Edit: Even if you want to be reductive and consider the entire movie as just a big brand advertisment, this doesn’t make sense. Does Burger King subsidize their commercials by running Samsung Ads within them?
Edit2: This is probably a bad retort, see my other comments for clarification.
This critique irks me for some reason. Consider this: Imagine the latest Top Gun had some scene where Tom Cruise literally high fives Uncle Sam, then slowly whispers “Freedom” and winks into the camera. You’d rightfully find this jarring, a poor aesthetic choice, weird.
But then someone online tells you why you’d expect anything else from a franchise that’s heavily subsidized and supported by the military industrial complex, and demanding a sort of artistic consistency from such a franchise is pointless to begin with.
Tldr: I think you can critique the art even if you’re aware of it’s ideological confines.
(This reply hinges on such a scene not being in the latest Top Gun movie, which I haven’t see yet to be honest)
A fair point, but in your original example we’re talking about a cell phone. That’s a significantly more subtle inclusion than Tom draping himself in an American flag and riding off on the back of an eagle.
I don’t remember the scene we’re talking about, so if it was a cell phone in the real world I see no issue. If it was in Barbie’s world then it should’ve been plastic. That would be my only complaint.
It might not be as obvious as literally winking into the camera, but Top Gun had substantial monetary investment from the U.S. military, and they definitely tried to make being in the military look cool and fun and attractive.
They definitely don’t show what it’s really like to be a service member, and that’s for good reason.
Yeah that’s kind of my point. Even knowing it’s partial propaganda, you’d know when something is “off”. Just like even knowing that Barbie is partially a branding campaign, You know how the car comercial scene is “off”.
I guess what I’m saying is I don’t see either top gun or Barbie movie as “partial propaganda”, I see them as entirely propaganda. So, at least for me, having some additional propaganda for Samsung phones or car brands doesn’t seem out of place or jarring for me.
It’s honestly more jarring for me to see how the military is portrayed compared to what it’s actually like.
BK was also a leader in cross-promotion. In 1977, they ran commercials using Star Wars advertising while selling glasses with the characters from the film.
Movie studios have been using paid promotions for products since the 90s. Iirc the very first paid movie tie-in was in ET. The studio had planned on using M&Ms in the film but were rejected by Mars. Hershey’s heard about this and paid them to instead use Reese’s Pieces in the movie.
It’s fair to hate it, I usually do, but it happens all the time. The only one I can think of that I liked was 30 Rock, especially with their Snapple product placement.
I have a rule about being constructive, so I can’t ask any questions right now because all the questions that I have right now are rhetorical and they end with the word idiot.
Do you know what a rhetorical- No, of course you don’t know what that is, you’re an idiot.
I’m sorry! I am so sorry, but you’re so stupid. You have no idea, and you’re the only one who has no idea, because guess why?
Don’t answer that. You’ll get it wrong. Aw, so dumb. You’re just a dumb little man who tries to destroy this school every minute.
Model trains. I don’t bring it up because it’s obscure, but I’ve definitely found there’s a stigma. “Oh he’s the guy who plays with trains”. Screw the haters, I like to relax after work and do a bit of escapism. Eventually I got over it though and talk about it with friends, but it’s not the first thing I bring up either
Not quite ready unfortunately, still in the “lots of pink fiberboard and paper mache” phase, but oh I will when we’re done. We’re probably too small for a model trains community, but I’ll probably be hanging out in !trains
this is a hobby I would absolutely love to get into but do not have the space (and renting a garage would probably not be realistic at this point for me). looks amazing dude I’m jealous of you! awesome hobby
It’s definitely a space eater, it’s currently taking up half of my bedroom as I build it. I probably should have waited for a bigger more dedicated space but then I’d be waiting another decade.
My dad has been into model trains since before I was born. We built a train layout in the early 2000s when I was in middle school or so. Working on that project helped get me into electronics as we made PCBs for signals and control circuits. Now, 20 some years later, I work in software engineering. My dad wanted to get back into working on the layout and I’m helping him with Arduino programming and Raspberry Pi stuff. He built a stepper motor controller for the turntable and then we built some turnout and light control boards that interface with DCC. We set up JMRI on a Raspberry Pi to drive trains from phones and automate stuff. I also got him into 3D printing and he’s printed a ton of new scenery for the layout after buying his own Ender 3 after using mine quite a bit. We’ve learned various CAD/modeling programs to make 3D prints.
