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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Back then the internet was a bunch of coffee shops. Not literally, of course - but for me it was about 30 people on messenger, my favorite chatroom, a random message board, a small but far flung group of people on LiveJournal, and sometimes even my Neopets guild.
    Each was my own retreat. The weird and funny stuff we shared there was created and shared because people had a passion for whatever. It also was great in that you could learn about something, and share it with another group that had not seen it yet.

    Today the internet is the infinite cul-de-sacs of meme pages, political messaging groups, and disinformation rings on Facebook, along with approximately 6 people that keep showing up from your friends list of hundreds. Or it’s the screaming gladiatorial stadium of Reddit, where the sheer volume of noise smothers any particular voice. Maybe it’s the infinite lawless Walmart of X or even the carefully manicured Target that is BlueSky.
    From mining your attention, to hawking trinkets amidst the spectacle, or attempting to sell a little bit of everything to anyone, the new internet lacks third places. It’s all business, all the time, and you can feel it. Every meme is created to engage with that platform’s broadest audience. Everything is homogenized and lacks uniqueness. All the content has been aggregated and reshared, and in the endless and futile search for validation from the algorithm it’s lost something that makes it meaningful.

    And that’s why I like Lemmy. It’s a digital third place.



  • I’ve never been a UMH customer, but about 7 months after the breach happened (November), I got a letter from the company handling customer complaints for Change Healthcare, telling me an unbeknown amount of my medical and or financial information was leaked to unknown parties via some unknown method. If I had questions, I could call the company handling customer complaints.
    When I called to ask how Change came to be in possession of my medical data, that they then lost, and subsequently failed to inform me of the situation within my state’s statutory notification window for having your data hacked, the representative told me they didn’t know, and would not be able to find out what company had entrusted them with my data.



  • If I’m honest, I think your dad’s logic is sound:
    Whether or not your brother has COVID is immaterial to the fact that he has an illness that is likely contagious and is still planning to visit your compromised aunt.
    If she’s ill enough that any illness could tip the scales for her, then it doesn’t matter which illness. The real question is why the hell is your brother considering visiting at all.

    Not that you’re wrong for asking that, it’s just that your question is superseded by a question that it seems your dad forgot to think about while contradicting you.

    Edit: Scratch that. I can’t do words good sometimes.
    I re-read your comment. I misunderstood part of your comment. I thought you were saying your brother is visiting your aunt sick, who has cancer. But your aunt is sick with cancer. My whole comment is predicated on a scenario that isn’t happening.




  • Monument@lemmy.sdf.orgtoMemes@lemmy.mlToxicity
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    7 months ago

    That’s very fair, indeed.

    Perhaps awareness of one will spark awareness of the other. I suppose my concern is that plasticisers are sort of a ‘hidden’ risk, for the most part. They’re used in nearly every food packaging (and prep, such as hoses) that isn’t contained in glass, or served up in its own peel.


  • Monument@lemmy.sdf.orgtoMemes@lemmy.mlToxicity
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    7 months ago

    Microplastics are terrifying and all that, but I’m sort of more worried about plasticisers like BPA, BPF, BPS and the rest of the alphabet of BP-whatever’s that was created and brought into use after the dangers of BPA were realized.

    Just a heads up - if something plastic says it’s BPA-free, it probably uses a different bisphenol compound that is less studied than BPA. And is likely as toxic (or even more toxic)!

    But nobody ever talks about those, because science words.







  • So - I don’t think Firefox would be generating captions for PDFs on PDF creation.

    But of the major ways that PDF’s do get created - converted from text editors or design software, I know that Microsoft Word automatically suggests captions when the document creator adds an image (but does not automatically apply captions), and I believe that some design software does, as well.

    I think that, functionally, both suggesting captions at time of document creation, or at time of document read are prone to the same issues - that the software may not be smart enough to properly identify the object, and if it is, that it is not necessarily smart enough to explain it in context.
    By way of example, a screenshot of a computer program will have the automatic suggestion of “A graphical user interface” (or similar), but depending on the context and usage, it could be “A virus installer disguised as ___ video game installer.” Or “The ___ video game installer.” Between the document creator and the creation software or screen reader, only the document creator would really know the context for the image.

    Which is all to say that I think that Mozilla has the right idea with auto-tagging, but it will always fail on context. The only way to actually address the issue is to deal with it within the document creation software.
    But I wouldn’t be opposed to ML on those that can auto-suggest things or even critique how content authors write their descriptions.