There was a pretty good thread on microblogging fedi this week about some of the severe problems with this. A few off the top of my head:

• Not every kid can just “go outside” and “interact with humans” for a whole variety of valid reasons which won’t be addressed by social media bans
• Not all kids live in places where the humans outside to be interacted with are safe, non-hostile, etc.
• Isolation in indifferent, non-nourishing, hostile, or frankly dangerous communities is still a big problem for many millions of kids, and blanket regulations like this directly harm the most marginalized.

Anecdata: I was online by age 10 back in pre-HTML days, and by 13 my access was keeping me alive in the ignorant redneck backwater I was stuck in, because it gave me access to people who respected me and offered a broader perspective than my own. This mental health support was absolutely critical, and temporarily losing access to it twice in my teens correlated with a substantial increase in mixing with a bad crowd and doing bad shit because I felt I had no other options.

I still get critical mental health support online today as an adult, because I’m still stuck in a shitty situation where simplistic thought-terminating cliches like “just go outside and interact with humans” come with a number of problems attached. So I’m pretty passionate about this effort by frankly thoughtless normie fucktards to ban kids from the internet. Plus so-called “age verification” is actually identity verification to engage in speech, and isn’t it funny how such legislation materialized simultaneously in every western “democracy” overnight, right after it became clear that Israel and the calcified US political establishment could not control discourse about Gaza sufficiently to their liking???

It seems weird that the admins would be blocking that server as this is a low-fediblock server. I’m not sure that prior thread conclusively proves it’s intentional.

the people who become popular in these scenes tend to be on the bully side of things

It is very worth keeping top of mind that people with the combination of average to above-average social capability and psychopathic, narcissistic, or Machiavellian traits are adept at climbing social hierarchies regardless of the purpose for which those hierarchies exist or to which they are oriented.

It’s up to everyone else to consider what to do about this and whether or not it’s ableist (or similar) to do anything about it at all, but certain personality traits tend to concentrate in certain roles cross-culturally, and it would be a lot more surprising if they didn’t.

edit: added quote

FWIW as an autist I don’t think there’s a typical autism gait, I suspect the one thing many autists have in common is that we walk a lil funny, rather than any particular funny aspects.

BTW and just as an aside for general interest, it seems a lot of people diagnosed with ADHD have different/increased sway on a balance platform as compared to normies, so much so that it might actually be diagnostically useful. I find this stuff fascinating, and of course it isn’t surprising that conditions which impact our entire conscious way of being would also impact our way of moving.

Apparently there’s a bipartisan anti-Flock movement in the state legislature where I live, but - Axon astroturfing conspiracy theories aside - some form of totally ubiquitous police surveillance is coming eventually. Delaying it, potentially fragmenting it to make it harder for them to use, are both valuable efforts, but that age is arriving.

The absolute best-case scenario from a privacy standpoint is to prevent local cops from having it, and make the feds have to access a heavily fragmented landscape of sensors illegally and then use parallel construction in any court cases which result. But make no mistake, the sensor mesh will exist and sufficiently powerful agencies will use it.

And these motherfuckers want to cut my SNAP and Medicaid while I’m the closest I’ve been in years to getting my legs back under me.

If people think the “roving bands of homeless people with machetes and nothing to lose” problem is bad now, just wait til summer 2027 when hundreds of thousands of people on Medicaid have been off their meds a few months.

I made one autistic friend with a sensitivity profile similar to my own, then lived with a father & daughter (both diagnosed) with a very different profile to my own, and thru that realized that in certain ways, all of us were like peas in a pod. And then I realized many of my friends are in the same orbit.

I will eventually experiment with small models for various text- and document-processing tasks.

I mean I pay a few bucks a month for compute resources I use for self-hosting, to a relative mom & pop provider who leases space in a small data center in-state that’s been around for many years. They’re not all the same.

I would’ve guessed Hillsboro since they have a few big ones, but I guess the hyperscale ones are just that much bigger. I know at least Google and Meta have a big Oregon presence.

Thanks!

'kay.

PS, I already eat a fair amount of ground flaxseed, it’s great in many baked goods, and a passable egg substitute (when hydrated) in certain applications, mostly binding and hydrating. I’ve been developing a homemade veggie burger patty recipe that has a fair amount of flax keeping it together. Great for digestion IME.

Fuck Israel and fuck Israeli apartheid 👍

I do have concerns, but right now I’m rolling the dice in a sense by sleeping and spending most of my day next to 265Wh of NMC cells and about 220Wh of LFP as “12V” drop-in replacements for lead-acid. The former is from a pretty reputable company, the latter is from a Chinese company which seems to be on the upper end of the manufacturing & testing scale, but my due diligence only went so far.

These are very small sizes compared to a whole-house system or even one that could run my servers for 24 hours, but the NMC power bank could easily start a house on fire, and the LFP units could easily fill the room with highly toxic smoke. YOLO I guess, but I’m definitely keeping an eye on battery development, and very excited for sodium-ion to become widespread.

(BTW, a big concern from LFP batteries in thermal runaway is that they can produce enough carbon monoxide to very quickly become life-threatening in enclosed areas… the risk of fire is less but the risk of being poisoned if there is an event is higher.)

hmm, this may be a little far afield of the topic for this community, let me know if it should go somewhere else.

It’s very ad-hoc and best-effort and there are plenty of UX problems, but it does function more often than completely fail to function at all. But how to best represent posts from a threaded model like Lemmy on a microblogging model like Mastodon is an open question. Leaving aside for the moment Mastodon’s disinterest in working with anyone else, there’s a different (and new) microblogging project called FediHood which may end up implementing interaction with threaded communities in a different way.

wow, impressive list of headliners they’ve got there. 👍

I really hope they can get the site stabilized, it’s been acting like it’s on its last legs for months at this point.

I am getting real interested in micro-scale DIY solar, both plug-in units, and the whole “stick a panel and a powerbank in the back yard and schlep it back & forth with another powerbank, manually plugging them in to power my servers” model.

I’ve been progressively downsizing my self-hosting stack, it’s now all “1-liter” PCs with 35-watt CPUs and a couple tiny ARM boxes… that’s a start, but at my budget I would probably need power banks that can automatically switch to the grid once exhausted to start powering my setup from solar. Or DIY some kind of power-switching solution on a little box that monitors the charge status of the power bank.