Practicing awareness. It gets mentioned a lot, or used to, and sounded silly until i kind of figured it out myself. Just stop thinking and feeling emotions for 2-5 minutes and put all of your attention into your senses of seeing, hearing, etc. It’s like taking a quick refreshing mental shower.

Thanks.

Thanks.

It's all about control. Anyone with even a scrap of dubious authority wants to control people, and everybody up the ladder piles on to whichever victim is found.

That was worse than i expected:

"As we all stood there shaking our heads, including my wife, who was finally allowed to join me, I connected the final dot. A lot of vehicles in JLR’s media fleet have a New Jersey manufacturer plate with the same alphanumeric structure—34 ## DTM—and Officer Ganshyn observed that meant it was now a nationwide issue. Anywhere a police department has a partnership with Flock, any other JLR-owned car with the same plate structure is going to get flagged as stolen. In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week, according to Officer Ganshyn. I was just the first one to get nabbed. The only way to stop it would be for the LAPD to correct their initial report and update Flock’s system, which Jaguar Land Rover was now racing to make happen following the phone call."

My understanding is that admins can disable downvoting at the instance level. I think Beehaw.org does this. I know only a little about it, but i think people on other instances can downvote a post from a no-downvotes instance, but on that no-downvote instance those downvotes are rejected. Something like that. So maybe another instance like Beehaw is what you're looking for.

I second this. The only way I've made Lemmy work for me is to block and blacklist LOTS of communities and users, not because they're all bad or do bad things, but just because they're not contributing to the atmosphere I want. Sounds selfish and I guess it is, but I think the freer the platform, the more you have to build your own fences and hedgerows. Good luck with your community, and thanks for bringing it to Lemmy.

Done. OP please let me know yearly (i never do subscriptions but i'm willing to manually repeat yearly)

There's this guy who hangs out on the steps of my local public library. I think he might be homeless. He always carries a chess set with him and will play a game with anyone who asks him. Anyway, he has an amazing memory and is really good at looking things up in the library if you ask him, but I think he might have some mental issues because he sometimes/often gets things wrong. But when he gets things right he really saves you a lot of time. You definitely have to double-check the facts, which wastes time so it's a toss-up whether you're actually saving time. And he can write things for you but his writing is 100% generic, like he has no personality or ideas of his own. Still, though, it comes in handy sometimes. And he can be fun to talk to but for the love of god don't give him any personal info or he'll share it with everyone who passes by. That's kind of how i think of LLMs now.

Chernobylite is really good.

Interesting, sad, and no surprise. From the linked article:

"Role in the History of Racist Ideas

In the 21st century, the work of Zurara has been re-examined for its foundational role in the development of modern racist ideology. Historian Ibram X. Kendi, in his 2016 book Stamped from the Beginning, argues that Zurara was the world's first racist because his chronicle was the first to articulate a comprehensive defense of the African slave trade based on the concept of Black inferiority.[12] Kendi posits that Zurara's writing was not the cause of the Portuguese slave trade but rather a product of it; Prince Henry's economic and political self-interest in the trade of enslaved Africans came first. Zurara was then tasked with creating a narrative to justify these policies.[13] According to this view, Zurara's chronicle established a powerful and enduring justification for racism by portraying enslaved Africans as savages who were being civilized and saved through their enslavement, thereby creating racist ideas to rationalize pre-existing racist policies.[14]"