cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/46695440

I found this zine interesting and on-topic for Anarchy. These tactics should be in everyone's mind, specially nowadays.

You have several different formats in the link, pdf, doc, etc.

Amazon Prime is particularly heinous about using dark patterns to confound users into risking forgetting but ultimately you've already paid for the month, year

I can confirm this to also be the case with most streaming giants plus the less-giant Shutter

Edit: comments have pointed out some notable exceptions such as services through Apple and HP Instant Ink

db0 set up an AI image generator bot both on the Threadverse and Mastodon some time back for anyone to use. All one needs to do is mention it in a comment followed by the text "draw for me" and then prompt text, and it'll respond with some generated images. For example:

@aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw for me An engraving of a skunk.

Caused it to reply back to me with:

Here are some images matching your request

Prompt: An engraving of a skunk.

Style: flux

The bot has apparently been active for some time and it looks like few people were aware that it existed or used it

I certainly wasn't!

I don't know whether it will work in this community, as this community says that it prohibits most bots from operating here. However, I set up a test thread over here on !test@sh.itjust.works to try it out, where it definitely does work; I was exploring some of how it functions there, and if you're looking for a test place to try it out, that should work!

It farms out the compute work to various people who are donating time on their GPUs via AI Horde.

The FAQ for the bot is here. For those familiar with local image generation, it supports a number of different models.

The default model is Flux, which is, I think, a good choice

that takes English-like sentences describing a picture, and is pretty easy to use without a lot of time reading documentation.

A few notes:

• The bot disallows NSFW image generation, and if it detects one, it'll impose a one-day tempban on its use to try to make it harder for people searching for loopholes to generate them.

• There appears to me in my brief testing to be some kind of per-user rate limit. db0 says that he does have a rate limit on Mastodon, but wasn't sure whether he put one on Lemmy, so if you might only be able to generate so many images so quickly.

• The way one chooses a model is to change the "style" by ending the prompt text with "style: stylename". Some of these styles entail use of a different model; among other things, it's got models specializing in furry images; there's a substantial furry fandom crowd here. There's a list of supported styles here with sample images.

db0 has encouraged people to use it in that test post and in another thread where we were discussing this, says have fun. I wanted to post here to give it some visibility, since I think that a lot of people, like me, have been unaware that has been available. Especially for people on phones or older computers, doing local AI image generation on GPUs really isn't an option, and this lets folks who do have GPUs share them with those folks.

Once we isolate key people, we look for people we know are in their upstream -- people that they read posts from, but who themselves are less influential. (This uses the same social media graph built before.) We then either start flame wars with bots to derail the conversations that are influencing influential people (think nonsense reddit posts about conspiracies that sound like Markov chains of nonsense other people have said), or else send off specific tasks for sockpuppets (changing this wording of an idea here; cause an ideological split there; etc).

The goal is to keep opinions we don't want fragmented and from coalescing in to a single voice for long enough that the memes we do want can, at which points they've gotten a head start on going viral and tend to capture a larger-than-otherwise share of media attention.

(All of the stuff above is basically the "standard" for online PR (usually farmed out to an LLC with a generic name working for the marketing firm contracted by the big firm; deniability is a word frequently said), once you're above a certain size.)

https://archive.is/PoUMo

Why YSK?

Because a lot of older games require immediate response from the controller (think jumping over pits).

Each TV is different, and may or may not have a game mode. For the longest time, I thought my lag was because of my Raspberry PI (model 4, 4gb). Turns out that turning on the game mode/game optimizer was all I needed. I also added a link to a post that has suggestions for Retroarch changes that can decrease input lag. Relavant content from post:

1. Set max swapchain to as low as possible, I think 1 and 2 run pretty similarly.
2. Turn on hard gpu sync and set it to 0
3. Set frame delay as high as you can go before you get stuttering. On the pi 1, I can go to about 8 with NES core and 4 with SNES. On Pi 3 you can probably go higher, but systems with higher graphics like N64 and PSX won't let you go as high before you run into problems.

