So… if Duolingo is just AI now, why would anyone pay for Duolingo? Just ask the AI for language lessons yourself.

You can absolutely submit screenshots of text conversations as evidence in court. I’ve literally done this myself.

Someone could challenge the veracity of the evidence if they wanted to, at which point you might want to prove that they hadn’t been edited by doing something like showing the copies that are actually on your phone. But you can absolutely submit screenshots.

I may at some point. It’s one of my backup plans. I do like the area I live in, though. It’s thankfully one of the better states. Maybe we’ll secede and join you! :D

We definitely won the election. Canadian authoritarianism would have just made things worse. And at least we still have somewhere to go north of the border.

They have a damn good reason to want to impeach him. He’s threatening the economy and the remainder of our relevance internationally. The Republicans have to live here too. If he yanks down all the load-bearing structures in our house, it’s going to collapse on them too.

I mean, step one is not turning the entire opposition into defeatists via constant steeping in negativity and hopelessness. We need to get our energy up and keep it there so we can actually get some traction. We have to believe that we have a chance to change something before we can actually work up the gumption to do it.

That won’t happen if half the left is busy telling the other half we’re cooked. It certainly won’t happen if they convince more of us to become defeatists or to try to take our ball and go home as if our homes aren’t literally in the country in question.

I would be surprised if it got that much support, but that’s not the point. The vibes on Lemmy are absolutely terrible and actively cultivating helplessness. There are so many people here who immediately decided we’re all cooked and spend their time trying to demotivate people and push any resistance to admit defeat that it’s absurd. That’s not how you push back, it’s not how you make things better, and it’s literally the kind of shitty helpless attitude that got us into this mess.

Something isn’t right? Don’t take active steps to try to fix it or give your support to anyone who is. Stand on the sidelines preaching this loser shit. We’re all doomed and there’s no point fighting. Don’t run new candidates, just refuse to vote. Don’t create networks of support, tear each other down. Don’t for a second allow a glimmer of hope to go unopposed.

Seriously, how can anyone ever be expected to accomplish anything with that kind of attitude?

I’m honestly starting to think this platform is just as toxic as Reddit or Facebook have ever been, without the help of any shady manipulative algorithm.

Despite the defeatist angles that are constantly posted on Lemmy, this is not what I’m seeing from actually reading the news.

Congress could literally be voting to impeach with 90% of the house and senate in support and y’all would still be banging on about how nothing will ever happen. I’m over it.

🤞

I think there’s a good chance. He’s shown both parties that the result of him being able to do whatever he wants unchecked will be the crumbling of our alliances and our economy and the steady erosion of all the good things about our country. Even conservatives can see the damage he’s doing.

If there were an election today he wouldn’t even come close to winning. Hopefully those who are responsible for his potential impeachment see that if they allow this to continue they won’t have a shot in their next elections either.

I’m just hoping there’s eventually some form of private server similar to FiveM so I can have my Dune roleplay.

Personally? The vast bulk of my interactions with people online. Voice chat, DMs, servers for pretty much everything. Being involved in roleplaying communities in DayZ and Conan, the vast majority of the behind-the-scenes stuff is taking place on discord. Servers for particular game servers as well as groups make up a pretty big portion of my list, along with smaller private discord servers of networks of players from various other servers. It’s how I stay connected with dozens of people I’ve known for years.

I’m also in quite a few discords related to modding and game development. Nearly every modder has their own discord, which is extremely useful if you’re running your own game servers and need to be in contact with them or if you make mods yourself and want to seek advice or information for compatibility. The same is true of a lot of other non-gaming software, with many developers having their own servers where they post updates and where you can find advice or post suggestions.

I’ve got a few queer community servers on my list, which were particularly helpful when I was early in my transition before I really had gotten around to rebuilding my social network and finding accepting people. There’s even a discord for a group of animators I used to spend a lot of time with back in the mid 00s; back then we were using forums and IRC mostly, and a little bit of Skype, but these days it’s been a good way to keep in touch.

If I’m home and on my computer, I’m almost always in a discord voice chat. It’s basically the modern equivalent of AIM or ICQ or Facebook, but with loads of added features and without Meta being involved. I even use it for note taking and storing images and screencaps.

Even something like Matrix, at the moment, doesn’t really cover all the voice and video chat features that Discord does. It’s close, but it’s missing essential components like push-to-talk, and it requires workarounds to enable things like screen sharing.

Discord turning to shit would be a real pain in the ass.

No paint? Sure. No touchscreen? Good.

…No radio? That’s going to absolutely murder their sales.

Do those have push to talk?

It’s one thing when everybody quits Starbucks. It’s another when everybody who might do the right thing resigns from all the positions of power.

It’s strange the way resigning seems to be treated as some sort of protest in and of itself. It’s not. It’s giving up. Protest would be refusing to resign, refusing to obey orders, and delegitimizating the people giving those orders.

Resigning just makes it easier for someone less principled to come along and do the job.

I think it’s just jabbing at our early assumptions about dinosaurs seemingly lacking much in the way of bulk. We used to interpret them as these ultra-skinny weirdly mummified looking things rather than the plumper creatures many of them probably were.

The idea is that aliens find skeletons of animals we’re more familiar with and come to the same kind of wildly mistaken conclusions about them that we might have if we’d found rabbit skeletons without having first hand experience of modern rabbits.

What is this shady, unsubstantiated, posted yesterday ass random github repo trying to encourage people to compromise their email security and why is it worth posting?

How can someone be guilty of acting as an agent of China but not guilty of conspiring to act as a foreign agent? 🤔

Once I sat in a field listening to Victor Wooten and whistling along with him. On a fence nearby was I think a brushed shouldered blackbird? Brushed shouldered something. It started singing with me and doing a little dance. Eventually it even started syncopating its part. Like, you could see it waiting for the timing to be just right for each note. On key and everything. Went on for about half an hour.

Birds are cool.

Honestly, this may be one of the concepts that it would be better to bring to people once they’ve already found some kind of leftist solidarity. If you take someone steeped in right-wing rhetoric and the first hurdle you put in front of them is expecting humility and understanding before you even give them a reason to want to understand? I don’t think that’s a terribly effective approach.

If the first thing I say to a cis person is that they have privilege that I lack because I’m trans, I’m doing a few things right out the gate that probably aren’t going to get them to listen. First, I’m highlighting the separate categories that we’re in rather than the unified categories that we’re in. Second, I’m asking them to defer to my experience of the world and to show sympathy and understanding before I even attempt to win them over. Third, I’m asking them to start from a place of humility before I’ve shown that I can be trusted with the very vulnerability that I’m requesting.

I find it’s much easier to look for common ground first and foremost. Find the ways that they have to struggle and recognize that struggle. Show them that I have some of the same exact struggles that they do. Often this comes down to health, finances, or other experiences that are more universal. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be a shared struggle, it can be a shared interest. But whatever it is, the first step has to be highlighting affinity. There’s a reason people talk about the weather, because we’re all in it together. Rain falls on everyone.

Once they see that we’re not so different, they tend to be much more willing to hear the stuff that’s outside their experience. You might even be able to highlight patterns like the interplay of intersectional privilege. But if you try to start from there? Good luck.

Complain about traffic. Complain about the price of eggs. Hit enough of those universals and they won’t be so skeptical when you bring something that requires them to stretch a bit to the table.

Our problem, I think, is that we’ve largely got the cart entirely before the horse.