they don’t vote anyone into any office, as “being the official candidate for party X” is not an government office. So the judge used A14 on an issue where it does not apply to in the first place

The political primary process still falls under electoral law, and state law can be brought to bear on questions of how the primary process is administered. Even the dissenting justices in this case appear to agree that finding of insurrection can trigger the enforcement of Colorado State law to remove someone from the ballot.

So having participated in an insurrection absolutely can be a factor that's pertinent to legal decisions about his eligibility, and in fact it's that very connection that seems to be the entire point of Colorado's state level law disqualifying insurrectionists from electoral office.

It's comments like this that make me glad Lemmy has a star that lets you favorite them. Thank you very much.

for being such a meanie

Lol. You mean literally engaging in insurrection? This is exactly what internet hippo was talking about in their now famous tweet:

New right wing thing is describing crimes as generically as possible to pretend like they're not crimes. Someone gets convicted of conspiracy and they start yelling "Wow so it's illegal to make plans with friends now"

I'd love to see a whole chart of how various crimes get described in a generic way. Describing insurrection as being a meanie probably something that should be printed in framed and hung up in a Hall of Fame honoring greatest all time excuses for federal crimes.

There's so many levels on which it is deeply concerning. One is just on the face value. They actually did storm the capital, the security forces in place seemed ambivalent or perhaps actually complicit to some degree. Nevertheless, numerous people were injured or died.

And then there's everything about the precedent it sets for next time, the excuses and defenses being made of it, and the ways in which those sympathetic to it may prepare to execute on the same idea again in the future, perhaps learning from prior lessons, and perhaps confident that they won't face any legal exposure.

It's a horrifying idea to have been allowed to take root in the form of real physical actions, which are then carried forward in culture to set the stage for future actions.

other than limiting exhaust, or is that it?

Gee, when you say it like that, it makes extinction-level events sound not so bad! It is That Bad, so that would be the most direct answer.

The important thing to note is that even though some electricity is generated from fossil fuels, EVs eliminate the path-dependency that ties transportation to fossil fuels.

Firefox is better than most, no double there, but at the same time they do have some shady finances

So I went ahead and read that article and goodness gracious, does anybody actually read these links??? Because that link is a complete nothingburger. It's a blog post from someone who never read a 990 before (standard nonprofit disclosure form) who thinks every other line of is proof of a scandal. But it's not, it's just a big word salad that is too long to read, so nobody will bother.

The most significant charge is (1) that the CEO makes too much and (2) the author doesn't like that they contract out work to consultants who think diversity is good. Every point made, so far as I can tell:

• Have assets worth $1.1 billion as of 2021

• Mozilla spent less on "expenses" from 2021 relative to 2020

• Revenue went up over the same time

• A lot of revenue was from royalties (e.g. agreements for default search)

• They disagree with the wording on a donate form about whether Mozilla "relies" on individual donations

• The CEO made $5.6MM

• They pulled out one expense, which appears to have been training/education relating to social justice topics

• They pull out a few more individual expenses and weren't sure what they were.

This isn't secret documents being handed to Deep Throat in a dark parking lot. There's no smoking gun, no smoke, just a PDF with ordinary tables of expenses and revenue, and consultants who did diversity training. If that's shady then, get ready to be mad about every non-profit ever.

F-Droid is the best starting point. It's an app that is basically a Google Play style app store, but all the apps are FOSS.

https://f-droid.org/

I've got to disagree here. Well, partially agree partially disagree. I think it's absolutely the case that your example qualifies, making a big deal about representation of Nazis in the armed forces is a kind of big lie that's just getting repeated without any sense of context or proportionality.

But I don't think it's a both sides thing the way you're making it out to be. You're acknowledging that it's Russia being worse than Ukraine, but it's not merely a difference of one being slightly worse, it's a huge part of the Russian narrative, whereas it factors in in no way whatsoever in Ukraine's message to the outside world. Ukraine has made historical analogies, in major speeches and communications to the outside world, but has not made the case that their sovereignty is legitimized due to anything having to do with Nazi representation in the Russian armed forces. It just doesn't at all play an equal role in the moral cases they're making.

I almost forgot today was April Fools day. I feel like since Covid, the national mood (TM) was such that Google and co stopped doing April Fools pranks, and/or if they did them, they were so safe they were groan inducing.

Looking around at the roundup links for 2024, there aren't many that happened this year, from the looks of it. So I wanted to post this one, because it's the rarest of rare - one that I thought was really incredibly well done.

The prison escape in the first Deus Ex, when you learn where you really are. I guess for some people this was easy to figure out beforehand, but when I first played it at age 15 it was a shock to me.