And:

(when asked where the settings are) You need to access the retroarch rgui menu while you are in a game. You can do this by pressing X button and select at the same time. Once you get to the rgui menu, you want to click on settings, then video.

All you need is a burner phone number. Tickets are first come first serve…

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/31344860

Disregard all rules, Get this to anyone you know in the US military now

A tweet states that National Guard or Active Duty military ordered to violate constitutional rights can call the GI Rights Hotline for support, with the number 1-877-447-4487 provided.

"WHY": It can help you plan for the best places to sit, take photos, etc.

A friend is planning an event this summer and wanted to find a shady spot in a large park for people to sit. I remembered seeing this project, and it helped in my use case

Here is the website: https://shademap.app/

Here is the developer's GitHub with some code, API, and sample projects: https://github.com/ted-piotrowski

Here is an article I found by Bellingcat talking about the features: https://bellingcat.gitbook.io/toolkit/more/all-tools/shademap

There is also this other tool ShadowMap (app.shadowmap.org), but the data quality wasn't great for the places that I tried.

My Previous Post (Read it first, as this post might not make sense to you, without reading the previous post first)

I saw a lot of people defending Ars Technica in my previous post. Here is a simple proof that they are an evil company:

ProPublica Posts:

Ars Technica post:

As it can be seen here, the original source of the info/Investigation was Propublica and even in terms of the story cover photo, Propublica used a custom cover.

Yet, despite all of that, as expected Reddit manipulated upvotes to boost the Ars Technica story and even deleted the second ProPublica story from Reddit.

Journalism will be fucked up, because of Condé Nast and their parent company manipulation.

When television first started, there were 3 channels and a handful of commercials. After a few decades of more channels and more ads appearing, cable showed up. Now you could pay a subscription to get premium content without ads!

But after a decade, not only were they putting ads on cable you paid a premium to watch, they were speeding up both the shows and the ads to fit more into breaks that kept getting longer.

Younger people are just starting to see the cycle is underway again with streaming services, but over the last 10ish years, I've noticed all the various cliques going "why is {our interest} going to shit" as if it were an isolated incident and not happening everywhere.

The first act of capitalism when it was created was the slave trade. Corporations have always been vehicles the ultra rich use to extract wealth.

Revenue is how much money a company brings in selling things. Profit is how much of that remains after paying for materials, leases, power, reinvesting into the business, and paying wages. Basically, CEOs are paid 300x more than employees to defer maintenance and suppress wages.

Economics 101- charge as much as you can, pay as little as possible. Any corporation that makes billions in profit only does so by gouging customers and stiffing workers.

Real wages are stagnant, pensions aren't a thing, and they're trying to get rid of social security. There's a reason we're told to use things like HSA, 529s, and 401ks: it enriches the already rich.

There is something called a fiduciary duty to shareholders which basically means publicly traded corporations must act in the best interest of investors. It SOUNDS like a good idea, but it's not really well defined.

The reality of the situation is BlackRock basically owns the stock market and the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve is owned and controlled by a group of banks- not the US government. Those banks are publicly traded corporations that own chunks of everything and each other. It's a giant rich guy circle jerk that basically means the recent uniform RTO mandates were probably from Larry Fink himself due to how central commercial real estate is to collateral for things like naked shorting.

Inflation isn't things costing more; it's the dollar being worth less as more money exists. The reason the rich buy art, watches, and shit is because they benefit from inflation. If you hold on to $5,000 for a decade you have $5,000 that buys less after a decade of inflation. If you buy a painting, jewelry, or whatever, it appreciates overtime being worth more than $5k.

Federal minimum wage was 7.25 in 2008. Not much, but you could buy 1-3 shares of AMD or 18" of Subway. Today, M2 (a measure of money in the economy) is three times what it was in 2008 and minimum wage is still $7.25 and might get you 6" of sandwich. AMD, on the other hand, currently sits around $120 a share.

