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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • Kagi.

    The downside is that it costs $10 per month.

    The upside is:

    • Privacy first
    • You can pin websites to the top of results, promote them so they appear higher, demote them so they appear lower, or have them completely removed
    • Lenses - quickly tell Kagi what type of results you want (News sources, academic articles, forum posts, programming sites, small web, etc.)
    • Snaps - search shortcuts kinda like bangs. Eg, typing @w is the same as typing site:wikipedia.com
    • An actual good AI summary. Completely unobtrusive - only activated when you press the button, doesn’t overextrapolate your request, and will only source the same results that you get from the search
    • Direct image results

    When I first migrated a couple years ago, it was a bit worse than Google but pretty close. Nowadays, I find it to be much much better. It’s honestly close to how Google was back in 2015 before they made it garbage.



  • That’s not how DEI policies are supposed to be applied. You’re not supposed to just reverse who’s being discriminated against. DEI means that you consider equivalent factors and ensure that your hiring pipeline and methodology doesn’t improperly harm certain classes.

    For example, you have two new hires coming straight out of the same college with the same degree.

    One of them grew up in a rather wealthy household. Everything was paid for them. They could spend their entire time at college focusing on schoolwork and socializing. They graduated with a 3.5 GPA.

    The other grew up rather poor. They had to work multiple jobs during college just to afford food and rent. They really couldn’t study except late at night and during the occasional lull at work. They graduated with a 2.8.

    If you just look at the GPA, it’s clear that the first candidate is better. But if you consider the factors behind it, well, then it’s the second. That’s an impressive work ethic. It’s rather common for people like that to drop out because they struggle too much making ends meet and can’t afford to stay.

    A proper DEI policy should be fighting back against misapplied policies like hiring quotas. It should be recognizing additional qualitative and quantitative factors.




  • Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

    Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.


  • That’s not even recent. Russia has been astroturfing Reddit since at least 2015.

    I remember reading /r/politics pretty often back then. All of a sudden, half the posts were from RT talking about Hillary and the DNC. Yes, what they did to Bernie was bullshit but the point was clearly to either get people to vote for Trump instead or to encourage people not to vote.

    Now, like you said, it’s about the war. All of a sudden, every single post about the invasion has dozens of people who are totes Ukrainian and think that Zelenskyy is a monster who refuses to end the war. Yet they either have a rather bare post/comment history or never mentioned the war before.

    And, if you go to the profile for any user who identified themselves as Ukrainian years ago, it’s crazy but they’re still in favor of the war and protecting Ukraine.

    This is what propaganda is. It’s not just the government putting up posters saying you should listen to them; it’s convincing you that your views are extreme and unpopular.


  • Haven’t gotten banned yet but it’s definitely gotten to the point on Reddit where you are aware that you can’t discuss some topics.

    Like mentioning Luigi could get you shadow-banned. Redditors acted like they were going to stand up against this and yet there’s nothing. So the censorship is working - either all the comments are getting removed or people are too afraid to talk about it.


  • I’d argue Lemmy and other decentralized platforms are the last bastion for free speech instead of Reddit though.

    Lemmy is kind of forced to be, too.

    Horrific speech can be removed from the site. But if you want to see it, the admin logs are open to the public. Other instances also aren’t forced to play along with the views of one instance. And each instance can choose whether they want to connect with others.

    So you could create your own Christian Nationalist and White Supremacist Lemmy. But our instances don’t have to federate with it. And if they choose to do so, we can leave for a different one or the users can block it entirely.

    Lemmy lets anyone have a platform and, simultaneously, it doesn’t force anyone to listen to you just because you have your own platform. Basically, everything that makes Lemmy a decentralized platform also makes it good for moderation without harming free speech.