C'mon, this is the NYPost. Their own link to the wayback machine shows the ad's been up since 2020.

Your knee jerked you right out of context.

I doubt he's ignoring anything. And I know nothing but I think it's a little unfair to bash him for this.

Meta does not need the Fediverse to create a ready-populated instance all of its own. It doesn't need to federate with anyone, it can probably kill Twitter and Reddit with a single stone (if it pours enough resource into moderating and siloing). Just stick a fediwidget in every logged in account page with some thoughtful seeding of content and it's done.

The danger of federating with Meta is much the same as not federating. It has such a massive userbase it will suck the lifeblood out of everywhere else whether or not it can see us.

The possible silver lining is that there are other very large corporates which can do the same (some of which have said they plan to). We could all end up with multiple logins on corporate instances simply because we have accounts with them for other reasons. And that means a lot of very large instances with name recognition, and easy access, making it much harder for any of them to stop federation and keep their users to themselves.

Being federated with one or more behemoths might well be hell. Some instances won't do it. Moderation standards will be key for those that do. But multiple federated behemoths can hold each other hostage because their users can all jump ship to the competition so easily.

This is much, much more complicated than just boycott or not. They cannot be trusted one tiny fraction of an inch but this is coming whether we like it or not. We need to work out how to protect ourselves and I'm starting to think that encouraging every site with a user login to make the fediverse a widget on their account pages might be the very best way to do it.

It's time we grow up and behave like an adult company

Uh huh.

The Mosuo (a Himalayan Chinese ethnic group) and the Himba (the Namibia and Angola border region) are both very interesting in this respect.

The Mosuo do not have marriage (although their now extinct aristocracy and nearly extinct priesthood did/do). They live in their family home all their lives. Mosuo women have sexual freedom; no one cares how many partners they have or whether there's more than one relationship ongoing simultaneously, and it's not always certain who someone's father is (the matriarchs keep tabs on relationships to help ward off accidental incest). Fathers are not expected to contribute; they raise the children of their sisters and contribute financially to their birth-family household. But, despite the freedom to have many partners on the go with no adverse social consequences at all, most Mosuo tend towards serial monogamy, with some relationships lasting years, others for a lifetime. Those that move to urban China for work tend to adopt traditional marriage because the Mosuo lifestyle is not practical without a whole household to help care for the children.

The Himba, on the other hand, do have marriage and, polyamory for men who are wealthy enough to support more than one wife. But wives are free to have as many other partners as they wish and many women, married or unmarried, will have several on the go at the same time. If a woman wants to sleep with a married man, she gets permission from his wife. Women will often have children before they get married and those they have after marriage are not necessarily fathered by their husbands. It's not an issue because they're herders; children are a source of wealth (more goats can be herded) so the men do not care who the fathers of their children are.

I'm no anthropologist, and I hope I've done these groups justice with my brief descriptions. It's a fascinating topic, especially with respect to polyamory in a rich world context.

There hasn’t even been an injury in 35 years in a non-military sub,”

xkcd has covered this.

Ah yes, those well known scientists with absolutely no agenda.

Come the fuck on, this is ridiculous.

That's not true. Instagram has 1.6bn users and all can use their Instagram logins to sign in to Threads. The roughly 1% who have signed up already have chosen to activate Threads, it's not done automatically.

applied by centre left and liberals

It's a term that originates with the left. Specifically, those who broke with the USSR over imperialist invasions, referring to those who did not. More broadly, it refers to the authoritarian left (as opposed to the anarchist left).

Voat died because it was landed with a big chunk of the toxicity ejected from reddit. This isn't the same thing at all.

The risk to the Fediverse from huge commercial players is described well here: How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)

In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore. And started a long quest to create a messenger, starting with Hangout (which was followed by Allo, Duo. I lost count after that).

As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.

And it's not an accident:

What Google did to XMPP was not new. In fact, in 1998, Microsoft engineer Vinod Vallopllil explicitly wrote a text titled "Blunting OSS attacks" where he suggested to "de-commoditize protocols & applications […]. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS project’s entry into the market."

Microsoft put that theory in practice with the release of Windows 2000 which offered support for the Kerberos security protocol. But that protocol was extended. The specifications of those extensions could be freely downloaded but required to accept a license which forbid you to implement those extensions. As soon as you clicked "OK", you could not work on any open source version of Kerberos. The goal was explicitly to kill any competing networking project such as Samba.

This anecdote was told Glyn Moody in his book "Rebel Code" and demonstrates that killing open source and decentralised projects are really conscious objectives. It never happens randomly and is never caused by bad luck.

