Why do they even have an Amazon echo if they know it's a fucking security risk? If you need a speaker, just get a speaker, not one a spyker (sorry, that was shite)

Fuck Putin, the warmongering cunt. I hope Ukraine continues to get Western support and can kick Russia out of their country, however slim the chances might be looking right now. Russia extending its influence and things gradually going back to business as usual, only for them to do it again in another 10 years won't be good for any Western democracies.

Haven't really been following the Israel/Palestine thing much to be honest, but it would be nice if people would stop killing one another. Also really sucks that it benefits Putin.

Anything that makes VRROOOOOOM VROOOOOM noises when it doesn't need to is almost certainly driven by an asshole.

If nutrition labels bothers them so much, why not just make the cereal more nutritious and less full of shit? It's not hard to see that there is a solution that doesn't involve looking like a villain with an army of lawyers to fight a label.

He's basically the new Trump, in that for five years you could not escape Trump's fucking face on every website you visited. Perhaps Musk isn't quite that level, but he's not far off. He's in the news an insane amount, and it's basically as annoying as Trump, only he's not as ugly or stupid.

At this point I have finally realised that Elon Musk is an attention-seeking cunt and we should probably start to just ignore him, at least for a while.

However, I've got some ideas! Instead of people without children, how about we restrict the vote to the children themselves? How does that sound, Elon? Nobody over 20 should get a vote because they only have... pthh, I dunno, a few decades, 90 years at most left on this planet, so fuck them. Am I right? Maybe we could give everyone a voting point for every year they have left assuming an average lifespan of 75 years - perhaps women could have more points as they generally live longer. That would be fair, no? We should also completely take money out of politics and stop billionaires and large corporations from undermining democracy too! Don't you think that's a great idea?

As far as I can tell, they aren't doing a very good job. I've seen the notice that an ad blocker is not allowed, and even without upgrading the ad blocker I use I can still just click the close button on the notice and it goes away and I can continue to watch uninterrupted.

If Google does figure out how to prevent people from using ad blockers on YouTube, I think it will help me break my honestly unhealthy habit and reduce the amount I watch, or perhaps even quit entirely, since there are far more ads on YouTube than there were in the past - especially if you also include sponsor ads that are embedded in videos.

Assassinating Abe wasn't right, but when I heard the killer's side of the story I honestly felt a bit sorry for him. Glad to hear something is being done about the Moonies.

Yes! I was just reading a post from the authors of Lemmy on lemmy.ml, and noticed I was not logged in. I assume that because lemmy.ml is another instance, I can't log in with my usual lemmy.world credentials, but since it is federated I should be able to post, correct? However, I am not sure how, and I think a lot of people would just try logging in normally, since it's just Lemmy, right? Lemmy.ml might be safe, but I think it could be possible to confuse people into entering their password for fediverse sites on malicious instances, which steal their credentials. It's a little bit confusing to noobs like myself to be honest.

An app that can manage credentials and post properly across compatible instances and show informative messages to notify the user if and why they cannot post would be very useful, managing multiple accounts seamlessly even more useful!

People have burner Reddit and Twitter accounts for posts or votes they think could bite them in the ass, so why wouldn't they do the same on Lemmy?

This is great, but I honestly hate the way that windows treats zips like they are just folders on your computer when they are fundamentally different, and I want to do different things with them. Sure, it's nice to be able to browse the files inside, but I can do that with 7zip.

It's definitely good to have people like you investigating the backgrounds of key developers, as there might be ulterior motives behind them developing open platforms that compete with established Western companies outside of loving the free web and open source. Thank you!

However, I wonder how many opinions we disagree with would be unearthed by doing this kind of research on every core developer of Chrome, Windows, MacOS, Google or whatever. I think you would find a lot if you get people to air their honest opinions. In today's climate, if these people were open about certain opinions they might hold (not saying they do, but statistically it's likely some do) they would just be fired, so it's easy for large corporations to shake damage to their reputation from having certain staff members. For OSS it is a bit harder, since although developers can be pushed out, and software can be forked, it's all open and it's harder to understate the contribution to the source code etc. that such a person could have contributed.

It does kind of suck when you hear that developers working on software you like have wildly different worldviews to your own, but sometimes you have to put things in perspective. Having said that, if this guy is the only developer I might feel less than happy about using Lemmy instead of Reddit.

Well can't they just call it Meta Threads or Threads by Meta if it isn't already, and nothing has to change.

Religions are unlikely to change substantially, I imagine they'll just find some way to explain the existence of aliens that fits their existing scriptures and world view.

