Don’t. Nothing you could say is going to change their mind. They’d need to hear it from new sources they trust and their peers and then it still wouldn’t be guaranteed they’d reconsider their position. Confirmation bias and a whole host of other brain stuff makes changing someone’s mind incredibly difficult. Save your breath.

I agree with most of what you’re saying. OP asked so I tried to game it out the best I could. Personally I think we need to approach gun legislation like we do cars. License to carry in public, strict rules about thier usage, and automatic max penalties and enhanced charges for any crime committed while carrying a gun (legally or otherwise), which can include losing your carry license.

I would say though that your trainer wouldn’t be thwarted by a bullet ownership limit either, it would just slow down their training. They’d buy their 50, shoot them, then have to buy more all of which could be done at the range.

I broadly agree with you about lists, eventually they will be misused. But the chilling effort would be the point. A chilling effect isn’t universally a bad thing, modern HR practices had a chilling effect on sexual harassment in the workplace, banning nazi symbols had a chilling effect on the spread of fascist ideals in post war germany, etc. In this case the chilling effect of reducing the amount of ammo purchased might be beneficial.

That’s pretty much what the Black Panthers did in California in the 1960’s. They organized armed marches through California cities and within a year or two the state had passed very restrictive gun control laws.

I often with we could organize a armed, unified, poc and queer movement that regularly demonstrated. Sort of a modern take on Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition, but with guns. Worse case gun laws change, best case, they listen.

I wouldn’t say ammo is easier to regulate at all. The average gun owner keeps several boxes of handgun ammo and 500-1000 rounds of rifle ammo on hand to start so none of that ammo will be caught by your regulation.

If you outright banned the new purchase of ammo it would take years before the effects are really noticed, especially considering the rush to buy up every bullet on the market before the ban went into effect. Afterwords you’d see gun owners driving to a state without an ammo ban.

If you slapped a max limit on ownership, say you can’t have more than 50 rounds of ammo per gun, that wouldn’t have stopped almost any of the mass shooters in the last 10 years who almost all fired less than 50 shots on their rampages. Not to mention enforcing that law would be next to impossible because you’d basically need a signed warrant to check a house for illegal amounts of ammo or catch them in transit.

If you put a massive tax on ammo combined with a max purchase limit, let’s say 1,000% tax and a limit of 50 rounds per ID card per day, it would be business as usual, just more expensive.

One thing that might be worth exploring would be an ammo purchase registry. Gun owners haaaaaate their names on lists aand fight it tooth an nail on guns, but they don’t have the protection of the 2nd amendment for ammo. Who knows it might have a chilling effect. Or just drive more transactions through the gun show/private seller loop holes.

Just look at the comments section of your post. So many people have seen the phrase cancel culture and ignored everything else you said just to accuse you of some venal sin in their eyes. I think I saw a few people trying to accuse you of being a secret right winger because you said you’re centrist.

It’s sad because so many of the issues that we are facing today could use a nuanced discussion that isn’t limited to the binary for or against framing corporate-run media tries to force on everyone.

Yeah I mean with things like COINTELPRO in our history and Russia’s Internet Research Agency in our present, it’s hard not to wonder. I don’t think there is good documentation for it, but the rumors floating around the periphery of the internet seem to suggest that foreign agents have been using AI powered bot farms to sow political division and erode trust in institutions. There are also networks of well funded right wing political operators using similar networks to divide the left exactly like you are suggesting.

But there are definitely “true believers” out there that are real live human beings acting in good faith, even if their methods and messages may be bad. My guess is it’s probably something like 30% true believers who get platformed and amplified by the other 70% of sock puppets, AI bots, and cynical actors.

It’s gotten much worse in recent years, but yes, there are an alarming number of people out there who zealously attack influencers and creators left of center to enforce their version of purity politics. You can’t really have a nuanced conversation about any of the political issues of the day without getting dragged, harassed, or threatened.

But I don’t think you should let that stop you. There are other factors at play making that problem seem worse than it is. For one, yes there are real human beings who hold their political beliefs zealously and cannot handle any challenge or idea that might call their own ideals into question. They run rampant in the comment sections of pretty much every platform. But there are also other cynical actors at work as well. It’s somewhat well documented that foreign agents use bot farms and AI to destabilize public trust and one of the ways they do it is to sow division within political groupings. There are also local (to the western world) operators doing the same thing. It’s impossible to tell the difference between the human zealot and the bot agitator or what percentage each group makes up, but it’s safe to assume the automated commenters are a significant portion of the population.

