A 50-something French dude that's old enough to think blogs are still cool, if not cooler than ever. I also like to write and to sketch.
A well integrated personality in our so wonderful capitalist societies?
In this model, humanity is merely more than a tool and/or a resources to be transformed using said tool, like any other natural resources. As a tool, we may very well be on the verge of being severely demoted (thx to AI and robots). And as a resources, in a pure capitalist logic, we should not have any rights (certainly not to decide of anything) but the right of being used by the ones able to exploit and transform us into more wealth (for themselves).
It's even more obvious when observing the active (and enthusiastic) demolishing of any form of spirituality/morality which were the only real limits one could us in order to restrain that relentless logic...
Following that logic we should not even be considered citizens of our respective countries anymore, not any more than a lump of coal or a cow grazing. Could this exactly be what is coming for us? Nah... Obviously, I'm just being silly here. Good question, though.
Indeed, that would not be medicine anymore but what an amazingly profitable business it would still be: lifetime (and endless) subscriptions to access new/healthy copies of oneself on a regular basis. I can already see our billionaire friends having a hard-on just thinking about the gazillion dollars that will earn them, on top of their already excessively large fortune(s).
Had been an Apple customer since the early 80s. Switched to Linux some 7 or 8 years ago.
I don't consider myself opinionated about tools (computer or otherwise). I just know what tool works best for me for the task at hand. For years, it used to be Mac/Apple. it is no longer the case.
Almost everything I do is either out of a desire to so, or because I have to do it. As a kid, I was already too stubborn to worry much about validation, getting old (now nearing my 60s) did not help much in that regard.
Say, writing (and reading) is something I do because I love doing it and, to grossly summarize, I could not care less about people (dis)agreeing with what I write (edit: and read). I mean, I do care but only in the sense that I will listen to their remarks and objections when they they have some, while I don't care about their feelings and emotions or whether they like what I write (and read), or not. Compared to, say, filling my tax form, which is another form of writing for which I do care a lot about how it will be read and received... but is also not something I write out of passion :p
- Without lies any civilization would collapse in a matter of minutes: faced with what all of us really think, most people would kill one another (or commit suicide) even faster than that, as all the wishful-thinking and illusions so many of us rely upon would instantly vanish.
- People would try to get rid of that tech (and in the process some would decide to do some nasty things to their creators/advocates) trying to save themselves from that very short lived hell this tech created. And they would fail.
no matter ho painful (and humbling), it's a great way to filter out friends from 'people you like spending time with'. I mean, if not a single one of them was willing to ask for your point of view on the situation, what does it say about them? Most certainly that none were a friend of yours. Friends do care about one another.
Many years ago, when I quit my 'dream' job (that came with good money and some prestige attached to it), a job I was even quite good at, my spouse and I witnessed almost all our 'dear friends' ghosting us. Suddenly, I was a nobody they had no use for. So be it. People come and go.
It helps to realize real friends are very rare: I know many people, quite a few of them I may even enjoy spending time with, but I have one friend. A single one, we've been friends for the last 40+ years and we've been through a lot of hard times together (despite each of us living in a different country, and not meeting that often), never failing the other. Someone like that is rare, very much unlike those 'people one may enjoy spending time with' that will often come and go, on a whim.
Getting rid of them is an opportunity to meet new people this time not making the same mistake: don't think all the people you enjoy are friends. Most, the very large majority, will not be. And that's fine.
"What a sad and poor country".
People should get a decent salary when they're hired to do a job, not hope for customer's tips to earn their living.
I would also be tempted to say that a poster that openly hostile to customers may not be the wisest choice to help them learn... anything.
Never. Why would I do that? It's an object, and I would not even do that toward a person.
The day we realized there were too many ads on TV... we (my spouse and I) decided it was not a good deal we were offered (paying for a tv and then being forced to watch always more ads) so we got rid of the tv (not breaking it, or anything: we gave it away) and since then we never watched TV again, that was some 26 years ago.
The day I realized I could not trust my (smart)phone to respect my privacy... I stopped using it for anything personal. No social, no games, not even music or ebooks are stored on it: only what I'm required to use for security and finance purpose because I have no alternative. Heck, I barely use it as a phone ;) And certainly not to watch YT: I watch it on my computer using uBO on a Firefox fork (Waterfox), so I never have to watch an ad. I used to be a paid subscriber to YT, but I decided to stop paying the day they became serious about hunting down on ad-blockers... and I started using one myself ;)
a weapon of mass destruction... of whatever any group of people will consider a menace and want to dismiss by making it 'hostile to progress' (progress being themselves/their idea(l)s, obviously).
