Going to guess their theory is that dealers of legalized drugs want people to do their legal drugs so anything that makes illegal/untaxed drugs more difficult to acquire than their legal drugs benefits their business. For the DEA, there are plenty of scarier drugs than marijuana for which to imprison people. They won’t be out of a job any time soon. And they can even team up with the IRS to hunt down people selling untaxed marijuana like the ATF does with moonshiners.

For the same reason people in infomercials seem to find it so impossible to perform basic human tasks like pouring a drink without a special drink pouring handle. The whole show is staged to get you to buy something, usually a movie ticket or a book. Talk show questions are often given to guests ahead of time to consider answers or given to the host by the guest to make it easier for them to promote their product. Neither of them is speaking as themselves, but as improv actors in an unscripted commercial.

Yep. Tasted like a potato.

The US is not a monoculture. Many areas broadly accept/promote immigration. Many areas do not.

He’s still alive?

Not really. If someone is offering their view, it’s often because they want to be valued for what they bring to the conversation. There’s nothing wrong with someone wanting to feel valued. There’s just no way to filter the things people say based on their motivation because even the speakers are often unaware of it. That’s a level of self-awareness very few people can manage. If you could magically shut down all communication that wasn’t at least heavily based in the esteem drive, you’d have a nearly silent world.

It’s somewhat similar, but there are a few differences.

One, the instance matters. You’ll see users as BlahBlah@somesuch.blargh. The somesuch.blargh is the instance. An instance with .ml is often a sign of tankies. 196 has a high proportion of trans individuals. db0 leans technical. World is more conversational and broad. Lots of smaller ones around too with less defined reputations/communities. If you want to be a piece of shit, there are actually instances for that too. They just get defederated. (No one outside the instance will see it)

Two, advertisers are evil. There are no ads here. No one wants to make a community that advertisers approve of. The focus is on maintaining the community, not a business. You might see things that offend you a little. Unless it’s actually hateful or illegal, grow up and deal with it. If it is hateful and illegal, report it. Mods are generally pretty good in a lot of places. Learn to use ‘block user,’ ‘block community,’ and ‘block instance’ to improve your feed. There’s no company algorhythmically trying to force you to see things.

Three, the maturity level is higher here. Reddit is the big name so it has all the teens. Lemmy leans toward older, more technical, less popularity focused people. There’s still plenty of silliness, but it’s not usually the same kind seen elsewhere. It’s a good thing.

Four, no karma. Your points aren’t about you. They are to help sort post and comment quality individually. So, if you are getting some downvotes because you said something a group of people didn’t like, ignore it. The points won’t follow you to the next post or comment.

Rule 0 is still ‘Don’t be an asshole’ though.

Depends on your goals. Are you putting something flashy on your arm candy’s finger so you can show off how wealthy you are to your male competitors? Shell out. Are you trying to give her the chance to flash it around to show her female competitors she landed a whale? Shell out. Are you buying it as a symbol of your secure, mature love? Price doesn’t matter. You could put a rubber O-ring on there and the point is served, but something that demonstrates you really know her is great.

As for permission, fuck the dad. They’re not the one you’re marrying. They don’t get a say.

The BS level is lower in Lemmy interactions than in day to day interactions. There are a lot of tech workers, who are famously asp-y. Same for a lot of net nerds really. People are less filtered as well because moderation is more about pushing out hateful people rather than creating an environment marketers like.

Taking things seriously is a sign one cares. The alternative is apathy. To borrow a quote, either everything matters or nothing does, and much rather the former than the latter.

If you are uncomfortable being held to some kind of standard, I’m sure you can find communities for that. Anything with ‘shitpost’ in it’s name should fit.

You’ve just described the social sphere of all humanity, I suspect.

Referred to as a thorn.

It’s absolutely for your benefit! Oh, wait, did you say user? I thought shareholder. No, you can get in line for the rectal probing with everyone else.

‘Not like that, Steve!’

It was half joking, but realistically, the cat is basically innocent, stuck in the care of a person who refuses to listen to reason in favor of their irrational beliefs, like a kid raised by a religious zealot. I won’t actually say the poster should go commit whatever crime cat kidnapping is, but I would say their friend may not be capable of making sound decisions, which inherently makes them untrustworthy, which makes their friendship dubious. If you can’t trust someone, they’re not really a friend.

I particularly enjoy the fourth from the top.

Looks like America. How about instead you attach day-glo orange blunderbusses so you can shoot drivers who attempt to murder you with their cars. Deadly weapon to defend against deadly weapon seems fair.

VPNs help your privacy against ISPs, not cookie tracking and malware like Facebook.

Complete wipe? Probably not. Change on a scale so deep and wide as to render their relation to what we are currently as relevant as our relation to a nautilus? Yeah. Pretty much guaranteed. Deep time has seen more worlds made of this planet than you could ever imagine surviving.

There seems to be a bit of an odd relation between its value and cost. Building a model and setting up a data center is horrifically expensive, so LLMs as a service have to be just as expensive. But the stuff that can be done by LLMs is low stakes, low thought work, like copy writing, chatbot customer service answering the same 30 FAQs but crashing out on anything else, summarizing this morning’s headlines, etc. The price on these things is still being hashed out but it’s looking a lot like using AI is like hiring Anthropic for $100,000/yr. to replace a person who only gets paid $45,000/yr.