Some tropes of the 80s and 90s: Teenagers ignoring their family while listening to a Walkman. Dads reading the newspaper and ignoring their family. Moms talking on the landline phone with friends and neighhbors. Nerds reading comic books. Dads playing golf. Mom shopping. Teens just "hanging out" at some random place like a parking lot, near a lake, under a bridge, behind the band hall, etc. Smoking. Crossword puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles. Cards.

I try to remember that we're voting for an entire administration and presidential appointments, an apparatus much larger than one old man. It's cold comfort, but it's something.

As I'm watching it, Mozart's Requiem in D minor is playing in my head.

Horizon Forbidden West. Went on sale earlier this week.

I felt bad reading this. Fast food is way too expensive here in 2024. And then you had to write an essay justifying yourself because of all the pedantic jerks who love to pounce on the smallest of things.

Researchers will be studying Trump and his followers for decades to come. A gold mine of data to help them better understand the mechanisms of authoritarian populism and cognitive dissonance.

As much as I disliked Steve Jobs, the man was 100% correct when he talked about companies rotting from the inside. They get taken over by sales & marketing types and the product designers and user experience experts get kicked to the curb.

Lemmy is missing:

• Bots
• Karma farmers
• Ads
• Insane mods
• Fucking Spez

You know you're right, we're nothing like reddit!!

I am stuck with Windows 10 & 11 at work, on multiple various machines. Also some versions of Windows Server.

It honestly feels hostile towards the user now. For myriad reasons. It's a constant battle for me to turn pointless crap off that it keeps turning back on with the next big update.

Louisiana: basic literacy is not their strong suit.

Yup. They just want a single day to enjoy the beach and feel safe and not be judged.

The internet loses its damned mind

Reddit wisdom:

"This"

"Bacon"

"OK, boomer"

pun thread 37 levels deep

Achievement unlocked: discovering the Great Filter.

I truly hate how shit like Adobe and ProTools become the only acceptable software to use "inside the industry". Plenty of independent self publishers use tools like Gimp and Reaper. But the velvet rope mindset refuses to accept that in certain circles.

Those same types of folks are the most likely to get replaced by AI. So maybe that will be some bittersweet Schadenfreude.

Too many of them think protecting these folks from bullying and harassment on one beach for one day is some kind of threat to civilization. Typical moral panic.

I despise Trump with every fiber of my being but I agree with the spirit of this. We need to make it easier for legal immigrants. I would be highly suspicious of a Trump administration's implementation of this policy, though. He makes everything about him.

LOL! Of course!

Well said, and thank you. I agree that shaming doesn't work. Fat people have the unfortunate disadvantage that their personal problem is so visible to others. The social dynamics would radically change if other types of problems were equally visible. Say you have a gambling problem and your skin turns green, or you cheated on your spouse and you grow a third eye on your forehead. Things like that. People love to judge and not be judged.

Yup. They violate HIPAA all the time, too. Rules for thee, not for me.

On the internet, nobody knows you're the 43rd president, just trying to put food on your family.

Niche <> bad.

Ha! Corrected. Thanks.

Skyscrapers typically take 2-5 years to build. I'm going to hazard a guess that a pyramid like the Great Pyramid of Giza would take more like 5-10 years.

There's a lot of variables to this, especially the location and the source (quarry) and transportation of the high-quality limestone that you would need. You would also want to use some granite and other stone materials if you're trying to match what the ancient Egyptians did. (If you're allowed to use modern concrete and steel, it could change things dramatically.)

The Great Pyramid is about 147m tall and 230m wide along each side. Assuming it's mostly solid stone, You would need roughly 2.5 million cubic meters of material.

Preparing and grading the site would go much faster with bulldozers and graders and the like, but is still a time-consuming process. Quarrying the limestone would also go much faster than the ancients because we have explosives, hydraulics, etc. But there's still a lot of precision cutting and fitting to be done. Cranes would make placing the stones go faster but again, still time-consuming.

CAD software would also make the whole project faster and easier (and would further highlight how ingenious the ancient people were with this accomplishment). Experts already know a lot about the pyramids, but I bet if they built one they'd learn even more.

My wild guess is: if you marshaled enough resources and put a highly competent person in charge of it, you could get it done in 5 years.

Oh cool, Cunningham's Law in action.

I had a buddy in the UK I chatted with on this thing in the early days. We thought we were so cool using it. We were not.

Ain't that the truth.

Kyle uses "son" a lot. Makes me chuckle.

It's important to note that the admins of beehaw are not happy about this solution, either. And they hope to refederate once they have better tools and enough mods / admins to deal with it.

They point wasn't to shadowban, that was a side effect. The point was to protect their member--who specifically wanted a certain type of safe friendly instance--from hostile weirdos sending dick pics and stuff like that. Nobody's happy with the situation, but it's the best they could do under the circumstances with the resources they have.