They tell me that you may want to start visiting used bookstore more ;)
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Having an open discussion is one thing. Being bombarded with half-digested rhetoric by a bunch of people not willing at all to confront ideas but merely looking forward to hate on you is a a rather different thing.
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Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here?
There are a lot of that around here, a lot more of it on some specific instances (servers). The great thing is that:
- it's easy to filter them out (blocking users, keywords or even entire instances when/if required)
- if some instances are literally ruined by that, not all of them are concerned.
I like proper discourse and it’s alright if I and another person disagree on something, what is important is that we communicate and understand where the other is coming from.
And one can get that on Lemmy/Piefed/the fediverse (it's the only reason I created an account and decided to stay), provided one learns to filter what I call the noise (aka, all the crap you noticed)
Anything pro-African is mostly neutral but in essence ignored, no upvotes, no downvotes, no comments.
I could not say but keep in mind that a lot of the content will be ignored and that there are a lot less users, like a lot than on other social media or on reddit. My own French speaking community has a real tiny user base and most topic related to France will barely get any comment or reaction: we're not enough ;)
My web would be a lot more focused on static content, aka text content and a less centralized one too. Making for a much leaner web (less resources wasted to load useless crap) while at the same time making for a much slower web to... consume as reading takes time, which also means the necessity to carefully pick what one will read instead of doom scrolling and also spend more time/attention reading each pick, one can't just glance at a block of text).
Hopefully, a Web less self-centered, with less fomo/anxiety/hate/anger/stupidity/numbness. With more attention and awareness to the other(s).
also, should it be chunky and easy to click?
Should a doorknob be easy to use?Should you pant zipper be easy to use?
Scrollbar used to be easy to use on computers, at one time. Then, designers took over the UI. Now, they're only about look. Usability? who gives a crap about that, right?
Probably the same designers, or from the same schools, that decided it was a great design to have rounded windows on rectangular screens, I imagine. But who am I to criticize professional designers...
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Liberating.
That was many, many decades ago. Never looked back.
I don’t know what to do. What would you suggest doing? Thank you.
Re-learn there is something else than FOMO that makes your live worth living. How? 1) turn off news and social media. 2) Don't turn them back on, even when it irks so bad.
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My own blog is so not worried with deadline or algorithm (not a single ads, and no desire to make a cent out of it, nor to promote anything) that it has no thematic and zero publishing schedule. I just checked, the last published post is from April 1st (isn't that funny). Some drafts have been waiting to be published... when and if I feel like it which may very well never happen.
I used to publish a lot more many years ago, on other blogs and on social media, for a relatively larger audience, but then one day I realized that was a rat race (one that was driving my nuts) and that was not what I wanted to do with the time I had left to live on this planet. So, I stopped using all my social media accounts and blogs without giving any explanation to anyone. I just left. A few years later, under another name, I opened this tiny blog that I don't really promote, on which I seldom publish and that, rather unsurprisingly, barely gets any reader.
The interesting thing is that I kinda like this blog, and the handful emails (no comment form on that blog) I may get in a year from a rare lost reader, a lot. I enjoy these exchanges.
It reminds me of the good old snail mail, people my age (soon to be 60) and older may remember. How we used to write to people all over the world and waited sometimes for weeks if not months (people were already busy back then), to get a reply. And how a discussion could last for years. Heck, with my best friend we wrote each other for decades. Plural... Even when we happened to live in the same country and city.
A bit like we used to play chess before the Internet, through mail. It was slow and a school of patience.
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Has not been social for a while, imho. I left Twitter some 7 years ago (or more? Can't remember) because of that feeling.... I joined it when it was first introduced and it was so much different, so much nicer and sincere. Not perfect but really great.
There is still that around here, just we lack more active users and we would also gain a lot by being less.... obsessed with politics. Imho, at least.
As for sharing hobbies: irl gathering are still ok-ish. Alas, oftentimes such event will be wrecked by some asshole trying to turn it into something they can boast about on their social media.
Blogs are still a thing, even though it seems almost impossible to get younger people to read outside of their favorite social media platform, blogs are there, very much alive if slower, and they're as much about sharing passions and hobbies as they ever were when they were trendy.
Habits were my biggest source of resistance. The day I decided to deal with those, the rest was (almost) painless.
The trigger was my desire to get back some control over my data (and over my computer) and to get back some privacy... while also being able to easily fix/upgrade my hardware instead of having to purchase a new one when it's fallen out of warranty.
Bash + scripting replaced Automator for my use case. The one thing I still do miss from macOS is... Spotlight. There is a lot of ways to search on Linux but the simplicity, efficiency and speed of Spotlight... it's just <3