Kind of a hard question to word, but is there anything in your life you have recommended to other people but no one’s ever gotten into?
I love podcasts and have friends who still thank me for getting them into this one or that one. But I’ve never gotten anyone to listen to My Brother, My Brother and Me. I don’t know if the name is unappealing or the concept but people seem to bounce off immediately.
So what can’t you get people into and why should we check it out?
Does Privacy count? I always I try to encourage people to treat themselves to better privacy, to step away from big corpo platforms and use more Foss services. Doesn’t stick with a lot of em. 😔
If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. /s
They’ll try and make it sound like it was a reasoned decision to give in, but if there was a little eyeball looking over their shoulder they’d 100% be freaked out.
well obviously, but a disembodied animate eyeball would freak anyone out regardless of what it was doing
What is the practical, measurable impact on my life of big corpo knowing my info? Seems like a lot of ass ache for without any measurable benefits beyond some principles stand big corpo doesn’t care about. It’s not like Big Corpo isn’t getting your info. Using Chrome and a VPN on the Google spy drone in your pocket isn’t hiding anything from Google. If Big Corpo wants your data, they will get it. They are better at getting it than we are at hiding it. The only solution is legislative, not individual nerds putting up knee high fences and feeling morally superior about it.
What is the practical, measurable impact on my life of big corpo knowing my info?
Just off the top of my head: spam, scam calls, phishing emails, credit agency hacks, every data aggregator in the world having a psychological profile on you, malicious actors who want your money having access to enough information to have a chance at getting access to your bank account. But at least advertisements will more likely be things you want.
Oh and don’t forget it’s not just big corpo, it’s also several nations spying on you. Sure you might not be doing anything wrong now, but take it from a political refugee: if they ever want to control you, all they need to do is criminalize something you did in the past and then they already have all the evidence they need. Isn’t “justice” fun?
If Big Corpo wants your data, they will get it.
That’s a very silly assumption to make. Just because they have better data aggregation abilities than your average person doesn’t mean they’re omnipotent.
They are better at getting it than we are at hiding it.
This really sounds luke you’re devolving into an All Or Nothing stance. Just because my online presence necessarily leaves a data footprint doesn’t mean I should just give up and let them have everything they want.
The only solution is legislative, not individual nerds putting up knee high fences and feeling morally superior about it.
Excuse you, mine’s a chest high wall.
Ignoring the assumption that legislation would ever act against the will of capital… As we’ve seen with the Right to Repair movement: societal change stems from the sustained pressure applied by groups of dedicated individuals. Legislation doesn’t just pop into congress because one of the representatives was visited the night before by the three ghosts of privacy past, present and future in the middle of the night; it comes from representatives that either belonged to the movements or were successfully lobbied by them.
Also if someone suggesting you should care about your own privacy and/or well-being feels like an attack against your morals, you should start asking why and who taught you to feel that way about it. I don’t feel like a better person than you, I feel a lot less paranoid and stressed all the time and I would wish that for everyone
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Lemmy
I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone outside of Lemmy where I feel their lives would be better if they used it. The only time I feel a want to yell about Lemmy is when people who are on Masterdon or the like blindly promote something on Reddit.
Linux
Forth
You mean the programming language?
Esperanto. A made up language that is really easy to learn and spoken to some degree by about 2 million people all over the world. I got into it when I heard that if you speak it you can stay with Esperanto speakers that just want to practice with strangers, for free. I traveled all over the world for free and met so many awesome people.
When I try to get anyone to learn it, they just won’t. They hear about that criticism of the language or another, or plain get bored. You can just start the Esperanto course on Duolingo for free, but nobody I know goes through, despite the benefits.
The moment I got interested in Esperanto, I wanted better so I jumped down a rabbit hole of ever more obscure languages until I realized what I had gotten into and stopped.
Also, and this probably applied to others, if I’m language learning, there’s two other languages I really 'should* be learning, but am not, so that makes me feel guilty.
I kinda understand the appeal but there are just too many other languages that have a real practical use for when I’m traveling and want to speak to regular people instead of a secret society.
i find it cool in the sense of how it’s a portrayal of all languages being somewhat synthetic. how other conlangs have tried to play with language features is how i landed on Jan Misali’s YT channel (here’s his Esperanto episode).
esperanto per-se i haven’t learnt because… maybe because I wouldn’t have anyone to practice with, and the point of languages is communication? idk.
Duolingo maybe be a good start for the theory, how did you start getting practice? and more importantly, what’s this about rent-free Esperanto hostels? 👀👀
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
How do you locate other Esperanto speakers?
