MetaFilter

whoop whoop!
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 9:50 PM on May 21, 2024

Might also be the FPP on There's Something About Miriam?
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 10:03 AM on May 16, 2024

(Note: that FPP is from 2003, so...be prepared.)
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 10:06 AM on May 16, 2024

.

(That pee comment is honestly a good one to go out on, if you have a sense of humor.)
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 8:03 AM on March 20, 2024

I can see if there's an argument about where this should be prioritized and the technical costs of implementation, but arguments based on the theory that Mefites should be perfect humans who don't respond to their environments are...strange to me. Do people really not take steps elsewhere online to block content they know they'll respond to badly?
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 1:39 PM on November 23, 2023

While the more sympathetic point about animal harm is also applicable to me, I will say up front: It me. I'm the problem. I stay fighty sometimes long after there's any point to it in a discussion. It genuinely helps on other social media if I mute the thread or whatever so that I don't get any reminders to prompt me to continue the fighty. It's not the highest priority ever, but it'd be nice to be able to do that here, too. Thanks to everyone concerned about my willpower or mental capacity… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 7:35 PM on November 24, 2023

I'm the kind of person who would generally flag or push back strongly in comments on content like this, had I read the post/watched the video. But...I didn't, because it takes a lot to get me on board with watching a random one-hour (?) video. I suspect that there are infinitely more people like me with respect to this particular post than there are people who actually watched the video and just shrugged, much less agreed. Probably everyone can afford to relax a little bit here.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 11:03 PM on October 11, 2023

As someone who's been very lightly involved with a nonconventional nonprofit since its inception and so seen some of the bumps in the road hit at top speed, I can't stress enough that there needs to be a professional, even if only part-time, ED, hired by the Board, who themselves should handle primarily existential issues. Mefi is much smaller than that nonprofit's operations are now, but the expertise is needed. Like, do you know what to do if volunteers start getting spammed with child… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 4:04 PM on October 3, 2023

"This WHOLE GODDAMNED WEBSITE is a prohibited political campaign activity."

This is not legal advice, but this statement doesn't jive with my understanding of nonprofit law at all. Transitioning to nonprofit status will almost certainly involve restrictions on what official site positions can be and (likely more onerously in practice) on what directors and staff can say on the site. However, I do not believe that what members or others… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 8:17 AM on October 6, 2023

I am sad that Bottlecap has buttoned.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 7:34 AM on September 29, 2023

I assumed somebody had made a really big donation during the fundraiser. Somebody with a...bee in their bonnet.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 7:51 AM on September 14, 2023

.

Condolences to those of you who knew him personally.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 11:27 AM on July 29, 2023

Slow cookers/crock pots are great for heatwave cooking because they don't heat up the house

And/or you can buy a single standalone induction burner. Much less radiant heat than gas or regular electric, though generally more than a crockpot with the lid on, and more flexible use than a crockpot. If you have gas, it'll also be useful for future air-quality-index days.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 2:56 PM on July 21, 2023

OK, fine, let's treat "genocidal" as a poor choice of words and not a useful framing. I don't think my anti-billionaire bona fides need any restating here, I'm not often accused of having excessive empathy for anyone, and I was still taken aback by the nastiness of some of the comments in that thread. These people might have been doing something reckless, but they weren't doing something evil. I would be very happy to see enough of their assets redistributed to make them… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 5:55 PM on June 20, 2023

I don't think it's realistic for people to shut down how they feel about this kind of adventure-tourism to a mass casualty site.

By the way, I think the idea that this was some kind of major motivation for the comments is a retcon, but, if that's the case, I look forward to the severe condemnation of every tourist who takes a selfie at Ground Zero. I really don't like the quest to find some high-minded justification to fit onto very low-minded comments.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 6:03 PM on June 20, 2023

At the absolute very least, they actively harmed the 19 year old

Except for the young man's father, did the other trip participants somehow cause or permit the kid to go?

If one wants to argue that the CEO dying along with the people who he helped put in harm's way with his (assumed) negligence is a grim form of rough justice...maybe, though still not one to be celebrated. But no one knew the CEO was on there at the time… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 6:09 PM on June 20, 2023

It's nice to know that your interpretation is the sole one that people are allowed to have.

I did not say that. I expressed my own interpretation, as someone else reading that thread off and on while all the deleted comments were being made. I did not say that all other interpretations were invalid, and I'm not sure how you get from there to here.

The difference between doing something like that (which is what… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 6:54 PM on June 20, 2023

I would, and I did, and I would again.

