I’ve never understood why there’s a special term for whale eye. Like. Isn’t it just…their eyes being turned to one side? Side eye? It just seems like it means the dog is looking somewhere other than where their head is pointed. To me it usually seems like a lack of interest. “I want to see this but not enough to turn my head”. Not sure why it would be read any different from equivalent human behavior.

Yeah, some of that is the impromptu nature of this post. I’ve thought about moving to other countries since high school. I’m very interested in a lot of cultural things that are just vastly more prevalent and thriving in Europe. Sometimes it feels like I was born in the wrong place. So there are definitely places I’d love to run to. I visited Switzerland and it felt like heaven on Earth compared to my state. I wanted to move there long before Trump’s first election. But it seems that particular country is near impossible to move to, plus Swiss German seems particularly tough.

I really like learning about other cultures and such, I’m afraid I may have come off entirely wrong in the brevity and laser-focus of my original post.

Very interesting that you say the working language would be English. That’s fantastic news. I definitely think I can get to a basic conversational level with languages pretty quickly, but reaching the technical professional level is my big fear. So that’s very encouraging to hear that it may not be so dire as that at least in the Netherlands. Thank you for taking the time to respond!

My German teacher had a fairly profound impact on my life, I knew him for four years and he was absolutely enamored with everything about Germany. Like the German equivalent of a weeb. Some of that has transferred to me, I like basically every aspect of German culture I’m familiar with, especially the sense of humor. Since I already have some language familiarity, it’s always been near the top of my list, until recently with the AfD stuff giving me a bit of a fright. Although I saw they were recently classified as extremists, which was reassuring (thanks Lemmy for being such a good news source!)

It’s of course too bad to hear about the rural racism, especially since I’d prefer a rural place of living, but it seems those two things always go together to some extent.

I’m certainly going to enroll in classes for whatever language corresponds to my target country. I really want to be an exemplary citizen of anywhere I go. I feel it’s an honor to be accepted for a visa somewhere so I don’t want to take that lightly. My biggest concern is just that I won’t be that great with the target language despite my best efforts.

Thank you very much for your insights and kind words!

Thanks for understanding, I do feel a bit hurt by some insinuations in some responses, but I understand why citizens of the world would feel unhappy with whiny Americans right now. I just hope it doesn’t progress into a hatred. Many of my fellow Americans are very good people, but unfortunately we are so disenfranchised politically - I think it’s hard to convey the extent of it. The state of things here isn’t a result of laziness and unwillingness to participate. But in fairness, I didn’t refine my original post deeply and it came off not quite right. I’m not looking to selfishly abandon ship or become a silent drain on another country. I would love to build community, but it’s certainly easier in some places than others, for a wide variety of reasons.

Canada is certainly tempting if only on the basis that I would be closer to my family, and my family closer to me. And the recent election results were very relieving. Weed is legal here too though, haha.

Thanks, for some reason Spain has never been near the top of my consideration. I suppose that’s because it’s not one of those classic “top ten” type of countries that seem to always be at the top of lists of good things. But it seems the margins of improvement are slim between top 30 and top 10, so I’ll have to look more into that.

Yes, I’ve thought about this a lot and do make efforts to improve my environment. But it’s disheartening, the vast majority of people in my community are extreme Trump supporters. I know people who threw parties to celebrate the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. It’s hard to know how to improve my community in light of that, and in fact it’s hard to even want to.

But I am open to suggestions, what do you think are some of the best things I could do to improve my area?

I deeply agree with the community aspect. I can see how my original post came off as self-centered, but it’s always been my vision to be an active contributor to the local and larger communities of wherever I live. I am generally a pro-social person and do my best to help my local community. I definitely agree that building a strong community is vital to the criteria I’m looking for. It’s just that my current community feels largely like a lost cause. We certainly have a subculture that is what I’m looking for, but it’s just that - a subculture. And while that may be comforting and nice, it’s not enough to get politicians to listen.

I try to stave off the harms of capitalism as best I can while also balancing my own happiness for my limited time on Earth. But that’s a topic I’m sure we could both write essays about, so maybe best to save that for another time.

Yes, I wouldn’t be renouncing U.S citizenship unless I really had to. I’ve stayed this long precisely because I don’t want to leave the “problem spot” and cause it to only have extremists left over living here. I do try to support events and businesses that support causes I agree with, but that’s about all there is to do as far as I can see. As I said in other comments, I would truly prefer to fix things here, as I like many things about my life here. But it’s starting to feel like I’m complicit in something wrong by remaining a resident and I’m not sure what to do about it.

