If you stream footage of a robot, wearing a wife-beater, dookie-rope and a mustache: grabbing a girl’s ass and making humping motions afterwards; I think it’s safe to say what the intentions were… This has to be dumbest shit I’ve read in a while haha.

Be subtle about it, free of judgement. Don’t lecture them on something they likely know already, and (semi)consciously ignore to maintain an unhealthy, yet comforting pattern. It’s rather about planting seeds, than doing the thinking for them: let them come to their own conclusions next time they use it.

It’s all about predatory dark patterns, that deliberately exploit human psychology; so gear them up to recognize these abusive mechanisms. Not in a direct way, but just by casual conversation about content on their timeline, with some observation woven into it, like: quite some advertisements, huh? What does that little text say? Oh, “sponsored content”. Do your friends still post things? Because I haven’t seen any on your timeline. Shouldn’t that be the entire purpose of this platform? They give you notifications about friends liking other’s posts now? That seems a little excessive.

My mom has been using the platform a lot less since I did, and she even has opened up to the concept of disabling Facebook push-notifications. The latter needing some more time, because she’s struggling with a fear of missing out. I once disabled push-notifications for news applications too without asking, so perhaps I should do the same for Facebook (Messenger being a different application anyways).

The main problem seems to be that users have, successfully, been conditioned into wanting anti-features. My mom actually clicks personalized advertisements, and I have no clue how to cure her from that; other than to joke about a particular shoe brand always being featured. I already substituted her ad-ridden weather app for a Firefox (with uBlock) shortcut, which she has really come to appreciate. So there’s progress to be made: it just requires the right approach, and a lot of patience; which is worthwhile for loved ones.

When solar energy is low, the energy is likely to come from a plant powered using fossil fuels. So instead of tanking LPG at a station, it’s converted to electricity and transported to a charger. Internal combustion engines can also run on alternative fuels, but the practice isn’t that common (think of running a diesel engine on vegetable oil); or may be further optimized to run extremely lean (requiring less visits to a gas station: if the fuel doesn’t degrade through volatility of octane-increasing additives).

I’m not really trying to make the argument that ICE-powered vehicles are superior to EVs (or the other way around for that matter), but rather that modern vehicles (regardless of energy source) are fundamentally anti-consumer (dealership lock-in, expensive replacement assemblies, on-board surveillance-tech monitoring and sharing user-data, etc.), compared to legacy vehicles (which just happen to be ICE-powered).

If it was the other way around, ICE-power vehicles would catch the heat instead; if used to force a change in fleet, arguably for economic reasons and increased control (to manufacturers, and by extension legislators and insurance companies). And this isn’t just limited to vehicles, but also insulation of homes, how energy is metered therein (“smart” meters: allowing for disproportionality in rates), or replacement appliances utilizing that energy (supposedly in more energy-efficient ways: if working in optimal conditions).

Same goes for you it seems, since you wrote yet another comment…

I’m not really arguing Russia isn’t facilitating bot-traffic (nor here on Lemmy, regardless of instance), but I simply don’t agree with the framing of most articles on it. The claims are barely substantiated, or conflated with Cloudflare’s general traffic drop (including that of crawlers). Well that, and somewhat of a collation of not immediately related frustrations I have on the overall subject at the end… :)

You’ve already spent time writing two comments. Could’ve also spent that writing something with at least some substance to it. If I’m supposed to value you your time and effort, how about you value mine too?

@wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz already made that “argument”, if you can call it that. How about meaningfully interacting, instead of disregarding based on something irrelevant?

Unexpected, really? The “energy transition” is mostly economically motivated: in that it (indirectly) forces consumers to invest into “new” technologies (while abandoning functional appliances, substituted for newly produced ones, and infrastructure accommodating for it; carbon emissions of which rarely taken into account); and effectively spending their savings for them (if not forced to enter into a loan agreement).

The disruptions in fossil fuel supply from Russia and the Middle East (which are at least in part self-inflicted), just further “incentivize” those that are primarily financially motivated (don’t “care for the planet”). Another primary interest, if not obsession, is governments’ and insurance companies’ push for a V2X (vehicle to everything) enabled fleet: constantly monitoring and communicating with surrounding vehicles and infrastructure (directly, or through mobile carriers).

And your argument? You’re only disregarding me for using an instance with a reasonable policy, and for what you consider Russian bot traffic, which is exactly the point I’m trying to make; whether or not you consider that of a critical thinker.

And your argument as to why?

If even the US’ Cold War anti-communist propaganda station ‘Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’ states the drop is likely due to Yandex’s crawlers, what does that tell you about the credibility of Zelenskyy (having an obvious conflict of interest) and all Western outlets running with it, by extension? The Russian government might not even need bot farms at this stage, because the West keeps undermining their own credibility: with single-sided, unsubstantiated malinformation of half-truths at best. It’s so obvious to me they’re trying to pass off any critical thinker as being a Russian troll, and trying to escalate the proxy-war by attributing “hybrid-war” sabotages to the “aggressor” (that is conveniently in a weakened state because of it). Yes, Russia undeniably invaded Ukraine, but wouldn’t the US do the same to Mexico if it turned communist, following all of South-America?

Zero trust is the end station, if you allow organizations to treat your personal devices as being theirs. Organizations that could actually benefit from the increased security (which isn’t Twitter, except for some high-profile individuals, maybe), should provide the user with resources to do so, at their expense (issuing a dedicated TOTP device for example).

But what tends to happen instead, is enshittification of service, while offloading it onto the client. A similar trend can be observed with car parking: where operators remove parking meters, and require the customer to use their device and data plan, to make a payment to the operator…

We’ve been on this trajectory for quite a while now: from Outlook enforcing IT-policies of email administrators (dictating screen locking requirements as device administration app), to SMS-based 2FA requiring one to have a mobile phone number and tying all to this tamper-resistant identifier. So why not a black box snitch, paid for by the client, further restrict their freedom for “security”?

It seems perfectly in line, and I think this article draws all the right parallels.

So all this is trying to solve, while introducing a whole lot of other complexities, is the delay caused by trains stopping at intermediary stations? Where individual carriages can part of the main track, allowing others to carry on? And what about railroad crossings? Are most supposed to be dissolved, while centralizing all to fewer that separate rail from passage? Because with all these individual carriages on track, crossings will be occupied a lot more frequently. There’s simply no way to safeguard all of these crossings, and if an event occurs, it disrupts large sections of the network.

For me it’s their ransomware-like business model of: attracting new users with free accounts, incentivizing them to migrate their Gmail inbox to Proton (Easy Switch), encrypting the content (“for security”), and then letting them find out that a paid feature (Bridge) is necessary to integrate the mailbox into a third-party client like Thunderbird (as a decryption layer in between); well, unless you want to manually export the mailbox using their Mail Export Tool. I’m not opposed to paying for a service (I also donate to Disroot), but I dropped them like a hot brick when I found out: thankfully not the hard way (I tested integration before migration).

Or certificate providers are ordered to provide a false certificate; or in case of Europe (thanks to the GDPR), the “data protection officer” that larger services operating in the Union (including cloud- and hosting-services: hosting most of the modern internet), are forced to employ and provide with unrestricted access (supposedly “to monitor compliance”), may be ordered to do additional processing (including that for which their “employer” has no legal basis), whilst being gagged by “professional secrecy” (including towards this “employer”); and the NSA also has a program that seeks to weaken TLS standards (at least by pushing standards for post-quantum encryption (PQE) only, instead of AES + PQE).