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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • You underestimate the power of whining online.

    MAGA is the result of decades of talk radio and pseudo-journalism aimed at curating a very specific way of seeing the world.

    They refined a narrative that was persuasive, easy to upload into people, consistent in how it framed emergent issues, and instilled a sense of urgency that encouraged its adherents to spread the gospel and get politically active.

    Obviously, we need to vote. But if you think victory is getting a Bernie 2.0 to 51% in a primary, you’re gonna be sorely disappointed by the general. It needs to be a slam dunk. We need a cultural win before we can have an electoral win.




  • They’re all towers. But the buttons are all pretty shallow with very light actuation force required.

    And they all happen to be situated such that the corner which has the button is the corner furthest away from the desk, so when she jumps up onto the PC as a platform to get ready to jump onto the desk, her feet are all grouped up right in that corner.

    And you can imagine that if she’s crouched down ready to jump, and I put my arm out to prevent her from jumping from the tower to the desk, that’s a lot of pressure all applied to her little toe beans.

    It’s an unfortunate coincidence. But that experience, together with seeing this Mac Mini design, has made me wonder why we tend to put a button with such drastic effects right out in the open like this.


  • You’re catching downvotes, but you’re not wrong.

    The emotional vibe from the left is: “If you’re not enough of a leftist according to my unique standards, you’re basically the worst person to ever exist. And don’t ask me to explain, cuz it’s not my job to educate you.”

    The emotional vibe from the right is: “Welcome home, you clever protagonist you. You knew the truth all along, you just needed the courage to admit you knew it. Hey, while you’re here, I’d like to introduce you to a few other things you might not realize you already believe.”

    The supreme irony is: The right doesn’t believe in democracy. They don’t believe you can persuade people and get them on your side and move forward with a cohesive vision of governance. Yet they’re doing a better job of persuading people than the left is.








  • A couple months ago, I logged into an old Reddit account. It only took a few minutes of scrolling before it happened.

    I had to scroll back up and try again, and record my screen so I could doublecheck my count later.

    35 ads or “recommended” posts (i.e. not from anything I subscribed to) in a row.

    I’m curious what that means for the overall percentage of the average user’s feed.

    Edit: Okay yall… I appreciate all of the free technical support, but it’s really not needed. I was just documenting some findings.

    But since everyone is so concerned about improving my Reddit experience, here are a few things to consider:

    • I’m a mobile dev, so I don’t mind enduring a shitty UX for the sake of finding out what other companies are doing with their apps. If I’m going in with a mindset of curiosity, it really doesn’t bother me. In fact, I want to see the worst parts.
    • Even if I had been going in just to have a pleasant scrolling experience, the reason I opened Reddit at all is because my wife had my phone for a while (due to toddler nonsense, we had swapped phones and she was stuck sitting in the hallway for a few minutes) and she had decided to open the app, so the decision of app vs. website was kinda made for me already.
    • Even if she had considered using the website instead, I wasn’t logged in because I only use private browsing (again, mobile dev, so when testing web flows I like to make sure there is no saved web data).
    • Even if I was already logged in, it’s an iPhone. While I do use an ad-blocker, the ad-blocking capabilities of Safari are pretty limited, so I’m not sure it would’ve improved much.
    • Even if I was on Android, I’d probably still not have any extensive ad-blocking enabled, because I want to stay relatively vanilla in my setup to reduce confounding factors when testing.
    • Even if there was a genuine opportunity here for my setup to be improved… I didn’t ask for that, and swarming people with “have you considered doing it the right way?” when they’re just making a basic observation doesn’t create a great atmosphere for the overall Lemmy experience.