It's too bad. I feel like they're a versions of Ubuntu from 2006 to, say, 2012 or so, that were beautiful and perfect and were accessible to me as a college student. It set a new standard. It seems like half the battle is having people with good vision making important decisions so things don't go off the rails.

Right, and to some people of a certain temperament, being aware of, and concerned about a vast range of entirely different issues, all of which can be engaged with on a number of levels that build on your knowledge and understanding, all of that is just an "echo chamber".

The echo chamber argument doesn't account for the fact that people can have shared fundamental values and nevertheless have constructive valuable informative conversations that engage in nuanced analysis. Being concerned about climate change, for instance, you can have all kinds of productive conversations about new research showing how hot September was, or how to make cities more walkable, or any number of things, and those are valuable conversations where describing them as echo chambers is silly. They're actually good conversations where we gain something from having them. If your primary test of a community is whether it does or doesn't have echo chambers, it doesn't have meaningful things to say about cases like this.

This is not from Google. This is Extinction Rebellion registering a domain to prank Google, by speaking in their voice and resolving to stop funding climate deniers. It's both a cheeky prank and a way to put pressure on Google to take accountability.

I mostly agree with you - Republicans participating in insurrection should be disqualified from seeking higher office, and one of the best weapons to safeguard our democracy is our legal system.

I'm not so sure you do get it because it seems like you want to hold protesters to the exact same moral judgment, despite agreeing with a factual analysis of how infrequent the most egregious behaviors were.

If you understand that, and, more importantly comprehend it, then that needs to cash out in your moral assessment of what happened, otherwise you have no business saying you agree or that you understand.

If the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference, then the opposite of "I understand" is not "I don't understand", it's "I understand, but still..."

I also think the website is exceptionally good, and has a unique distinction of being equally good on desktop and mobile. Feel that the website is so good on mobile that I don't need to use a mobile app, and I sure as heck can't say that about Reddit.

Pretty sure all non-profits strive to be cash flow positive, in the United States and otherwise.

So I did read the article, and.... I'm not understanding a word you are saying. The families are suing a video game company for a gun in their video game. Also the article is not at all making the emphasis that you are making between marketing a specific game and video games writ large (the article kind of speaks to both of those at the same time and isn't making any such distinction), so I don't know what you are talking about. As far as the article is concerned this has everything to do with the fact that the gun was in a video game, and even Activisions statement in response was to defend themselves from the idea that their video game is a thing that pushing people to violence. So even Activision understands the lawsuit as tying their video game to violence.

I'm not saying I agree with the logic of the suit, but I literally have no idea what you think in the article separates out video games from the particular model of gun because that is just not a thing the article does at all.

Wow, I actually believed in this one. Is there a short text version of what the videos are explaining?

okay but still where is the nepotism? You've commented on the general hypothetical possibility of nepotism not having been dis-proven.

Being at Stanford in and of itself is not nepotism so it's a pretty fair question to those of us who want words to mean things.

What is the insight from your perspective?

Well they aren't blocked at the fediverse level. They are blocked at the instance level which is the fediverse working as designed.

It could factor in to stuff relating to Israel in the Middle East. Although, like other commenters here, I don't know much about this and I'd like to see some more substantiation.

Because it’s pointless.

This is like Marvel Movie brain except applied to OSs. This mindset suggests that the only conceivable rationale for an OS is that it's tied to shiny brand names and commercial rationalizations.

Despite this insistence, numerous alternative OS's do in fact exist and have been listed here. And the range of motivations extends beyond just having glossy icons for whatever the first 3 or 4 companies that pop in your head.

You have:

• experimentation and novelty/niche interest that don't align with specific commercial interests (e.g. Menuet OS, TempleOS)

• user-oriented design philosophies with specific definitions of speed and useability (e.g. Haiku OS)

• study/teaching in academic context

• niche/emerging product categories (QNX)

If you are able to understand why people would have these kinds of interests, it's the kind of thing that lights a fire in your mind, and for some people, sets them on a career, or opens up a major new interest, or leads to them having fun with projects that scratch their own itch, so to speak in ways that do lead to commercial applications (lest we forget that every FAANG has an origin story about how it started with tinkering in a garage). "Because it's pointless" makes me feel like I'm witnessing that inner fire of curiosity and sense of possibility die in real time.

It doesn't mean there's no barrier to market penetration or no difficulty creating a kernel, but there's so much more to the WHY of creating an OS than getting listed on Nasdaq.