Do your thing, block/ignore the haters, it’s just noise.

Contra Points would be a good example. She had Buck Angel read a John Waters quote in a video she did back in 2019 (I think) and got harassed so badly she dropped off the face of the earth for a while. I remember seeing an interview with her where she described people doxing and threatening her. But her only real mistake was to not vet a voice actor and think about how it would be perceived for her to hire him.

But there is a real phenomenon online where influencers are ruthlessly doxed and threatened for small mistakes, what might be perceived as “incorrect takes”, and not being inclusive enough. I have followed several small to medium sized influencers on TikTok who have been harassed for similar reasons who have been forced to change they way they make content or stop all together for very minor stuff.

I don’t think I would call it cancel culture, but I don’t think I’d say anyone was wrong for using the label. But there are absolutely people trawling social media for anyone who presents themself as left of center that differ from the internet’s ontological idea of leftism and try to bully them into conformity.

Surely you’ve noticed in the comments sections of every social media platform that exists that people are attacking each other and the OP’s for petty differences and are often individuals who share 95% of their other beliefs.

There are probably multiple flashy clients and gui’s for it, but if you’re already used to the terminal, I’d recommend rsync. This might be the wrong syntax but something like rsync -av ~/local/project servername:/var/www/html/ would take your local files and update the web directory of your server with only the files that are more recent. Rsync will even read your ssh config file so if you’re got an entry for your server you can just use the host name.

I ran a little blog for a while using a static site generator so I setup the git server on my web server and wrote a git hook where every time I pushed to the repo the server would pull it’s cloned copy of the repo into the html directory. Took me a few hours to setup but it made updating the blog as simple as pushing to the repo.

The outlook is grim. AI “leaders” have already started talking about slowing down development to ensure proper guardrails are in place to prevent catastrophe. If you take it at face value that means frontier models are vastly more dangerous than we thought if the move-fast-and-break-stuff crowd is advising caution. On the other hand there is a dire gap in what has been promised by these folks and what AI is able to deliver. I believe currently the number is something like $10,000 invested for $1 in profits. That kind of gap is unsustainable so the “slow down it’s too dangerous” message could be a cover for a difficult to monetize product so investors don’t crash the markets.

As to the future, it’s difficult to predict, but if we take current trends forward we’ll see a massive reduction in the overall usefulness of the internet. AI bots will eventually greatly outnumber human users on social media, AI generated content will be ubiquitous, and the algorithms will begin optimizing for AI material to the point that human created media will fall to the wayside.

The impact on society will be profound and immeasurable. We’re already seeing a shift in how algorithms are controlling information. They are surpressing resistance movements, atrocities, and any stories that threaten the status quo. Moving into the future that stuff will be burried under AI generated content that is indistinguishable from reality. Political movements will be entirely fabricated from whole cloth while real ones become impossible to find. Fakes of politicians and leaders making speaches they would never give or moments that never happened will flood the zone and drown out any real information.

What’s of most concern is that the ecosystem of the internet is almost entirely controlled by colonial capitalists and their fascist cronies so they will be the ones setting the tone and direction.

Honestly, I don’t know. The app had been really spotty for months, I didn’t check about updates or anything, I just jumped ship. If the maintainers abandoned it though, that would explain why it broke.

I was using Sync for Lemmy until a week or two ago. It was nice and familiar because that was my reddit app of choice prior to api-gate, but for some reason it kept frequently erroring out and not showing posts or images. I switched to Voyager and so far it’s been pretty good

Reducing consumer demand for water-intensive products is generally a good idea, but this article is woefully incomplete. It needs the water usage of other domains to properly put that into perspective. For example chocolate uses 1,700 liters of water to make a 100g bar, far more than pork or beef and a much easier sell to consumers than go vegan or even vegetarian. It also fails to note that AI specifically doesn’t need any water to run at all, the datacenter’s servers need it for cooling and water usage of an AI data center is more or less the same as a non-AI datacenter.