Someone that works to eat will always be falling behind while someone that's not struggling can just load up on wealth that keeps growing. A majority of the country doesn't have money on hand to deal with a $500 emergency while more than half the wealth of the country is owned by a handful of people that make lifetimes of wealth through passive investments alone.

Unfortunately, it's all very complicated and basically everyone is stupid most of the time with only brief windows of subject specific competence. Reason and rationality is a best case outcome but people act like it's the default.

Welcome to the meat grinder. None of us matter.

I started to notice some thing weird while using Reddit, every link post from Condé Nast owned news outlet was getting a high amount of upvotes and awards while other publications had a very normal rate of awards( usually zero, with the exception of the sponsored ones) and upvotes.

That when I started to investigate this matter till I found out about this.

They are boosting their publications on Reddit on the major subreddits. They are trying to give their publications a advantage over all the other news outlets.

They have the ability to kill the other news outlets if they keep doing that. Avoid them as if your freedom is dependent on it.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/31299380

It's freeing in a way, I don't have to do any extra processing in my head, and can just see the posts and comments for what they are. You should try it too!

Not that I have to tell anyone, but this is tremendously useful for filtering out the flood of over-optimized garbage sites polluting the search indices nowadays.

For installation instructions see the link. (Tl;dr: Install the browser extension TamperMonkey, then click the green "Install this script" button on the page.)

(While there are also browser extensions for filtering search results, even ones that are purportedly open-source, the problem is that one has to trust that the program one installs is the same as the code in the github repository. With user scripts, on the other hand, one can see exactly which code gets installed and run, so that one only has to trust the Tampermonkey extension, and this extension is recommended by the Chrome web store and monitored for security by the Firefox web store.)

This post is here to soothe fears and give practical starting points, so there will be no sales pitch with reasons to edit. Skip around to whatever sections are relevant to you.

It's easier than it looks

Getting into Wikipedia looks like walking into a minefield: with 7 million articles, finding things to create is hard; a tangle of policies, guidelines, and cultures have developed over 25 years; and stories of experienced editors biting newcomers make it look like a fiefdom. "It takes a certain type, and I'm not that type" is how I used to look at it. What I didn't realize is that it doesn't take a type; it creates a type.

Everyone sucks at editing when they start. No one has ever started out knowing what they're doing. Even the project itself had to learn what it was doing. Here was our article on Guinea worm disease in 2004 plagiarized verbatim from the US CDC's website. Here's our article today. Teachers in 2005 used "Wikipedia" as a slur, and they were right: editors didn't know what they were doing. But somehow, they learned.

You might be right if you think editing wouldn't be worth your time or too boring. You might be right if you think you can't handle rejection from having your early edits changed or reverted (trust me: me too; it hurts). But if you've ever told yourself that you're not "competent enough" or wouldn't "fit in", then you're dead wrong; that humility is the kernel of a good editor. If you come in wanting to help build an encyclopedia, you're prepared.

Prep work?

See what I said before: if you come in wanting to help build an encyclopedia, you are prepared. If that satisfies you, skip this section. If you're not convinced, here's some material to make you feel more secure:

• Wikipedia operates on five fundamental principles called pillars; this is the most useful page you can read as a new editor.
• Too vague? "I need to grind to level 50 in the tutorial dungeon"? Fine. You asked for this. We have a page called "Contributing to Wikipedia" that gives you about a year of trial-and-error's worth of information if you can digest it.
• "Okay, fine, that's too much, but I still don't feel ready after reading the five pillars."
  • If you like reading, the 'Introduction' is for you.
  • If you like doing, The Wikipedia Adventure is for you.
• "But what if I get lost?" Experienced editors (especially admins) will probably help you out if you go to their talk page with a question, but for a 100% guaranteed answer, the Teahouse is always two clicks away. The two most prominent "hosts", Cullen328 and ColinFine, are both really nice and care a lot about the little guy.
• "But what if I don't fit in?" If you're not any of these things, you don't need to worry about fitting in.
• "But the markup looks too complicated." Thanks to the VisualEditor, you don't need to touch the markup for most edits. 99% of the time when experienced editors use markup, it's because it's faster, not because it's impossible in the VisualEditor.
• "I'm going to make mistakes." Literally everyone does. Here are some of the most common ones if you want to stay aware of them.

