• 35 Posts
  • 812 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: April 1st, 2022
  • comfy@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What are the websites, articles, books or games most intellectually stimulating to you?
    1·
    14 hours ago

    I’ve found that when I’m deciding to try out something creative or artistic, I start to look for techniques in other people’s works when I might otherwise just be enjoying them on a surface level. Anyone can look at a work and say if it’s pretty or not, if it seems well-designed, how it makes you feel, but when you start to ask how an artist does that, you quickly discover techniques that you may be able to apply to your own art, your own writing. You can even look at a list of techniques [1] and then start to identify when creators are using them, and how to use them effectively. The more you experience and the more you think about it, the more understanding and the more tools you have at your fingertips. And by forcing yourself to get into D&D, you’re throwing yourself into a game that will help you develop that variety of skills, and probably into a scene where plenty of people know enough of those skills that you can rapidly learn from them, see what they do brilliantly and see what they could do better.

  • comfy@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What should be done with the unemployable people?
    24·
    2 days ago

    Since this question is asking “should”, I think it’s fine to answer with a rational but radical answer:

    • People can be useful to society even if they aren’t employed in our current economies. Retired people may not have jobs, but often still perform productive or necessary labor, like maintenance, artistic contributions, child care, historical preservation. When someone isn’t working for money, they still often voluntarily work for society!
    • I believe that, generally speaking, it’s within society’s best interest, even just from an economic standpoint, to support these people even if they aren’t formally employable.
    • Looking at most capitalist countries, overproduction is normal. Usable property remains empty just because an owner wants more money for their investment. Perfectly edible food is systematically thrown in bins rather than given to hungry people for free, or rejected by stores because it doesn’t look perfect (like an oddly shaped carrot). Clothes are thrown out once they’re “unfashionable”.

    We have all the resources needed to support everyone, and it wouldn’t take much extra effort from a determined government to get those resources where they need to go. There’s no reason why unemployed people should be left to starve and freeze simply because they don’t have enough income. In our society, the scarcity of basic needs is artificial (‘artificial scarcity’).

    Automation is seen as a bad thing, a threat, because workers in society are threatened with starvation if they don’t have the income needed for food, shelter, medicine and perhaps basic luxuries. But if our political economy were first-and-foremost based around society’s needs instead of profiting, and therefore we used our modern technology to automate the production of these basic needs and distribute them, then suddenly automation would mean free time and easier labor!

  • comfy@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Do you think sometimes privacy practices of people at c/privacy or r/privacy communities are overparanoid or take things too far?
    3·
    8 days ago

    I haven’t been around these communities in a while, so I can’t really speak for /c/privacy as much as /r/privacy and other communities, but I’ve noticed far far far far too many posts which are blindly perfectionist, with no consideration of threat capabilities or their motivations. Privacy is futile without a realistic threat model, that’s how you get burned out solving non-problems and neglecting actual problems.

    My threat model is largely just minimizing surveillance capitalism and avoiding basement-dweller neo-nazi stalkers from connecting any dots between my online personas and real life identity. Even for that, my measures are a bit excessive, but not to the point where I’m wasting much time or effort.

    Daily reminder: “more private” and “more secure” are red flags. If you see or say these, without a very specific context, it’s the wrong attitude towards privacy and security. They’re not linear scales, they’re complex concepts. That’s why Tor Browser is excellent for my anonymity situation but atrociously insecure to anyone who is being personally targeted by malware (tl;dr monoculture ESR Firefox[1]). That’s why Graphene is not automatically anti-privacy simply because it runs on a Google Pixel and Android-based OS. (Google is one of my main adversaries.) And I think this simplistic ‘broscience’ style of “[x] is better than [y], [z] is bad” discourse is harmful and leads people into ineffective approaches.