Its so confusing. My friend gave me permission to share her slides on it, its just a few but I think it helped me understand.

My friend is a palaeobotanist and recently tried to see if I (a microbiologist) could understand her presentation on taxonomy for ancient plants. I found it very weird to find out that the different parts of the plant retain the names they were described as even when integrated into the plant as a whole.

Like if you find a dino skull and call it ‘skullosaurus’ then somebody finds a femur and calls it ‘femurdon’ then later finds both in the same fossil, ‘femurdon’ gets retired and the whole thing is ‘skullosaurus’.

But with plants you can separately describe a female organ as ‘femonia’, a male organ as ‘maleonanthus’ and a leaf as ‘leafopteris’. Then somebody finds they belong to the same plant and not only do you just get to pick what to call the plant somewhat arbitrarily based on the organ prevelance, age, leaf or even an entirely new name but the original parts still keep their old names as separate taxa. I still can’t get my head around this ‘whole plant hypothesis’ thing…

Uggggh… I only watched the 13th doctor episodes a couple of years ago to catch up to David Tennant’s return and I totally forgot about all that… I don’t mind weird ‘missing’ incarnations like the war doctor and even the one at the lighthouse had she either fit in or was ambiguous as to what ‘number’ they are but yeah, the timeless child stuff was awful and weird and just made the doctor feel so hollow… Instead of being this flawed character trying to do good they suddenly are important in the universe because of their nature and not their deeds… It cheapens the doctor so much… Can we not just pretend that 13 never happened? I’m still yet to watch the 15th doctor series because of how awful the Chibnell era was…

I very much enjoyed the 5 hour video by Jay Exci on it because it really showed how poor it really was. I was never that keen on some of the Moffat era when he got too Moffat-y for his own good but I would have had that in a heartbeat.

Exactly my point. Let it be personal. I don’t understand why you would do this without a toggle and without being clear to users.

Err… what? That wasn’t my point at all, you just took the words and decided to say something totally different. I’m talking about the line one draws in what is seen as obvious, objective or morally responsible. Which is exactly what you then go to totally misconstrue here:

Also, you only said Stormfront or Infowars (now a The Onion site). If it was only extreme right stuff that’d be one thing (still bad if it’s not made clear, in my opinion). It isn’t though. It also includes some less radical right stuff, but also some left stuff.

I made no comment on the filter list in this part. I said it as my own opinion on what I see as morally correct, not them. I made the comment as a set-up to the next part of the comment; I would think nothing of filtering those two items out as way of demonstrating that few people would object to them being blacklisted as hateful sites of no useful substance. The entire point was to demonstrate that my moral compass in that regard is less controversial yet ultimately it is the same concept - the developer chose to filter what they likely think is hateful or fake, they just have a different idea of what that covers.

(And thank you so much for the “UMMM ACKCHULLY” on Infowars. I’m well aware of the situation with it but it was clearly done as a way to pick an obvious website that few would have cared about blocking).

I don’t care that you don’t use Piefed. If you’ve seen it before and didn’t know about it, you’re in the same position as most users.

Aww, I’m sorry for offering up information that was entirely relevant to the question that you asked me:

Were you aware of this before the post? If the answer to those is not very high and/or no, it’s not being forward with what it’s doing

I know you apparently don’t care about answers to questions you ask but I’ll make it clearer for you - Why would I be aware of the features of a piece of software I don’t use???

If he’s supporting the status quo by hiding Israel genocide information from users, that’s bad, right?

Yup. But that’s up to them. Don’t like it? Don’t use it.

t’s a piece of software that should be designed to facilitate what the user wants, not what the creator thinks.

Absolutely could not disagree more. You do not get to decide on their behalf what they produce - it is no difference in that sense than creating art, or writing a book or running a website. What the creator puts out is up to them - you don’t like it then you stop using it or you change it. Would allowing more user control over stuff like that be preferable to me? Yes. Would it make it more popular? Probably. Can we or should we force or pressure them? No. It is entirely their choice, you have no right to try force their hand to make it more palatable to your sensibilities. They create it that way because that is what they think is best. You can question that choice, you can hold that choice against them, you can attempt to change their mind, ask to re-think it, object to it, submit your own changes to it with justification, do whatever you want but implying that they have some kind of obligation to anyone but themselves to make them do what you think is best is absurd.

The only option is to fork it, which is possible, so he isn’t stopping this, but purposefully chose to make this not clear so people won’t. It’s an attempt at thought control by being hidden and sneaking it in.

