“Work as hard and amass as much money as you possibly can and nothing else matters?” Or do you see something different/better?

The hell with money obsession (I quit a great job many years ago, to get my life back).

But making stuff is not just about earning money. It’s about making. Making something out of nothing or out of some raw material (be it a piece of wood before one starts sculpting it, or some vague idea before one starts making a book out of it). And that, that is indeed hard work. It requires efforts, humility (one needs to be ok with being bad at first), and patience (o learn to get better at doing it).

Imvho, that hard work is the very reason why we’re alive, we just need to re-learn that we don’t have to make a business out of it.

Edit: clarifications.

Surely, unless I somehow manage to forget.

Also, I wash my hands before I cook and before I eat. But I don’t wash them every time I touch whatever else all day long.

I would rater teach younger kids but, no matter their age, it would be history and/or literature, philosophy, maybe even Greek and Latin for the most motivated among them.

More or less, it would be what was once called ‘humanities’. Some people and some interests across the entire political spectrum, including our own are trying real hard to eradicate this kind of education and that is not for the kids good. I would love to contribute my humble part in resisting that eradication.

Europe is not one country, nor is it one democracy. It is 27countries that are all different. You would be better asking for specific countries ;)

Ancient Greece was not that much of “a democracy” either. I mean, there was no “Greek nation”, there were cities and group of cities, and there were many non-democratic cities. Facing Athens, there was Sparta, their lifelong nemesis, which was not really a democratic city. The Athenian democracy itself lasted approx 200 years (a bit less, and with pauses) and its “golden age” (around that Pericles dude who gave it its first real democratic constitution among a few other impressive things) was very short lived: less than 35 years. And even then it was still a lot more… selective to determine who was deemed worthy of being a citizen (there were a lot less of them, only men and only from a certain group of population). Like I said, democracy was not “Greek” it was a “city” thing, as there was no such things as our relatively recent idea of a “nation” (or then, the city was the nation). There were alliances between cities though (but not always… spontaneous, nor reliable: Be it against of from Athens there were many betrayals) and there were almost many wars including against foreign powers.

Those countless wars is what, imho, put the Athenian democracy to the ground and this makes me wonder: could there be any modern democratic nation uneducated enough (and dumb enough to elect one of the most uneducated POTUS ever) to ignore that past experience and think it would be a great idea to start countless wars nowadays, and also to betray alliances?

Just wondering, obviously.

Seen from France, I would say the most obvious difference I can see between the US version of a democratic republic and my own is in how quite a few of our own representatives still at least try to pretend they work for us, and not in their own interest or in their friend’s and sponsor’s interests. That is changing, sadly.

It also looks like many US citizens consider the word ‘solidarity’ an insult, whereas it is (or was as, sadly, things are changing quite fast here too) a founding principle of the French Republic: it’s the ‘Fraternité’ part in our ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’.

On the plus side for the USA: up until quite recently, you used to have a real incomparable freedom of expression (which we dearly lack around here, all in the nae of political correctness), but its seems you decided to let go of it, for the same absurd reasons, as we did a few years ago.

You also used to be able to sustain and accept very different values and ideas, within the same space. That too is going away very quickly all in the name of intolerant ideologies (from the right as well as from the left side of your political spectrum)

And now, let the downvote festival begin. I suppose.

no. Full disk encryption is enough to protect my privacy from anyone stealing my computer/disks, it’s what matters to me.

If some secret agency want to access said data, they would just need to ask me, with a smile and a nice warrant. At least here in France, not complying is severely punished.

You’re right, sorry I was not more careful expressing it. And thx a lot for pointing it out.

TLDR: give a pair of sneakers to an oyster, it won’t make it Usain Bolt.

Disclaimer: I’m not a US christian.

Christ was poor, he stood for the poorest, not the richest, he had some brain working, he was oppressed for his ideas, and he died for them… while at the same time forgiving his murderers.

No matter the amount of AI trickery (and wasted energy), Trump looks as much as Christ as he looks like a decent human being (hint: not at all). Imho, he would have a lot more chance to try to pass as Taylor Swift…

I’m lightning fast the moment I realize someone is only looking to either

• be toxic, or worse
• waste my time, troll me.

