Phone proximity is used, so if your phone is in proximity to his, the algorythm can note a relationship between his interests and yours- or even the interests of people who also interact with him.

It’s possible his behaviour is learned from a narcissistic parent, or that enough of his customers are involved in learning about narcissism. OR you also mightve been at a Cafe near a clinic for long enough your phone tried to ping the office wifi, and you just noticed it because of your interactions with him.

Google also uses your relationships, so maybe a person you know is interested, or you watched a video about (blank) and a lot of those viewers also watched narcissism videos. Your brain is asking the connection to the contractor because it’s an intuitive logical leap.

Phones spy on us in a dozen different ways, mostly pattern recognition. They track location without GPS (by recording wifi pings), and track interests without the microphone. So they can claim they’re not tracking those specific things while still gathering scary amounts of data.

Moat of the teams I see hiring designers are still using Adobe, and printshops take .ai files. But most of the solo designers I know use Affinity, and I’ve heard of one (albeit small) team that has swapped to Affinity for their whole team.

Affinity was just bought by Canva so idk how it might evolve over time, or if v3 will make compromises I don’t agree with. But I got v1 during Covid, loved it, converted to v2 as soon as it was available, still love it. Using all of them on the same file in the same window feels amazing.

Another downside is that designers rarely make asset packs for Affinity. But I’m pretty sure Affinity is able to import brush pack formats from one of the other big names, just not sure which (likely Adboe’s .abr)

I don’t like painting in Photo though, but that might be because I’m so used to Krita, which is designed for illustration in the first place. (They’re great, I might donate to them again actually)

I use Affinity Suite for work. Paid for it once, have it forever. Free updates until new editions, which are discounted if you own an older edition. Buy it for one platform (Windows), that’s a license for that edition of any other platform too. AND they regularly go on special, often to 50% off.

It doesn’t have AI content generation, but it does a few things Adobe doesn’t - like being able to use Photo and Designer from INSIDE Publisher, seamless like its a single program!

Affinity Photo (Photoshop), Designer (Illustrator), and Publisher (InDesign). Then Krita for raster illustration. That’s all I need as a professional

Learned about the band Jars of Clay when they were on MTV as a kid and thought they were pretty neat. Bought a couple albums ad a student. Still listen to them sometimes

I like Flood (more rock), Sad Clown (more chill), and Boy on a String (in between)

This is what I do, except I would add 700 and 236 at the end.

Well except I would probably add 700 and 116 or something, because my working memory fucking sucks and my brain drops digits very easily when there’s more than 1

I might. Then I can subtract 74 to get 74*14, and subtract 28 to get 72*13.

I don’t generally do that to ‘weird’ numbers, I usually get closer to multiples of 5, 9, 10, or 11.

But a computer stores information differently. Perhaps it moves closer to numbers with simpler binary addresses.

I think that social media (which is much broader than most people think) isn’t really the issue. It’s a tool being leveraged by the real danger. As you say, Lemmy hasn’t been bought and sold by special interest groups.

The way social media is leveraged is very harmful, but those groups are also leveraging other media (particularly the news). I would blame our ibcreased social division on the special interest groups that benefit from, and promote, social division.

IMO blaming social media itself for our woes is like blaming the ocean’s plastic on straws. It ultimately let’s the real damage continue while blaming the everyman’s suffering on their own consumption.

How do you reconcile that with how social media platforms like Lemmy allow people to collaborate across groups also? Or to educate?

Like, I do agree that social media plays a hugely pivotal role. But that’s because humans are social creatures with pliable perspectives and are reactive to the views of those we call our peers.

That means special interest groups can tell us what our views should be and sway millions, but it also means that small towns have always been extremely insular and would reject ‘out-group’ people, with or without social media. The ‘liberal redneck’ can only exist now because they can have contact with diverse and nuanced people outside of their local communities through online platforms.

I think humans have stunted relationships with their local communities in favour of fragile online ones, but I believe bad actors are leveraging the power of humanity’s propensity for community groupthink. Social media expands the size of our ‘tribes’, but it’s engagement algorythms that are enforcing echo chambers, to keep us on platforms in profitable ways. That is a property of for profit Capitalism, more than of remote peer-to-peer interaction.