When Taylor Swift’s JET ALONE produces more carbon annually than 1000 individuals driving their car daily, it doesn’t matter one iota what kind of vehicle the average joe drives.

Amazingly, you're missing your own point. If it's not about individuals, well, even Taylor Swifts jet by itself is a rounding error when considered in the context of global emissions.

But more importantly, it seems like you are contradicting yourself in a pretty fundamental way. You are perfectly comfortable taking Taylor Swift's emissions and holding her responsible for those due to her belonging to a class, namely folding her into membership of "corporations/billionaires". So Taylor, insofar as she represents the collective actions of that class, gets moral responsibility.

But individual consumers are also contributing significant emissions when conceived of as a class, which is a way of conceptualizing individual actions that, by your own Taylor Swift example, you are perfectly comfortable doing.

It doesn't mean it's the only thing we should strive to change, but it definitely is one of them, because the global collective emissions of people using internal combustion engines is in fact a significant input into CO2 levels, and we can reason about these things at those scales if we choose to.

I don't think this is actually a myth. I think there's an extreme version of the statement, but it nevertheless is true that there are specialized taste buds and that they aggregate on sections on the tongue.

And I think there's a whole rabbit hole here, of overeager "corrections", that are not in fact corrections but just someone engaging in bad faith with a statement that's close enough to the actual truth. It's actually more wrong to categorically dismiss it, then it would be to note the difference between it and the truth, which is to say while they are not strictly regions, they're nevertheless as attested to be the NIH:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8956797/

There is undoubtedly a spatial component to our experience of gustatory stimulus qualities such as sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and umami, however its importance is currently unknown. Taste thresholds have been shown to differ at different locations within the oral cavity where gustatory receptors are found. However, the relationship between the stimulation of particular taste receptors and the subjective spatially-localized experience of taste qualities is uncertain. Although the existence of the so-called ‘tongue map’ has long been discredited, the psychophysical evidence clearly demonstrates significant (albeit small) differences in taste sensitivity across the tongue, soft palate, and pharynx (all sites where taste buds have been documented).

In my opinion, the more interesting phenomenon is understanding how these facts, and the temptation to correct, challenges our ability to sustain nuance and to carefully differentiate between degrees of truth, instead of just making blanket denials.

What would you consider an authoritative source on if something looks nice?

Because even for me, a full time systems coder, just figuring out what server to join was a pain

What was there to figure out in your case?

we shouldn’t rely on free software made by free labor, and we need to say goodbye to some 60-70% or more of the software we use

Again I'm just reading along, and as a person who cares about, you know, the principle of charity, I don't see how you can possibly think that's the most charitable interpretation of what they said. I took them to mean we should do what we can to ensure these projects have financial resources to continue, not that we should "say goodbye" to them.

And here's the crazy thing: I'm not even saying I agree. I just think it's possible to address a face value version of what they're talking about without taking unnecessary cheap shots.

I think I explained why I think you can call this successful without having similar numbers to reddit.

Widespread user adoption is important, but that is being achieved. I don't think I agree that the specific criteria of "being more used than Reddit by FOSS enthusiasts" is a make or break criteria that decides whether this is a success.

I think Lemmy is functional, usable on its own terms, and aside from not quite doing enough to ban trolls it's valuable in its present form.

I would distinguish it from, say, diaspora, which I don't believe has reached a critical mass of users and frankly just isn't designed well enough to really get off the ground.

I was wondering what the point of lemmy was

What was great in the early days of Mastodon is that, for those who could remember, it recaptured the feel of the "early" internet. You could feel distinct and interesting voices, patience and willingness to get into deepdives, where the payoff was from one to one interactions with personalities deeply interested in interaction itself and passion projects.

That made it have a value in and of itself that didn't depend on competing platforms.

That said, you can feel echoes of typical internet culture all throughout the fediverse now. I don' think you should measure success or failure on replacing reddit, but its great to have a place ready and waiting to absorb communities that become (say) disenchanted with bad mods.

So the model for replacements I think would be looking at how facebook replaced myspace, and how reddit replaced digg. In both cases, there was widespread user disenchantment at substandard designs and redesigns that disregarded interests of users. I think that kind of catastrophic incompetence and disregard for users was unique to a particular era, and there probably have emerged some industry standards and best practices to stop that from happening in our current internet, for better or for worse.

I think with reddits redesign, it has become increasingly frustrating to the user base, and there is a prospect that user disenchantment with reddit could lead to something, but I think its a long shot. The important thing to remember about reddit is that they caught a wave of exponential growth by not fucking things up, and staying more or less consistent with their product.