For the rest I don’t block individuals, nor instances (I can have issue with people, but I don’t want to condemn the entire population of their instance).

Thank you very much. I’m just sharing what I think.

And Netscape was created by?

So anyways… how do y’all detect “AI”, IRL?

I don’t meet AI IRL, I meet people.

And online?

• Too
• many
• useless
• Bullets

Too many titles

used to make

the lack of content look

more serious than it really is

Emoji, too 🎇💫🦧

;)

My opinion is that toxicity can be found in every little gesture in our daily life, no need for an highway. It’s also not somethign ‘external’ to us that appears because of poor decisions. It can and often thrives even in the most ‘humble’ or humane ‘infrastructures’, to use you image. Suffice to look how two people, say two neighbors, can literally hate on one another for petty reasons.

If you build platforms that don’t allow cars/limit their behavior where people are trying to have a polite conversation, you’ll see quiet more thoughtful modes of transportation and fewer innocent bystanders get hurt.

People can have a fight on the street, or in a pub, in a shop, at work, or wherever, even at home, within a family circle, because “he looked at me!” or because “I don’t like the way he dress” kind of reasons. Do you really think tech is the issue?

But once again, you’re more than welcome to believe what you want to believe. Just don’t try to put words in my mouth that I did not say.

• Firefox (now using Waterfox), I started using when it was still Mosaic and no idea it would one day become Mozilla Firefox…
• LibreOffice.
• In a couple years, maybe three, I’ll be on Mint for 10 years and, yep, I do like it. And I certainly love many GNU apps that came with my distro: they’re lightweight, focused and so incredibly useful <3
• I used to love Mac OS (previous to Linux, since the early 80s I had been an Apple user) and many small third party apps. But I moved away from Apple and have no desire to go back.

I don’t buy this narrative that toxicity is inevitable.

You’re more than welcome to buy what you fancy, I don’t recall saying it was unavoidable. I even think I mentioned why we somehow manged to make it as… present as it is, and how we should try to get rid of most of it (hint: through education).

Can we get rid of all of it? Nope, unless one is to pretend we’re perfect? Don’t know about you but I’m certainly not perfect.

How do we fix/improve this culture of toxicity?

We don’t because:

1. it’s a wider issue than ‘the Internet’. Haven’t you noticed how even politics in general, which was supposed to be the epitome of our democratic societies, has morphed into an hate-filled shit show at best, when it’s not effing openly celebrating murders and assassinations of people we don’t like?
2. we’re part of the issue. It’s not a ‘them’ vs ‘us’. It’s us. And most of us, no matter what we believe in, are acting like morons, at best.

but Lemmy seems to have gotten worse alongside the rest of internet culture, proving me wrong.

Lemmy has not “gotten worse” in my opinion. It was worse to begin with and when I arrived a few years ago, the first thing I had to urgently learn is how to filter out what I call its ‘noise’: that constant (and self-celebrating) hatred for ‘the other camp’, the hatred for those who dare not think like ‘us’ (I certainly don’t put myself in that group). I then moved from Lemmy to Piefed, mostly because back then at least it offered me simpler/more efficient ways to filter out that noise.

How do we fix/improve this culture of toxicity?

Like mentioned in other comments, the only way is through changing (civil) society itself. Aka through education.

As long as our respective public educative systems (I’m from France, but I know it’s as shitty in the USA if not worse) are allowed to not do their job of actually educating and teaching kids some common values and principles (next to some actual knowledge and know-how), toxicity will thrive.

It thrives because it has been normalized and because those who benefit from it are being regarded as role models. But it’s even worse than that: just publicly discussing this issue and its causes would expose anyone to being… punished by an angry toxic crowd of people that don’t want to hear they’re being toxic (or that their ‘ideology’ they want so hard to believe in have morphed them into assholes). That is a huge loss for any freedom respecting society, and a huge win for those benefiting from that hate/toxicity.

edit: clarifications.