I also finally got to do something I always wanted to do as a kid, which is to drive the trains from a first-person view. We have gone through a bunch of different variations of putting a Raspberry Pi Zero and camera module on an HO scale railcar. We did some different designs. Our latest design uses an SG-90 micro servo to control the camera angle so you can look left and right. I also 3D printed an enclosure for a regulator, battery charger, and battery that takes track power and powers the Pi.
It’s pretty fun to be able to sit on the couch with a phone, watching the view on the TV, and drive the train from the other room including operating turnouts. Haven’t yet tried to drive the trains over the Internet yet but I want to, since I live a state away from my parents where the layout is.
Very cool! Sounds pretty much like what I have started on mine, I went the full DCC++ route, have an arduino and rpi running the whole layout, with a few other boards helping along the way. At some point I’d love to do full automation of the setup but that’ll be a while. What camera did you use for the rpi and train? I’m running n scale so I’m assuming yours would be larger
We built the layout when DCC was first coming out after going to a train show. We ended up picking up one of Digitrax’s first systems (Empire Builder IIRC, with DB150 base station). That’s still what we use for DCC. I designed a LocoNet to serial adapter (MS100 compatible, but very cheap and simple) in college (2010 ish) and we’re using that to connect it up to a Pi 3 running JMRI. Our layout is HO scale. N scale is probably too small for even a Raspberry Pi Zero with camera module, as the setup barely fits on an HO scale car.
I have set up a DCC++ Ex setup at my house for testing and experiments. Just got a loop of EZ Track on the floor with an Arduino as the base station and another Pi with JMRI that is configured similarly to the real layout.
Here is an early picture of the camera car design with the servo. I’ve since condensed everything on to one car with a custom 3D printed design. I want to publish it eventually but haven’t had time. I even 3D printed trucks with power pickups in my latest design (just had to buy metal wheel sets to put in them). I also made a tiny Python webserver that has buttons for different servo positions so you can easily move the servo from a browser.
For the DCC controlled turnouts, lights, and turntable, I built up an Arduino Nano based DCC decoder from a design I found online and a DCC decoder library that is available in Arduino. Since the layout spans multiple tables, instead of putting a DCC decoder for each table/PCB I just had the one decoder echo the DCC commands as serial messages over a serial bus that spans all the tables. The other boards (turnout controllers, light controllers, and turntable controller) all just have their RX pins wired to the decoder’s TX and can receive commands that way. Turnout controllers are a mix of SG90 micro servo based ones and L293D motor drivers for Tortoise switch machines. Light controllers use transistors to switch 12V outputs on and off to drive bulbs and LEDs. Turntable controller is an EasyDriver based stepper controller with some pre-programmed position offsets for each turntable track (each track position is mapped to a DCC function address).
I’ve found the Kato setups to be a bit more friendly on the wallet and have great reliability. I’d recommend that, a small oval with a kato starter set
Car dealerships. They are awful on purpose. In many places car manufacturers are not legally allowed to sell their cars directly to customers, in order to create what is essentially legally mandated car dealerships, which all suck.
My younger coworker was just super stoaked that he only paid $3000 over MSRP for his new car. They gave him a year of oil changes and undercoat for free though!
It is entirely about taxes. By making the sale in your state/town the government gets a cut. If it was manufacturer direct Michigan would have no income tax and have jetpacks for everyone.
Disagree. The States will find a way to tax the sale based on destination. The states can move to a different registration/property tax model to recapture the sales tax. See also online shopping sales tax changes.
It’s entirely about lobbying by autodealer trade groups.
Everything I’ve read said it had very little to do with concern for the consumer. As I understand it, car dealerships lobbied for these laws because, according to them, the manufacturers were being anti-competative and squeezing car dealers out of business. So the laws were passed to protect “small” dealers from big car manufacturers, not to protect the consumers.
