Itty53

The irony of people posting on web applications they utilize for their own enjoyment, “applications don’t belong on web browsers” is killing me here.

There is a portion of the tech industry with their head stuck firmly up their ass and it seems a lot of em hang out in the fediverse. These people would demand we go back to party lines and manual switchboards. Techno-hipsters who are just angry at the next generation who took their BBS internet and actually made the world use it.

Downvote me, that’s fine. Use that interactivity application on your browser. Go be the very definition of irony. Please.

This is a wildly over generalized take.

Twitter was also an important tool for journalists and researchers worldwide. Military targets have come from Twitter posts. It is a reflection of a huge chunk of society. You may as well call all of internet technology “just a porn box” for how wildly over generalized that statement is. The reality is your generalization comes from arrogance. “I never engaged in such frivolous behavior”. You’re here now. Yes you have and yes you do.

Even your comment is the first cousin of outrage, it’s pure disdain. Nothing more or less, and exactly as valuable as outrage.

We need a good drama sub to track all the meta tea.

No joke, start digging into the guys who made ancient aliens and not too long after you start seeing Nazi shit in their past. Like explicitly so, not tangentially related, not “neo” but actual Nazis. Historical revisionism is literally the basis of the show, so you shouldn’t be surprised that the main players are Holocaust deniers.

Wanna know who wrote the book the show is based on? It wasn’t Von Daniken. He only wrote the first, unsuccessful draft. Utz Utermann rewrote the second draft that actually became very popular. Guess where he was from? Guess what he was doing during WW2? Writing propaganda for the Hitler Youth and working as the editor for Nazi newspapers. I’m dead serious.

Ancient Aliens is just soft selling literal, actual mystic Nazism and it always, always, always has been.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Utermann

Also just because you’ve installed an instance and it works doesn’t mean job done. Could’ve been simply settings.

The value of the Russian ruble has fallen by almost half in the last year. They have taken a severe pay cut, that ten percent doesn’t even kind of bring them up par.

For the record, OP posted the article title and not a question of their own.

The “difficulty” in signing up is a feature, I say.

I have hope because this whole issue is widespread and known. Takes the wind out of their sails.

Sure they can. Stack overflow is one example. Any business operating on user driven content will be culpable. When you agree to the EULA and it tells you “what you post here belongs to us and we grant you a license to publish it yourself”, you’re signing over ownership of your content in exchange for a license to replicate it. That’s how social media all works, all the EULAs work that way. FOSS is no different.

Ah yes, Facebook, where all the users on activity hub are from.

Wait. That’s not correct at all.

Just because it happened a once or even twice does not mean it can’t succeed despite that. Facebook doesn’t have some core of active users using there activity hub protocol that they can unplug and snuff out the protocol for. Also every implementation like Lemmy and kbin and even mastodon have custom implementation allowing additional features beyond just what the protocol itself has.

At this rate mastadon, lemmy and Kbin themselves are more likely to hinder the growth of activity hub as FOSS. They’re the ones implementing bunches of features the others have to either keep up with or defederate from. But a hundred walled gardens is still better than the one.

There’s also a lot to say about the mindset of the users. Reddit still exists. Twitter does too. So does Facebook, etc etc etc. The users here chose this over those. These are distinct differences that make the argument of the article a bit weightless. The warning isn’t weightless, and people need to be adamant that new users use different instances in order to block all this from being effective. But again, the fact that that article is shared over and over here shows the mindset of the users. We can’t stop them from federation. Protocols are protocols. That’s the point.

Ask yourself these questions…

How long until http protocol is monetized?

How long until POP, IMAP and SMTP (collectively referred to as ‘email’) is monetized?

How long before torrents are monetized?

The answer is, quite nearly from the start you could … but anyone can still do everything you could with those protocols by themselves, for free, without any strings. Still people monetized all those things early.

Because those are all just protocol, or a digitized agreement on rules of communicating fixed sets of information. Sets like an email, or a website, or a collection of files. No one owns any of these rules they just exist and any two computers can agree on them and use that to exchange information.

Fediverse is a protocol. Lemmy, kbin, mastodon, and the others are all just programs talking the same protocols. No one allowed any of them to do so, they just agreed to. All the entities that make up the fediverse agreed to the same thing, so all of them can talk to each other, in theory. In practice each one can choose which others it wants to talk to. Just like you can build an email client that just will not send emails to Gmail. It’s not because it can’t but because it doesn’t want to.