Knowing that there was a nineteen-year-old in the crew?

"Suleman Dawood has a sister, Alina, and his mother has been named as Christine. The family had been staying in Canada for several weeks before the dive.

Earlier this week a family statement described Suleman as a 'big fan of science fiction literature and learning new things', who was also keen on… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 12:55 PM on June 22, 2023

I'm not sure that MetaFilter specifically should be a community where we need to be considerate for the families of these particular victims.

As a general rule, probably not. I do think it's remarkably misguided to argue that the survivors of these people don't deserve consideration because the victims didn't take sufficient care for them, which was the argument put forth and is almost the nastiest thing I've seen said in this… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 2:53 PM on June 22, 2023

It seems worthwhile to take a time out from Israeli/Palestinian issues to note that antisemitic incidents in the U.S. rose by 36% in 2022, and are at an all-time high.

This is always worth paying attention to, but I am not sure why you are bringing it up in this context, unless you think that any criticism of Israel must be anti-Semitic.

I wasn't aware of this soft ban on I/P posts. I read the linked essay before the post… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 6:25 PM on May 26, 2023

do I/P posts add to the site enough to make up for the impact on readers/users/members?

Asking this in all sincerity, because clearly there are some subterranean topic restrictions I don't know about: what other subject matters are required to prove they can pass this test? (The politics megathreads were an issue because of scope, not subject matter, and I don't believe FPPs that happen to fall within the topics discussed in those threads are… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 9:13 AM on May 27, 2023

I feel strongly that LLM-generated texts should not be permitted, because we expect to interact with humans here and because there is zero responsibility in an LLM for what it generates.(*)

I don't see, though, how we can be expected to suss out a mechanism that in stronger or weaker forms is behind a substantial portion of Internet interactions these days.

(*) Today I challenged Bard about a factual claim it made about the… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 12:26 PM on May 12, 2023

Yes, that was an obituary a person could be proud of.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 9:39 AM on May 8, 2023

This post seems really unnecessary. Presumably the mods have some discretion not to nuke a "duplicate" post if the link appears only once in a large collection. That's the only potential harm I can think of that results from this style of FPP.

If the site is going to crack down so hard on offensive content--which I think most people here would agree is necessary to some degree or another--it should probably be very mellow on what constitutes a… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 9:48 AM on March 22, 2023

So why not get more distinct FPP's out of an equal amount of research etc?

Because (I assume!) kliuless likes doing it this way. If they enjoyed doing it the other way, they must know how.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 11:07 AM on March 22, 2023

As mentioned above, what some think of as style others see as an accessibility issue that prevents them from participating in the discussion. It is frustrating that the default response from a lot of users seems to boil down to "it doesn't bother me so just get over yourself".

Vague claims of inaccessibility can sometimes come across as finding a stalking horse for your personal preferences, as if one couldn't say "I don't like these… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 1:53 PM on March 22, 2023

Golly. I opened the thread just thinking "well, universal flagging of deletions in-thread would actually be helpful if it's not overwhelming work, the current vanishing approach is disconcerting," and now my jaw is on the floor. Really???

I'm told that when parents find themselves locked in an oppositional spiral with teenagers they should take a break and try to reset. An imperfect analogy, but...just saying.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 9:20 AM on February 25, 2023

So a moderation log in and of itself wouldn't necessarily provide anyone with the clarity about missing comments that some are looking for with this proposal.

I am under the impression (someone correct me if I'm wrong) that mass deletion/wipe is rare. Since (another guess) it's often happening for personal security reasons, it makes sense not to tag those deletions. It doesn't have to be a 100% solution to help.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 6:17 PM on February 26, 2023

I think policies should be made and defined with more robust reasoning than a specific user case. I’d rather discuss the underlying policy than the specific actions taken and the private communications with a member.

You can have great policies and yet execute them poorly.

Not to drag a personal grievance into this, but while I freely concede that an occasional comment of mine might reasonably be considered to merit a… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 6:44 PM on January 30, 2023

Wow. We know not the hour. Condolences to his loved ones.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 8:00 AM on January 27, 2023

Yeah, here in NYC it dropped 40 degrees over the course of barely a day. We were out around 6 pm and the wind was tremendous. Not fit for man nor beast out there.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 6:42 PM on December 23, 2022

Also...I've seen many answers that clearly involved the answerer missing some point in what might is often a long or detailed question. I think newer members might find it unnecessarily discouraging to get their knuckles rapped for a good-faith mistake.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 8:02 PM on November 26, 2022

