That’s fair, and you raise good points. Thank you for sharing and explaining your perspective.

The perception of cycling in general is already negative, but I suspect it has less to do with idiots on bikes and more that bikes can’t help but be in drivers’ way. Yet I still hear NIMBYs actively fight against bike lanes because they think cyclists are entitled, and don’t want to lose parking spaces to them, or get longer commutes if roads are converted to one-way. That’s not something responsible cycling can fix; that’s a direct result of car-centric culture being resistant to having a smaller slice of the pie.

EDIT: One thing to add. Human psychology is weird, and it treats being inside a car as like being in one’s own house. ‘Road rage’ is a real phenomenon of drivers feeling ‘territorial’ in protecting ‘their’ space. It means theyre more reactive, more impulsive, and often more spiteful. No doubt in part because driving is a highly demanding activity mentally, especially at higher speeds, so adrenaline spikes easily.

By comparison, we don’t get widespread ‘supermarket rage’ with our shipping trolleys, because it feels like a public space in a way ‘inside of my car’ doesn’t (and we’re slower and have time to think). And unfortunately, there isn’t anything cyclists can do about that, either.

Also, correction: I didn’t say all the things that piss off drivers are being done to make us safer. I said all the things that make us safer still tend to piss off drivers. Part of the Road Rage issue is that drivers get pissed off over any perceived infraction, regardless of context: even if their own inattention is at fault (like blaming people on the footpath for being in their way). Usually, the feeling passes In a couple seconds, but every now and then some asshole tries to run you off the road to ‘make a point’…

Absolutely, but the same idiots that text while driving and microwave grapes can also buy bikes, so the existence of idiots on bikes cannot be assumed to represent a philosophy for cyclists at large (in your area, anyway). Are these things you see many cyclists doing? Or just things you’ve seen a cyclist do?

I see the concerns you’ve listed, and I agree they’re not safe. But I know why people choose several of them, even if I personally don’t do them. I have headlights and a reflective vest, but if your hobby bike doesn’t and you need to get home after dark, you deal. If there’s no safe space on the road, or the visibility is too poor, you deal.

Some of the other things you name, I haven’t seen and cannot fathom why somebody would do such things. We’re probably not from the same country (let alone area) so our cycling infrastructure will be different.

One of them I have done: riding the footpath in the opposing direction. I’m going at low speed so I can brake, but the only risk is of a bad driver being impatient - the same risk a mobility scooter, mailbuggy, skateboarder etc would have. And I do this if a) the road only has one path, and the otherside i would be exposed on the shoulder, or b) when my destination is close on the same side because it makes no sense to cross the road twice within 100m. Both are decisions I make to reduce my exposure to cars.

Cyclists break laws to reduce exposure to cars and their drivers. Even walking on a footpath, you’re more likely to be killed by a car mounting the curb, or launching from a driveway than anything else. Car drivers are the apex predator of cyclists and pedestrians.

The reason cyclists avoid stopping is that our vehicles are pedal powered. If we lose all momentum, we take far, FAR longer to execute maneuvers. It means we spend longer in intersections, which are the MOST dangerous place for cyclists to be. Because of the cars.

And if we stop and wait, we need a far bigger gap than cars do. We cant inject fuel into our legs for a burst of speed. So drivers get impatient waiting for us to go and try to cut in front of us, turn in front of us, take any gaps we could’ve taken.

So the recommended action is to ‘take the lane’ (be in the middle of the lane so cars can’t pass us) and then drivers are angry we’re in the way and slowing them down and behave recklessly out of spite. Or politeness, sometimes drivers ‘help’ by stopping in the middle of intersections to create space, which also causes accidents.

Or we could be on the footpath, which means we now have to go much slower for safety and oh wait the biggest risk IS STILL CARS because drivers forget the footpath exist and launch out driveways at full speed without even looking. Cyclists, mobility scooters, skateboards; all irrelevant to the impatient driver.

