Maybe use “sucks”?

“Sucks” has homophobic/misogynist roots, though, and they’re much more recent than the ableist usage of “lame”. Even the 1950’s version of “sucks eggs” wasn’t actually talking about the things that come from a chicken.

If this is true, then another danger is it (community, server, platform, etc) becomes an echo chamber.

There’s a middle ground between being an “echo chamber” and being forced to put up with the same 10 different bad-faith bumper-sticker sealion questions over and over again for all eternity.

I come to Beehaw when I’m just dead-dog tired of having the same arguments over and over again, when I’m sick to death of hearing what the alt-right thinks about any given issue, when I’m just fed up having to defend my identity and my beliefs from crypto-facists who think they’re being subtle when they imply I shouldn’t exist and wouldn’t exist if they had their way.

I know what “the other side” thinks. Dear God, I can’t escape hearing what “the other side” thinks, about everything from the international politics of war to beer cans. I’m well aware of the “discussion” they want to have, I’ve had it eighty thousand times over the course of my life and it’s always the same theme and the same tactics lightly reskinned for whatever outrage bait they read about on Facebook last week.

For example, their opinion on “kids getting trans surgery” is exactly the same pile of nonsense as their opinion on “partial-birth abortion” was 25 years ago: “We’re going to take an extreme situation, that almost never actually happens precisely because of how extreme it is, that only ever takes place after months or years of agonizing decision-making between parents and entire teams of professionals with advanced degrees and decades of experience, and pretend like it’s the primary form of this issue and happens on a whim.”

I’m over 40. I’ve heard it all. I know what their opinions are. Fuck, I know what their opinions will be on shit that hasn’t even come up yet, because it never changes. They never shut up about their opinions. So no, I’m not worried about getting into an “echo chamber”. I like finally having a little bit of soundproofing between me and the “(allegedly) silent majority”.

I’m guessing they will try to solve this issue with some cheap human labour to review what is being generated.

They already do. These current "AI"s are starting to look more and more like Mechanical Turks, except with a couple hundred third-world wage-slaves inside the box.

Dude, look, I’m sorry Firefox killed your dog (or whatever). But please stop spamming your irrational hate-boner for Mozilla all over the thread.

Doc went corporate, and is now HMO. He’s rich now, because he charges the other dwarves a monthly premium, but somehow their coverage never actually covers anything that’s wrong with them.

Dopey has been replaced with Trippy, after discovering the healing powers of psychedelics.

Between climate change, the housing market, and stagnant wages, Happy found he needed some extra assistance to keep up the positive attitude. Fortunately, Trippy “knows a guy”. Happy now goes by Xanny.

Bashful, after being diagnosed by HMO, changed his name to Social Anxiety. He can’t afford medication, since HMO won’t cover the brand-name drug to treat it (only the generic that didn’t work and made him fat). But at least he has real diagnosis now, and he’s working on it through on-line pay-per-session therapy from a company he heard about on a self-help podcast.

Grumpy spent years doomscrolling through Reddit and Twitter, and now knows The Truth about Them. He is now known as Ragey, and frequently encourages the other dwarves to Do Their Own Researchy.

Sneezy became a pariah during the COVID-19 pandemic, as everyone assumed he had it. To fight against that stigma, he changed his name to Allergy. Nobody believes him.

Sleepy discovered that the best way to not have to deal with any of the others was to lean in to his shtick, and is therefore still Sleepy (and hasn’t been out of bed since 2016).

Are there ghosts? Because I’ll pay a premium if there are for sure ghosts.

Sure! Here are a few things:

Cats vs rats (Scientific American)

Cats vs mice (Ontario Wildlife Removal)

Cats vs mice, better source that’s not trying to sell us things (Bulletin of the World Health Organization

The one above is a long paper, so I’ll include a couple of relevant quotes.

From the abstract:

Domestic and feral cats control rodents well in some situations but only after some other agent has removed a large part of the rodent population.

From the conclusion:

Students of predation do not agree on the value of different carnivores as agents for the control of rodents. Howard’s (1967) statement that “vertebrate predators usually do more to increase the population densities of field rodents than they do to depress them” implies that “without predation, self-limitation stress factors come into play at lower density levels, and that these forces operate as population controls more drastically than does predation.” … The evidence collected by the writer supports the views of Errington and Pearson that predators cannot effectively control rodent populations.

Barn owls vs rodents in general

Barn owls vs agricultural pests in general

Barn owls vs mice (Missouri Department of Conservation) (very small article, relevant part quoted below)

By identifying the prey remains in the pellets, you can study the owl’s food habits. For example, scientists found that pellets beneath one perch contained parts of 1,987 field mice, 656 house mice, 210 rats, 92 blackbirds, and four frogs.

