Ask Lemmy

It's just because I like the way my middle name sounds together with my last name. My full name is Jeffrey Neil Crockett, but I've always thought that Neil Jeffrey Crockett sounded better. I was always way too lazy to do anything about it, though. Is it worth doing anything like, legally speaking, or should I just get people to call me Neil?

Inkscape and GIMP

I give money to Gimp and Inkscape because they are creating free open source alternatives to Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. The developers behind these projects are amazing people.

https://www.gimp.org/

https://inkscape.org/

I also want Inkscape and GIMP to be great so more photographers and artists can switch to Linux.

The Guardian

I give money to The Guardian.

It's the largest non-profit newspaper in the world. They have reporters around the world. Their environmental coverage is impressive. They also refuse to display gambling advertising,.

Independent journalism is costly and supporting them is the least I can do. I'm so tired of people whining about "corporate media" but refusing to fund non-profit media.

When The Guardian exposes scumbags, I feel my money is super useful.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/02/christopher-booth-far-right-youtube-channel

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/06/michigan-university-gaza-surveillance

Actions meet consequences.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/09/university-of-michigan-surveillance-students

https://www.wzzm13.com/article/news/local/neo-nazi-concerns-in-montcalm-county/69-b484159f-3d61-449d-b72a-c3317efd7116

Libre Office

I give money to LibreOffice. They are creating a free open source alternative to Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Excel. This is a very important project.

Fuck Microsoft Office overcharging people and communities.

https://www.libreoffice.org/

Ukraine

I started giving money to Ukraine. What the Russians are doing is just horrific

It's literally a democracy fighting against Russia + Iran + China + North Korea.

Yale Professor Timothy Snyder is a great historian:

He is fundraising to help Ukrainians acquire armored medical ambulances equipped with anti-drone devices.

Professor Snyder is a great author and thinker. I would trust him with my own life.

So I decided to give money to his fundraising campaign. In fact, I felt guilty and gave again and again:

https://snyder.substack.com/p/freedom-is-action-a-campaign-for

Lemmy.world

I give money to Lemmy.world in order to support them. Reddit advertising executives absolutely hate Lemmy. My message to them: We aren't going anywhere.

https://ko-fi.com/fhfworld

What are non-profit organizations that you actually give money to? And why?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/39643616

I’ve recently fallen down a rabbit hole of fake video games. Not fake like fraud, but fake like art; games that don’t exist to play, but do exist to tell their stories. I’m super into it but finding more is kinda difficult, so here we are!

What fake games do you like? Why do you like them? Pictures, links, videos, whatever.

I really enjoyed Petscop (video 1/25 linked) and Valle Verde (video 1 linked, Spanish with subtitles), both series are let’s play style, exploring fake games to tell their stories. Petscop is much more narratively involved, and tells a great story (you’ll probably want an explainer video afterwards.. it’s involved) while Valle Verde is more ghost-in-the-machine horror.

I found this rabbit hole through this video, from Super Eyepatch Wolf about fake video games, why they are made and how they “work” as an art form. Their content is weirdly enjoyable to me, and pleasingly entirely too long. Plus they have their own fake video game.

Edit for clarity: Fake video games is a super broad category. Pictures with gameplay hud that implies a video game, videos of gameplay or cutscenes styled after games count (even those weird live action “games” people record for TikTok count), books or stories that describe gameplay for games that don’t exist count, even soundtracks modeled after game sound tracks count. So if it’s a game or part of a game that doesn’t exist, it counts!

Could be any kind of performer be it comedian, podcaster, actor, etc.

What is it about Idaho in particular that appeals so much to neo-Nazis and other far-right extremists that they all keep moving out there?

A friend of mine was helping me to do some screens to make some OBS Studio scenes. We were on discord sharing our workflow via screen share, then he looks for an AI model using a search engine. Then upload an image just to cut the white background. I told him that easily he could use the magic wand in photoshop or gimp to cut it out, even, if he wanted, customize the settings to achieve saw edges or none of them. The place where he works loads a bunch of work to him, so, he says me that that's the only way to make the day job done, but, the image that the AI spit out was horrible. The AI not just cut the background, it cut relevant part of the image too, also, it added some transparency to the image. Thing that my buddy had to fix in photoshop adding some black under it in another layer.

I do not know how to talk to him about it, because he was the photoshop guy in highschool and I was the gimp guy in highschool, we always tried to achieve the same things in both softwares, we got pretty good in them. He uses AI for everything now, to add subtitles, to delete content from a video or image, to cut background, etc, just to fix it in photoshop or whatever.

