No.

Not really. If someone is offering their view, it’s often because they want to be valued for what they bring to the conversation. There’s nothing wrong with someone wanting to feel valued. There’s just no way to filter the things people say based on their motivation because even the speakers are often unaware of it. That’s a level of self-awareness very few people can manage. If you could magically shut down all communication that wasn’t at least heavily based in the esteem drive, you’d have a nearly silent world.

It’s somewhat similar, but there are a few differences.

One, the instance matters. You’ll see users as BlahBlah@somesuch.blargh. The somesuch.blargh is the instance. An instance with .ml is often a sign of tankies. 196 has a high proportion of trans individuals. db0 leans technical. World is more conversational and broad. Lots of smaller ones around too with less defined reputations/communities. If you want to be a piece of shit, there are actually instances for that too. They just get defederated. (No one outside the instance will see it)

Two, advertisers are evil. There are no ads here. No one wants to make a community that advertisers approve of. The focus is on maintaining the community, not a business. You might see things that offend you a little. Unless it’s actually hateful or illegal, grow up and deal with it. If it is hateful and illegal, report it. Mods are generally pretty good in a lot of places. Learn to use ‘block user,’ ‘block community,’ and ‘block instance’ to improve your feed. There’s no company algorhythmically trying to force you to see things.

Three, the maturity level is higher here. Reddit is the big name so it has all the teens. Lemmy leans toward older, more technical, less popularity focused people. There’s still plenty of silliness, but it’s not usually the same kind seen elsewhere. It’s a good thing.

Four, no karma. Your points aren’t about you. They are to help sort post and comment quality individually. So, if you are getting some downvotes because you said something a group of people didn’t like, ignore it. The points won’t follow you to the next post or comment.

Rule 0 is still ‘Don’t be an asshole’ though.

Depends on your goals. Are you putting something flashy on your arm candy’s finger so you can show off how wealthy you are to your male competitors? Shell out. Are you trying to give her the chance to flash it around to show her female competitors she landed a whale? Shell out. Are you buying it as a symbol of your secure, mature love? Price doesn’t matter. You could put a rubber O-ring on there and the point is served, but something that demonstrates you really know her is great.

As for permission, fuck the dad. They’re not the one you’re marrying. They don’t get a say.

The BS level is lower in Lemmy interactions than in day to day interactions. There are a lot of tech workers, who are famously asp-y. Same for a lot of net nerds really. People are less filtered as well because moderation is more about pushing out hateful people rather than creating an environment marketers like.

Taking things seriously is a sign one cares. The alternative is apathy. To borrow a quote, either everything matters or nothing does, and much rather the former than the latter.

If you are uncomfortable being held to some kind of standard, I’m sure you can find communities for that. Anything with ‘shitpost’ in it’s name should fit.

You’ve just described the social sphere of all humanity, I suspect.

It was half joking, but realistically, the cat is basically innocent, stuck in the care of a person who refuses to listen to reason in favor of their irrational beliefs, like a kid raised by a religious zealot. I won’t actually say the poster should go commit whatever crime cat kidnapping is, but I would say their friend may not be capable of making sound decisions, which inherently makes them untrustworthy, which makes their friendship dubious. If you can’t trust someone, they’re not really a friend.

VPNs help your privacy against ISPs, not cookie tracking and malware like Facebook.

Complete wipe? Probably not. Change on a scale so deep and wide as to render their relation to what we are currently as relevant as our relation to a nautilus? Yeah. Pretty much guaranteed. Deep time has seen more worlds made of this planet than you could ever imagine surviving.

There seems to be a bit of an odd relation between its value and cost. Building a model and setting up a data center is horrifically expensive, so LLMs as a service have to be just as expensive. But the stuff that can be done by LLMs is low stakes, low thought work, like copy writing, chatbot customer service answering the same 30 FAQs but crashing out on anything else, summarizing this morning’s headlines, etc. The price on these things is still being hashed out but it’s looking a lot like using AI is like hiring Anthropic for $100,000/yr. to replace a person who only gets paid $45,000/yr.

Where is my grip on reality (not socially comfortable consensus delusion, but reality) failing?

Take the cat. Be the Cat Protective Services the cat needs. Then find real friends who aren’t so delusional they probably shouldn’t be considered legally capable of giving consent.

One of the grand, society wide problems (at least in the English speaking world, my experience with other parts is limited) is the way in which people, in an effort to avoid hitting people’s feelings, and to keep things simple for children, have stretched the word ‘friend’ to gloss over important distinctions between different relationships.

In order to avoid hurting people’s feelings, they point at a coworker who they share memes with over the company slack channels and say ‘friend’ even though they never speak outside of those memes, they don’t know anything about each other, and they wouldn’t trust them with anything more meaningful than a meme.

In order to avoid having to explain the difference between different kinds of relationship (which they quite possibly don’t know themselves) to kids, adults point at the kid their kid shares a classroom with and loves like a brother, and the kid who puts their kid through mild physical torture on a nearly daily basis, and calls them both ‘friend.’ How is the kid supposed to acknowledge the difference they have no words for outside of making hand waving gestures How are they supposed to teach their own kids the difference if they don’t learn it?

English has the words friend, buddy, coworker, pal, comrade, ally, mate, classmate, bunkmate, playmate, acquaintance, companion, partner, associate, chum, bro, and more, but because people are too lazy, ignorant, or socially anxious, they all end up as ‘friend.’

It is possible to think of time as a ‘line’ with events strung on it like flags/tags.

Some people believe there are points at which events seem like they could result in different outcomes, like flipping a coin. They flip a coin and it comes up ‘heads’ but they can imagine a world where the flip came up ‘tails.’

Some people even think both the ‘heads’ world and the ‘tails’ world are equally real, just that people in one cannot interact with the other. Both worlds continue forever.

These are ‘parallel’ or ‘alternate’ timelines.

Here comes heat wave Aaauughh.

That’s probably a joke for legal reasons but I have to wonder how often someone like Vance thinks the phrase, ‘One little push…’

Not until after the trial.

Never seen that anywhere before. I don’t think your ‘we’ is the same as our ‘we.’

If this is the simulation the entity that is running it is ineffably more complicated than you can possibly imagine with your tiny simulation of a brain.