OK, you’ve convinced me, I’m going to delete my account at this point.

When I first found Lemmy I genuinely thought it was an improvement on Reddit. People were nice, I didn’t see the dogpiling and general assholedom that I saw on Reddit, conversations seemed civil and reasonable.

As time’s gone by, that’s become increasingly clearly untrue. I unsubscribed (and blocked) the technology forum because of dogpiling, initially others, then me when I agreed with the others (who weren’t saying anything uncontroversial… outside, apparently, of r/technology.)

Things have not felt civil in other groups, but they haven’t been as bad. But now I have you reposting a comment I deleted and calling me spineless. And for what? Because I felt I should withdraw comments I was making regarding a domain I’m not an expert in? This, apparently, now, is “spineless”? I’m supposed to arrogantly nerdsplain my views on the constitution to everyone and I’m a coward if I step back and say “I’m not an expert in this, I shouldn’t be posting”?

What the fucking hell.

And yes, I know, “Lemmy’s not at fault, it just has a few people who aren’t…” Stop, just stop. It has more than “a few”, it’s positively infested with them. It’s actually worse than Reddit. I didn’t have to put up with this kind of crap on Reddit anything like as frequently, and I speak as someone who actually got banned from one subreddit in the last year.

Lemmy’s federated nature is a good thing, but unfortunately it seems to lack the qualities needed to ensure its user base understands the need for quality discussion. Going below Reddit in this respect is difficult, but Lemmy has managed it.

It’s a nice experiment, good luck to you, all, but you’re not for me. Sorry.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

I use Zimbra with an external email gateway that only accepts authenticated email. Zimbra is pretty heavy (it’s intended to be a Microsoft Exchange replacement) but it at least has a huge amount of protection built-in to deal with spam and comes configured out of the box to not relay (well, outside of you setting up aliases and lists.)

That said, it’s not hard to find “incoming email only” configurations that deliver to local mailboxes only, for most email servers. The thing to avoid is having a single server configuration that tries to do both - accepting external email and sending locally originated email out. The configurations do exist to do that, but they’re confusing and tricky.

External email gateways… that bit is hard. I use a mail server I set up myself on a VPS. It does not listen on incoming port 25. It requires credentials. I did this largely because I was trying to send email out via Xfinity’s customer email relay, but the latter kept upping the authentication requirements until one day Zimbra just couldn’t be configured to use it any more. And each time they changed something, I wouldn’t find out until I noticed people had clearly not received the emails I’ve sent out.

VPSes are problematic as some IPs are blocked due to spam. There’s not much you can do about it if you’re stuck with a bad IP, so if you can find a way to send outgoing email via your ISP’s outgoing email server, do that. For Postfix, you can send out authenticated email using something like: in main.cf:

relayhost = [smtp.office365.com]:587
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_use_tls = yes

and in /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd:

[smtp.office365.com]:587 example@outlook.com:hunter2

So in summary:

• Consider an email-in-a-box solution like Zimbra, I understand the wish to go for something light but it might make sense if your aim is just to control your own email
• Regardless of whether you do or not, use separate servers for incoming/outgoing email.
• For incoming email, lock it down to accept local email down if you’re manually doing this rather than using an email-in-a-box solution like Zimbra.
• For outgoing email, use authentication and avoid it listening on port 25. Consider either directly using your ISPs, or if that’s not practical, configuring your outgoing email server to relay in turn to your ISP (see above for how to do this.)

Good luck.

Oddly enough, the Gen Zers that have decided not to talk to me or my wife, because they can’t stand disagreement, are our nieces and are both rabid Trump supporters (well, unfortunately I currently live in Florida) and couldn’t stand the fact my wife made a joke at Twitler’s expense.

Not that I’m complaining, I don’t want anything to do with Trump supporters (SEE! It’s US TOO!) so that made it easier for me. My wife is more family oriented than I am and is pissed about it.

All of which is kind of meaningless given the article conveniently forgets that under 25 year olds of all generations (as in I saw it with mine) traditionally (1) tend to be more politicized, (2) tend not to have the practical social skills to understand the need for tolerance and (3) quite honestly, the country has swung to the right recently and being intolerant of fascism is no vice and a mark of being a human being, so anything they’re seeing with Gen Z is simply an amplification, thanks to (1) and (2), of what’s actually happening among all generations.

If people want me to hang out with them, they can stop wanting LGBT people killed, can stop supporting politicians who are passing laws denying life saving healthcare to women, can stop calling everyone who disagrees with them pedophiles (and can stop supporting groups that actually support pedophiles like the big three churches), can stop supporting the murders of black people by law enforcement and “white people who think they’re law enforcement”, and so on. 'cos all of those positions are extreme. And horrible. And you don’t get a pass in my home for having them.

While that’s true, the boomers entering the “oldsphere”, to coin a term, are the ones adjacent to Gen X who weren’t scared of personal computers when they started to become a thing during the 1980s. They’re people who have been using computers in offices for the last 30+ years, and they’re very used to how they work. I genuinely think they’re less likely to fall for an online scam.

