Of course bitcoin is a scam. It’s a “currency” you can’t spend anywhere. It’s only purpose is a pump and dump scheme for early adopters.

I dunno, I hate Trump as much as the next guy but it seems to me he meant “I’m going to fix all the country’s problems in one term so you won’t need to vote for me again”, not “I’m going to abolish voting”.

Yeah it pisses me off the way people are like “tech bros ruined the internet”. No, users ruined it! There was no reason to stop self-hosting webpages, forums and IRC servers. Users switched to Facebook instead because they preferred it and didn’t care about the downsides. There’s an alternative to every website and app which respects privacy, serves no ads, and has no algorithm to farm your outrage. Users refuse to use them because they aren’t cool enough.

£100k per year is not middle class, it’s the top 3% of the country.

I grew up middle class, my family are lawyers, high level civil servants, software engineers. I don’t know anyone who earns £100k.

How does this argument not also apply to photography? A modern camera is a computer, you fiddle with the settings, press a button and it automatically makes a picture for you. People produce billions of shitty photographs a day which aren’t art, but that doesn’t mean someone working in photography as a medium can’t be an artist.

In my experience it’s only non-artists who make this argument, because in their heads they’re comparing AI to painting. But for visual artists there are tons of mediums and disciplines where you don’t physically make the marks yourself and it’s the concept and composition that’s important.

There was an exhibition of AI generated art at the big local gallery here last year and I expected artist friends to be against it, but they were just like “oh, that’s interesting”. They just see AI generation as another way of creating an image and whether a particular image is or isn’t art depends on the intention not the process.

Hexbear is better on this than most places to be honest. Surprising coming from a community that formed around Chapo, whose favourite insults are autistic and smooth brained.

If your ethnic group only survived because they adapted to cannibalising their young during famines, would you eat babies

This is why I can’t do online left wing spaces any more. They talk the talk about ableism, but then its “why can’t you boycott the only food you can eat, just eat something else”, “you could talk to service workers if you wanted to, you just think you’re better than them”.

Then sharing a video of people with their fingers in their ears at a black music festival with a caption calling them racists, when they’re clearly autistic people enjoying the festival but having sensory problems.

I blame the popular understanding/misunderstanding of neurodiversity. People think autism is just a personality type.

Is this part of a series or something? I have no idea what any part of it means

Does anyone else not really like talking about their special interests?

I can see how bored people are the second I start, like their eye contact suddenly breaks and they look around the room, and only say “mmhmm” instead of replying. So I shut up after one sentence.

But if the other person also likes the subject, I don’t like talking to them either, because there’s nothing to say. If we disagree I don’t want to be rude and argue so I awkwardly pretend to agree. If we agree then all you can do is tell each other things you both already know and agree that they’re good.

Also they shouldn’t do it unless they’re going to apply it to all politicians, like when Biden lied about seeing photos of beheaded babies in Israel.

All the answers you got show why this conversation goes badly. No one can come up with an actual problem that data collection causes, it’s all silly comparisons to giving people your credit card number or shitting in front of them.

For me, having my data collected is like having CCTV cameras in stores. Yeah, technically someone is filming everything I do. Yeah it would be bad if a private individual was filming me for nefarious reasons. But no one actually uses that data for anything bad, and it doesn’t actually cause any problems.

All that happens is I get more relevant ads.

I still use both Lemmy and Reddit and I honestly think Lemmy is in a sweet spot where there are enough comments for a discussion but not enough to go off topic.

Reddit discussions are never about the OP, they’re always riffing on an off-topic joke that someone made in a reply to the already off-topic top comment.

Overpriced. It maybe used to be worth it, but these days all phones look and work the same anyway.

I used to be an iPhone person, bought a new one every two years from the iPhone 4 in 2010 until my iPhone SE broke in 2018. That was when iPhones jumped to being like $1000, so I thought fuck it and bought a $150 Android.

I was ready for a really rough transition but it turns out these days all apps are cross platform React Native with data stored in the cloud. Once you’re logged in literally everything is exactly the same.

Yet here you are, posting on a website that doesn’t allow absolute free speech.