A classic, the French merde.

“Fine. As always. And you?”

Like you said, that is not the kind of question someone asks to get any kind of personal/intimate answer, it’s merely a way to be polite.

We have no tv. None.

Does that mean I can’t ask it?

You can ask whatever you want.

Don’t worry it’s a hypothetical that I intended to get insight on humanity.

The only insight you can maybe get is on such a tiny subset of humanity (the one that is using Lemmy) and even then it will only be a subset of that already tiny subset (17 comments posted, when I write mine and not ll of them are even answering your question), which, statically, is meaningless and should not allow anyone to draw any conclusion.

On the other hand, you may get an insight on your own personal values by reflecting on the type of question you chose to ask and how badly you were expecting to be able to conclude something out of any answer you might get. That would already be a lot more meaningful statistically since you alone you already represent 100% of the entire population of… yourself. But it would still not be enough to draw any conclusion regarding you as a person, as its only one question without any context. So, realizing how impossible it already is to conclude anything about yourself, a unique person, how come would you or anyone else be able to conclude anything regarding ‘humanity’?

Just the fact that it’s getting down voted shows people are uncomfortable with reality under trump

Since you seem willing to be toying with some philosophy, which is an excellent idea, you may want to also consider these other points:

• Since you’re referring to Trump, I will suppose you’re from the USA. There are approx 340 million people like you that are US citizens, while there are more than 8 billion of us human beings on the planet. Meaning that the US population is worth more or less 4% of the world population. No matter how badly some of that US population may want to believe ‘they’ are the world, they’re not. Far from it.
• You did not define the ‘reality’ you’re referring to, mentioning Trump.
  I’m willing the bet a whole penny that trying to have all participants in your study (that means all 17 persons that commented (provided someone did not post multiple comments), plus me after I publish my comment, plus yourself too, that means all of 19 of us) to agree on what that ‘reality’ is should already be hard enough to make anyone realize there is no such thing as a single commonly-agreed upon ‘reality’, one that would be obvious to all of us at least. BTW, a certain René Descartes wrote a book on that very question (what can be known for sure and how), that was a few centuries ago but his book had some impact back in its days and some would even say that he still has to this day. It’s called ‘Les méditations métaphysiques’ (Descartes was French, but he wrote his book in Latin), it has been translated as ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’. It’s in the public domain, meaning anyone can easily access it for free, legally : in English (I’ve never read it in English no idea how good it has been translated, it also looks like they offer an audio version of it but I would advise to instead read it: the text is dense enough that I don’t think one will be able to follow along easily only by listening to it), in French, and in its original Latin (with German foreword and notes).
• Trump or no Trump involved, most people are uncomfortable with their own reality. Most of us are uncomfortable with the world around us, with other people, with… ourselves. Heck, most of us can’t even face the most obvious fact that we can be mistaken (we can be wrong and our dearest ‘truths’ maybe lies, we can be the bad guys, and so on). Most of us will even have a hard time facing the less disputable fact of them all: we will die. Every single one of us and the world will keep on spinning undisturbed by us passing away (to any flat-earther reading that, I’m not really sorry to say that no matter how hard you want to believe otherwise, it’s still a spinning ball). Here again, Trump has little bearing on that (save maybe with flat-earthers? That I could not tell).

Now, to try to answer your question allow me to ask you another question instead: would you decide to kill someone (quick and painless death too) because you sincerely believe (or some crowd you’re part of told you so) that person is doing evil things and deserves to die. Or would you rather refuse to kill anyone no matter how badly you don’t like that person, knowing you (or that crowd you’re part of) could be wrong, could be mistaken about them?

• Wallet (cash, id, bank cards)
• A small voice memo recorder
• Keys.

And my phone? It’s in my messenger bag with the few other stuff I don’t constantly need or want to have on me at all time: my glasses (most of the time, I’m wearing them but I carry the box-thingy to store them), a notebook + a pen, some book(s), an umbrella, or a cap or something to cover my bald head when I need to, a pair of sunglasses too when it’s shining outside. Stuff like that.