Yeah, I think the joke isn’t working sorry.

Running a ship aground is something the crew does to their own ship. It does not involve other ships, only their own ship + the ground of a landmass.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_grounding

I nearly always scroll lemmy on my phone, so when I can’t find the Waldo right away, I zoom in and start panning around. But with this find Waldo picture, I can actually spot the leopard easier when not zoomed in. It just pops out for me, my cat has probably trained me too well.

I think the issue with the boredpanda picture is that the original photo was already fuzzy (long distance shot I think) and a compressed jpeg. Someone at boredpanda then cut out a too small part of that and jpeg compressed it a 2nd time, giving the leopard additional dazzle camouflage on top of it’s natural camouflage.

https://content.api.news/v3/images/bin/0b31d94e3bff7d6804274d24562f62cd?width=1024

From https://www.escape.com.au/news/snow-leopard-perfectly-camouflaged-in-mountain-terrain-baffles-the-internet/news-story/bcc5e99d35292787175a13f489ebd7aa. Brought to you by reporters copying things of reddit, but at least escape didn’t butcher the image, unlike boredpanda.

The photographer’s website wouldn’t load for me, so I don’t know if it has a better quality available.

This makes a lot of sense. I do indeed stick to all on lemmy and the ignorant downvoting that often happens, reminds me of what would happen in default reddit subs like worldnews. My opt in reddit subs indeed had a way better crowd. The frontpage of Lemmy didn’t used to be this way when I first joined though.

Good news, thanks for the open communication.

I wasn’t party to it from the start since I’m not a vegan and I didn’t see the original discussion, but from my understanding: Vegans were having a discussion on the possibilities and risks of vegan cat food, in the vegan community Lemmy world. A Lemmy world admin invaded that discussion and started using his admin/mod powers to push his unsubstantiated opinion on the subject and silence the voice of users who had another opinion. And now apparently there’s new rules being added to justify that kind of admin behaviour.

And this is also apparently not the first time that that admin abused their mod powers, since I read a few comments in this thread saying something like “oh, an admin abusing mod powers, that’s probably going to be xxx again”.

That was all before Musk. Since musk took over, twitter gives in to all demands for censorship by governments. It went from about 50% to basically 100%. I expect that the information of users isn’t safe either.

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/5/2/twitter-fulfilling-more-government-censorship-requests-under-musk

Lemmy is still very left though, even when not federated with the tankiest instances. My impression is that it’s not an influx of more right leaning people, but rather that the increased popularity brought in a wider audience, which also brought in more people who are unwilling to consider or respect alternate viewpoints, no matter how well argued or founded those opinions are.

I read a post by a vegan in this thread who wanted to try a vegan diet for their cat, so they went to the vet for a plan, tried that vet approved plan, but their cat didn’t like the food so they switched back. Imo perfectly reasonable and well argumented, no risk or harm to the kitten at all, and yet massive downvotes.

I’m sorry if I come across as preachy in the below post, but I wanted to try and explain to you where the critique is coming from. And also that it’s not personal or any widespread resentment.

I (and many others) get what a thankless and also necessary job moderating is. It’s not easy to do it well, it’s frustrating, it’s thankless and without it the community would be dead. But being a moderator and sticking out your neck brings you exposure and you are guaranteed to meet more asshats than you ever thought existed. But the users are not one homogenous group, it’s not because one user has flung abuse at moderators, that all users are now suddenly resentful of moderators.

The person you are replying to, put a good bit of time in listing what comments were most up voted, which are probably the comments that found most support amongst the users in that thread. In the same way that we should not be dismissive of what you do or say, you shouldn’t be dismissive of what others do or say (or up vote). Mutual respect and all that.

Self reflection is also important, it’s important to realize and accept that it is possible to be wrong about something. Doing a mea culpa and moving on is far easier in the long term than doubling down and digging a deeper hole, yet it’s a lot rarer because it hurts our ego in the short term.

Their final point about a problem with handling feedback rings true to me:

• You (not you personally, but the team that did that feedback thread) have apparently treated up- and down votes on a thread as a poll and a popular mandate for action, but up- and down votes are not a poll and most (probably most) people don’t use them as such.

• Up- and down votes on comments are useful for finding which remarks resonated with or turned away other users. They are not a poll either, and most upvoted are not automatically most correct at all, but they give you a chance to read the room.

• You (now you personally) have thrown shade on the people that up voted comments against the bot, by insinuating that those people might have been bots themselves and that therefore their opinions are irrelevant. Yes it’s possible that there are some users using alts, but all those users? Not very likely.

• The best feedback I saw in that thread was not in the up or down votes, it was in the comments themselves. There were some very compelling arguments as to why using a biased site to display bias, was a bad idea. Those comments also had quite a bit of upvotes, so the way I read the room, that was a popular sentiment.

