Isn't Ford the company that got its start by telling customers that they could get their model t in any color they want, as long as it's black?

Perhaps this is simply part of Ford's DNA and they don't know how to make it stop?

This is my favorite form of protest.

Legend has it that some people spend their entire work day trying to determine if a nipple is a boy nipple or a girl nipple. Could you fucking imagine?

✅ Accurate ✅ Concise ✅ Relevant

Checks all the boxes for a top tier response here. Cheers.

Friend, you're right, I am missing your point.

I wasn't trying to engage in a conversation with you at any point. I don't know why you keep replying.

We seem to mostly be in alignment on the issue of liberals and Nazis not being the same. I was offering my viewpoint to the original commenter I replied to, just in the same way that you did, when you came at me with this "I'm standing right here" bullshit.

If you're hurt because I've insulted your instance, that's tough. If you hang out with Anarchists all the time, you aren't allowed to get upset if someone calls you an Anarchist. I'm far from the only person who has pointed out the frequency of viewpoints that lack any connection to reality coming out of Hexbear. My comment was a PSA and I won't apologize for calling it out.

Yes, I recall the speeches Biden has given where he rallies the crowd against the Palestinian scourge!

Look, I'm not arguing that the Israelis are doing anything positive, I'm merely suggesting that the venn diagram of people who are thankful that Biden dropped out and people who support genocide is not a circle.

Sorry, ad hominem attacks are not something I want to engage on today. Me and my baby brain will enjoy existing in the real world, enjoy your limited world view.

I don't know anything about your situation, and I truly don't need details, but if you think you can't afford access to any news outlet, I don't think you're trying hard enough.

Since you're apparently too poor to access any way to entertain or inform yourself, I'm guessing you've had ample time to mull over solutions to this problem, and I'm eager to learn what an ideal solution would look like from your perspective.

Are you cool with paying for your news in exchange for your data/ads? Is there part of the editorial process we could remove to save money? Maybe we don't need fact checkers and should just assume that journalists know what they're talking about?

I'm not sure how we simultaneously provide free journalism and ensure that those journalists have enough to eat themselves, but I share in your convictions that democratizing information is imperative.

From where I sit, it seems like news organizations have moved away from showing ads for revenue to some extent, so the only option we have is to include news in our monthly budget and support journalists as much as we can.

Anyone holding a "Thank you Joe" sign supports the genocide of Palestinians

Have you ever considered that being this much of a reductionist is limiting your ability to understand the true nature of the world around you?

You're standing right here, on Lemmy.zip, not on your home instance, and the comment I was responding to was a response to a different Hexbear user who was literally saying that there is no difference between liberals and Nazis.

If I meant to reply to your comment, I would have done that.

It was incredibly jarring when I first got to Lemmy and started running into nutjobs who seem to be on some sort of crusade, spouting ideas so far out of touch that they're either straight up trolling or they are state propaganda assets from a western adversary. Sometimes when people ask where these people are coming from, I like to provide something of an orientation, as the community will never survive off of nutjobs alone.

First, I appreciate your reference to literal dozens of liberals. 😁

Second, you're right that most liberals don't want revolution. Non-liberals too, for the most part! Unfortunately, in some corners of Lemmy, such as Hexbear or Lemmygrad, the ability to distinguish and discuss nuance is not included in what I would describe as their "community values".

If you're looking for a constructive discussion about policy issues, you're barking up the wrong tree. Alternatively, if you prefer to discuss everything in terms of absolutes, and you love China and tanks, it could be a great time.

Ah, well I'm sure it will still be here if/when you escape from Elden Ring. Have fun!

They just added a bunch of new missions, planet modifiers, and ship call downs, which was a pleasant surprise. Also, there is a lot of speculation that they're going to introduce the third enemy race pretty soon, so if you were enjoying it before, now might not be a bad time to dip your toe back in the pool.

Crazy. This was voted on by the delegates?

Are these the very same delegates who received their mandate as a result of the primary process in which Muslim voters overwhelmingly refused to submit even a single vote?

It's almost as if you're suggesting that refusing to participate in the democratic process means that your ideas will largely be discounted, as you bring literally nothing to the table in terms of political capital, but that just doesn't seem quite right?