Everyone have their warm blankets on? Cool.

Getting started

Language

So you want to start but don't know where. The biggest consideration is what language you want. The English Wikipedia is only one of many, and an account on one lets you edit on all the others. Fundamental principles are the same between Wikipedias, but policies and guidelines might change, so beware if you want to straddle multiple languages. Just because it's the biggest, don't ever feel pressured to contribute in English; diversity is a strength, and Wikipedia needs more of it.

Registration

Before contributing anything, you should register an account. This gives you a face (a user page and user talk page), it gives you a track record that builds community trust, and it means your IP isn't publicly logged in the edit history. It also gives you access to the 'Preferences' tab, which becomes very useful when you start learning what its options mean.

Types of contributing

So what are the best kinds of edits to make to get into editing? (Disclaimer: Almost nobody stays on the same type of editing indefinitely, and all of these "types" are very, very broad categorizations of millions of types.) It really depends. We keep a task center classifying different types of contributions.

What I did

I started by fixing typos and grammatical errors on articles I was already reading, then when I got more comfortable, I started adding wikilinks to articles that didn't have enough. This continued for about a year until I made an article about a retro video game. In hindsight, it was really poor quality and a bad decision, but it evaded notice (I eventually cleaned it up some), and it was the point where I broke out into more intermediate and advanced types of contributing.

"Advanced" versus "non-advanced"

To be crystal clear: if you even just occasionally contribute with edits that don't require deep knowledge of Wikipedia or intensive effort, you're still an editor, you're still valued, and you're still helping. Wikipedia adheres to a hierarchy only when strictly necessary (even admins are not considered "above" other editors), and you aren't treated as disposable just because you haven't almost single-handedly made Wikipedia the best resource for US local television stations in human history (srsly gurl how the fuuuuuuuuck).

Other options

Other good options I didn't do early on are categorization (every page goes into different categories which you'll find at the bottom) and fact-checking. Categorization is the weirdest one out of all of these since it's a major part of what makes Wikipedia tick, but almost no reader realizes how important this is. Fact-checking, meanwhile, is the most difficult of these unless you're a subject matter expert. But it's also the most crucial one, and it teaches you a lot (it teaches you policies like verifiability and reliable sourcing, linked below). This involves adding citations where there aren't ones, improving citations where they're poor or malformed, and removing or editing statements which aren't verifiably true. Also consider looking at WikiProjects, which are informal groups working to improve some aspect of Wikipedia. (An example is Women in Red, which seeks to create more biographies on women.)

🚨 Actual warning fr fr on god 🚨

The only "here be dragons"-style warning I'll give is to not try creating a new article until you're really experienced. In 2025, no brand-new editor is ready for this: there's just too much to know. Creating an article involves policies and guidelines like notability, reliable sourcing, independent sources, article titles, verifiability, no original research, etc., and for brand-new editors, this goes through a heavily backlogged process called Articles for Creation. If you want to jump into the deep end, expanding out short articles is both way easier and often way more useful than creating new articles.

So what now?

Now just ask yourself "What's the worst that could happen?" If you somehow magically get in over your head, I'll step in and save you. But if you come in wanting to help build an encyclopedia, you're prepared.

I've noticed that recently this community has had a lot of posts that have general, useful but not extremely important advice, like a lot of cooking stuff and such (I won't name any names but I think you all know what I mean), as opposed to what this community posted a while ago: very crucial information.

