unable to open the doors and drowned

If you find yourself in a car sinking in water, conserve your energy because the doors will not open until your cabin is submerged. Take a deep breath at the last second that you can (you will need it) and wait until you are fully underwater to try to open the doors. This may not have been possible with the shallowness of the pool in the above news story. There are also specialized tools for breaking car windows that you can keep in your glove compartment for emergencies.

👍

Who’s out there licking pens, clean or otherwise?

Bad headline. The first paragraph:

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed Monday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authorized the Sept. 2 strikes on an alleged drug trafficking boat in the Caribbean, while saying it was Adm. Frank Bradley who specifically ordered a second strike that killed survivors.

Dutch Vander is a J. K. Rowling type of name for a character

Paraguay

Which mobile apps are keeping up with changes to Piefed?

Unfortunately, even mainstream artists known for their inventive artistry and who have even written previous songs about machinery vs. individual expression have turned to AI generated music videos. Pink Floyd and Peter Gabriel both seem to have forgotten the points of their previous works “Welcome to the Machine” and “The Tower That Ate People”, respectively. There’s a difference between finding a new tool to work with vs. passing the buck of creation to a tool.

As for businesses playing things over their TV or radio, I haven’t seen AI music videos in particular. I’ve suffered through overly poppy hits (holiday-themed and otherwise) and extremely loud network shows though. I think a lot of businesses (or at least their corporate managers) don’t care if what plays on their locations’ TVs or radio is good so long as it is inoffensive, which is why sports are often on businesses’ TVs. I think people also like having some ambient stimuli, which is why Windows’ classic 3D pipes screensaver is still referenced today; while I would think the pathing for this screensaver is “AI”, it’s not a substitute for human expression but rather is a visual stimulus in the vein of a lava lamp.

Stupid idiot doesn’t even realize that the cartridge’s internal battery has died probably like 10-15 years ago and saving is now impossible, Jesus man go one button press past the load screen

Let them eat cake

From what I recall, the most common Reddit bot nomenclature was [word][word][number], [first name][last name] (usually feminine to later become a NSFW spammer), and [string of random letters and numbers of various lengths]. Each may have had hyphens, underscores, random typos, or deleted or duplicated letters. Of course, not every bot fit these archetypes.

[word][word][number] was also the default nomenclature for genuine human accounts created through a certain avenue, if I recall. If you go bothunting, be mindful of false positives triggered by one or two red flags.

I appreciate all of the extra work you do in terms of Threadiverse infrastructure and quality of life.

Many Reddit bots have also straight copy+pasted content from Reddit or other social media with only trivial changes to the text or image, if any change, so the Threadiverse needs to be able to catch those as well. A better internal search engine, especially one that can search for strings of text [edit: and one which can search through deleted and removed content], would help users track down if an account’s content was routinely copy+pasted. I think a new instance (unaffiliated with any particular instance) staffed by users familiar with bot detection to flag bot accounts for federated instances to then ban would be the best facsimile of Reddit’s now defunct BotDefense subreddit, which was a critical tool for users to tackle the site’s bot problem.

This account I noticed yesterday is an example of a Threadiverse account just copy+pasting content (or in this case, crossposting to the original community) with little to no change. I have reported it to its host instance as suspicious but it has yet to be removed. An independent and informed instance for flagging bot accounts could more effectively communicate to the host instance as well as to Federated instances that this account is ticking the boxes of a bot account and should be blocked, banned, or at the very least closely monitored.

A detector for bot networks, such as in the screenshot above, would also be helpful. Some sort of indicator of if several accounts are interacting with each other or on the same posts as each other far more often than they are interacting with other accounts and other posts would be helpful.

Maybe like the New Account Highlightenator on the Voyager app, there can be an indicator for when an account has fewer than X amount of posts or comments (i.e. a potential new bot account), as well as an indicator of if the account has returned from a long hiatus of posting/commenting (i.e. a potential former human account that was bought or hacked to become a bot account).

I’ll try to think of more signs of bots and more ways the Threadiverse can build infrastructure against them.

This isn’t new. This has been going for maybe 10 years or so if you knew where to look and how to notice them. However, when Reddit changed its API policy in 2023, that wholly crippled any infrastructure to effectively deal with these accounts and allowed them to flourish without restraint.

It’s also important to note that the Threadiverse is not immune from bot accounts like this sprouting up and we should take steps to educate users and to implement infrastructure to deal with them.

*Firstp tpime

Oh god…. This isn’t satire

This is a common symptom of CPTSD, if that is relevant to your prior experiences

I don’t have handy a nonfictional record of kids thinking of it as a fictional part of pop culture, but that context is critical for the premise of this joke

we

If you’re commenting here, you’re older than the age I’m referring to

fake

I don’t mean staged. I mean they think that it’s just something from pop culture that people reference without necessarily knowing what it’s from or about or having seen the original media, like “Play it again, Sam” or “That’s the beauty of it: it doesn’t do anything” or thinking that 420 and 69 are funny internet numbers with no real meaning.

Do kids these days think that the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald wasn’t real and it’s just a thing from pop culture like they do with 9/11?