“Be careful whose advice you buy, but, be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.”

True that. We’ve just got a longer list of mistakes.

This is exactly why hes done it.

Why would he give a shit what people think about him? Others rich people don’t because when you’ve got enough money you can insulate yourself entirely from what the world thinks.

You don’t know what hes actually responsible for

Nor do the people judging him so harshly.

You don’t see the pharmaceutical investments hes made

The fuck? Why would he donate money and save countless lives just to benefit from it via some claimed business link?

What a ridiculous argument you’ve made here.

Brave of you to hold a nuanced opinion! So many people have a very binary view of others, and Lemmy’s the same, as the downvoting shows.

And yes, totally, he was a typical morally corrupt businessman and one of the first tech bros in a time before most of Lemmy was even born. But he’s also done a lot of good in the second half of his life. People are dismissive of that but they bloody well shouldn’t be.

Who else has contributed $2bn specifically to fight malaria? Nobody. There’s quite a few now who could have helped but nobody else has. The Gates Foundation has also contributed that much again towards fighting Tuberculosis and AIDs. These are big numbers and they’ve had a real effect. Those of us who live comfortable lives are fortunate where these diseases aren’t everyday killers of friends and family and we cannot fully appreciate the benefit this work has done.

Does this offset his earlier negative behaviour? I honestly think it might do.

I actually hold the opposite opinion; that most people are generally good, or at the least, focused on their own problems most of the time.

This isn’t just personal experience (I’m old so have a bunch) but one example is that I watch a lot of travelling vlogs, mostly motorbikes. Whenever a rider has a breakdown, even in the middle of nowhere, someone will be along and will help. Even allowing for a general positive bias of the media, those who would take advantage of that situation are a tiny percentage.

What does happen though, is that those who aren’t good can abuse the goodness of others to gain power and influence, so are statistically more noticable.

Sure, I use them, for three good reasons.

1. Cheapest domain registrations around.
2. Cloudflare tunnel for free which allows me to reach my selfhosted stuff despite my ISP running CGNAT.
3. I host several website using Pages for free, so now I don’t care about AI or endless bots hammering my limited bandwidth, or having malicious attacks on my equipment.

Except many of us use cloudflare tunnels to reach our selfhosted kit from the internet because we’re behind CGNATs…

Thanks for the PSA, genuinely. Have paused updates for now for caution. Hopefully it’s nothing.

(If installed via play, open app in play store, hit three dots and untick “Enable auto updates”)

Good article and a reminder that all might not be as it seems, and I’m glad they’re reporting this to the French Police as well as raising awareness. The language used in the emails do suggest it could be a single zealot rather than a professional body. It also highlights how often “but what about the children?” is used to enact censorship. (Not least by my own government in the UK with the OSA)

I have one issue though;

The complaints against the site look extremely suspicious. In our case, they came from an organization that was only recently registered that seems deliberately set up to hide the identities of those behind it.

Surely anyone registering any online organisation today would want to take reasonable steps to protect their real identity, especially one dealing with such sensitive matters? Anyone thwarted would want that information for malicious ends.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but, be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

deleted by creator

Become a dog. They’re the happiest people I know.

Just installed it.

Went to Reddit, it recommended I use Lemmy. Sounds good.

“Tell me you work in America without telling me you work in America”

Big orders for single people, especially for stuff like curry, pizza and chinese, could just mean they’re buying several meals at once and are going to freeze it for later on. Think of it as meal prepping without having to cook.

How the heck is UK European? They left the EU 5 years ago.

Steady that jerky knee there fella, you might want to read that a bit more closely.

The premise is European, not EU. It’s a matter of geography, not politics.

Right answer. In fact, the only viable answer.

As a 54 year old who has just had two weeks of agony because he forgot his age and tried to deadlift a 225kg motorbike by himself, I’m going to skip this one because I clearly haven’t learned anything.

“That’s a great question!” </ai>

The truth is, we don’t need AI to have misinformation, and AI is not the biggest problem in the current post-truth society. There has been a war going on globally in undermining truth for a long time. The old saying, “The first casualty in war is truth” is invalid now, because truth is no longer relevant and lies are weaponised like never before in history. People don’t want to be certain of something, their first reaction to news is to react at a deep and emotional level and the science of misinformation is highly refined and successful in making most people react in a certain way. It takes effort and training not to do that, and most of us can’t.

Journalists have been warning us about this for decades but integrity costs money, and that funding has been under attack too. It’s pretty depressing whichever way you look at it.

Personal view: I’d rather you didn’t. One of the benefits of Lemmy over Reddit is that repost bots are at a minimum.