Did they remove channel blocking recently? Something very undesirable appeared on my recommendations this week, and when I went to the channel to block it it the button wasn’t there, and worse still me going to the channel auto played more of its shit. So now YouTube think I want more.

It’s hardly tinfoil hat time - I defy you to name a single poster anywhere on Lemmy who reads more like a repost bot or engagement farmer than that particular user.

Yup. Also the post captions always read a bit too engagmentey, if that makes sense? Like either the account is a bot, or it’s one that being run cynically by a farm who’s following a set of guidelines to maximize reach over anything like sincere interest or value or humanity.

I’d recently blocked “LadyButterfly she/her” because I was getting fed up of her constant low effort ragebait, so I was surprised to see this post appear on my feed - it turns out she’s posting from multiple instances, presumably to get around either blocks or bans.

I’m reminded of Jon Ronson’s observation in “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed”, that the religious right are surprisingly tolerant of sexual misconduct scandals in a way that progressives aren’t.

The current MAGA position seems to be that they weren’t children, they were just very very very young adults…

She does look like she’d get cast as B.A. Baracus in the inevitable all-female reboot

Not even a good film.

One quirk of github copilot is that because it lets you choose which model to send a question to, you can gaslight Opus into apologising for something that gpt-4o told you.

One of the many stupid things about it is that generally speaking, most measures to reduce cars have the effect of making car travel more pleasant. It’s building tons of extra lanes that drives its own demand and makes driving slow and unpleasant.

I recently had an interaction where it made a really weird comment about a function that didn’t make sense, and when I asked it to explain what it meant, it said “let me have another look at the code to see what I meant”, and made up something even more nonsensical.

It’s clear why it happened as well; when I asked it to explain itself, it had no access to its state of mind when it made the original statement; it has no memory of its own beyond the text the middleware feeds it each time. It was essentially being asked to explain what someone who wrote what it wrote, might have been thinking.

She only looks cool because she looks like she’s part of a rag-tag team of underdogs who infiltrated the courtroom to bust him out. She probably has telekinetic powers.

Yes that puzzled me too, I checked like 5 different transcripts and they all said the same thing.

The swallow may fly south with the sun, or the house-martin or the plumber may seek warmer climes in winter; yet these are not strangers to our land.

The problem there is that a religious text loses its authority if it’s full of demonstrably incorrect statements. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.

Once you’ve decided that you can just ignore anything that looks wrong, the Bible stops being a source of truth and becomes a Rorschach ink blot for you to see whatever you want in it.

Reddit moderation has been pretty comprehensively captured by bad actors.

My 3rd generation iPad became functionally useless after only 6-7 years even though the hardware was pristine. Almost half of the apps on it, including some major ones like YouTube, started refusing to run because they had a mandatory Update, and the App Store wouldn’t provide updates for the newest iOS version that the 3rd gen could support.

Meanwhile my Windows laptop that I bought at the same time is still in service after 12 years. Windows going out of support just means you don’t get the security updates; Apple going out of support means they’ll brick your machine.

Fuck Apple to infinity.

Some of those are astonishing.

Safety Index: 71st, lower than Belarus, Lebanon, and Egypt.

Healthcare: 39th, worse than Argentina, Sri Lanka and Mexico

It’s an issue with cost, but that also extends to the perception of the degree itself. Even a few decades ago I always found American culture to be generally more disdainful towards degrees and degree holders than most of Europe or Asia.

One of the worst things you can be in America is “elitist”; it’s a loaded word that describes a fundamentally Un-American attitude. And you can see why - there’s plenty of idiots with rich parents and a degree, and a lot of intelligent people with poor parents and no degree. So elitism and intellectual snobbery also imply classism and racism.

In countries with free/cheap tertiary education, it’s less controversial to say that people who are qualified to do a thing are likely to be better at that thing, and that getting qualifications is inherently a good thing.

In some ways it’s just as well to occasionally get a reminder that loyalty to a brand is a fundamentally bullshit concept in the first place.