• The person you are replying to made a few arguments and one scathing critique which they probably hoped that you would improve on in the future. Imo a polite disagreement with your previous statements. You respond by being dismissive of his arguments and acting like it’s a personal attack. They were sticking to facts, you’re making it about you as a person. I really don’t think that was their intent.

Nope, that’s not how it works.

There are instances that only allow up votes. There are people that will up vote any post by a dev as a show of appreciation for the effort, without necessarily thinking about or agreeing with the changes.

If you want a poll, then you have to do a proper poll. Up- and down votes are not it.

What happens when the bias checker is biased?

The mbfc site should not be used for anything. It’s just the subjective opinions of the site owner (who is misleadingly talking about “we” and “our” in his methodology page), aided by a few unknown volunteers who do some of the “checking”. The site claims to be objective, but there’s been enough examples to show that it isn’t (fe, it says that Fox News is as trustworthy as The Guardian or that CNN is somehow center left).

The so called methodology that is used, is just a lot of words that boil down to “several facets were checked by a human and that human gave a subjective rating to each facet, we then count up those subjective ratings and claim to be objective because we use a point system”.

For checking the trustworthiness of a source, I’d say that the mbfc site is about as useful as using CPU Userbenchmark for chosing a CPU. Yes, it’s easy to read and more convenient to use than other sources, but it’s also a load of horseshit and unless you drill down into the underlying “data”, you’re just going to draw the wrong conclusions because of how misleading the site is.

In 2022 there were some stories of how people on work visas were unable to jump ship while others were fleeing en masse. And now after all the tech layoffs in the USA, I imagine that finding another company to sponsor their visa, has become a lot harder still. So that’s one group still working there: people who will be deported if they lose their job.

Fox news gets the same credibility rating of “mixed” as the guardian, which should tell you all that you need to know about the credibility of the mbfc site.

Edit for context: fox news commitment to factuality, is so bad that they knowingly air news that they themselves know to be false: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/fox-news-dominion-lawsuit-trump/673132/ Rampant misinformation, sitting on news until they can release at a more opportune time, selective reporting, airing heavily edited footage to make their guy look less like an idiot, … These are all things that fox news does, but I’m hard pressed to find any examples of the guardian doing any of these. And yet still somehow, the mbfc site wants us to believe that the guardian is as untrustworthy as fox news. Somehow I’m not buying it.

Completely. Calling NBC news center left is a real head scratcher, that bot is apparently living in an alternative facts reality.

Kinda like the sharpy hurricane: he’d rather do something that makes him look stupid and petty, than admit to having been wrong about something. Combine a very fragile ego with stupidity and you end up with antics like this.

Has there ever been done a sociological study on how many and why so many closeted homosexuals are homophobic? I can think of 2 reasons as to why, but I would love to see some numbers.

The 2 reasons I can think of: Non homosexuals don’t think as much about homo sex as closeted homosexuals, so they are less likely to constantly be thinking about gays having sex and thus less likely to speak out against it. And closeted homosexuals are probably jealous of gays that are no longer in the closet, a case of “how dare those people openly live happy lives doing what I would like to do, but can’t because I’m a bigot with a fragile ego”. And this last point is probably why it’s so often republicans who are like this: it fits with the republican mindset of being “the party of spite”.

I’m absolutely certain that it wasn’t ads that put a firm like TomTom on a downward slope. This was actually the first time that I’ve heard someone proclaim that ads are the reason.

If your business is to sell maps + navigation devices for money and then the times change and now nearly everyone already owns a smartphone with built in gps + some car manufacturers provide sat nav as a default + another company is giving access to a map away for free, well then your business is in trouble.

I’ve never even heard of ads in TomTom or Garmin, since I stopped using a dedicated sat nav once I had a smartphone, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was one of the things they tried to stay afloat after smartphones became ubiquitous.

Authoritarian capitalism is not the most effective form of capitalism. It is the most effective for those that are already on top, but for the market as a whole (and especially for the society around that market), it’s going to be worse in the long run.

Companies that are protected from competition by an authoritarian government will be able to extract higher profits in the short term, but their products and services will become worse in the long term, which not only harms their customers, but also the company’s chances of selling their products on actually competitive markets. The American car makers are a good example of this imo.

Companies that are protected from having to pay fair wages and/or providing good working conditions, will be faced with labor shortages if the workers have alternatives, or with a depressed consumer market because the people have less money/time to spend on consuming things.

I really like their pagewide xl printers, but those are purely aimed at businesses. Just to name one thing I like :D

And those xl printers are the only thing that I can think off. I won’t even consider buying a current HP computer/laptop/small printer/…