Older boomers, sure, but those are people who were, as a group (individuals are different! I can name plenty of awesome technically skilled boomers of that age group, I’m just making a generalization which for statistical purposes is reasonable) were more suspicious of computers and which contained a large number who managed to reach retirement age without going into jobs that absolutely required computer knowledge.

Those people are not the majority of people crossing the 60-65 age barrier today.

This may be true. The other thing that’s been bothering me for a while is that Millennials were really the last generation to be given an understanding of how computers worked. The computers they grew up with had hierarchical file systems, file types, programs that understood both, etc.

From iTunes onwards (yes, iTunes, this didn’t even start with the cloud), there’s been an attitude of “Computers are too hard to understand so let’s dumb it down and hide everything” from computer makers. This got ramped up when everything moved to the cloud and/or mobile devices, the latter doing everything practically possible to avoid giving anyone some language in which they could understand what the computer was doing underneath.

Hell yeah, I’d expect people to fall for online scams when they’ve had the ability to understand what they’re looking at ripped away from them by a short-termist industry that’s just, today, looking for ways to charge people for stuff they could do themselves like manage their own data.

And I’ve seen this dumbing down impact other things too. People furious about the idea of using BBSes other than Reddit because… I honestly don’t know, but there’s always massive support for their opinion. People who, likewise, describe Mastodon as “too hard” because they have to pick a server. Even in tech communities, people who you’d assume had no problem picking a mobile phone carrier, or an ISP, or an email provider, have a massive problem with picking a Mastodon node, and when you talk to them, not only are you flamed to hell and back by everyone else, but it becomes clear that actually, no, they didn’t pick a mobile phone carrier, they used their parent’s. They didn’t pick an ISP, they picked Xfinity because Comcast already gave them TV. They didn’t pick an email provider, they didn’t even realize you could, they just signed up to GMail.

Ten years ago, none of this was true. People as a whole, especially those who were discussing tech topics, were not that tech ignorant. Today? We are regressing as a society.

Is there actually an abolish the police movement in the UK? I’m an ex-Brit who lives in the US so I’m familiar with both, and the UK police forces have an entirely different history and reputation to the US LE organizations. I’d be surprised if there’s anything outside of anarchist groups there. But I’m happy to shown I’m wrong (well, “happy” is a relative term, if the UK police have devolved to the same troughs as the US LE orgs then that’s terrible news.)

If I may strike a positive note, at least the UK appears to care about this.

You don’t hear about this happening in the US (OK, now I’m striking a negative note, actually “note” doesn’t even cover it), not because America’s law enforcement organizations aren’t also infested with sexist, homophobic, and racist (which wasn’t even a big enough problem with the Met to note) corrupt assholes, but because nobody with power actually cares about it, so these people will continue to keep their jobs. And unlike the Met Officers, they have even more power and can kill people with impunity.

Bravo to the Met for actually sucking up and doing something about the problem.

While I’m OK with entertaining the proposition he’s also probably a pedophile given his obsession with calling other people that (albeit if he was a practicing one I’d have expected a victim to have spoken out by now, whether he visited Epstein’s island or not), the whole buy out happened very publicly and was very much in keeping with the instability and narcissism we’re increasingly aware he represents.

• He made an offer to buy Twitter and accepted a contract that was very one sided. Doesn’t anyone else’s advice, thinks he can “fix” anything. Largely “hate bought” Twitter, his offer came after months of insulting Twitter’s management and accusing them of various frauds (projection, stupidity, pointless fighting, etc)
• He realized this was a terrible idea after the fact and tried to wiggle out of it.
• He continued insulting Twitter’s management attempting to justify pulling out and managed to break the only terms in the contract that would have allowed him to get out of it because it contained what was essentially a non-disparagement clause. Had he not broken that he could have simply said he was unable to find funding (true or not) and paid a $1B break-up fee.
• Eventually, reluctantly, the buy out went through because he left himself no options.

Basically the Musk we had started to realize existed when he lied about CaHSR and proposed a bad-faith vaporware “technology” as a replacement, when he accused a hero of being a pedophile for stating the obvious about his “help”, when he became estranged from his daughter because he couldn’t accept her having gender dysphoria, when he kept repeating the same claim about the readiness of self driving technology over the space of half a decade, screwed up in exactly the way we’d expect him to.

He didn’t need to be blackmailed. This is who he is.

deleted by creator

This is just the way our natural grammatical structure works.

We’re not having a discussion about grammar, we’re having a discussion about how phrases can be misleading even if technically correct, and how those phrases can end up serving inhuman agendas.

While “Hit by car” the driver is usually at fault. Note news articles will generally go out of their way to avoid “hit by car” on the rare occasion someone jumps in front of one.

Hit by a pitch? Not sure what this means.