So yeah, all the things that make using a light vehicle safer tend to make heavy vehicle users pissed off. I can do everything right, but if an impatient driver overtakes me in an intersection and collides with me, I’m still the one who ends up in hospital.

So… yeah. Being a defensive cyclists means minimizing interactions with drivers wherever possible.

Good lord. So glad my country has strict animal welfare standards for livestock. Uncomfortable that we still import and slaughter pigs from countries without those standards. (And yes, we import-and-slaughter because we don’t import pork itself. We do however, allow the import/export of live animals, so international trade buys our sheep for ‘breeding’, and sell us their pigs for ‘NZ-made pork’. I suppose it at least enforces abattoir health standards…?)

We probably don’t have enough user traffic to give people the specific help they need. Certainly not compared to something like StackOverflow, which is already what you’re describing.

The issues with generalised user-to-user programming help (esp re: StackOverflow) is that an increasing number of communities are doing this in closed-off areas like Slack and Discord, where their support is not indexed or searchable. Users running into the same problems are struggling to find each others’ answers. Creating yet another community that’s separated from the internet at large exacerbates this problem.

Man, I used to really like browsing the stuff at ThinkGeek. Even bought a few things. Now that it’s owned by… I wanna say GameStop?.. it’s ceased to be interesting to me. I liked things like the laundry basket that looked like a radioactive barrel, the shower gel that looks like a blood bag… that kind of light-hearted novelty stuff. But the new owner just gutted all the interesting content, and it’s just all IP collectables now.

It’s been long enough I forgot bout ThinkGeek. Damn. Wish something like it were still around.

• “progress on [1], fixed linting [2]”
• “[1] completed, setup for [2]”
• “[3] and [4] completed”
• “fixed formatting”
• “refactoring [1] and [2]”
• “fix variable typos”
• “update logic in [2]”
• “revert package.json and regenerate package-lock”

All my commits have comments. I generally commit after completing a ‘block’ objective, a describe what that was but in very simple terms mostly in regards to the file/section with the most significant logic changes. I don’t always specify the file if I did tiny typos/linting/annotation across a bunch of them, because the logic is unaffected I know that the differences will be visible in the commit history.

My weakness is that I don’t do it often enough. If I’m working on [2] for several hours, I’ll only commit when I consider it minimally-viable (completed 2), or when moving between machines ([further] progress on 2). And I have a bad habit of not pushing every time I commit, just at the end of the day or when moving between machines (though a messy rebase hopefully made that lesson stick), or if somebody else on the team wants to review an issue I’m having.

They’re all derivative names. My first/middle names are gender-neutral, though I use the original spelling (which implies masc).

I won’t go into detail since it’s generally not a good idea to share full names on the internet with strangers, but when I was a kid I looked up my birthname, and the meaning of my first name was “the (opposing) version of [Name]” (eg “Francine is the feminine of Frank”).

The irony of the original name was that its meaning was ‘very gender’ (eg: if Frank were to mean “buff and hairy”), so it was confusing if the opposing version’s meaning changed in any way. I took a shine to it when I was a kid, then I used the original name and its most common spelling as my new first name as an adult.

AI can code assist; it’s quite helpful for that. Predictive text, learning a less familiar language, converting pseudo, etc.

But it couldn’t possibly replace senior developers long-term. It just looks new and exciting, especially to people who don’t truly understand how it works. We still need to have human developers capable of writing their own new code.

1. AI is entirely derivative, it’s just copying the human devs of yester-year. If AI does the majority of coding then it becomes incapable of learning, thus necessitating human coders anyway. It also is only going to generate solutions to broad-strokes problems that it already has in its dataset, or convert pseudocode into functional code (which still requires a dev know enough to write pseudo).

2. It also currently has no way of validating what it writes. It’s trying to replicate what our writing looks like contextually, it doesn’t comprehend it. If it ever starts training on itself as it ages, it will stagnate and require human review, which means needing humans that understand code. And that’s not including the poor practices it will already have because so many devs are inconsistent about things like writing comments, documentation, or unit testing. AI doesn’t have its own bias but it inevitably learns to imitate ours.