Any thoughts on this?

Your right to due process under the law is rooted in almost a millennium of precedent, and in the United States (as in other free countries), the power of arrest and detention expressly withheld from the executive.

Here is an extremely thorough and lucid treatise on habeas corpus by Chief Justice Taney following Lincoln's illegal invocation (and delegation to military officers' discretion) of its suspension to arrest and detain a Maryland man without judicial warrant, evidence, or due process.

...Executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America, to hold his office during the term of four years—and then proceeds to prescribe the mode of election, and to specify, in precise and plain words, the powers delegated to him and the duties imposed upon him. And the short term for which he is elected, and the narrow limits to which his power is confined, show the jealousy and apprehensions of future danger which the framers of the Constitution felt in relation to that department of the Government—and how carefully they withheld from it many of the powers belonging to the Executive branch of the English Government, which were considered as dangerous to the liberty of the subject—and conferred (and that in clear and specific terms) those powers only which were deemed essential to secure the successful operation of the Government.

[...]

...He is not empowered to arrest any one charged with an offence [sic] against the United States, and whom he may, from the evidence before him, believe to be guilty—nor can he authorize any officer, civil or military, to exercise this power; for the 5th article of the amendments to the Constitution expressly provides that no person "shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law."—that is, judicial process. And even if the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus was suspended by act of Congress, and a party not subject to the rules and articles of war was afterwards arrested and imprisoned by regular judicial process, he could not be detained in prison or brought to trial before a military tribunal, for the article in the amendments to the Constitution, immediately following the one above referred to—that is, the 6th article—provides that "in all criminal prosecutions the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defence [sic].

Emphasis mine:

And the only power, therefore, which the President possesses, where the "life, liberty or property" of a private citizen is concerned, is the power and duty prescribed in the third section of the 2d article, which requires "that he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed." He is not authorized to execute them himself, or through agents or officers, civil or military, appointed by himself, but he is to take care that they be faithfully carried into execution as they are expounded and adjudged by the co-ordinate branch of the Government, to which that duty is assigned by the Constitution. It is thus made his duty to come in aid of the judicial authority, if it shall be resisted by a force too strong to be overcome without the assistance of the Executive arm. But in exercising this power, he acts in subordinate to judicial authority, assisting it to execute its process and enforce its judgments.

With such provisions in the Constitution, expressed in language too clear to be misunderstood by any one, I can see no ground whatever for supposing that the President, in any emergency or in any state of things, can authorize the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, or arrest a citizen, except in aid of the judicial power. He certainly does not faithfully execute the laws if he takes upon himself legislative power by suspending the writ of habeas corpus— and the judicial power, also, by arresting and imprisoning a person without due process of law. Nor can any argument be drawn from the nature of sovereignty, or the necessities of government for [self-defense] in times of tumult and danger. The Government of the United States is one of delegated and limited powers.

Blackstone, in his Commentaries, (1st vol., 137) states it in the following words: "To make imprisonment lawful, it must be either by process from the Courts of Judicature or by warrant from some legal officer having authority to commit to prison." And the people of the United Colonies, who had themselves lived under its protection while they were British subjects, were well aware of the necessity of this safeguard for their personal liberty. And no one can believe that in framing a government intended to guard still more efficiently the rights and liberties of the citizens against executive encroachment and oppression, they would have conferred on the President a power which the history of England had proved to be dangerous and oppressive in the hands of the Crown, and which the people of England had compelled it to surrender after a long and obstinate struggle on the part of the English Executive to usurp and retain it.

ETA: apropos quotes

RCV trends: Four states ban RCV in 2025, bringing the number of states with bans to 15.

(Okay idk why it says 15 up here then later says 16, somebody on that site probably didn't update the title text)

As of April 30, five states had banned RCV in 2025, which brought the total number of states that prohibit RCV to 16.

