Walking the streets of Cambridge without a smartphone, with nothing to do but look at blue jays and squirrels has replaced buzzing notifications in my pocket.

There’s a middle way. Turn off the notifications. Or, go crazy (and this also foils most tracking): airplane mode.

This article is becoming a bit of a chestnut. IMO the cold-turkey advice is only appropriate to some personality types (maybe most of them, admittedly). It also occurs to me that “right to be unknown” is basically exactly the same as “right to privacy”. Still, the author writes well and it would be great if people listened.

Was just about to quote the same passage with the same question! Seems we’re not familiar with what the kids are doing with AI.

Before, normies didn’t know what they were doing and so they couldn’t do it. Now they can go ahead and do it anyway. Technical ignorance is about to become a serious problem.

What do you hope to achieve by posting nothing but insults and mockery on social media? I don’t get it. You’re wasting your time.

Without China’s innovation and industrial scaling in green tech - particular solar PV and battery - the world would currently be going in reverse on the climate crisis. It is all but entirely thanks to China that carbon intensity is inching downward.

I am no fan of the Chinese political system but I recognize facts when I see them.

Interesting. And seems to be a fair overview.

If small countries are throwing Taiwan under the bus because China is the only country taking the climate crisis seriously, we in the the West only have ourselves to blame.

Very interesting. I wonder why a horse is so much more efficient than a rodent. Something to do with size and limb mechanics I guess. Would be nice to know what the dot underneath “automobile” is, I’m guessing “bus”.

Video so text summary needed.

I don’t see much indicating him as a former communist

He talked about it - some variety of Trotskyism IIRC. A bit of a surprise but shouldn’t have been. Tons of former Maoists have been in high positions. Even a neoliberal head of the European Commission (Barroso).

On the supposed virtues of communism, you won’t convince me but I suppose you know that already. IMO the world would have done very well to listen to George Orwell, someone who saw through it all on the basis of up-front experience 90 years ago. That might have saved an awful lot of needless suffering. Or Orlando Figes, who wrote a book whose title says it all: “The USSR: A People’s Tragedy”.

Useful to know.

Amusing. And what detective work! Your time is valuable, careful not to waste too much of it.

Personally I’m not especially bothered by sockpuppetry in itself (talking of people wasting their time…). But it’s obviously important to have a plurality of viewpoints. If only they would sockpuppet more creatively!

This seems right. Personally I’m not sure I could roll my eyes harder at the fact that so many people in 2026 are so ignorant as to be prepared to call themselves “communists” - after all the famines, the purges, the 40 years in which much of Europe was struggling to escape (literally) from communism… And then I saw that you, too, call yourself a communist! So I guess I’ll stop there.

Except to recommend you the Ones and Tooze podcast, in which the brilliant host (an ex-communist) recently did a whole series, in great and illuminating detail, on the various communist thinkers. Which I listened to… dutifully.

Out of interest, how do you know it’s sockpuppets?

To be honest I’m genuinely a bit interested in who this might be. I’m imagining a disgruntled Hong Kong exile with too much time on their hands. Also seems likely to be Chinese in that they have a top-down concept of information, not seeing that obvious and relentless propaganda will just backfire with a sophisticated and relatively informed audience. Perhaps I’m being slightly optimistic, but I can’t see how they’ve convinced anyone here that “China bad” who didn’t already think that.

The real issue is that AI bots are making Q&A forums de-facto redundant. StackExchange posted its stats recently, and activity is dropping through the floor there too.

Of course, this leaves the question of what the AI bots are going to do in a few years when they have no new original content to eat. But right now they still have a banquet.

20 communities with similar names (which gaming community is the “real” one?)

On this one, I agree with them. Network effects do not go well with splittism. And yet it’s hardly surprising we’re here given the ills of contemporary society: narcissism, snowflakery, identitarianism, intolerance for contradiction. For every subject there must be ten separate communities (AKA echo chambers, bubbles) so that nobody has to see anything that they might disagree with.

I’m caricaturing, of course. But this issue is real. Given the political orientation here, it probably affects the fediverse more than corporate social media. And whatever the wrongs and rights of the subject, it is not helping the cause of attracting newcomers.

Ironically, the most active user on the current #2 China community, !china@sopuli.xyz, is an absolutely indefatigable anti-Chinese propagandist.

This person, @Hotznplotzn@lemmy.sdf.org posts multiple times per day, usually quite sensible and well-sourced articles, but always on the same downer subjects (repression, Uighurs, corruption and so on) and never anything that paints China (let alone its government) in the slightest positive light. Since nobody else in this community can match their posting stamina, the end result is a community that, to newcomers, looks like one rando’s “I hate China” blog. Hardly surprising that it’s not a very successful community.

I’ve asked this user to consider dropping the tempo a bit, and been met with defensiveness. I complained in private to the mod, who is completely AWOL, and they didn’t care. Oh well.

Yeah sure, I understand all that, indeed it’s pretty much exactly what I wrote. You are simply taking an expansive definition of E2EE where I am using a narrow one. As far as we know, Meta is indeed sending its messages in an encrypted state, end to end, so technically it makes the grade as E2EE. That debate is kinda boring, I was simply trying to point out that this case study illustrates the importance of FOSS. And since you are downvoting me, that’s all I have to say here.

What he said is obviously technically correct, and we all know that he’s playing a difficult game where he has to keep a mad king on side.

Storm in a teacup that only became a news story because social media is encouraging politicians to shout at each other from behind the safety of their screens (like everybody else in society is doing).

if they can read the messages then its not strictly speaking e2ee

Yes, it can absolutely still be E2EE: the message is encrypted and the central server does not have the key. The issue is that the clients (i.e. the "E"s) are controlled by the same entity as the central server, and we don’t know exactly what the client (app) is doing. So the fact that it’s E2EE is somewhat moot.

This is exhibit #1 in the case for open-source software.

PS: you obviously get this, I’m just trying to make it clearer for anyone who doesn’t.

OK. Oz might be a bit of an outlier situation but I stand corrected.

OK I understand better. Interesting information, too.