3. And what about bug-testing? When the AI writes something that breaks, who do you ask for help? The AI doesn’t comprehend the context of the code its reading if you paste it back, it doesn’t remember writing it. You need people who understand how the code works to be able to recognise why it might be breaking.

AI devs are the fast food of coding. It will never be as good quality as something from an experienced professional. But if you’re an awful cook, it still makes it fast and easy to get a sad, flat cheeseburger.

I’ve worked with devs who are the equivalent of line cooks and are also producing sad, flat cheeseburgers: code of poor quality that still sees production because the client doesn’t know any better. IMO, those are the only devs that need to be concerned, because those are the ones that are easy to replace.

If AI coding causes any problems within the job market for devs, it will be that it replaces graduate/junior developers so well that fewer devs get the mentoring or experience to become seniors, and the demand for seniors will rack up significantly. It seems more likely that developers will split into two separate specialisations, not that our single track will be replaced.

These are essentially my thoughts. They’re helpful for indicating context (tone/expression/sentiment). The goal of language is communication; words alone can struggle with that. Well-placed emojis help improve communication. Numerous emojis breaking up sentences makes them harder to read; imo it impairs communication.

I also don’t like the idea of policing others’ use of a harmless sub-dialect of online communication just because one decides not to use it themselves. I personally don’t use or enjoy the ‘emojis’ that are just ‘fun graphics we like’ (most Discord custom emotes are this). Nor do I like that filter where 1-3 emojis are inserted after basically every single word. But that’s because it’s not my online dialect; it doesn’t mean people who use emojis that way are ‘wrong’.

Different platforms have different ‘accents’, and emojis are only one example of that. I find the numerous dialects of online English to be a fascinating topic that isn’t often considered.

Sometimes I’d feel sad that a trait of say, Tumblr’s dialect didn’t have a Reddit equivalent: Tumblr uses punctuation, capitalisation, and even typos as a tone indicator. A Redditor doesn’t know the different tones implied amongst these, even though most Tumblr users do:

• no. stop
• no stop
• noo staaaaahp
• noolkjaflakud STOP
• No. Stop.
• NO STOP

I can tell which of these are vaguely upset, genuinely upset, or pretending to be upset in a few different ways. Reddit doesn’t have that, because it expects everybody to write with formal grammar all the time, including not ‘allowing’ emojis as tone indicators. I suspect that formal writing style probably contributes to why so many comments are read in bad faith as smug/adversarial. 😢

What templates have you looked at?

I did sign up for Notion; I thought it would be a helpful repo for things like notes that I’d previous been writing down. However the amount of setup involved is preventing me from using it, like it did for Todoist. I would find something plug-and-play to modify and build off of very helpful.

It’s not like the service itself is complicated. It’s that I really struggle to prioritise what’s important, or categorise. My comments are miles long because I don’t know what words to cut, and I’m terrible at reducing grey spectrums down to black and white for things like NSFW filters or category sorting; I despise having to put #tags of anything I upload and I can’t estimate how long a task takes either.

The most useful thing I’ve found as of late is goblin.tools; the todo list uses Open AI to generate subtasks based on how scary/hard it feels to do. This is the part I actually struggle with; I’m extremely productive when I know exactly what I need to do.

Building a personal wiki seems like a great idea of documenting things like grounding exercises or strategies. I guess I’m hoping somebody’s done the skeleton for me, so I don’t procrastinate it for a year until I eventually close the tab.

Metaverse was such a weird pitch to me. It seemed to think the way we are living our lives in the way we want to live them, and just offered that in a sterile, miserable package of digital ennui.

Like I get it, our lives right now are built around work and material consumption. But we don’t enjoy work and material consumption! It doesn’t make us happy; it’s not what we’re excited about! We just can’t meet basic survival needs without money (work), and the stress kills us so much that we look to any shallow escape to recover juuuuust enough to keep doing it.