According to this https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/fbi-subpoena-tries-to-unmask-mysterious-founder-of-archive-today/ source, FBI gave Tucows a deadline of 29 November. It has already been 3 days since that date and I see no signs of any action being taken: the archive is operating as usual, and there's absolutely nothing I could find online about the aftermath of this investigation. Was it dismissed? Did Tucows actually give FBI the owner's data? If so, are they in a safe place right now?

Likely many other, I've been grossed out by some of the shit getting churned out with generative ai. But it's also made me notice some of the existing things that give me the same feeling.

Poorly translated stuff, as often seen on cheap Chinese imports, has the same uncanny valley awkwardness. It sounds like English, but it isn't what an actual human who spoke English would say. And if we want to talk about an algorithm that's gone rogue and is destroying the world while trying to fulfill some arbitary metrics, there's always late-stage capitalism...

Anyone else notice things like this?

I mean look at this: https://lemmy.ml/u/annamiddleton@lemmy.world

I feel that people will misunderstood me here, but I wanted to ask this question.

Why did no company employ basically 70%-90% trainees, people with disabilities and desperate people and outsource the work that cannot be finished cheaply?

Is there is a company like that, but I just don't know it?

I have 10-15 years of Linux experience for personal use and I have a few years of IT support work in the cloud but I still have some gaps in my tech knowledge, especially in regards to networking. I recently lost my job to AI and I'm interested in what comes next. I won't touch windows. I don't want to install it, image it, use it, support it, etc.

Is it possible to get into an IT career without ever acknowledging the existence of windows?

I understand having a limit for small crimes but for huge ones, like murder, why would the crime prescribe? Is there a reason for that?!

I joined lemmy a couple of years ago and added a lot of lemmy.ml communities but the politics there is unhinged and I don't even care about politics! What are some fun/funny communities with less unhinged people?! (no .ml please)

Edit: You guys are awesome! thank you for making my days more fun and cute

I have neither time, resources nor know-how to like go all out on data privacy. But I try doing things like using Proton for Mail, browsing with DuckDuckGo or Ecosia, messaging on Signal instead of WhatsApp, etc.

But I'm having a hard time responding to people who say "why do you do that, it's completely pointless since companies like Google have all of our data anyways unless we go all out, and nobody has time for all the effort that takes".

One of the environmental regulations we benefit from here in the us, is eu common charger rules! Basically all computer like devices now use usb-c. Thanks.

But it would be even better to be common to essentially every portable device. I’ve seen flashlights that charge over usb-c.

While I was travelling this past weekend, my toothbrush battery died and I didn’t have the proprietary charging base. I sure wish that took usb-c also. Looking online I see a couple but most electronic toothbrushes still use proprietary chargers

Which brings up: what are you guys seeing, where common charger rules are actually required? Looking across non-computer devices that are not required to be usb-c, are they?

Edit: proprietary

Personally, I've always loved the process of taking things apart, understanding how they work and putting them back together. I turned that into a degree in mechanical engineering and eventually a career in power plant operations. Couldn't be happier with my work than I currently am. Its WORK but I don't hate it and I feel like I'm doing something important.

Broadly speaking, you probably agree with the large majority of the views commonly attributed to whichever group you identify with - what are the exceptions? Something that if you mention without a caveat immediately makes people jump to conclusions or even attack you?

So, not uBlock or whatever as everyone's aware of that.

Mine (all Firefox):

Video Speed Controller. LOVE this one. A tiny widget appears on any video showing current speed and you hit a key to +10% / -10% (I have mine mapped to [ and ]). You can also hide the little widget (v) if you're watching a movie etc.

Very handy for sites that don't support changing video speed or have limited options.

Quick cookie manager - Allows you to delete all cookies on a page that you've visited. Very handy when "reject all" leaves you with like 20 cookies anyway.

Netflux - 1080p Netflix on Linux. Can be a little fiddly at times but it does work.

Every religion/cult/screaming guy wearing posterboard has an end-of-the-world scenario. What's the best one?

Looking for a e ink ebook reader that's easy on the eyes, can do Libby library books easily, and extra bonus if there is a built in planner that could sync online. I don't want to be locked into an Amazon or other system that requires subscription services. Thanks!

Edit: thanks a ton for all the replies and advice. I ordered a kobo libre color! Going to set it up for the misses as a gift. She generally wants a physical book but recently had been reading on her phone and complaining about it hurting her eyes. <3