I’m just a werebear tech with his paws on the ground and his head in the stars.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • I’m Gen X and I’ve been in Information Technology for twenty-eight years. My generation was there at the dawn of personal computing. Yes, there are less technically-savvy people in every generational group, but “older Gen Xers” might consider what you’ve said to be… hmm, what’s the right term? Oh, yes. “Bullshit stereotyping based on age” is the term I’m grasping for here.

    I’m well aware of the ELF (Extremely Low-Frequency Radiation) panic. This actually started in the 1970s and rose to national prominence around the late 90s, when it was covered to death by every news outlet. And it was just as silly then as it is now. France is just being France.

    And that has little or nothing to do with which generational group you call home.






  • I don’t think people appreicate the old axiom “when you look into the abyss, it also looks into you” in this case. For a long time, corporate social media algorithms drove what content you saw. This tended to be “outrage” content, because as others have mentioned, it gets clicks. But marinate in that long enough and YOU become the source of the outrage clickbait. The algorithm starts people down that path until their mentality becomes self-reinforcing. They post what they’re used to posting – angry stuff. And they seek out more even without behind-the-scenes manipulation of their feed. Now imagine all those Twitter refugees landing in the Fediverse with that kind of outlook. It’s not surprising that outrage and bile are trending.

    The way to break this cycle is… just ignore it. I have an extensive list of keyword filters on Mastodon. It screens out 99% of the political content. I just don’t want to see it. I’m here to engage with people who share the same passions and hobbies as myself. THAT’S what makes my Fediverse social media experience better. It’s not a magical function of crossing the corporate/open-source boundary. I have to be responsible for curating my feed according to what I want to seek.

    The same goes for Lemmy. I’m using Leomard as my client on macOS, and it allows me to block out any Lemmy instances I don’t want to see. And I set my default view to “subscribed,” not “local” or “all.” That prevents me from getting psychologically drenched with whatever angry or trollish content might be lurking in those feeds when I open the client. I also sort by “new” rather than “hot,” “most comments,” etc. It’s great that people have opnions about things, but I find relying on up/downvotes to be a poor way of discovering the content I want.

    Long story short (too late): your social media experience in the Fediverse is yours to shape. If you rely on the defaults and flow with the tide, you’ll likely end up somewhere you don’t want to be. If you trim your sails and take the wheel, there are all sorts of wonderful destinations out here.

    Don’t use other people’s anger and unhappiness as your compass.





  • Reasons I use my M1 MacBook Air:

    1. Real estate. Thanks to AirPlay and the Thunderbolt port, I can have three desktops going at once with all my open windows.
    2. Intel binaries still run on it via Rosetta 2.
    3. Control – I have more access to the OS, the command line, etc.
    4. Virtualization – Apple Silicon is built on ARM, so I can virtualize any ARM-based Linux distribution using VMware Fusion. (I run Fedora in a VM.)
    5. Input – despite iPads having the ability to accept keyboard and touchpad input these days, the pointer is still pretty clumsy.

    And lots more, but that’s a good start for me.