Esperanto has a special call that attracts other Esperanto users.
It also has a mating call, but that only attracts birds.
I have asked many a friend to play modded Minecraft with me.
Unfortunately, I am reminded time and time again that the Venn diagram of people I know who are interested in that and people with PCs who can run that is two circles.
Three separate times now someone’s invited me to a Create server and 2 hours later I’ve somehow instead ended up joining a 300+ mod modpack that takes roughly 45 minutes to load on my laptop, crashes and errors out every few hours, and dies within a week after someone uses some random mod to gain infinite diamonds or something.
Is Minecraft heavy now?
When you cram it full of tech mods it is.
If you don’t have at minimum 4 GB of RAM to dedicate to the game alone, you are not going to be able to load the packs I want to play. And yet, this is apparently how much RAM a lot of people still have in their PCs total in the year of our lord 2024.
I also have a lot of friends using underpowered netbooks as daily drivers, which will quickly be CPU-bounded in a game like modded Minecraft.
Minecraft, especially modded Minecraft, is almost an anti-game. Unlike nearly every other big game, where it’s a neat and tidy compiled package that stays in its lane memory-wise, loads relatively quickly, and only makes you ask questions about how many pretty settings your GPU can handle and what FPS you’ll get doing it, Minecraft instead is a bloated, memory-hogging dumpster fire written crappily in Java (many of the mods are, anyway) that runs like a dream on integrated graphics but can bring nearly any processor you might have to its knees on single thread performance.
It amazes me that my laptop, which would have been sold alongside phones with keyboards, still has more RAM and pixels than some people, and an appreciable number of cores. The GPU is caca and increasingly unsupported though.
Are there any mods that are surprisingly economical? CPU-heavyness is pretty much just the genera - Dwarf Fortress has long been the same - but coding your thing well can make a huge difference. DF itself just got multithreading, and apparently some of the sorting tasks were implemented very naively before.
Demoscene stuff. Basically just digital art written for fun and to show off your coding skills. People have been doing it since the Amiga. If you’ve ever pirated software in the 90’s to 00’s, you’ve probably seen a realtime animation and mod-based techno track accompany the keygen - that’s an example of Demoscene art.
I can’t find anyone in the US, not even one of the nerds that works in tech with me, who gives a single shit about this stuff. There are parties and conventions all the time, none of them in North America…
I’m traveling to Germany at the end of March to go to a Demoparty just for the chance to meet a single other person who cares. It should be fun.
I made my own prod discovery service if you ever want to check it out: https://prods.page/ (Yes, I need to update it).
Bebop and cool jazz.
So what can’t you get people into
My weird fetishes
why should we check it out?
Uuuhh…
In reality, tabletop games, including RPG. There’s even a local, free event that happens every 2 months, but out of everyone I invite, nobody shows up, not even the people who say “I’d like to play once”. It really saddens me how many people reply with “I don’t have the skill to play, it’s too complicated”, actually meaning “I doubt I can develop the skill I think is needed to play and I’m not willing to try” whenever I get excited about RPGs.
LSD haha, its insane and awesome, so many people should experience it before thinking they know themselves.
My favorite TV show Stargate. I’ve only been able to convince one person to watch it, and they loved it too. Everyone else says its to long since sg1+Atlantis+universe is 17 seasons total. Plus 3 Movies.
If anything there is not enough of it. Universe should really have went on for more seasons.
For sure. Season one wasn’t great, but season two was awesome. Felt like it was really just getting started when it ended.
Space Team! It’s a fantastic mobile party game to be played with people in the same room with you! You get a bunch of technobabble labeled dials, buttons, levers, knobs and whatever else while you gotta read the top of the screen to everyone else to keep your ship flying! They also gotta do the same. It gets crazier as you go.
Literally nobody will play with me. If you’re in Cincinnati, hit me up for some Space Team!
It is such a fun game. I love it too. If you are ever in Vancouver, Canada let me know. I’ll play with you
If you ever want a fast track to the no-fly list, play Space Team on a airplane!
Jokes aside, I forgot about this game and it’s great fun. I need to remember it next time I am in a room with a few friends.
For me it’s sim racing and VR gaming.
All my friends care about is LOL and CSGO.
Communism, but thats because i have a hard time talking to people irl
Communists when they find out community cooperation requires talking to people in person
I STILL DO IT OK
The Deathworlders
Discworld by Terry Pratchett. It’s got something for just about everyone and I have a few avid readers in my family but they keep putting it off.