Hit by stray bullet is modified to describe an unusual set of circumstances so inappropriate here. That’s the equivalent of “Man hit by derailed train”. We’re not talking about that kind of situation. The nearest equivalent of “Man hit by train” where the direct cause of death is an aimed bullet is “Man shot”, or "Man shot by ", it’s never “Man hit by bullet”

Struck by new knowledge doesn’t really apply here too.

The underlying message of “Hit by train” is that transit was at fault (the train “hit”). Rather than the drunk driver. Rather than the reckless idiot who decided to go around the barrier. Rather than the suicidal cyclist who stepped in front of it. Rather than, in this case, the cop that parked on the tracks and locked a prisoner inside the car.

Words are about communication. And all phrases have subtexts and good writing recognizes those subtexts and avoids misleading ones and uses accurate ones that convey as much information as possible.

"Train hits " is an intentional choice by journalists to focus the blame on transit rather than the person whose actions lead to death. Whether it’s technically correct ignores the fact that there are better phrases that could be used that also focus the blame on the person who caused the situation. "Colorado officer who trapped prisoner in path of train sentenced to " doesn’t have the misleading nuances that the headline does. It’s more accurate and more informative as a result.

You know on a conscious level that the train couldn’t have done anything. But on a subconscious level the author is telling you the train, not the “person that caused something to be in the way of the train” was the cause of the accident. Had there been no pesky train just existing, there’d have been no accident regardless of how avoidable the accident was.

That’s my problem with the language. Just as you know an officer-involved-shooting actually involved the officer shooting someone, but the language is so weak that on some level your subconscious assumes it can’t be a big deal if that kind of vague, woolly, wording is appropriate.

And as I mentioned, it appears to be an intentional word choice. People don’t talk about rivers (non-sentient object) asphyxiating people, they talk about people drowning in rivers. A threshing machine (non-sentient) doesn’t thresh a minion (!), the minion falls into a threshing machine. But a train (non-sentient) hits people, rather than vice-versa. To be fair you occasionally see this language with cars, but cars are driven by people, it’s usually the case the car driver is actually the decision maker that caused a death.

Does that make sense?

Unless they have the exact same standards for hair length for all students, regardless of gender, that’s plainly discriminatory

I would suggest that in almost all cases a unified standard would actually be guaranteed to be discriminatory, in much the same way a unified standard for how tall you’re allowed to be would be. The only thing I can think of that wouldn’t would be if everyone had to have their heads shaved as “the standard”.

Biologically/genetically, and socially, different (protected!) groups have different hair and expectations about how that hair can be styled.

Even the “head shaved” thing, while possible with any hair no matter what the underlying biology and genetics, would be torture for a sizable number of women in a modern society.

They haven’t shifted it to trans people, they’ve added trans people.

I don’t know where Lemmy users are getting it from that the Republicans have reduced their hatred for LGB people over the last 10 years, I’m seeing literally the opposite. Teachers in Florida aren’t even allowed to make statements to target the bullying of gay students without breaching a (probably unconstitutional, but who the f— knows what the current SCOTUS will do?) law passed only a year ago.

Honestly, my observation isn’t that trans people have been picked as an alternative set of victims, it’s that they’ve been swept up as part of the anti-gay agenda.

I hate that phrase “hit by a train”. It’s usually because it’s fodder for NIMBYs. It implies the train did something, like it jumped the tracks or something, whereas the train was just traveling the path it always does. A woman drowns, she’s not “asphyxiated by the river”, a man burns himself on a stove, he’s not “Burnt by the stove.” In the train’s case the conscious action was the “putting something in front of it”. Yet somehow it’s the train’s fault? Suicide? It’s the train’s fault. Drunk idiot? It’s the train’s fault.

I mention this because this is yet another case in which transit is getting blamed for a human action, an action that human knew could leave to the death of someone else, but that the human did anyway. It detracts from the fact the blame is with the officer.

Anyway, I know you all don’t care, but it’s another way in which language serves an establishment, in this case two - the car centric, anti-transit establishment that it usually does, and the officer who all but murdered a suspect. It’s another phrase like “Officer involved shooting”, except maybe even that phrase doesn’t place blame on an inanimate object.

I don’t think it’s that surprising. Both are often linked to a distrust of the establishment, and the pharmaceutical industry is obviously a part of that. Indeed, the fact the government is on the one hand saying “Cannabis is terrible and will turn you into a total monster” while simultaneously saying “Oxycontin is fine, doctors can prescribe it because capitalism”, is a major problem and undermines the government when it is being run by less terrible people who are trying to do the right thing.

(Note, before anyone thinks I have that mentality: I’m taking a vaccine booster whatever that fuck DeSantis says as soon as I’m eligible, and you should wear a mask if you can without people being violent to you, but government corruption on a minor to medium scale such as the War on Drugs and the Oxycontin bullshit is how we end up with conspiracy theorists who’ll believe the UN wants them to eat bugs, scientists invented global warming as a way to increase government power, and that we never go to the moon.)

deleted by creator