Adding an admin flag is not making the user feel bad if a user never sees it....it was meant for what I presumed already existed (but evidently doesn't), purposes of data collection and analyses and trends, in an effort to hopefully be able to get people to either think more about what question they're wanting answered (if an analysis were to indicate that someone's Ask posts are getting a lot of these flags) or to nudge someone to be more careful when reading the question (if an… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 8:57 AM on December 1, 2022

Worth pointing out that the (correct) discouragement of thread-sitting means it is hard to ask the kind of clarifying questions that I think many of us might ask, were we posed the exact same questions in real life and trying to give the best answer. So sometimes you get answers that are trying to work around various reasons that a person might say "I can't do [x]," which might mean they could actually do [x] under [y] conditions. E.g., there's a difference between saying "fish… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 1:45 PM on December 2, 2022

Often true, prawmunire, but...that's not the situation here, since the OP stated "vegan" as well as "can't handle eating meat products anymore."

Yeah, I'm not trying to take a position on the specific individual situation (I don't think it requires that much adjudication!) as much as using some of the facts as a way to illustrate one of the possible causes of "bad" answers. Sorry if that was not clear.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 2:34 PM on December 2, 2022

I don't think there's outright complaining but rather constructive dialogue, but I guess it depends on how you look at it.

The occasional time I've looked over there, I've seen a fair amount of shit-talking from people who don't wish the site well, and a number in particular whose main issue seems to be "wokeness" and the tragedy of leftist white guys leaving.

Obviously, you can post wherever you want, geoff, but I… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 1:09 PM on August 19, 2022

While I discussed the role of bodily autonomy in that thread, as I consider it an important and applicable ethical principle, I deliberately did not use that phrase because I didn't think it appropriate. However, semantic drift is inevitable, and I also think it's important for us to be able to articulate what the limits of a principle of bodily autonomy are and why it might apply in the abortion rights context and not, or not in such an absolute way, in the vaccination… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 10:38 AM on August 16, 2022

I can't believe we're arguing about whether or not it's morally acceptable to spread disease.

I'm disappointed that anyone would bring so little nuance or awareness of historical context to that question, so there we are, I guess. Life is unsatisfactory.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 1:04 PM on August 16, 2022

.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 10:43 AM on August 16, 2022

"How to become a better cat for the best internet?"

...can this be real?
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 5:20 PM on August 6, 2022

seeing this in some of the recent SCOTUS posts

In addition to being cynical and pugnacious, I'm a public interest lawyer, and I have barely glanced at these posts, because the black-and-white thinking that predictably pops up is just incompatible with getting anything done, but, at the same time, I don't feel like punching the already staggered.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 6:05 PM on July 1, 2022

Perhaps this piece may be helpful to some? ("One, two, three.")
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 9:54 AM on July 7, 2022

Old-fashioned, still use emoticons as God intended. But I guess on Twitter sometimes the urge to reply with a flood of clown faces does overcome me.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 10:05 AM on June 4, 2022

*DJ Khaled "I appreciate you" GIF*
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 1:12 PM on April 26, 2022

I'm in the middle of Elie Mystal's Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution. Funny, and very readable for non-lawyers.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 7:07 PM on April 15, 2022

I thought the Noom request was (a) politely phrased and (b) not about not discussing one's personal experiences with dieting, but with going into a diet in great detail. It's common knowledge, isn't it, that that kind of talk can help induce relapse in the eating-disordered? Someone requesting the avoidance of a narrowly defined and fairly peripheral sort of tangent so that certain people can continue to participate in the conversation (with a clear explanation, as here, of… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 2:13 PM on April 9, 2022

(Maybe it's just that I don't feel required to observe this kind of request from a non-mod, but would like to make an informed choice.)
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 2:14 PM on April 9, 2022

Well, it is passing judgment on the people currently in the thread

If you think you're being "judged" every time someone suggests that something you've said or want to say in a conversation might not be helpful, well. When people don't tell you that because they think you're unable to distinguish the twinge of conscience or empathy you might feel from an injury from an attack, they're actually judging you a lot harder.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 8:42 AM on April 10, 2022

Theoretically they can respect each other's position, but if they continue to exist in the same space the latter people are going to have their wishes trampled on.

Competing access needs can absolutely exist, even on a discussion website, and a failure to recognize that has crippled more than one analysis.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 10:25 PM on April 12, 2022

I'm so very sorry. That was a beautiful sendoff for her.
posted to MetaTalk by praemunire at 12:27 PM on March 31, 2022