I would certainly rather fix this one than leave, but it’s pretty dismal. There are already large protests, almost nobody is satisfied with how things are, yet nothing changes. Our elected officials don’t listen to us, even on the off chance that one I like gets elected in my area. The best I can hope for is that someone will run who will just keep things as bad as they are, nobody ever actually improves things. I’ve never had an opportunity to vote for a candidate that actually represents my interests. I live in one of the most far right places in the country.

I really would like to fix it here. But I am very unsure as to how. There’s lots of community togetherness types of opportunities, but unfortunately having friends with like minds does no good when anyone with power doesn’t listen. And now even protesting, no, even just showing up to a political event on “the wrong side” is terrifying because of the effectiveness of mass surveillance and the complete lack of oversight on our police. I am open to specific suggestions on how to fix it.

Yes indeed :( it’s a wishlist for sure, not feasible in it’s purest form.

People thought “Gulf of America” was just Trump being ridiculous and egotistical, but to me it now seems clear that it was intended to lay the groundwork to ban press like AP. I believe that was a multi-step plan. The administration is not stupid, they’re getting everything they want. Everything is working out in their favor. That is not by accident, that is not the result of stupidity.

It’s worth pausing and considering what kind of non-stupid, multi-step plan would call for a large accumulation of likely Trump-supporting soldiers with military equipment at Washington D.C.

Is that what this is? Who knows. But I think it’s naive to attribute any of these actions to just ego-stroking.

Very bad even by already low American standards. Does anyone know what other countries regulations look like in relation to this? Does Canada have laws limiting any of these? European countries? I’m trying to find out, but info is sparse it seems.

Surprisingly solid article especially given CNN’s initial propagandistic coverage of the Luigi story. They actually quote people they interviewed, they seemed to cherry pick a representative sample rather than a few crazy people. I don’t think this really says much about CNN though, but it is uplifting in the sense that the social narrative around Luigi is becoming so solidified that even mainstream media can’t dance around it without looking totally idiotic. I suspect the crowd also had very clear talking points in mind that made it difficult to find a bad look to cherry pick. Very nice to see such a clear message here, especially on strong talking points like the clearly unequal treatment vs school shooters, and best of all - this article even mentions the line of reasoning that the CEO was effectively a mass murderer. Surely a more contentious angle, but definitely one with some validity to it. Very pleased to see that make it into this article.

What’s always upset me about this is that I don’t get to see the illustrated diagram. I want to see the diagram.

I think this is quite a bad idea even if we totally set aside any ethical concerns with AI, solely because it increases the hardware requirements to run a Lemmy instance. I believe that a critical goal of federated services should be to reduce the barrier to entry for instance ownership as much as possible. The more instances the better. If there’s only two or three big ones, the problems of centralization appear again, albeit diluted. The whole point of federation is to have multiple instances. Already many survive on donations or outright charity. But AI increases costs immensely.

I think it’s fine to add features that require more compute power if they have a vast improvement to user experience for the compute required. But AI is one of the most computationally intensive features I can think of, and the ratio to its value addition is particularly low. There’s so little content on Lemmy that you can feasibly view the entire post history of most communities in under a day of browsing, so there’s no real need for improved searchability - it’s just not that big here yet. And even when it does get that big, I think a strong search algorithm would be just about as effective, much more transparent, and most importantly not require instance owners to add GPUs to their servers.

It answers the call behind the scenes without you needing to hear or listen. It pops up a notification saying that the call is ongoing with the screening AI, and you have an option to immediately stop the call or to pick it up. It also records a transcript of the call for you to listen to afterwards. It also doesn’t screen every call, if it’s a number in your contacts it lets it through to you as normal.

Fingers crossed this is just due to particular weather in the screenshots. The meshes and textures look great, but the post processing immediately threw me off. At least that’s something easy to fix via Reshade and mods.

I believe the difference is that gacha introduces an element of chance, so you spend an in game currency to buy a spin of a wheel where you may get different rewards. Microtransactions could be something like “spend $5 and get this new skin”, it’s a guarantee. Gacha will be like “spend $1 for a 10% chance at this legendary skin, spend $5 for a 70% chance, etc etc”

Has anyone here read 100 Years of Solitude? This seems exactly like something that would happen in that book.