Why on earth would a working human - which is >90% of us - want to move into a space that has all the drudgery, tracking, oversight, micromanagement, and shallow pandering of the current world… and lose all the socialisation, birdsong, walking past a busker playing blues, the smell of a nearby cafe, the sound of passers-by laughing; life?

I want to wake up in the morning in a comfortable bed and open my curtains to clear skies without traffic smoke; you think waking up to traffic noise and grey skies and shuffling over to my laptop to do my economy-mandated 8 hours labour with a blue-skies backdrop is somehow appealing? If anything, it highlights just how incredibly dystopic the waking world is becoming in the name of productivity and efficiency. It makes the ennui even more visible than before, to see what life could have been and know most of us will never afford it.

How little does MZ understand about humanity, to think we want an existence devoid of nothing more than existing in a closed economy and 3D storefronts?

I’m not aware of what Discord has been doing that is causing people’s concern. What are people currently concerned about re: Discord?

I accepted that it would have to start doing something eventually - it can’t operate for free forever. But the only news I’ve heard recently is giving servers optional tools to monetise, and free users can continue to not use servers that do that. The few servers I’ve been in that do it are doing it ironically - donate to the sub to gain access to a channel with a giant 🍆 emoji and nothing else! Comments disabled! etc.

I wouldn’t blame Patreon for somebody moving all their content behind a $20/m sub, I just wouldn’t subscribe to them… so I’m not concerned with Discord until it enshittifies for users.

Curated communities would likely choose to defederate from instances like that since they have no barrier for entry, and may be bots, spam, or bad actors.

If you’re joining an established instance (or work with people to create a new one), then you’ll at least get a local community, which will both give a instance content if defederated, and legitimise it so it’s less likely to be.

Only if you define mods winning as ‘things go back to what they were’.

The CEO is only ‘winning’ in the sense that things will never return to what they are. He will undermine the protest at every turn, and then he will release his changes as intended.

His contributing users however, are leaving in droves. His ‘victory’ will be pyrrhic at beast.

Users were working for free in mutual trust; now they are expected to produce and moderate for free, and then buy back their own product. Moderators are booted because they’re locking subs as private, and then subs stay private anyway because nobody wants to moderate for free. Even those who would see moderating as a grab for power (the expected scabs) are less inclined to moderate while admins are proving they actually have little power at all (just unpaid labour).

We are his livestock. We thought we were meeting in a community hall to socialise, and then Huffman revealed we were congregated in his barn. The content we produced is to be sold off for his gain; it’s not ours. The space isn’t in any way ours, it merely shelters us while we produce his product: content.

Well, what’s happening right now is that the people who produce the content are leaving. Reddit will still have a ton of users, but they’ll mostly be the 90% lurkers and low-effort users that went there to consume that content contributing users aggregated for them.

Contributors are readily welcomed in almost any community; they don’t need to stay. It is the consuming users that are addicted, that Huffman (correctly) predicts will accept it.

The chickens are leaving the barn, and Huffman will be left with the confused roosters who’ll produce nothing for him other than noise.

Mods are losing… but so is he.

Thanks for sharing your perspective with me, I really enjoyed reading it!

You raised an interesting point, the polarising of r/AITA, and its something I’ve noticed a few times… I now have a theory:

Personal experiences are far more likely to move towards emotional extremes.

Emotionally-invested people reach points of ‘black and white morality’ as they get larger, labelled as moral or immoral based on each viewer’s personal perspective.

I’m not saying our emotions are bad - if anything, many people are martyrs from their own emotional neglect - rather that many of us have not learned how to feel emotion authentically without treating them as objective judgements that justify action. (eg: this happened, I feel angry, therefore you wronged me, therefore I can defend myself, etc)

Humans are empathetic, which is truly wonderful. But we have two types of empathy:

• affective empathy is our brain’s mirror neurons, feeling emotion in response to others’ visible feelings. I see you feel sad, so I feel sad for you. It’s innate.
• cognitive empathy is a social skill, one facet of emotional maturity. I recognise that if this were to happen, then somebody in your situation may feel sad, and I understand why. It’s learned, primarily in childhood as modelled by our parents.

