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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Indoor smoking bans in public places made sense, but this is just dumb as fuck.

    Second-hand cigarette smoke is a health hazard when frequently ingested and it was probably refreshing to not have everything smell like tobacco. But this harmed the hospitality sector and made smokers far less inclined to go out drinking. A lot of pubs shut after the 2007 smoking ban introduced by the UK and the hospitality sector hasn’t really recovered since. A good ‘best of both worlds’ approach would have been to allow larger establishments to have a ventilated indoor smoking area and make it a soft-ban, but unfortunately big tobacco is the enemy.

    And now Keir Starmer (British PM) wants to push through a similar outdoor smoking ban to what the EU are proposing, where it would become illegal to light up outside a hospital or in a pub beer garden.

    This moronic plan would basically kill what is left of the hospitality industry, and if Keir Starmer’s grand master plan to solve our country’s housing crisis is to make more pubs shut so greedy parasitic landlords and property developers can snap them up and turn them for a profit, then he’s gonna be remembered as the UK’s worst prime minister. And believe me when I say that the Tory bastards who killed thousands with austerity measures, dragged us kicking & screaming out of the European Union, partied in 10 Downing Street while we were forced to lock down from COVID, and who crashed our economy with tax cuts have put up some stiff competition.

    Fun fact, you used to be able to smoke on airplanes, and the air quality on flights actually decreased after smoking bans were put in place, because the regulations around air conditioning were also cut.










  • Online dating apps. I’d:

    1. Break up the monopoly that Match Group and Bumble Inc hold on the market, by working with the Federal Trade Commission and UK Competitions & Markets Authority.

    2. Introduce caps on what apps can charge for Premium features. Charging the same price as several World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV subscriptions just to see likes is scummy as fuck.

    3. Introduce mandatory ID verification to dissuade fake users, and have very strict regulations on how said data is processed and stored, with massive fines for data breaches that could easily have been avoided.

    4. Have a correct appeals process towards account penalties/closure and outlaw the use of shadowbanning.



  • Clbull@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneAI Rule
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    18 days ago

    On the plus side, the sheer power consumption of using an LLM to dish out targeted advertisements will be prohibitively expensive. Any agency stupid enough to do this with current technology is gonna go bust.

    As for hosting the LLM locally on the viewer’s machine… Remember the furore of shady companies burying crypto miners into their software? This is going to be even more wasteful of system resources and is going to result in such a sluggish user experience that the industry will go bankrupt.




  • Some good examples:

    • Fat acceptance and body positivity. Obesity is glorified (even fetishized) when it’s a woman, whereas obese men are shunned. Have you noticed that nobody in the fat acceptance movement is vouching for the 300lb basement dwellers?

    • Older ladies who date younger guys are called cougars, whereas if you flip the gender roles, an older man dating a younger lady half his age is going to be labelled a pedophile, even if she’s of-age. Just look at at the anger surrounding Tobey Maguire (48 years old) dating a 20 year old actress. There are people who legitimately think men like him should be hunted for sport.

    • The amount of effort you have to put into your dating profile. Women have the opposite problem of being inundated with matches even with minimal effort.


  • Negotiate a peace agreement between NATO, the European Union, Ukraine and Russia, with the aim of:

    • Keeping control of Crimea and small parts of the Donbas in exchange for the land Ukraine gained in their Kursk incursion. This would give Russia access to a second sea port that can be used all year round, and unlike Kaliningrad, isn’t an exclave sandwiched between NATO powers.

    • Negotiating the immediate release of all POWs on both sides.

    • Obtaining a neutrality agreement to ensure Ukraine will not join NATO (EU or EFTA membership is fine.) Not really anything we can do about Finland or Sweden joining.

    • Joint Russian and Western aid in rebuilding Ukraine.

    • Lifting all economic sanctions (including those placed on Russia before 2022), travel restrictions and readmission back into the G7, Council of Europe, FIFA, IOC, etc.


  • I used to be hugely into World of Warcraft.

    The more I think about it, what ruined the game for me wasn’t a particular update or new game feature. It was the community, or rather how much it has degraded into a hotbed of elitism, toxicity and greed.

    WoW is the kind of community where you’ll be ostracized from joining groups unless you already have a high ranking. And even if you get into a group, people will abandon the group or boot you out and call you a “boosted retard” in the process over a minor error, like dying to a boss mechanic or not pressing the Bloodlust/Time Warp/Heroism button in time.

    Blizzard doesn’t do anything, because Activision and Microsoft have spent years gutting out their customer support teams and installing automated systems in their place.


  • Not current workplace but previous ones.

    • Used to work with a guy who had no filter whatsoever and would openly brag about how efficiently and quickly he’d work and multitask, and about the 9/10 models he used to shag back when he lived in South East Asia. He was fired from my workplace after a string of incidents where he growled at a female colleague, bullied several other colleagues over bad quality monitors and openly used racial slurs in the office.

    • That same guy went to work for an energy company that I had other friends work at. I learned he was fired and escorted out by security within minutes after being reprimanded by a team leader. He went into a company-wide Slack channel and openly called her a “fucking bitch.”

    • Two people got fired for taking dick pics in the office whilst on an evening shift and posting them on their socials.


  • I don’t think the “decentralize and federate everything” strategy is a good idea when it comes to online marketplaces.

    We’ve seen how quickly bad actors can wreak havoc on the Fediverse like that one time when Lemmy Shitpost was closed for weeks due to people creating new instances of their own and spamming the community with CSAM. Imagine how much you open the community up to scams or criminal activity when money gets involved.







  • Still trying to find that out. A harsh lesson I learned a while ago is to not open up about your frustrations because you’re only going to make yourself a target.

    I recently paid £90 for a three month Hinge X subscription and even after two weeks of near-constant use, I’ve had zero new matches. I’m starting to think that my Hinge profile may be shadowbanned and that Match Group actually scammed me.

    On two online dating subreddits I posted screenshots of my profile and asked for advice. One was given a very harsh and rude response by a power tripping cuck of a moderator and was swiftly removed for reasons I don’t understand. Apparently I didn’t fully read the Great Text Wall of China he erected on the stickied thread. No use arguing with him because I feel like he’s one of those pricks who will just ban and modmail mute me. The other one got downvoted with no reply whatsoever.

    Bad experiences with the Reddit community aside, I’ve been frustrated with women and how they treated me, but even I look at a lot of incel forums and their misogynist rhetoric with disgust.

    The most I got involved with the manosphere was posting in r/TheRedPill a decade ago. I left that community because it was becoming increasingly toxic, and when I found out about the beliefs of some of their biggest influencers (i.e. Roosh V being an advocate for legalizing spousal rape), I felt like I wanted nothing more to do with them.


  • I have an anecdote about this very subject.

    My ex tried to get back together with me after a 2.5 year on/off relationship where there was no intimacy and I’m pretty sure she had no intentions of ever putting out. The reason I didn’t trust her was that she straight-up ghosted me and cut me out of my life twice before, and the last time we broke up, I had the choice of either salvaging a vacation to Santorini into a five day solo trip or end up £1k out of pocket.

    I was kind to her, I listened to her, I agreed to meet with her for a meal. We talked as if we didn’t have a two year absence hanging between us.

    When it came time to pay the bill, I insisted we split it. Her face immediately dropped and the whole mood changed.

    She blocked me afterwards.