vonbaronhans

I'll have to check those out! Thanks for the rec.

I haven't used Ground News past the free trial, but a decent feature that I liked was simply that you could look into "a story" and get virtually all of the possible news reports about that one story. Just handy, tbh. If there are other free aggregators doing that sort of linking and grouping, I'd be interested.

The thing about "sources" I can understand, but I think they still have their place. For example, I really like Ars Technica as a tech and science source. One of the things that sold me on them was seeing them make predictions based on their "sources" and those predictions coming true (or close enough). When it comes to politics, the same thing applies. Have they established enough credibility to warrant me believing their "sources", at least provisionally?

But if you don't need or want to be on the cutting edge of political conspiring, then waiting for the court filing, full bill, etc. makes complete sense. I just often might need news, anyway, to understand the broader context of a primary source.

To be fair, that does limit your ability to decide what is newsworthy to begin with. Ain't nobody got the time to read every primary source ever, and sometimes the news is literally just "sources say" until an actual court case or whatever drops.

Granted, if you already know what you want to stay updated on, then cutting out the middleman could be workable. You're just kinda limited in terms of what you'll ultimately be exposed to.

I just don't think the average American can (let alone would) read enough primary sources to keep "up to date" in the political sphere. Add science and tech, and that's just way too much to wade through. Even seasoned beat reporters miss stuff on their beat.

I love poke balls with the super big and legendary ones turned off, more like the Melee and Brawl ones.

I'd like to add some nuance to your observation.

We Americans, most of us anyway, went to public school. And in our history classes, we teach what has been called the "Standard American History Myth" by YouTube channel Knowing Better in their video on American Neo-slavery.

In short, America is founded on many ideals (freedom, liberty, etc), and we generally write our histories as if we have always believed in and acted according to those beliefs (with slavery being a "failure to live up to those ideals"). That's the simple history we teach our kids here, it's what we grow up believing, and the only people who ever really learn anything different had nontraditional learning opportunities (e.g. local experts in black history, American Indian history, etc), studied history at a university, or nowadays maybe learned from social media (like the above Knowing Better channel).

Manifest Destiny is a big example. We teach that America believed in their divinely inspired right to the American continent, from sea to shining sea. We do mention the Trail of Tears, but it's taught as a brute fact at best, and as punishment for standing against America at worst. There's no emotional processing that we did a bad thing and that we shouldn't do that thing anymore. Most Americans would do it all again given the opportunity.

And that's the big thing. We just... simply don't have any sort of national level conscience. If we did something bad to someone, no we didn't, and if we did, they deserved it.

I only really came to grips with America's dark side in grad school by reading, listening, and watching interviews with black people who protested Jim Crowe and Asian Americans who told their experiences living in concentration camps (euphemistically "internment camps") during WW2.

That, I think, is the biggest problem in the American psyche. Not only have we "never done anything wrong, really" but we're also pumped up on religious symbolism (we're a beacon on a hill, a light into the world, etc).

"Divinely inspired" crybully, basically. There's a reason Trump resonates so strongly here. He's the embodiment of "I am the best, I never did anything wrong, and fuck you for trying to insinuate otherwise, you ungrateful traitor."

What's really weird about all this is Vance is married to an ethnically Indian woman. But he does the Christian nationalist white supremacist schtick.

I have to imagine that the Silicon Valley style tech bro culture that Vance was inculcated into is so full of high skill Indian and Asian people that he has something of a blind spot to what his political rhetoric will do to those people, too. I honestly don't know how he squares any of his beliefs. Or if he even bothers to try to have a consistent set of beliefs in the first place.

Vance is so much worse than I initially thought. And my standards were already super low thanks to the unambiguously racist villainizing of Haitian migrants in Ohio at the VP debate, but holy shit this was grotesque. Literal schoolyard bully shit.

It does, but not everyone sets up their 2fa, or uses the least secure forms. Then passwords get hacked, and those lists get shared so when the next hack comes along, they have that many more tools to try and break the encryption (assuming there is any) on a bigger site, compromising even more people.

It's a whole systemic shit bag. Passkeys were meant to solve a lot of these problems, and they would, but Big Tech is botching the execution in favor of yet another thing locking you into their ecosystem.

Jesus Christ, dude, that is exactly it.

We're trying to implement passkeys at work and the testing has been an absolute nightmare. Literally have no control over the onboarding experience because each tech giant is clamoring over each other, interjecting into the process to be the "home" for your passkeys. It's bananas.

When it's all set up, it's kinda great! But getting set up in the first place is an exercise in frustration.

Weirdos end up on Lemmy. Many of us are a splendidly wonderful, if pedantic, sort.

And then there's the weirdos that... aren't that. The ones who never built social skills or the ability to look at the world from beyond their own limited experiences. The ones who extrapolate with reckless abandon, usually in the traditional directions of punching down.

I'm sorry if they or someone they know got baby-trapped, but that is DEFINITELY not the usual nor should it be phrased like it is.