FriendOfDeSoto

Set alarms on your phone and pretend it’s phone calls from work, a friend in need, etc. Go hide in there bathroom and take a ten minute break.

Do you have allies in the family? Make a pact to take turns. Get them to lure you away on a pretense. Go help clean the kitchen.

If you can’t wiggle free, give yourself permission to switch off. You don’t have to fight every battle, you don’t need to set everything right. It’s amazing how long you can keep a conversation going if all you do is repeat the last thing they said to you back at them but you raise your tone at the end to turn it into a question. Make plans on how to compensate yourself for enduring this shit. Pat yourself on the back for maintaining peace in the face of adversity.

Nothing bores people more than showing them “a funny video” on YouTube. Or some really boring vacation pictures. Or have a non-controversial topic of your own and stubbornly steer conversation that way. Tell a story with no point. If you’re sitting in something comfy, like an armchair, pretend to fall asleep because you worked so hard. Praise the food and how good it was every time you’re biting your tongue and you really want to say fuck you.

It’s family, it’s the holidays. I’m not saying you should swallow all bullshit. But raise the bar in the interest of family peace. And remember that folks will blame the loudmouths, the ones who raised their voice more than necessary, and not the quiet one for any fracas.

None of these strategies will work by themselves. It’s the mix that does it. It’s better to go into the situation looking at it like a game you play. Not like: fuck! Uncle Bob is going to annoy me again. You have your armor on and uncle Bob can’t do shit.

That release was batshit if you ask me.

BatOS obvs

What confuses me about this scenario you’re painting is this: it doesn’t matter which app is better than WhatsApp for your mother to navigate if none of the contacts she texts with are willing to move with her. She’s not breaking off contact with folks over a GUI issue, is she? Or is she only using it with you?

Also, random messages not going through has not been an issue in the “war” between Android and iOS so far as I can see. Image quality of attached images, getting spammed with a new text for every reaction of a user in iMessage on the Android side, and some rare messages in group chat contexts that originated in iMessage were issues (and they’re not anymore IIRC). Now, if those are the ones you mean with “random messages” then okay. Did you or she convince all her contacts to move to WhatsApp as a result? If so, once again, moving her off it won’t do any good unless everybody follows along with her.

A move off of WhatsApp and to Signal is recommended from a privacy point of view. Meta is a terrible company. Signal is less bloated than WhatsApp. Beyond that I think they’re all roughly similar in functionality and user interface. By which I mean equally confusing for somebody over 60 today.

Yes, because my point is that your point doesn’t make sense.

That’s a remarkable statement in the context of a hypothetical, counterfactual scenario where we are attempting to interpret the possible thinking of a long deceased man displaced in time for the benefit of said scenario.

You may disagree with me. You haven’t changed my mind either. So let’s leave it at that.

You’re citing my text but cutting off just before the point I was trying to make. I think be would still side with the people who claim to follow his ideology (yes, piss poor efforts objectively speaking but that’s irrelevant to him because he would prefer them over the folks entrenched in capitalism on the other side).

Ideologs are a dangerous breed because they are surprisingly flexible under realpolitik conditions when the alternative is having to admit defeat. Or in Marx’s case admitting that his ideas didn’t work or the fact that they didn’t work as intended cost the lives of millions. Surely he wouldn’t like Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China and well apoortioned crticism thereof (or of the GDR or wherever) would have eventually spent his good will capital (pun intended) with the local leadership and he would end up in a gulag or erased from history. Karl-Marx-Stadt would have been renamed sooner.

Trump doesn’t care about peace. Trump cares about Trump. And his mindset is reality television. He wants to be in the headlines. Hero or heel, he does not care.

Obama got the Nobel. That stings. He wants one so he can “equal” if not best the accomplishments of Obama, who openly mocked him during that White House “comedy” press gala. That personal vendetta drives him.

I think if he were honest with himself he would see that what he got wasn’t what he had envisioned in any of the countries that claimed to be communist/socialist. But they were his team so he would publicly support them. You can sell his stance as an evolvement of the theory rather than admitting mistakes. Not too dissimilar from the way the PRC sells its version of communism to its people: communism “with Chinese characteristics.”

Chances are though that he would have perished in one of the purges happening in whichever communist country he would have chosen to reside in. He would have enough clout to niggle at leadership openly about stuff going wrong and eventually be would deliver the straw that broke his camel’s back. He would be mind-holed and his legacy rectified so he wouldn’t be the lighthouse of the movement that he could only become because he died early. And he didn’t starve millions. And communism would become the thing created by the people through an arduous march and not a system dreamed up by some German philosophers.

