As stupid as I think they are, I also feel sorry for them; they don’t realize they’re being used as pawns and will be hung out to dry as soon as it suites Musk and Trump.

The reason they’re so young and inexperienced is that everyone else realized the implications and refused for their own well-being. The fact that none of the DOGE leadership wants to be officially “in-charge” is a giant red flag.

Not if literally anyone other than a Republican is elected.

You

Interesting, thanks!

Do you know what level German you are at?

I took a full-year German course in university a few years ago, and by the end of that I was probably A1. I’ve forgotten most of it since then, but I could probably relearn it within a few weeks. Every time I visit my German side of the family I try to brush up on it, but that isn’t very often.

Now it’s been 15 months learning daily and am at the B1 level. So not an expert just intermediate with more to learn.

Good for you. I feel like the hardest part of German (as a non-native speaker) is regularly practicing.

Most of the country wants this. For every person who tries to overthrow the government, there are more people who will fight to keep it as it is.

I have a friend who’s really into serial killers and cults

Yeah, uhhhh, keep an eye on that guy.

I don’t remember most of the grammatically correct genders, but when I was trying to learn them I had the distinct impression that stereo-typically manly nouns were masculine and stereo-typically womanly things were feminine.

I have heard nonbinary people find neuter as being offensive because it’s infantilizing them. At least that’s how it was explained to me.

I haven’t heard anything about that but that’s really interesting. Do you know how they prefer to be addressed?

This is arguably subjective, but I think making masculine and feminine words neuter is the only way to counteract the inherent sexism of gendered nouns. If you make everything masculine, you’re still tacitly supporting the previous categorization of masculine nouns as correct, and vice versa for making every noun feminine.

Shouldn’t have trusted that fart.

*Aromantic

Your washing machine still tosses (clothing) salad on a regular basis.

I don’t know how German compares to French or Spanish, but in German things can be masculine, feminine, or neutral. What I do—which is partially as a protest, and partially out of laziness—is to assume every non-person noun is neutral.

It works surprisingly well in IT where basically all nouns are neutral, but I probably sound like Kevin from The Office in every other context.

Some mods would do it. I don’t know why, but they would.

I thought Tinder’s most expensive tier costing $500/month was a joke, but it’s actually a thing. Someone somewhere is paying $500 for Tinder every single month. Wild.

Repost bots are already rampant on big subs, but it would get so much worse if those bots could generate continual revenue.

simply spin the wheel

That’s how the Lemmy info page (what comes up when you search for “Lemmy”) does it, and the experience isn’t great.

Before I knew how Lemmy worked I just clicked the first option it showed, which (for me) was a non-English instance. The second option was that LGBT-focused instance that defederated with lemmy.world a few months ago. Of course I didn’t know anything about either community so I just picked randomly. I went right back to Reddit until they pulled the next anti-user thing.

Assuming you’re correct, what alternative is there besides MAGAs getting gut-punched with reality? All the issues that you say contribute to the problem are being exacerbated by Trump.

This particular comment notwithstanding, the banter on Lemmy is surprisingly Reddit-like, but in a good way.

Tesla investors are starting to care, it seems.

I’ve had people on Reddit and Lemmy dispute my comments by citing ChatGPT… AI is a really innovative wrench that people are using as a hammer.

I also blame the AI companies for pushing that usage. It doesn’t matter how many tiny disclaimers Google and Microsoft add when they return AI answers to queries by default.

I asked the locally-hosted version about Tienanmen Square and it gave an accurate description, but the wording was a bit sympathetic to the CCP. It was like “according to some people, this is what happened, but the government contests this.”