There are no solutions to climate change that are contingent on a particular party being in power in a single nation when the problem isn’t confined to a single nation. Making the environment about Democrats over Republicans is wildly dangerous because it breeds contentment: people think they did their part in electing the “right” person and stop giving a damn. Politics isn’t going to offer a solution to climate change, but they’ll certainly tell you they’ve got em.

Tell me you’re okay with being lied to in order to be made afraid, tell me you’re okay with science being misrepresented for political brownie points, and I’ll tell you you’re no better than a grubby politician yourself, because that’s all that standpoint serves. Political brownie points. It’s “ends justify the means” logic. “Its fine to fear monger and lie and misrepresent facts as long as you’re doing so on support of the right ideology” is wildly stupid and dangerous reasoning.

Given the climate (pun) of politics at the time he was alive and playing that role, and given that hindsight has taught us An Inconvenient Truth was more political than it was based in science, and given that Crichton’s argument was that environmentalism had to be apolitical in order to ever be effective … yeah I’m not a climate change denier but neither was Crichton.

Crichton was a Democrat. And he was right, Al Gore’s movie was about fear-driven politics, not actionable goals and plans.

Go look at how climate scientists described that movie. “The basic truth and it’s inconvenience remains” one researcher was quoted saying. Tacitly admitting everything beyond the basic truth of the film was inaccurate. Go on, check out what retrospectives have to say about it. There’s a lot of em.

Again, Crichton was right, and he was absolutely not in denial of climate change. He was against using social problems with scientific solutions as political ammunition in the fear cannons.

Bottom line is any time someone insists a complex problem has a solution as simple and clear cut as “vote Democrat”, they’re wrong. More wrong than they are right, especially given any timeline longer than 4 years. And that’s exactly what you’re doing here. “Crichton deviated from the party line on the environment ergo he’s just a ‘denier’”. There’s far more nuance in this life than that.

Fun fact, Michael Crichton (that one) coined that, Gell-Mann amnesia after Murray Gell-Mann, who had nothing to do with it.

Actually Prigozhin is arguably waaayyyy worse. Putin is a ruthless warlord just like Prigozhin, yes. They have equally virulent ideologies, yep.

But Putin is a politician first and Prigozhin is 100% not. Say what you want of Putin but deep down he still gives a shit about projecting certain images of control, law, etc – he still values the opinion of certain international communities. He is still the leader of a government, not just a battalion or an army.

Prigozhin doesn’t give a shit about any of that, he is a simple and ruthless warlord without any pretense of governance at all, who only understands force and who has no qualms about being open in his toxic ideologies.

I think it’s extraordinarily unlikely Prigozhin actually accomplishes any of his own goals towards Russia because he isn’t a politician and he’s just a thug, but I also think it’s equally unlikely Putin’s Russia recovers from this. Wagner was Putin’s pitbull. They were virtually the entirety of professional real soldiers Russia had under its command. No more pit bull changes things dramatically. We can easily expect a social “downgrade” of Russia’s status as superpower in the eyes of other nations. That leaves some big doors open for China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and of course, the United States.

We may be on the cusp of a second break up of the USSR, further breaking Russia down into disparate nationstates. That possibility offers a lot of problems on its own. It’s no longer a question of “rogue warlord gains control of russian nukes”, now its “russian nukes don’t exist, now those nukes belong to 15 new whatever-istan nations, each without any pre-existing relationships or treaties”. That’s scarier. Doubly so because in that big muck of former Russian states, Wagner could still be around. He’d go Atilla, march through every one of them and conscript every dude over 16 to fight. And history tells us over and over just how those situations end: global-scale wars. Conqueror types never stop, they just keep conquering until they get stopped.

I just can’t fathom buying a luxury car and coping with “well it works and gets me where I need to go”. If I’m spending that kinda change on a car, and also paying for its services in ongoing fashion apart from the car payment itself … it better do more than just “get me there”.

That dude 100% deserved it. Not for anything he said but for being a tech career guy and wiring his house up so hard he couldn’t open it without Alexa. He wouldn’t have been able to open it without wifi either.

“Fairly decent” is a bit of a stretch. Panels come up, features sold to you that won’t work and will endanger your life. “Fairly” standard for luxury rides amiright?

“Decent”. Hmph.