• Gov. Mark Gordon (Republican) signed HB 165 on March 18.
• West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey (Republican) signed SB 490 the March 19.
• Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly (Democrat) signed SB 6 into law on April 1.
• North Dakota Gov. Kelly Armstrong (Republican) signed HB 1297 on April 15.
• Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Republican) signed HB 1706 which became law on April 17.

Six states banned RCV in 2024.

Why YSK: If you're a US-American, its time to pay attention to State and Local politics instead of solely on the Federal. There is a trend in conservative jurisdictions to stop progress in making elecoral systems more fair. Use this opportunity as a rallying-cry to pass Ranked-Choice Voting in progressive jurisdictions, and hopefully everyone else takes notes. Sometimes, all you need is a few states adopting a law to become the catalyst for it to become the model for the entire country, for better or for worse. Don't allow anti-RCV legislations to dominate, counter the propaganda with pro-RCV arguments. Time to turn the tide.

Edit: fixed formatting

Edit 2: Added in the map so you don't have to click the link:

See the pattern? 🤔

MintPress News has reposted content from Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik,[26][27] and is listed as a "partner" of PeaceData, a Russian fake news site run by the Internet Research Agency.[28][29][30] A report from New Knowledge includes MintPress News as part of the "Russian web of disinformation,"[31][32] and the site has published fake authors attributed to the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency.[33] MintPress News defended Russia's invasion of Crimea, claiming Ukraine's post-revolution government was "illegitimate".[34]

On August 29, 2013, an unverified MintPress article attributed to Dale Gavlak and Yahya Ababneh said that Syrian rebels and local residents in Ghouta, Syria alleged that rebels were responsible for the chemical weapons attack on August 21.[14]

…

On September 20, the Brown Moses Blog published a statement from Gavlak saying that "despite my repeated requests, made directly and through legal counsel, they have not been willing to issue a retraction stating that I was not the author. Yahya Ababneh is the sole reporter and author of the Mint Press News piece."[37][38] Gavlak also said the report had not been verified.[16][39]

Gavlak also told the New York Times that "There was no fact finding or reporting by me for the piece. I did not travel to Syria, so I cannot corroborate [Ababneh's] account" and that Muhawesh refused to remove her name from the byline because "this is an existential issue for MintPress and an issue of credibility as this will appear as though we are lying."[37]

MintPress added an editor's note at the top of the article stating Ababneh was the sole reporter on the ground in Syria, while Gavlak assisted in researching and writing the article. It said that Gavlak was a MintPress News correspondent who had freelanced for the Associated Press (AP) in Jordan for a decade. A note at the bottom of the story says: "Some information in this article could not be independently verified. Mint Press News will continue to provide further information and updates."[40] The Russian Foreign Ministry cited the article in future statements.[41][42]

In 2023, Randi Lucile Nord, a MintPress News staff writer,[60][59] admitted to spray-painting a swastika and the word "Azov" (in reference to the Azov Brigade) on a synagogue in Royal Oak, Michigan, in order to undermine United States support to Ukraine during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[61]

No, this isn't a cast iron thing. Using stainless pans, you can get nonstick effects that, in my experience, far outperform Teflon anyway. The process is called "spot seasoning." I have cooked crispy, cheesy rice noodles with eggs with zero sticking.

I love my cast iron pans, but stainless is my daily go-to. Added bonus: use 100% copper wool to clean your stainless pan. The copper-coated wool at most grocery stores is problematic; you might get a few uses out of the coated garbage and then it starts shedding metal bits.

I'm not European, so I can't sign (I think), sharing this is the most I can do; but if you and/or someone you know is from Europe and hasn't signed yet Please do!

EDIT: THE THRESHOLD HAS BEEN REACHED!!! LETS FUCKING GOOOOO!!!

Humble Bundle used to only be known for selling game bundles for a discounted price, but I recently found out they now have a regular storefront and let you buy games individually!