In solidarity with Naples' economic losses, we must force every port to ban super yachts. Apart from Blackpool, which needs the cash.

As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.

How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)

Your 1% figure comes from misrepresentation of a 'study', pushed by Purdue and others for criminal gain.

The One-Paragraph Letter From 1980 That Fueled the Opioid Crisis

Purdue Pharma, which makes OxyContin, starting using the letter’s data to say that less than one percent of patients treated with opioids became addicted. Pain specialists routinely cited it in their lectures. Porter and Jick’s letter is not the only study whose findings on opioid addiction became taken out of context, but it was one of the most prominent. Jick recently told the AP, “I’m essentially mortified that that letter to the editor was used as an excuse to do what these drug companies did.”

Don't get me wrong, pain is miserable and treatment needs to be better. But around 80% of opioid addictions start with prescriptions for people in genuine pain. What percentage of prescriptees that is, I don't know. But it's not a trivial issue, and it is a very difficult problem to solve.

When they're seeking to have people beaten to a pulp? Yes, obviously. Freedom for a few fascist bullies is unfreedom for everyone else. They can fuck off to Gab or Truth Social or somewhere else they'd be welcome. Not here.

The high rate of failure to replicate is not, in and of itself, evidence of fraud. It's primarily a problem with low power to detect plausible effects (ie small sample sizes). That's not to say there isn't much deliberate fraud or p-hacking going on, there's far too much. But the so-called replication crisis was entirely predictable without needing to assume any wrongdoing. It happened primarily because most researchers don't fully understand the statistics they are using.

There was a good paper published on this recently: Understanding the Replication Crisis as a Base Rate Fallacy

And this is a nice simple explanation of the base rate fallacy for anyone who can't access the paper: The p value and the base rate fallacy

tl;dr p<0.05 does not mean what most researchers think it means

but maybe not something you want to put your life on the line over.

To be fair, their hubris usually only kills poor people so, progress?

Yaccarino told investors that ad spending in several advertiser categories is now up at least 40% year-over-year, including health, consumer packaged goods and financial services, the source said.

So, kook pills, preppers, and crypto scams.

because people like being where people are

That's exactly the problem with mega-instances. From the link posted above:

As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.

It does make some salient points, but it too is starting to feel a bit like astroturf.

Astroturf is created by billionaires to make it seem like a bunch of ordinary people agree with them. A legit article about several actual instances of corporations killing FOSS does not become astroturf just because a lot of ordinary people found it useful enough to post and cite.

The solution offered is not entirely clear but I read it as "do not federate with huge corporations because they will bury you".

Also. can we have an option for links to magazines/content opening in a new window/tab? Obviously ctrl-click, shift-click, or right click <...> solves the problem but not needing two hands/multiple clicks to avoid losing the current page would be fab.

I linked an article about how that stat became widely cited, based on almost nothing. It's not uncommon in medicine, especially when it suits Pharma. I teach medical students and the first thing we teach them is that half the course will be out of date by the time they graduate and the other half is already out of date.

That's not to say that addiction rates can't be kept very low with responsible prescribing and there's nothing wrong with reassuring patients who may be concerned about swapping one problem for another. But this particular factoid was cultivated by drug companies wanting to encourage irresponsible prescribing. And they succeeded.

There's a brilliant drama on Disney/Hulu called Dopesick which tells the story (including of this statistic). It's an excellent, and enraging, watch.

You can check their post history? Karma doesn't tell you anything, really. Mine went up tenfold one day just because I replied to what ended up as the top post in a top thread in a much bigger sub than those I normally post in. Some people spend all their time in big subs making short, smart remarks that get a lot of karma, others spend their time in enemy territory battling people they disagree with. Some toxic people have a lot of karma because they hang out in toxic subs.

The problem to be solved is how to order threads. Old skool bulletin boards just bump the most recently replied one to the top. Which works well on an old skool bulletin board as long as it isn't too large, but very badly on a big site where a few big active threads can drown out all the others.

I don't know what the solution is. But the numbers don't mean anything without checking the context. Karma is useful for ordering threads/comments, and giving users a bit of dopamine when they get some attention. But there (probably) are better ways to do it.

Not all Muslims agree with them, of course. These are conservative Muslims. "Rights for me and not for thee" is a right-wing trait, regardless of religious belief or heritage.

This is the mantra of lemmy.ml.

Tell us, how are russian and chinese cops?

It's more of an anarchist thing, to be fair.

They're bastards, obv. Like it says in the OP.

