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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • There are a lot of subreddits which routinely award hundreds or thousands of upvotes for repetitive low value posts. … This is a cog in the well-tuned machine of new-accounts being created and matured to look ‘real’ for when they are later used for advertising / manipulation later down the line.

    In the early months of a new account, it is easier to spot. Eg. If you see a post on a game subreddit with a title like “Exciting to try this game, any tips get started?”, you might click the profile and see that their entire history is a bunch of low-effort discussion starters. “Name a band from the 80s that everyone has forgotten”; “What’s the most misunderstood concept in maths?”; “What’s the most underrated (movie / band / drug / car / tourist attraction / whatever suits the topic of the subreddit)?”

    A heap of threads like that, on a new account with a very generic name (adjective-noun-numbers is a common pattern); posting on a variety of subredits… is highly suspicious. But it gets harder to recognise as the account gets older and has a longer history - at which point it is ready to be sold / used for its next purpose.






  • Hey, no one is trying to stop you from doing that. I’m sure it is very convenient for you.

    My point of view though is that automatically uploading my personal files to some corporation computer on the other side of the world should not be the default when I try to save something. Maybe sometimes I’ll want to use that feature, but there are a variety of reasons why I don’t want it most of the time. And I definitely don’t like having to jump through hoops just to avoid it.




  • Sure. I agree it won’t change unless citizens push for a change. But choosing to not participate is not pushing for a change. That’s just capitulation. Choosing to not vote is not a signal of protest. It’s a signal of someone who doesn’t care what the outcome is.

    Voting is the first and most basic step in pushing for change. Doing more is good, but you definitely can’t skip that step.





  • I agree. The rich are the main problem, and that should be top priority. But that also shouldn’t be used as an excuse to not improve oneself personally. My suggestion is that people shouldn’t worry about aiming for personal idealism, but should just make a conscious effort to be less environmentally damaging than their peers, their family, work colleges, and friends. If a person achieves that, then they can be confident that they are not the problem.

    [edit] Obviously if everyone did what I’m suggesting then it would be a kind of race-to-the-bottom. But that’s not happening. If it was, then we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. All I’m suggesting is a rough heuristic for what’s reasonable for an individual to do on their own.


  • I’d think ‘repurpose’ is part of ‘reuse’ rather than recycle. Doesn’t recycle mean that you’re going to destroy the object to extract its raw resources to be made into a new product? Whereas ‘reuse’ just means that you are going to use it again. I’d say ‘repurpose’ means you are going to use it again, but not in the same way it was used the first time.

    In any case, I agree that the added words are unnecessary. Maybe they were added to deliberately weaken the slogan. Sometimes people deliberately try to make sustainable living sound like a lot of work, by adding a whole lot of extra steps and conditions.




  • That has happened. But clearly that is not how chat-bots and image generating AI work. Even putting aside the style and peculiarities of the results, the AI programs are far too fast for that to be done by a person. Even if a person just read a message and then did a direct cut-and-paste from wikipedia, that would take far too long to be convincing as a chat-bot.