My original source for the claim I made in my original comment was a paper that directly compared owls to cats in their predation potential of mice and rats, but Google is now a shit search engine that just wants to sell me pest control stuff, and I can no longer find it. I can’t even find it on Google scholar, so maybe I’ve been hit with Mandela Effect and that study wasn’t done in this universe. I hate when that happens.

Anyway, I’m using barn owls for a comparison because barn owl hatchlings are a common prey of feral cats. The point being that cats actually kill the things that are rodent specialists and that kill X times more mice/rats than the cats do. Unfortunately, that specific information is harder to retrieve than I expected it to be.

I agree that there is probably no better rodent control,

Even their efficacy at rodent control is a myth. They’re indiscriminate, opportunist killers that remove at least as many other more selective rodent-controlling animals as they do rodents (for example, snakes and owl hatchlings/fledglings).

The use of free-roaming feral “barn cats” are yet another one of those things that are “traditional”, which is to say, not governed actual data-driven policy but by belief/superstition, much like so many other practices that flourish in rural areas.

Right? I’d see a couple of notifications pop up in my browser and my first thought would be “Oh, fuck, what did I say that pissed everyone off this time?”

It’s actually be kind of hard to turn off “reddit mode” when I comment here; I honestly didn’t notice how I’d started to enter every comment thread with defensiveness and verbal aggression/threat displays right off the bat, as an anticipatory maneuver. There’ve been a couple of times where I re-read something I commented here and said “Oh, that was an unnecessarily aggressive way to phrase that. I hope nobody sees it before this edit goes through.”

I have a ton of these. I’ll start with history:

The name of the woman depicted by the Statue of Liberty is “The Mother of Exiles”.

On Feb 2, 2014, former New York City mayor Bill DeBlasio killed NY’s official weather-forecasting groundhog by accidentally dropping it.

Dr. Ben Spock is most well-known for his groundbreaking 1946 book on child-rearing, but he’s less well-known for winning an Olympic gold medal in rowing (in 1924).

The Second Congo War, which ran from 1998 to 2003, still holds the dubious distinction of being the deadliest war since WWII (5.4 million casualties).

When it was founded, Oxford University did not teach any classes on the Aztec Empire or calculus, because neither existed.

The oldest continuously-honored international alliance that is still in force today is the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance between England and Portugal, which was signed in 1386. [Note that there are a lot of people who will claim that the Auld Alliance (between Scotland and France against England, signed in 1295) is the rightful holder of this distinction, but they’re wrong: it was formally ended with the Treaty of Edinburgh in 1560, even though some groups continued to uphold it anyway, and it was made entirely obsolete by the Acts of Union in 1707, when Scotland was brought into the UK.]

And to mix it up a little, here’s a bit of sports trivia:

Kobe Bryant is one of only 5 players in NBA history to have won the All-Star MVP award more than twice. Of those 5 players, Kobe is the only one who’s dead (as far as I know right now). The rest are all still alive, because the NBA is much younger than most people think of it as being.

I can’t grasp the whole concept of Discord servers even though I was moderating one. They’re bad as a knowledge base, they’re bad as a discussion platform, so why do people keep creating them?

I mean, as a chat room, it’s fantastic. It’s a massively upgraded IRC (except in terms of the ease of discovering new servers), with QOL features I didn’t even know how badly I wanted back in the old Yahoo! Chat days (such as the ability to spin up a temporary thread to take an in-depth conversation out of the main channel without going to DMs). It’s for discussions that happen right now and are not meant to be conserved forever because, generally speaking, they’re not expected to be that important. I love discord for that, because I miss chat rooms.

But it’s absolutely garbage for being a repository of static knowledge. Releasing patch notes only in discord is ridiculous.

I wish people would stop trying to use Discord as an information repository/hub. It’s a chat program. It’s designed for people to engage in transient, real-time back-and-forth communication, not to store discussions or information for long-term use. I get so cranky at people who insist that Discord can be used like a web forum when it so obviously sucks nuts at it.

A forum has content that can stay up indefinitely, where the message history on narrowly defined subjects is packaged into a convenient container and is visible as far back in time as one cares to go. It’s easily searchable, and old discussions for which a user has new questions can be brought back up to the top of the list, in full. Trying to recreate that kind of functionality on Discord is not only stupid, but also generally futile. It’s the exact opposite of what Discord is intended to be.

Yep… people usually interpret “free speech” as “freedom from the consequences of my speech,” but it’s never meant that.

It’s not even that complicated. To these people, “free speech” only means that they believe they should be allowed to scream literal slurs when they want to make someone feel afraid or worthless. That’s literally the only thing they really want to use “free speech” for.