign of that CommonMark page (that seems certain to be refused even if a finished product were offered wholesale with no strings attached).