I kind of think normal people don’t even exist. Everyone is weird in their own way. What we call normal is just the average of all these uniquely strange individuals - but that kind of person may be nothing more than an abstraction, like saying the average family has 2.5 children.

We assume we’re not normal because we know ourselves in far greater depth than we know others. But we call them normal because, from the outside, that’s how they seem to us. Yet, in the same way, there are people who look at us and see normal.

Self-employed contractor.

Not that much really other than the fact that some of my customers want to talk about it.

I’ve got one too!

Agree. Blocking / keyword based filtering is quite blunt tool. I’d much rather tell AI what I don’t want to see and have it analyze the content for me.

Too bad that my brain apparently still can’t figure out the difference between they keys for my front door, shed and bike lock. Still requires 3 tries just like with USB sticks.

Samsung somehow managed to include removable battery, a headphone jack and SD card slot in the XCover 6 Pro while maintaining ip67 rating and a price of under 700 euros. I’m sure they’ll be able to figure it out.

The thing here is that I have zero desire to screw people over.

The issue with your premise is that it seems to imply that the people defending them also consider them to be assholes which most likely is not the case. So it’s not that they defend assholes - you simply just disagree who the assholes are.

That’s the thing - consuming anything even remotely resembling a healthy news diet requires actively avoiding most of it. Unfiltered news consumption means getting firehosed with information to the point of paralysis and depression. I wouldn’t be surprised if even a hermit living in the woods knows the latest about Trump and Musk. There’s no way to avoid hearing about them and who ever suggests you can clearly haven’t even tried.

Not everyone wants to spend their entire day reading about the politics of a country they don’t even live in. Have you considered that some people prefer getting their news once a day from a proper news outlet, and then spending the rest of their day focused on topics they’re actually interested in? That’s not “sticking your head in the sand,” it’s having healthy boundaries.

It very much is coming and I’ve yet to hear a single good argument for why it wouldn’t be. The only thing I’m sceptical of is the time scale. People are saying it’s just a few years away but they couldn’t possibly know that. For all I know it could be 5 decades away - but it’s still coming.

Lemmy doesn’t have a recommendation algorithm, yet our feeds are just as bad - if not worse. If your daily interest revolves around reading about U.S. politics, this might not be obvious to you, but for the rest of us, it’s painfully clear. And before you suggest “just avoid political communities” or “stick to your subscription feed,” let me assure you that doesn’t work. It’s not just political communities - it’s everywhere. I can’t even read articles about space without people injecting their opinions on the CEO of a certain rocket company. Even communities like microblogmemes are beyond salvation. If you limit yourself exclusively to communities where the “no politics” rule is actually enforced, you’ll exhaust new content within about two minutes each day.

My point is that the algorithm itself isn’t the sole issue. Algorithms can actually be helpful, provided you invest even minimal effort into training them. YouTube doesn’t bombard me with politics because it knows I’m not interested. Lemmy’s user base, however, seems so addicted to outrage that outrage inevitably dominates everyone’s experience here. If we measure the quality of social media by counting the “regrettable minutes” we’ve spent there, Lemmy would rank at the absolute bottom. Even Twitter doesn’t irritate me as consistently as Lemmy does. I’ve gone to great lengths setting up content filters to block politics, but even when half my feed is blocked, the majority of what’s left is still U.S. politics.

I don’t really care. I have nothing against amazon.

Nowhere probably. I’m not traveling because I can’t afford to but rather because I’m not interested to.

As long as it sounds good, I don’t give a damn even if it’s made by AI.

Sanction EU for doing exactly what he has been telling us to do ever since 2016? The entire reason he has been threatening with US leaving NATO is because virtually all the member countries are freeriding and frankly it’s one of the few things he’s 100% right about that.

I’m still waiting for the previous retaliatory measures of all the red lines we’ve crossed so far.

I’ve ordered from Amazon once. That’s the only occasion I’ve ever used any of their services. I’m not intentionally avoiding them, I simply don’t have the need for any of it. I’ve always just used ebay and Aliexpress instead.

Probably so, but that still doesn’t justify it in my view. There are better ways to handle this. For example, they could inform the customer that the issue needs to be addressed before they proceed, offer to mask the control panel themselves for an extra charge, or simply ask if the customer really wants them to paint over it - which they almost certainly don’t.

Doing subpar work under a “not my job” mentality isn’t just unprofessional - it displays poor character.

As a contractor who takes pride in my work, seeing things like this baffles me - and honestly, it’s not that uncommon either. I just don’t get it. Even if they somehow manage to get the client to pay for this, there’s no way they’ll be hired again. Meanwhile, about half of my clients are repeat customers. No wonder it’s so easy to stand out when the bar is this low.