You Should Know

I know some people are boycotting US businesses during the current administration, but the same mindset has ripple effects here in the EU. In other words: stay vigilant!

I recently learned that voting on lemmy is not anonymous. Anyone can get information about who has upvoted and downvoted a post or comment.

In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk. Also, people can target you for your votes.

Sadly, this is something where I would prefer Reddit over Lemmy. Big tech scrapes data from both places anyways, at least Reddit is safe.

You can't make this shit up 🐶

https://abc7.com/post/kristi-noem-south-dakotas-governor-defends-controversial-decision-to-shoot-her-dog/14741935/>

YSK: People are switching their profile pictures to Microsoft's Clippy in protest of the unethical, immoral, anti-consumer practices by various companies. The movement was started by Louis Rossmann (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_Dtmpe9qaQ) on August 7th, 2025.

@6:46 "Clippy's a symbol that what used to be considered one of the worst annoyances in our life would now not only be welcomed, but for all of his flaws, celebrated as an idol. Because for all of these things that occur right now where there is negative malice of intent, [...] Clippy just wanted to help. And if you were to turn him on today, unlike most cloud bullshit, he'd still work."

Louis hopes for this to be a show of solidarity.

@5:44 "When a company CEO logs into their Slack and sees 10,000 Clippy's looking back at them, what I hope occurs is that they intuitively understand that they no longer live in a world where they can get away with fucking over the consumer."

@5:58 "[...] that [people] are alert and they are aware of what is going on, and they are going to politely but firmly push back against it. Every single one of those 10,000 people will be an obstacle to the anti-consumer practices and the anti-ownership practices, and they will no longer be another cog in the assembly line sending us all into a dystopia."

Why YSK: I was curious about the number of Clippy avatars, and thought other people might be curious too.

@4:28 "Clippy never tried to normalize sex trafficking. He just wanted to help."

You definitely don't want to be using these

https://qalculate.github.io/

Susie Willies is the Chief of Staff of the President.

She controls his agenda. She sometimes takes decisions on his behalf.

She is one of the very few people that Donald Trump actually trusts.

In 2010, she helped healthcare businessman Rick Scott become Governor of Florida.

She went to create a corporate lobbying firm named Ballard Partners. She recruited Pam Bondi as a lobbyist for Ballard Partners.

In 2018, she helped Ron De Santis become Governor Governor of Florida.

In 2024, Susie Willies was the top campaign manager of Donald Trump.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/33818262

Today is Bandcamp Friday

From now until 12 a.m. PST, Bandcamp will pass 100% of revenue directly to artists. From its website:

Bandcamp Fridays began in March of 2020 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic when the shuttering of venues led to a loss of vital tour revenue for artists. Since then, Bandcamp Fridays—on which we waive our revenue share and pass the funds directly to artists & labels—has resulted in millions of fans paying over $120 million directly to labels and musicians they love. In addition to helping artists pay the rent, or fund album recordings and tours, Bandcamp Fridays have also become a beacon for artists and record labels looking to raise awareness for causes or raise money for charities.

So much for trying to cut off access to most of the internet under the guise of requiring ID

Your photos might include information of the exact location and time of the photo taken, your photo/camera models etc. Companies, governments, or someone with bad intentions can use such information for their benefits against you. This can easily be accessed by AI as well.

On Windows 11:

1. Right-click on the file
2. Properties
3. Details
4. Remove properties and personal information

Lots of people don't care, but I guess this could be useful for some of you.

Press the little smily face on the post/comment box and go to the "*" tab.

The company is Access Industries and the Founder and Owner is Leonard Blavatnik

Along with what's in the title, he is accused of reputation laundering against Ukraine and has been personally sanctioned by Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He was also part of a WhatsApp group involving some of the United States' most powerful business leaders with the stated goals of "changing the narrative" in favour of Israel and "helping win the war" against Gaza.

Everything is in the linked Wikipedia article about him, mostly under the "Controversies and disputes" part.

I switched to Deezer after seeing it recommended as a better Spotify alternative here on Lemmy, but after finding all this I immediately stopped using it. It's as bad as the shit Spotify does and has done IMO. I'm not here to recommend or push an alternative, but if I can give info on what I use now if someone asks.