There will be new religions that pop up as a result though, for sure.

From what I've seen of him, he's definitely not reformed.

I offer Elon $1 to change his name to Doge McCumStain. I hope he will accept my generous offer.

Last Autumn I went on a month long road and hiking trip around the Tohoku region of Japan to climb as all of the 100 famous peaks of Japan in the area. I drove in a kei van from Kyoto to Tohoku and then went around all the mountains on my list, so I did an absolute fuck ton of driving (4400km total) and over 200km of hiking in just under a month.

While these are generally not challenging hikes, I didn't really want to mess around camping, since I don't have a lot of camping experience, and although I could stay in a mountain hut, I'd still need to take a setup for sleeping and extra food, so I just tried to make everything a day hike.

Mostly this was fine, but one of the last hikes I did was Mt. Iide, which was the longest of all the hikes, with about 22km of mountain trail and total ascent of around 2000m (not height, just sections where I was hiking up a hill).

I set off at 6am, slightly later than planned, but it wasn't a big problem, and the first hour and a half was absolutely fine. The weather was cloudy with some light drizzle, but I was feeling good, and had reached a narrow rocky ridge after emerging from the forest. I scrambled up a few rocky sections of path, and was quite enjoying it, but at one point it felt a bit steep and as I pushed myself up what I thought was the trail I realised that I must have made a mistake as it had basically turned into light rock climbing, and the rocks didn't seem especially firm either. I looked down and realised that if I fell I would fall quite a long way down into a valley, because the ledge I clambered up from was too narrow to stop me. I didn't really want to risk backing down onto it either as I was nearly at the top of the short climb, so with some effort I managed to push myself up and back onto the next part of the trail and to relative safety.

I looked around and realised there was another route up, with a chain to climb, and that I'd just done something really stupid because I wasn't paying attention. The drizzle had also wet the rocks, and everything felt super sketchy, but I continued up the trail crouched low to the ground in a state of fear, and eventually reached a hut and took a short break.

Then I took a wrong turn, walking for almost 40 minutes in the wrong direction. I jogged back to the hut and continued the hike along another ridge with a couple more short rocky sections, eventually managing to reach the summit, but I was absolutely drained of energy and it was also covered in snow, so wasn't especially pleasant to be there, but I had to slow down and take frequent breaks to refuel.

On the way back I was dreading heading back down the first rocky section, and was in a rush to get there before dark, but when I got there and saw it from above without the drizzle it didn't really phase me at all and I walked down it in maybe 15 minutes. I managed to get back to the van by around 4pm, so I didn't have to use my headlight at all, let alone on the rocks. Thanks to my route-finding error, I ended up walking 26km :/

This trip really woke me up to the dangers of hiking, and the need to plan carefully. I'd literally been driving to each mountain, usually sleeping in the van at the trailhead and hiking up the next day, but this time was almost too much for me, and I was lucky I didn't have even a minor accident and that I had packed just enough food. I know there are far more dangerous trails, both in Japan, and especially in other countries where mountains are larger, more remote and the likelihood of bumping into dangerous fauna is higher, but I'm glad I learned this lesson in Tohoku, and not on any of the properly terrifying hiking trails in the Northern Japan Alps.

I was watching a video by right to repair advocate Louis Rossman yesterday and he was basically saying that he's fine to go after big companies and the government to try and get right to repair passed, but he doesn't want to fuck with Scientology because they appear to be psychos that will harass the shit out of him and probably wreck his life if he gets in their way. Apparently they are anti-right to repair because they have some fake ass thetan reading machines they sell for $5000.

Anyway, he mentions some of the shit they did in his video, and while I'm not sure if it's a fact or not, he does mention that they were going after the IRS for years to try and get out of paying taxes after laws changed and they lost their tax-exempt status. After a huge amount of harassment and other crime against the IRS over 37 years, they eventually got their taxes reduced from something like a billion+ dollars to $12.5 million... How did they not just end up in jail?

Just recently created a Mastodon account, and this is my first Lemmy post, so it's very new to me too, and there is definitely a feeling of discovering something new.

I do have a similar feeling with the Fediverse as I did as a teenager back in the web 1.0 days, although it might just be that there is a lot of text content that feels sincere (which honestly there is on Reddit too), much less spam and advertising, and generally just has not been commercialised at all yet.

So was the rebranding of Twitter to X just so Elon could say "U fuckin' wot m8? This company is X, and your employment contract is with Twitter, so it looks like you were never employed here."?