Look, I'm 100% for peace in Gaza & on earth more broadly, but you can't refuse to return your RSVP and then act shocked that the host didn't save you a place at the table.

Honestly, it just makes me sad for future generations.

LLMs aren't like the computers we've grown accustomed to, where we rely on them to be accurate because the output is all based on distinct and repeatable mathematical operations. A LLM can't provide any feedback on the accuracy of its outputs, because it is simply predicting a set of tokens based on its training data. We've already seen cases where professionals who literally have advanced degrees have tried to pass off its output without scrutiny and it backfired spectacularly.

As students, who by definition lack context and experience in a given field make use of this technology, I fear they will overestimate their own skills far past the point of no return and I fear catastrophic results over the long run. Perhaps I'm being a bit overly pessimistic here, but I have trouble identifying mitigating factors that provide a significant level of reassurance.

"Gross profit" is a meaningless number in this context. Their net income was $15.5B. If you do the same math to try to determine profit per location, ($15.5B/10500) it's about $1.48M. Not bad, but still about 90% lower than your estimate.

Since I was already estimating seemingly random profit ratios, I also looked at their profit per employee, which came out to $7380/person ($15.5B/2.1M employees).

Unfortunately these numbers are also inclusive of, for example, Walmart's e-commerce program, so calculating the profit per location doesn't indicate anything meaningful to me, though I'm morbidly curious about what insights you are hoping to get from it?

What, you hate teenagers or something?

Sort by Top and I'm sure the crusaders of New will have everything sorted out by then. If you find these ideas being upvoted, you're in the wrong community and you may be in a lemmygrad community. You're on the wrong side of the train tracks and need to seek higher ground.

We don't need to create literal echo chambers of people talking past each other because we block out any information that makes us uncomfortable. That's not how we foster constructive dialog and

Yes, I too salivate at the idea that I could simply disappear all of the ideas I disagree with, but that is exactly how to turn a community into an echo chamber.

So I have users A B C D E F who are known to me who have voted on a given post. D and E are idiots I disregard their votes. F literally hates everything I love so I count his votes inversely. A and B are fantastic I count them x10 I tend to agree with C so I count his x2.

What you are suggesting here is, as I'm understanding it, a way to only get feedback from people you agree with and to never experience a critical discussion of ideas based on their merits.

Now, I'm not here to suggest that Lemmy is some kind of shining beacon of drama-free intellectualism, where every idea is discussed without bias or agenda, but I DO think it is valuable to hear from people whose lived experiences led them to a different conclusion than the one I've reached. Obviously there needs to be a mechanism to remove trolls from the discussion, but I fear a world where we only see content that we agree with, because then we will truly be removed from reality, and that's not why I'm here.

"If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear."

Given the strong presence of the privacy community on Lemmy, I have to say that I'm a bit shocked to hear so many in these discussions chiming in to support voting transparency.

I'm on board with the idea of using ring signatures to validate the legitimacy of a vote and moderating spammers based on metadata.

Or, for something (potentially) easier to implement, aggregating vote tallies at the instance level (votes visible to your instance admin and mods) and federating the votes anonymously by instance, so you might see something like:

• lemmy.world: 9 up, 2 down
• discuss.tchncs.de: 3 up, 4 down
• Etc

Up/down votes are the method of community moderation that sets Reddit apart from many other platforms. If the Lemmy community is trying to capture some of that magic, which is good for both highlighting gems AND burying turds, radical transparency isn't the path to get there.

In fact, I'd argue that the secret ballot has already been thoroughly discussed and tested throughout history and there are plenty of legitimate examples of why it would be better if they were more secret than they are today.

Many people have brought up the idea of brigading, but would this truly get better if votes are public? Is it hard to imagine noticing that an account you generally trust has voted and matching their vote, even subconsciously?

For those who feel that they aren't able to post on Lemmy because downvotes make you feel sad, my feeling is that if you make posts in a community and they consistently get down voted to oblivion, you're in the wrong place. The people in that community don't value your contributions, and you should find another place to share them. This is the system working as intended and the mods should be thankful that such a system has been implemented.

The last point I'll make is about the potential for a chilling effect - making users less likely to interact with a post in any way due to a fear of retaliation. Look - if you're looking for a platform where all of your activity is public, those are out there. Why should we make Lemmy look just like every other platform?