Limited and generalizing.

In your example, I think this is a defense mechanism more than anything. People deal with grief of separation in different ways. This looks dumb on the surface but it’s like burning your hand on the stove. You only need to do it once to be fearful of and therefore extra careful with all stoves. Person who likes blue and broke their heart = stove.

Apple was the first big aggregator with then iTunes. Spotify is the biggest streamer that also hosts podcasts. I suppose it helped highlighting the ease of subscribing through these services to get subscribers.

I absolutely hate this triad of “you can find us on [insert propriatory source like Spotify], Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.” The last third includes the two preceding ones. Both Spotify or Apple are places where one can find podcasts. It is illogical to say it like that and I find it annoying. I don’t think it is necessary to remind people any more how podcasts work in 2025. They will find you. Stop giving free ads to other services. Especially services that have proven to be hostile to the open RSS architecture, like Spotify.

I don’t think this is genetic though. Critical thinking is something you should learn how to do. It’s a failure due to chronic underfunding in education.

I do agree with you that the people who can do it, often despair and withdraw from public discourse out of frustration. But they could be making babies like rabbits at the same time.

My preference is simple:

Minimalist Lemmy - ordered by new, chronological (used to be the same on reddit before I stopped) Mastodon - chronological

If I look at how the algorithms on YouTube or Instagram (don’t know which category they fall in) treat me, they always surface 80% irrelevant stuff and 20% that is okay but only in the rarest cases mindblowingly good. And that’s why on YouTube I tend to ignore the Home tab.

Especially in the short video algorithms, I fucking hate that if you didn’t respond within a microsecond you’ll now get fed sloth videos or car crashes until you die. I’m all algorithm’ed out.

It remains to be seen if reading about all the emotions and morals is the same as feeling them, acting according to them, or just being able to identify them in us meatbags. So even with the sum total of human knowledge at their disposal, this may not matter. We already don’t know how these models actually organize their “knowledge.” We can feed them and we can correct bad outcomes. Beyond that it is a black box, at least right now. So if the spark from statistical spellchecker (current so-called AI) to actual AI (or AGI) happens, we’ll probably not even notice until it writes us a literary classic of Shakespearean proportions or until it turns us into fuel for its paperclip factory. That’s my assessment anyway.

I think it would be fair to highlight that this was revolutionary France’ brainchild. It is a republic today as well but they’ve gone back and forth on that one a bit in the last two centuries.

Groundhog Day

That’s a matter of opinion. I suspect a big university like that quickly spends its budget and does way more than compile a dictionary. And if spelling is all you need, that still appears to be possible in front of the paywall.

For the longest time, it wasn’t free of charge. You had to buy expensive books. I fail to see a justification for the outrage. Also considering that this thread is rife with suggestions for alternatives and more dodgy solutions.

It’s a funny coincidence of history that gated communities for the well off folks in capitalism and mass housing for the not well off in communism follow the same design principle: few access points that can be controlled by a single tank each.

They aren’t under any obligation to provide the fruit of their labour free of charge.

As far as I can see their subscription prices have also only gone up over the years. Why? Do you think a Mr Burns like figure is sitting behind the scenes asking Smithers to relese the hounds? Or because running the linguistic operation, the database, and a website that people all over the world look at as the de facto authority of the language and gets queried thousands of times per day just cost shitloads of money? And they no longer get enough funding another way?

Did they ever put ads on their website? Do you run uBlock or similar plugins on your browser?

Is it possible? Yes. You can see examples in mainland China where foreign channels, including the more liberal channels from Hong Kong, routinely get blacked out when China news come on (unless they are gloriously positive).

Is it likely where you are? No. Especially it happening on broadcast channels you would hear a lot more about it. The socials would be full of it. There would have to be an office full of people censoring broadcast channels as they go out. We know the Chinese are operating such a facility because we heard about it. And we haven’t heard anything like that for the US. Ockham’s razor points at a buffering issue somewhere along the distribution chain from the news studio to your local antenna. A streaming video, like on YouTube, is just freeze framed when it’s buffering also. And I don’t think you as an individual consumer are important enough for somebody just doing it for your receiver.

Captcha, but for bots, I imagine. Fits in with the general conspiratorial theme.