Lots of lovely laws, none of them enforced. Liberals* are really very bad** at this game.

*in the political science meaning of the word, not the US colloquial meaning

**or good, depending on your perspective and/or the sincerity of their declared intent

That's not true in the US. They have a tipped minimum wage; there, if you're not tipping you're stealing someone's labour.

It is a sucky system, as the buried lede in that article shows:

However, data from the very checkout system that prompted tipping revealed disparities in pay. Neitzel noticed that Black employees were earning less tips than their White counterparts.

But, until it is burned to the ground, that is the system and (in the US) you should not use it to exploit people.

Your post has appeared in the wrong sub but the pressure vessel absolutely was jerry-rigged and the viewport wasn't up to the job: A whistleblower raised safety concerns about OceanGate’s submersible in 2018. Then he was fired.

The report detailed “numerous issues that posed serious safety concerns,” according to the filing. These included Lochridge’s worry that “visible flaws” in the carbon fiber supplied to OceanGate raised the risk of small flaws expanding into larger tears during “pressure cycling.” These are the huge pressure changes that the submersible would experience as it made its way and from the deep ocean floor. He noted that a previously tested scale model of the hull had “prevalent flaws.”
...
A day after filing his report, Lochridge was summoned to a meeting with Rush and company’s human resources, engineering and operations directors. There, the filing states, he was also informed that the manufacturer of the Titan’s forward viewport would only certify it to a depth of 1,300 meters due to OceanGate’s experimental design. The filing states that OceanGate refused to pay for the manufacturer to build a viewport that would meet the Titan’s intended depth of 4,000 meters. The Titanic lies about 3,800 meters below the surface.

They probably will realise that 10 million is less than 1% of 1.6bn and that they can safely ignore people making shit up.

The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack.

My thoughts exactly!

I found the link via this article from the always thoughtful A R Moxon*: What Is Lost

You'll probably enjoy that too. :)

*@JuliusGoat @ mastodon. social

(extra spaces above to stop the instance removing all mention of itself from the visible post. WTF?)

There is a really, really big difference between "we want to kill you" and "we do not want to be killed by you".

Don't tolerate fascists. However comfortable that centrist illusion is, you are signing your own death warrant and that of millions of others (most of whom will suffer the consequences of your actions long before they get around to the people who feel safe enough to argue that fascists must be tolerated).

If your employer would not want to lose you, think about what would make it work better for you and then talk to your manager. More days WFH, or shorter hours on days you're in the office, or a big fat relocation package, or whatever works for you.

If they can't/won't help, don't quit until you have another job lined up. Make sure they know it's why you're leaving.

I don't think that's true? It might be true of USian Christians because the Christian right has run riot there for the last 40 years. But I don't think it generalises?

There is a Christian right in the UK but they're not really that prominent outside of the Northern Irish context (where they are sadly all too prominent). I think most British people would associate Christians with feeding people, and cardigans. Our Christian churches are mulling over whether to perform same-sex marriages, not trying to ban them for everyone.

And the UK Muslim vote is firmly on the 'left', of course. But I don't know how that breaks down by heritage vs belief (or centre vs actual left).

Thanks for that.

Lack of blinding is a serious issue for subjective outcomes but blinding when treatment effects are obvious to both intervention and control groups is dishonest (Pharma does it all the time to make their trials look more credible than they are).

Open label is the norm for cancer trials for exactly this reason. It is important to consider the biases that may arise, in subjective endpoints especially. But it is ludicrous to dismiss research on this basis alone. We can't randomise 12 year olds to become lifetime smokers or not, let alone use placebo controls, but we do know that smoking kills. It's just a bit more complicated to prove it when perfectly designed RCTs are not possible.

If he took the test too, he knows about it. If he wants to talk about it, he will. And if he wants to know why she didn't raise it, it's because he is still her dad.

The intention was, as it always is, to make immigrant labour easier to exploit without affecting supply. But they forgot that immigrants have other options in the middle of a national labour shortage. Oops.

I have an e-ink tablet that runs Android. Copes with most apps and can deliver stuttery video.

E-Ink can't be far off replacing glass screens (at least as an option) because the benefits for battery life are substantial. But I'd think it would replace them rather than be in addition to. A phone with screens on both sides would be so fragile.

Fold, for sure. Actually pocketable, and secure once pocketed.

You don't know what clutter is but you do have a very cool rabbit.

Thanks for this. Turns out they also made it hard to make anything other than Edge your default browser (you have to set it separately for each file extension). How to fix that here:

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-set-default-web-browser-windows-11