I’m a big Lego fan and I agree that they are one of the best in this regard. However, they’ve taken up some relatively new practices such as compromising mold and instruction quality in favor of faster production, conditioning kids to gamble with minifigure loot boxes, commandeering a cornerstone of the secondhand market (BrickLink), and gatekeeping certain themes or genres behind massive price tags, which are not in the favor of customers in general.

Re: bots

If feasible, I think the best option would be an instance that functions similarly to how Reddit’s now defunct r/BotDefense operated and instances which want to filter out bots would federate with that. Essentially, if there is an account that is suspect of being a bot, users could submit that account to this bot defense server and an automated system would flag obvious bots whereas less obvious bots would have to be inspected manually by informed admins/mods of the server. This flagging would signal to the federated servers to ban these suspect/confirmed bot accounts. Edit 1: This instance would also be able to flag when a particular server is being overrun by bots and advise other servers to temporarily defederate.

If you are hosting a Lemmy instance, I suggest requiring new accounts to provide an email address and pass a captcha. I’m not informed enough with the security side of things to suggest more, but https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted or the admins of large instances may be able to provide more insight for security.

Edit 2: If possible, an improved search function for Lemmy, or cross-media content in general, would be helpful. Since this medium still has a relatively small userbase, most bot and spam content is lifted from other sites. Being able to track where bots’ content is coming from is extremely helpful to conclude that there is no human curating their posts. This is why I’m wary of seemingly real users on Lemmy who do binge spam memes or other non-OC. Being able to search for a string of text, search for image sources/matching images, being able to search for strings of text within an image, and being able to find original texts that a bot has rephrased are on my wishlist.

Re: AI content

AFAIK, the best option is just to have instance/community rules against it if you’re concerned about it.

The best defense against both is education and critical examination of what you see online.

The person inputting prompt modifications may have controlled the larger assets as a whole, but they did not curate the Gestalt of the image. If the input is text that a computer is to output as a literal estimation, then it is data, not art; if the input is data curated by a person who means for a computer to output it as plotted data, such as with a complex lineplot or 3D model or even text as ASCII images, then that can be art.

You Kant ever be one to Plato the crowd. Foucault the haters.

It was a tough seven years when people called him Prince instead of just saying Ƭ̵̬̊

Gives a new meaning to Knuckles the Echidna

Me calling into work because I woke up transformed into a gigantic insect

You wouldn’t believe how long I’ve been waiting for a refund on this crappy copper I bought from Ea-nāṣir

Certain Lemmy apps show an indicator, such as the baby face emoji, next to newly created accounts. I assume this is a futureproofing measure against spam or bot accounts by bringing the newness of the account to other users’ attention so they know to be more wary of them. Based on my previous experience hunting bots on Reddit, I think this is an excellent futureproofing feature.

If you’re using the Voyager app, you can activate or deactivate this indicator on your end by going to the General settings in the app and switching the New Account Highlightenator. Other users will still see the baby face next to your username until you age out of it, but I don’t know how long that will take.

Welcome to Lemmy!

The top eighth of a billionaire and the bottom seven-eighths of a billionaire

This was the day after the majority of our dept., including my boss, spent a chunk of meeting time lauding Trump, Musk, and DOGE while espousing relevant canards; this resulted in one nonparticipating coworker leaving the room clearly upset by their dogma.

The conversation with this one coworker the following day went along the lines of him asking me where I went to college and I answered with the college name and campus location, both of which have a strong leftist/liberal/progressive reputation. He responded “You’re not one of those damn dirty liberals, are you?!”, and to defuse the situation without showing too many cards or creating a row, my response was to give a pronounced laugh and say that the polarity was an initial cause for me not wanting to go there and that I wanted to go to a different college that gave me a better scholarship but I wouldn’t have had the support from my parents otherwise.

Within certain industries, if you fire everyone who partakes in political soapboxing or uncouth commentary, you’ll lose half or more of the workforce and your company won’t stay afloat. This isn’t the first workplace that I’ve seen this. It is difficult to locate workplaces in which these behaviors are not common among the grunts as well as some higher-ups. A company won’t dismiss difficult to replace employees since it could cost the company its own existence. My employee handbook only “asks” that employees avoid talking about politics, and my HR rep is a self-described moderate (the HR rep self-described themself via an appropriate platform unrelated to work).

Edit: About 2 weeks later, the HR rep has since changed her self-description to liberal. Not sure specifically why, but it is curious.

Vote now as to whether or not I should show this meme to my conservative coworker who in earnest asked me if I was “one of those damn dirty liberals” tomorrow

I wouldn’t do it. Consciousness is like the worst thing I’ve experienced ever.

Also, this prompt might be better suited for !asklemmy@lemmy.world