So, back to your example of r/AITA - the NAH and ESH ratings are likely only being used by those engaging with cognitive empathy, (hopefully) recognising possible biases and advocating for communication that will satisfy both, as if they are a third party observing.

But for those who engage with their affective empathy, they project themselves into the story - if the story is evocative, they’ll readily side with OP. If the other’s experience angers them, they’ll readily call them out. They’re not here to offer perspective - only judgement.

So what does that mean for communities that want to prevent polarisation?

Haha, fuck if I know, I mostly just find the topic interesting and enjoy having a space to explore it. But I have a couple ideas, and would be curious to hear yours?

On Reddit, we see this black/white emotional judgement in upvotes/downvotes - though they are intended for whether a comment contributes something, they’re often used to define whether a comment is moral according to the voter’s values. Without downvotes, a comment that is bigoted can still be blocked/reported; but with them, a comment that says I think Witcher 3 is boring because- can be buried.

r/AITA also encourages a degree of absolutism by boiling down rulings to three letters, and groupthink by drawing an ultimate conclusion based on which one is most popular rather than presenting a table graph. Users can feel just and righteous - standing up for victim OP, or standing up for their victim.

So I don’t know if the problem is preventable, it’s a humanities issue; but I would consider some of the following:

• no downvoting system. It’s rarely used in good faith; comments that don’t contribute that be reported instead. Comments that are engaging will still rise over comments that are not.
• active diverse moderation. Hopefully with a diverse enough mod team it will slow homogenisation. eg: a mod that likes children will push for rules that discourage/ban anti-child language; a mod that doesn’t like children will push for a platform that encourages/allows those struggling to vent. Together they may find guidelines that emotionally validates struggle without perpetuating hate.
• smaller communities, like you said. Subs like r/childfree are trying to be resource communities (the list of doctors, advice, etc) and have good reason for being large, but social communities are probably better off kept smaller. eg: if they made a r/childfreesupport for venting and emotional validation.

Also, for those of you who read to the end, I really appreciate it. I know I ramble about stuff I find interesting, and despite editing out a bunch of waffle I know this is still really long. Would enjoy reading your equally long responses lol

That seems like a good idea for users in your situation. What do you choose to replace them with? Are they simply removed, text-descriptions…? Do you know why you dislike emojis (I’m curious!), or is it simply something to you know to be true of yourself?

I personally like them as tone indicators, because so little of communication is technically the words we say (~4%). I know my writing looks quite formal and so it’s easy for people to think I’m ‘cold’ or unapproachable; I don’t know how to make it read more casually while still being accurate. But I can put little emojis next to some of the sentences if it helps 👍

I’m curious about it, yes. I think it’s easy for older users to claim their version was somehow ‘superior’ but all humans have their own perspective; it’s when we cease sharing those perspectives as respectful equals that I think we lose something.

To clarify I don’t equate being smug with being knowledgeable. I know people can struggle with feeling self-conscious in that respect and feel that they are somehow being judged if somebody talks about information as though they ‘should’ know it, and that’s not what I’m talking about.

No, I’m talking about when the discussion of ideas stops being about shared perspectives, and starts being about winning. When you don’t share knowledge because you love learning and want to share what you’ve learned, but because knowledge gives you status over the person you’re ‘teaching’.

So many questions that aren’t asked for fear we’d ‘look dumb’, so many ideas resistant to new evidence for fear we’d seem foolish, discussions not had because ‘they’ll assume I think they’re stupid’.

Learning is so wonderful! There’s so much to learn, a human is not capable of learning everything. There should never be shame in somebody knowing something you don’t know, and therefore there should never be superiority in sharing something you do know!

I celebrate a system that includes specialised people sharing their specialisations. My interest is in sociology and psychology; but I know very little about gardening or machinery for example, I would enjoy a person in those fields to share what they know about them.