I also don't think it's wrong for instances to have their own strong rules and preferences. This is one of the GOOD things about the Fediverse. The software features and how people use lemmy will catch up eventually.

As for the confusion / chaos around multiple/redundant/competing communities and so on...that will get better over time as people figure things out. Honestly it's not that different than reddit with all of its splinter subs like "true-" whatever.

After reading "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer, I feel like anyone still traveling to climb Everest is a rich douchebag. It's glorified tourism of the worst kind. It's been done a zillion times already, and isn't as impressive as they fantasize. Go run a marathon or something for your stupid adventure junky social media clout. The sherpas do all the real work.

Whenever I get frustrated by the outages I remind myself: still better than reddit.

Shit like this is what lorem ipsum is for.

Let's assume for the sake of argument he's correct. So fucking what? Wealth concentration is wage theft. Profits are at historic highs. They owe it to the workers to put down the fucking whip. It's better for the environment. Every worker who wants to telecommute (in jobs where it's possible) should be allowed to do so. It's unethical not to. It should be made illegal, IMO.

I wonder if others on the jury helped them see the light. Or maybe the nodding and smiling was sarcasm, or even intentionally trolling Trump. Fun to think about.

Years ago, back before it was totally shitty, someone on reddit posted a gigantic, comprehensive, well-sourced list of all the horrible shit Zuck / Meta have done over the years.

It's unfortunate that long lists of damning facts can't seem to move the needle very much. People don't seem to care unless directly impacted.

I hate seeing Meta dig its tentacles in. Thanks for posting this.

I don't miss the dipshits, pun spammers, and smug power mods of reddit at all. I do miss their niche subs and smarter users. Like it or not, they do have some brainy folks peppered among the shit posters.

We have some good folks here, too. Just need more of them.

It's a shame reddit has been dialing up the shit faucet slowly enough that most of their users don't notice how awful it is now. They've grown accustomed to the poor quality of the content and weaponized greed of the owners.

Exactly. There's too many platforms, not enough quality content on any one of them, and weaponized greed. Worse, these streaming services have "inspired" every asshole executive out there to make everything under the sun a subscription model.

Think of the atmosphere as a layer cake. The bottom of the cake is very dense and the higher up you go, these layers get less and less dense. Up on a mountain, the air is very thin.

In other words, there are fewer air molecules per cubic foot (volume of air). The molecules are farther apart and can hold less heat energy. Because "heat" is what we say when we mean molecules are moving around. The more they move, and the more molecules there are, the more heat you have.

It's also helpful to know that the air is heated by the ground and oceans. The heat from our sun mostly passes right through the atmosphere, not directly warming the air up very much. But the surface of the planet will warm up wherever the sun is shining on it. And in turn, the warm ground or the warm surface water then gradually warms the air from the bottom up. (This is because heat is transferred in different modes: radiant, convection, and conduction.)

And the warm air does indeed rise. As it rises, it gradually spreads out and cools off again. Some of the heat even radiates back out into space.

There are "fountains" of air constantly circulating throughout the atmosphere, and this creates weather patterns. It tends to snow on mountains because the warm air has carried some moisture with it on its way up. As it cools and thins, it can't carry the moisture any more, and the moisture precipitates out. Which is why we call it precipitation whenever it snows, rains, sleets, etc.

So by the time air reaches a high mountaintop, it's probably going to be cool or even frigid cold.

This is also why hotter regions, like the southern US, tend to get very humid in the summer. The warm air can carry a lot of moisture, and there is a lot of warm surface water. Our sweat is less efficient when the air is moist, because it takes longer to evaporate and carry the heat away with it.

Deserts have few water sources. So they also have hot dry air, and much less humidity, and therefore little to no precipitation. But they also get cold at night, because there's very little humidity to hold the heat overnight.

All of this is to illustrate the complex interactions between the sun, the atmosphere, and water (or lack of it) on the surface, and humidity in the air.

Inside an older building you're more likely to experience warmer air on higher floors than lower floors because the air is trapped in a nearly closed system and hot air rises. Of course, HVAC engineers try to compensate for this in modern buildings.

UX design got better and better for many years...but it has definitely been regressing over the past few years, IMO. It's weaponized minimalism at this point. Because it "looks cool, bro".

It's a variant of enshittification.

Routine abuse of the filibuster rules by Republicans was a big part of it. Not the only reason, but a fairly major one as I recall.

And while I am a Democrat and I vote that way, I very readily admit the Democrats often bring a book to a gun fight when it comes to politics. They have good intentions but then they get steamrollered on things like SCOTUS appointments....

The lack of karma helps some. There's no point in trying to rack up the most points for your account(s), which is a good thing. Why waste time on the lamest internet game when you can engage in conversation with folks on lemmy instead.