I think the best thing Lemmy can do is be consistent and keep doing what it is doing, and not try and reinvent itself. I actually think the website's functionality on mobile is truly fantastic, the best I've experienced from using a website in place of a dedicated app, so I wouldn't worry about it. I think so much of Lemmy is right in its current for, and 99% of the issue with fediverse products is that the ui/design is being terrible, and it took Mastodon to kind of teach people that it mattered. So yeah, I think the main thing is to not mess with success.

This feels like a basic misunderstanding of how the fediverse works. There are instances that embody your preferences and you can sign up for them.

One of the most important reasons I believe it is so useful to have a federverse that allows defederating is because ever since 2014 and 2015, and growing since then, there's been a phenomenon of rabid online trolling and hyperpoliticization that's had tendency to take over and destroy whatever pre-existing culture and norms existed, and the people doing it have leveraged bad faith free speech arguments to attempt to expose more platforms to their behavior, often making the same copy paste echo chamber argument that you are right now. I found the people making this argument to be operating from really shallow understandings of what intellectual diversity really means, because these people tend to ignore important components such as the paradox of tolerance, they tend not to believe that trolling or harassment campaigns are real, they tend not to be able to distinguish between "echo chamber" and the high level of discussion that's possible when you found a community based on a common interest or shared set on principles, tend not to understand that you're actually reducing the diversity of ideas by destroying each communities and turning all communities into the same thing, and tend to think of the full range of human ideas is represented in the unfortunately narrow framing of left-right spectrum which is most pertinent in American politics.

And for the fediverse, it calls the bluff perfectly, because for people who are concerned about echo chambers or "exposure to ideas" (yeah, which ones??), such people are able to join an instance that gives them the thing they say they want. But what they really tend to want is unmoderated unfiltered exposure to a captive audience, and the tangled contradictory mishmash of arguments about free speech and being open to ideas are just a means to that end. And so, they tend to be completely empty-handed when you ask them to explain why they feel specific instances need to federate or de-federate, you just get vague nothingburger speeches.

To be clear I don't think that everyone making the argument thinks that way, I think some people are unwittingly doing the work of bad actors without meaning to. It's just that I've seen this argument made over and over, and I feel like there's some sort of boot camp we should all put ourselves through that involves understanding the history and some core ideas, because it could save everyone a lot of time.

I agree that there is an unfortunate bipartisan consensus on national security issues that is normalized bombings.

I would nevertheless say you can find significant differences on foreign policy. And, you can find huge huge huge differences on domestic policy, on things like respect for the rule of law, on the type of people appointed to courts, on economic policy.

So I think you raise a legitimate concern, but then you proceed to completely abuse it by trying to make that concern stand in for the whole of everything that matters about political decisions.

Right, this is what it means to have a sober and comprehensive look at the issues that separate the parties. Nobody who says both parties are the same ever seems capable of participating in this type of conversation, they just talk in memes.

And when it became clear that there were no nuclear weapons, it became a dishonest equivocation about weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, there was also loads of dishonest communication about Iraq's coordination with terrorist groups.

I don't know how privacy respecting it is but one well done AI search engine is:

https://search.marginalia.nu/

Mate, we are discussing on two different threads. Chill out. Maybe I didnt get your point so feel free to elaborate or leave it.

I think it would be really good if all of us on the internet agreed to a rule, which is that if you mischaracterize someone or misread them, it's not that weird for them to want you to not do that. So I don't think it's fair to response to a comment correctly noting they are being mischaractized by going out of your way to try and make it about their emotions/mental state.

In what way did I bend your logic?

Well for starters, the person above was pretty explicitly NOT advocating for reliance on third party libs, and perhaps more importantly, they were not in any way suggesting reliance on closed source software. In essence, diametrically the opposite of everything you were talking about.

I think your confusion came in their phrasing of not relying on "labor product." I took them to mean, not relying on people committing their free labor to sustain FOSS. I think you must have read that as not supporting FOSS.

Also - not constructive? But you’re the one that’s being negative.

I think they are right. You took the exact opposite of what they said and "corrected" them for it, which is irritating as hell. And now you're doubling down, which is worse. I would be irritated too!

Sorry, I was super unclear there. This was not Google.

However, Google also sometimes has done their own April Fools bits, and historically Google has been big part of April Fools hijinks. So I did mention them as a company that does these, and I did post this which is impersonating Google as an april fools prank, but yeah, this particular one was not at all carried out by Google.

So I'm not a fan of guns but, "marketing guns" is not per se illegal nor unique to video games. Yet the lawsuit separates out video games specifically. So I am not sure I agree that it's less crazy at the end of the day.