But now they use that ubiquity to get higher prices through shady tactics. It needs changed again, this time in favor of the consumer.
A lot of these laws were created very recently. It was a response to Tesla’s business model. That was the main argument used this time as well, and it’s not wrong.
Dealerships provide local points of contact from which the government can collect taxes and ensure local regulations are being met. They suck but they exist for a reason.
They aren’t trying to swindle anyone. You can literally ask the salesperson to explain the math to you. I have sold cars before and I promise you we aren’t getting trained to screw you that is done by the customer of their own volition. For the dealership it was always best to get you into the cheapest car that you could afford as that made for the most likely deal. People who get screwed either are not paying attention to the math which I would explain if asked.
Dealerships used to be able to screw you over easily but that was before the internet gave customers the ability to know everything about a car. That forced a lot of changes.
This is the real answer. When they illegalized a drug that was already widespread and in common use, basically everyone simply became a criminal. There’s no reason to think people’s natures will have changed enough to suddenly want to be law-abiding citizens, easpecially when they’re on ceffeine withdrawl.
I don’t think it would be as widespread though, since you need specific caffeine producing plants in order to get it, as opposed to alcohol which can be made from just about anything. The growth and distribution would probably be more like Marijuana, if 90% of the country were addicted to it (so insanely expensive and a whole lot of also caffeine-dependent cops being paid off).
I can make wine, to prevent me from making wine you’d have to make literally every fruit illegal, and even then there are millions of wild apple trees in my country that you’d have to cut down. It’s impossible to prevent people from making alcohol.
In contrast to that, you can’t grow anything that produces caffeine in my country. I’d have to import it, and checking mail in customs is a hell of a lot easier than checking the vast areas of empty forest to see if I’m illegally growing apples.
Same. Though can we also add a button to hide all content pertaining to US state politics? “The governor of Arkansas-” I live in The Netherlands, that shit has no bearing on me
I got used to it, you just need to look at the US as a union of states like Europe, in which case Arkansas is about equivalent to Lithuania in population (although if you correct for the more states and less pop of the US you get Bulgaria or Finland if you use a ranked method) . The same could be done for China, India and Brazil.
Alright, polandball time: I’ll ask around the EU++ who wants to play Arkansas in the school play…if nobody takes it, I’m giving it to Hungary :D because they’re being a dick lately. So, which state do you want? I hear Idaho’s nice :) Germany already took California, France took New York, Italy took Texas, Spain took Florida, the Netherlands took Pennsylvania, Poland took Illinois, Romania got Georgia, Sweden asked for Michigan and Austria asked for Massachusets, Finland got offered Indiana, but picked Arizona, lol etc etc…do you want Wisconsin? Also: UK guest starring as Canada and Turkey as Mexico lol
Idaho, the mountainous parts, are nice. Some of the people are nice. But in general, Idaho has some of the most batshit insane stuff happening in it in regards to cults and crazy people. It’s been getting crazier in recent years. They were an absolute mess during the pandemic and needed tons of help from other states who then couldn’t look after locals in need.
I was trying to be inclusive, because I’m not american and I don’t want to disparage those places I’ve never been to or know that well…but since you say it…rural states sound like a backwater nightmare :/
I must admit some of it is so hilarious and farcical it does seem like a soap opera… I put on US news for a short spurt every day for giggles… Until that commercial comes on with the slimy woman advertising a deodorant cream she puts in her butt crack
A huge part of that is american-centric attitudes though. There is the politics sub on Lemmy.world and it’s only for US politics. But it’s not called “usonlypolitics” it’s called “politics”. Somehow they don’t see the problem with that.
Also the mods are been absolutely bellends about it and are refusing to even acknowledge that that is a problem.
This is possible because Lemmy doesn’t proxy external images but instead loads them directly. While not all that bad, this could be used for Spy pixels by nefarious posters and commenters.
Note, that the only thing that I willingly log is the “hit count” visible in the image, and I have no intention to misuse the data.
The best part is it also works on DMs, so it’s trivial to get any persons IP address. Want an admins IP address? Just DM them a message with an embedded spy pixel.
