a1studmuffin

The “complicated” Fediverse signup process is actually the perfect filter. If someone isn’t willing to learn such a trivial process to gain access to an open decentralized discussion platform, then they really only have themselves to blame when they keep ending up in enshittified algorithmically-manipulated echo chambers.

The way I implemented this strategy was to make sure I had a single cigarette and lighter on me at all times. I named the cigarette, which psychologically helped prevent me from smoking it. I stuck that out for a few months until a friend smoked it in desperation. At that point I felt confident I’d quit because I wanted to, not because of random circumstance.

Sometimes the real value of a project isn’t its proposed worth, but the schadenfreude it offers instead. I’ve backed a few failed Kickstarters that I absolutely got my money’s worth on.

I’d rather drink a verification can every 30 minutes.

I noticed this as well and agree with everything you’ve said. Hopefully it’s something that can be easily addressed for the next version, I doubt there’s many people that would prefer to keep it as is when the comments action bar is disabled by default.

If you turn on text labels for the navigation buttons, they reappear. So seems to be when the icons only are showing.

To kill any competition and ensure they retain control over future standards. Money. It’s pretty straightforward.

The basic idea is that a huge company with infinite money creates software that supports an open standard, such as Threads. Next they spend significant amounts of money driving users to their software, rather than an open software equivalent. Once they’ve captured a huge percent of all users of the open standard, they abandon the open standard, going with a proprietary one instead. They’ll make up some new feature to justify this and sell it as a positive. Because they control almost all of the users at this point, many of the users they don’t control will decide to switch over to their software, otherwise the value of the open standard drops significantly overnight for them. What’s left is a “dead” open standard that still technically exists but is no longer used. You can find plenty of past examples of this pattern, such as Google and XMPP.

I can’t speak for Craigslist, but in my area Gumtree is big, and I know from first-hand experience that they “handle it” by waiting for the crime to occur and be reported to police, then they give police the list of all IP addresses that viewed a listing. Having stared down the pointy end of a knife right outside my own home, I feel there’s an opportunity to build a better system that keeps people honest and discourages thieves.

One of the biggest challenges with online marketplaces is personal safety for physical meetups and scam prevention for online sales. It’ll be interesting if there are any efforts to solve this, such as an escrow system or other process to keep buyers and sellers honest.

A new deal is being forged with 4chan instead.

And imagine being the guy who’s got to clean out the train car afterwards of all the tiny pieces. Nightmare fuel.

Would love to see the same tests with an adblocker installed.

The US has absolutely atrocious employment laws, so yes they can: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

That last sentence rings true of most software engineers. Everyone wants to work on a glamorous new feature that’s going to wow users or let them think about problems they want to think about. No-one wants to hunt down the difficult-to-repro bug in an old but critical section of someone else’s code.

Stop giving Hideo Kojima ideas…

HARD BOILED EGG MAN

One of the great things about Home Assistant is they give you full control over everything, so it’s entirely up to you how much you rely on local vs cloud infrastructure. It all just comes down to how you configure individual settings and plugins.

Their subscription plan is great because it allows them to continue open source development without relying on commercial sponsorship, so there’s no ecosystem bias or advertising or anything crazy like that. A great open source project.

Yeah I’m really surprised they didn’t go with a laptop screen rather than a monitor designed to be left in a fixed place! Whoever’s first to market with a good laptop e-ink display is going to rake it in.

Thanks for the nostalgia. Haven’t seen the LHA file format in the wild for years!

Between this and gutter oil (Google it, or actually maybe don’t), it sure doesn’t leave me with a great impression of China and hygiene.