Aah yes, genius-level thought manipulation and level 100 sneak achieved by *checks notes* leaving the list in a plain text format in a publicly accessible repository, fully indexed, copied & replicated online &offline and integrated right into the most popular AI models. What a galaxy-brained master of subterfuge.

It isn’t hard-baked into the code. Instance owners can adjust it as needed in the software they want to run and the community they wish to create. If this is such a moral injustice then I’m sure we are going to see a fork of this with filtering removed and the original one will fade into irrelevance…

This is such a non-issue blown out of the water as some kind of evil mastermind carefully crafting the media landscape rather than just one person making a thing they like and blocking out the things they think are bad. This literally is freedom of speech and it couldn’t be more free than “don’t like what I’m doing? Go and do it yourself then, here are all the instructions, no strings attached”. Trying to force somebody’s hand because you don’t like what they are doing will only have the effect of driving the developer away entirely.

There are loads of projects and pieces of software I have seen that are either created by hateful people or people who tolerate bigotry in their community but it is my right to ignore them and pretend they don’t exist. Likely all they are doing is hurting themselves and I can live in hope that it doesn’t work out in the long run. I’m happy to make my distaste for it known and make it clear that i object to it but to say they have some kind of duty to cater to me or anyone else??? No, but hopefully if people get the message, agree and stop using their software or fork it and make their own then that’s a win.

I don’t use piefed so no, of course I didn’t know or have seen it. And it doesn’t need to be malicious, i would have zero issues morally in suppressing or warning about links to stormfront or infowars and would think nothing of it - the line that somebody draws for themselves is personal and it seems the person making piefed has decided what they think is appropriate for them and their userbase.

In one direction sure, not on the z axis

I still can’t find a reason to say it is censorship or sneaky. Isnt the point that it highlights the sources? In which case it isn’t really hiding it. And if you decide you don’t like it then just leave and go elsewhere. I don’t really see a reason why a creator of something has a requirement to be apolitical or make their feelings known. People complain a lot about .ml and lemmy’s creator. Never understood why, nobody is forcing you to participate and stay instead of going elsewhere - and I say that as somebody who was on .ml during the exodus then saw everyone defederating.

I guess i very much see it as creative freedom, it isn’t doing anything malicious and my understanding is that it does expose these blocks to the user when encountered?

So what? Its open source software and subject to what the developer wants. Don’t like it then fork it, remove the offending blocks and run your own, literally exactly the same freedoms offered. There is absolutely nothing wrong with not wanting to platform people.

It isn’t censorship though? Just as much as people have the right to speak, others have the right to not have to listen. The beauty of the fediverse is that literally everyone has the right to say what they want, you can join a new instance or make your own but if you start saying stuff that people don’t want to listen to then they can’t be forced to listen.

Well we know Ben Shapiro hasn’t

Never understood the point in this. When you flipped the DVD to the other side to play the other half it naturally rewound the first side. Such a scam.

I was a dental nurse for a while in my youth and NHS dental price bands were always so weird. Sometimes it was far cheaper to go private for some procedures that were within NHS band 2 but were really on the very low end of that scale, stuff like sealant or a tiny amount of filling like a glass ionomer as a prevention for a cavity that was only a few mins worth of work or applying some fissure sealant.

Also people are a lot more protective about their karma so it tends to make everyone into a weird homogeneous blob too scared to say anything that goes against the grain

Most people don’t. There is a theory (and I don’t know if it was ever verified officially) that Adobe stuff was made so easy to pirate and crack intentionally. That way students and people learning how to use their tools (primarily photoshop) would master it and therefore force any employer they later worked with to get and stay with Adobe and their expensive enterprise licences. The lower the barrier of entry the more people in the workforce could be competent with it.

I was happier not knowing this…

I think we need to be more consistent with it, time to drop the ‘p’ sound from helicopter as per its roots.

Can’t believe it doesn’t have a London Cheesecake. Well actually I can because not only is it not a cake but it doesn’t even have cheese in it…

Its a weird little thing mostly localised to London as the name would suggest. Basically a square of puff pastry with a jam filling, icing and coconut shavings on top.

Not ideal when you want an actual cheesecake but a really simple and delicious pastry.

I tried but failed, people are so reliant on it that I couldn’t interest people enough and gradually even some people who moved over, drifted back.

Happy that worked for you but doing so would have cut a huge social part of my life away, its more than just 1:1 messaging stuff.

They can but that instantly excludes me from casual day to day things like my family group chat or more spur of the moment messaging - plans here heavily favour data these days over texts - honestly the only texts i get these days are automated services. I just have no desire to be so isolated from friends and family