I emailed the lemmy developers about this a few weeks ago since IMHO it’s a pretty big security issue, no reply.
I'm on kbin, so tell me: do the images open on their own on Lemmy? If not, then it works like any link one might send, image or not image. The server always can see the IP address, as it was never meant to be secret. This also assumes the admins always use a single network with a single static IP address.
Embeds are fetched and displayed without user interaction.
This also assumes the admins always use a single network with a single static IP address.
Not really. Send a DM to every single admin of an instance and wait until you get enough collected IP addresses. Pay someone running a botnet to flood those addresses for an hour or two.
Even with a dynamic IP address, you’re still stuck with it for a while. If you’re lucky, power cycling will get a new one immediately. If you’re not you get to enjoy waiting for a day or sitting on hold with your ISP’s support number, running through their scripted support process until you finally get to someone capable of helping.
If you are planning on hijacking one of their online accounts, then obtaining all possible intel about someone helps to make phishing their other service providers easier. Knowing someone’s IP address means you instantly know what city they are in and who their service provider is.
If you are trying to reveal someone’s true identity and you have already learned of their IP address through some other means, then this would allow you to reveal their identity on lemmy. Example: an employer already knows the home ip addresses of their employees who work remotely and vpn into the company office. They see someone on lemmy sharing insider info about the company they would rather not have shared and suspect the lemmy user is a disgruntled employee and send them a dm with tracking pixel to verify whether that lemmy user’s ip address matches the addresses of any of their employees.
Consider the case of someone thinking they are anonymous and boasting about some activities that might be legally questionable, then consider some law enforcement agency using tracking pixel to get user’s ip address. If the lemmy server is outside of jurisdiction they might not be able to subponea the lemmy instance admins for that user’s ip address, but now they don’t have to. With the IP address they can just subponea the isp to get the user’s identity. This could be over criminal activity…or maybe just something like admitting being gay in a country that sentences to death for that.
These are just three examples…there are countless other examples just as bad.
TL/DR: it is a significant security breach to allow 3rd parties the ability to use the platform to expose user’s ip addresses, and even worse when it can be targeted at specific users (such as the DM scenerio that is also affected).
If all the big instances go away through lack of financial support, they’re going to find out they paid $130 to swap Sync memes with the 3 people left.
They might contribute to an existing instance sure, but I doubt they’d host. There’s no real financial incentive for the profit driven to host a Lemmy instance unless they charge for membership and I doubt even Sync users are naive enough to pay twice for something.
I left because of how reddit treated the 3rd part app Devs, suddenly forcing them to cancel subscriptions halfway through the year. (They could have given the Devs a heads up, but chose not to.) I left because of the libel that was being spread about a dev. For me, it wasn’t that they wanted to charge money to use reddit, it’s how they went about it that made me leave and not return.
Of course, they also forgot about blind people and moderating tools. They then kicked many mods for voicing their opinion and/or participating the blackout, even if the subreddit in question was in agreement with them.
I don’t see Sync doing any of that, so please speak for yourself on why the migration happened.
Is there anyway you could also check fanaticus.social I am a mod on the Braves community there but I havent seen any new posts in days. If I go to the community via their instance, I show new posts.
Example: Via Lemmy.World the newest post is 4 days old: lemmy.world/c/[email protected]?dataType=Po…Via Fanaticus.Social the newest post is 17 hours old: fanaticus.social/c/braves?dataType=Post&page=…
I did notice they are on 0.18.2 where we are on 0.18.3. Is it as simple as that server needing to update?
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !braves?dataType=Post&page=1&sort=New, !braves
I wanted to piggy back off of your comment. Have you learned anything about what’s going on? I’m a mod over at lemmy.world/c/[email protected] and it seems posts haven’t federated for the better part of 2 weeks now.
I’ve had no luck yet. My hope was it would be fixed in the next version of lemmy that was created a day or two ago. But that doesn’t seem to have fixed things.
I’m considering just creating a 2nd account there until the issue is fixed.