Let me share with you what I’m thinking of when I talk about ‘true’ subs, as I understand it’s a broad statement. I can offer a perspective that is more nuanced, if longer to read. I’ll bold the key statements.

I understand that when subs get large enough, groupthink emerges; people voting up/down not based on whether a comment contributes meaningfully, but whether or not they agree or feel good about it. Thus even constructive minority voices are drowned out.

The reason the splintered subs could be a problem is that it often left the disruptive people to represent entire ideas, for better or for worse. It fractures movements that should otherwise have common goals into smaller and smaller slices that are unwilling to co-operate towards otherwise shared goals.

The one that comes to mind for me is r/childfree. It started out as a resource for those who’d chosen a child-free life to find support, collate a list of recommended doctors that recognised body autonomy (its often very difficult to get sterilised, especially if you’re younger and/or don’t already have several children), how the workforce treated them differently for being child-free (such as expecting them to cancel their plans and sacrifice their time off for parents on short notice), impact on their social lives, etc.’

However, over time it stopped being pro childfree lifestyle choices, and support for a group that is often seen as ‘selfish’; and started becoming anti child lifestyle choices. The frontpage became mostly rants, filled with terms like ‘crotchfruit’, ‘breeder’, etc. What was once a community of a minority lifestyle trying to find support and legitimacy gave way to anger and tribalism.

Eventually enough of the users that consider choosing to have children to be an equally valid lifestyle choice - merely one they’d chosen not to live - slowly started lurking, unsubbing, or otherwise becoming invisible. Anti-child/‘breeder’ rhetoric became more and more prevalent. Eventually, r/truechildfree was founded to do what r/childfree used to - collate resources and support for those who have chosen a child-free life in a world where children are considered ‘opt out’. Thus childfree users split into pro-child and anti-child tribes.

Which is lovely for r/truechildfree and its users (I am child-free, but I like children; I just recognise I am not equipped to raise them). But it meant that the largest and most visible sub, r/childfree, became almost only child-haters, and an already maligned community often considered ‘selfish’ is now represented by absolutists that are no longer willing to respect people who disagree.

I understand that it is the nature of humanity, once pushed, to push back. I understand why those who see mistreatment in the workplace or socially for their choice to be child free would be upset, same as anything we hold close to our hearts. That pain is why the r/childfree support group came to exist in the first place.

But it is diversity of opinion that makes discussion so interesting, that allows us opportunity for growth, that has us looking at the ways we are similar instead of fighting over the ways we are different.

I think the anger of those in the new r/childfree is real, valid, legitimate.
I think the users of r/truechildfree’s discomfort with how that anger was displayed is also real, valid, legitimate.

I wish we’d looked for a better way to handle it than for letting communities devolve into absolutism, though. Whatever your reasons for not choosing to have children, you still deal with the same stigma; it’s a shame to have people who are struggling against the same chains to schism over the metal they’re made of.

This is why I’m hoping Lemmy can resist against some of the Reddit-specific culture that I think would dampen the experience here. Animosity towards emojis, creating echo-chamber communities/subreddits, the air of smug self-righteousness, discussion as something one can ‘win’ etc.

Redditors in general aren’t bad, but a lot of vocal users had it in their heads that they were somehow better than people who used other platforms, and staked lines to maintain that cultural divide. Some of them concluded they were better than other redditors; turning communities into Us vs Them tribalism, until they would fracture into r/subreddit and r/truesubreddit.

Lemmy is not Reddit. It had a culture and it had users before the API shuffle; it’s an opportunity to start fresh. It’s not appropriate to expect Lemmy turn into Reddit, with all the unpleasantness that entails, and at the expense of the lemmings that were already here.

I’m quite honest about it; I spent years on Reddit too. I’m a redditor. But being here on Lemmy has been such a wonderful breath of fresh air, the ‘I disagree but I’ll respectfully explain why’ that Reddit was missing for years. I can feel how miserable modern Reddit is in comparison and I really hope we don’t recreate it.