The Secret War To Censor The Internet

Recent Lextorias video explains how a 2018 FOSTA-SESTA law amended protections to the Communications Decency Act, and immediately opened the flood gates for targeted harassment of payment processors for adult content censorship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is_wu0VRIqQ

Recent meme post prompted this as a needed reminder of what the issue with audio is, and how it should be fixed legislatively in a civilized world.

Debanking on wikipedia

So with the new regime executive order declaring it essentially illegal to be unhoused, people at risk might be thinking, "how do they classify me as homeless if I am surfing between friends or family or shelters?"

One of the big answers to this is the practice of debanking. If your financial institutions catch wind that you don't have a stable address, they will try to close your accounts and send your balance as a cashier's check to your last legal address. At-risk people understand the many, many scenarios where even just this process could be devastating.

Some unexpected ways you can get de-banked:

• your apartment doesn't have a legal address

• you lose home owner's insurance or your coverage changes and your bank decides it doesn't like that

• your building's owner defaults

• fire

• flood

You may be at risk and just now realizing it. If you have an MH diagnosis and you don't have two back-up legal addresses, you are on this Ex O.

Anyway, do not get debanked. Have legal address back-up plans EVEN IF YOU TRY TO FLEE THE COUNTRY because you do not want the regime classifying you as someone they want to put in the camps.

Sorry for another US-centric post.

The former Prime Minister of Australia said politicians are frightened of him:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/video/2021/feb/19/australian-politicians-frightened-murdoch-media-beast-kevin-rudd-video

JD Vance recently flew across the United States to meet him in his mansion:

https://apnews.com/article/jd-vance-montana-visits-rupert-lachlan-murdoch-d4f040113968ea5d702061cac6129ee4

When you are creating your resume, you don't need to put every random job you've ever had. What companies do is they look at your jobs on the resume, and at most call the employer and ask them if you worked for them and how you did at the job.

There is no way for a non government employee to know if you worked other jobs. Keep off any jobs that you worked at for less than 2 years and use every skill you learned as a skill for your resume.

Nothing hurts your resume more than having 3 or 4 jobs in a span of 2 years because it shows you are unreliable.

I see a huge amount of confusion around terminology in discussions about Artificial Intelligence, so here’s my quick attempt to clear some of it up.

Artificial Intelligence is the broadest possible category. It includes everything from the chess opponent on the Atari to hypothetical superintelligent systems piloting spaceships in sci-fi. Both are forms of artificial intelligence - but drastically different.

That chess engine is an example of narrow AI: it may even be superhuman at chess, but it can’t do anything else. In contrast, the sci-fi systems like HAL 9000, JARVIS, Ava, Mother, Samantha, Skynet, or GERTY are imagined as generally intelligent - that is, capable of performing a wide range of cognitive tasks across domains. This is called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

One common misconception I keep running into is the claim that Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are “not AI” or “not intelligent.” That’s simply false. The issue here is mostly about mismatched expectations. LLMs are not generally intelligent - but they are a form of narrow AI. They’re trained to do one thing very well: generate natural-sounding text based on patterns in language. And they do that with remarkable fluency.

What they’re not designed to do is give factual answers. That it often seems like they do is a side effect - a reflection of how much factual information was present in their training data. But fundamentally, they’re not knowledge databases - they’re statistical pattern machines trained to continue a given prompt with plausible text.

Death Generator is an easy generator for changing the text displayed on old game screens.

You should know this because there aren't enough Death Generator memes on Lemmy ;)

Opnxng hosts a number of public services focused on privacy by using opensource front ends for popular websites, including:

• Medium
• Threads
• Github
• IMDB
• Stackoverflow
• Tumblr
• Quora
• Fandom

It also hosts tools like:

• Stirling PDF
• IT Tools
• Etherpad
• Privatebin
• Send

and a few lemmy frontends like mlmym, Photon, and Voyager.

Edit: added a detail that they are not hosting the websites I listed, but rather open source and privacy respecting front ends for these websites.