This actually makes a lot of sense. A lot of people are using Lemmy either because they prefer federated web platforms to centralized, which makes it antithetical to corporate interests, or because they’re opposed to Reddit’s API policy, which was a blatant move to squeeze more money out of their users. Either way, Lemmy’s appeal is very anti-capitalist, and since opposition to capitalism is a generally left-wing philosophy, I can totally see why most Lemmy users would be left-wing.
This is my thought as well. Lemmy isn’t what everyone is looking for. It’s a free open source software project for creating a decentralized federated network of content aggregators. For most people that sentence doesn’t make any sense nor do they really care. They just want a site they can doom scroll for hours.
The people who choose to use Lemmy are people who care about open source projects, care about decentralization of online platforms, or both. These types of people by their very nature support groups of people coming together collectively to do something big.
A collection of people working together towards a common goal without a strict hierarchy. You could say these people are community focused. Maybe we could call that communityism or something. Where people make rules as a group, or a union you could say. So yeah, no idea where the left lean is coming from.
“communityism” was somewhat the goal of reddit by having subreddits but still site owners has all the control over you. Lemmy is a free software and many free software projects interact with the userbase with such a community. Before this reddit thing, Free software enthusiasts used lemmy. Same goes with mastodon users before twitter was bought by elon. Now i can see when whatsapp does something shit(maybe) and people porting over to federated and decentralised E2EE matrix for instant messaging.(or maybe they just switch to telegram)
Honestly I came here just a few days ago, right after Reddit admins removed that r/place guillotine. I wouldn’t say that I am very far to the left, but I do enjoy living in something close to a social democracy. I wouldn’t be happy in a place like the United States for example.
Maybe Lemmy was like this at the very start and is what helped Lemmy kick off, but I think a lot of people are looking for an alternative to Reddit. I think you’re going to see a lot more people coming here for the content, not the politics of it all.
I have seen the same behaviour in myself. Reddit was the only social media I used and when they pulled the plug on third-party apps, I took it as a goodbye.
I see myself sometimes opening my phone to “do something” but I have almost no apps to waste time on. I’ve reused that time to do better things, which feels nice. I read a little more here and there, I learn stuff of wikipedia when I’m on my phone, or I get up and do something else. It’s been great for me, even though I’m kind of sad to see it go. Lemmy is a great community, though I’ll try not to start using it so much, just for my own sake and not on the fault of the platform itself.
I was already learning Spanish, but not having Reddit has upped how much time I’m spending learning. So yay I suppose. Plus, less doom scrolling is probably healthier.
Same, I had a birthday recently and my wife got me a kindle. I’m not great at reading and often have to look up words as I go, but that’s easy. I just finished The Name of the Wind and am on to the second book. I highly recommend it as it was easy to read and very engrossing.
Same. I find myself scrolling through my apps and can’t decide what to do. Got me to open Duolingo which I had forgotten was installed. At least doing something productive now.
First, in my personal (subjective!) opinion, XMPP died because of entirely different primary reason: it, by design, had trouble working on mobile devices. Keeping the connection was either battery-expensive or outright impossible, and using OS native push notifications had significant barriers.
As for Google Talk - it just came and went. Because they never had proper MUCs (multi user conferences, think communities), in my own (again, personal, thus subjective - not objective!) experience it was quite the opposite to how the article paints it. Whoever participated in chatrooms I’ve been in, and had used a Google account, hated Google’s decision and moved to XMPP. I’m no fond of Google, but their impact on XMPP was not strictly negative - they contributed some useful XEPs and useful free software libraries after all. Although, of course, for those who used XMPP primarily as a classic messenger system (like MSN, AIM or ICQ) for private 1:1 chats things surely looked differently.
Now, why I think the comparison is not correct. I think Threads’ situation is different because of fundamental differences in how those systems operate. And not in favor of Threads/Meta. If Threads would be Lemmy or XMPP MUC-like system (that is, having communities/groups hosted on particular servers), then it would be a complicated story, where Fediverse could even theoretically score a net win. But as I get it, Threads is Mastodon/Twitter-like thing, and their users’ content will stay with Meta, entirely at Meta’s discretion whenever they let other systems access it, and when they pull the plug. Given that Meta is also not likely to contribute to FLOSS Fediverse projects, their Fediverse presence is of questionable benefits to say the least.
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