Good riddance to Meta's bullshit. Stop them before they get to the first E in EEE.

Here's a sign to put up at the border between Lemmy.ml and Threads, which will surely have a 100-meter wall built on it with 50 kV electric fences, barbed wire, watchtowers, snipers, and whatever to keep those Meta corporate fuckers out.

::: spoiler Threads Quarantine Zone sign :::

can you even call it a democracy anymore?

YouTube. I wish they made better decisions about how to run the platform,.

Yeah, but the city council meeting I'm listening to is on the other side of the Pacific Ocean (Filipino here), so I couldn't do anything even if I wanted to. And given the geographical distance, the impact on my day-to-day life is.. zero.

But still, the stories I hear during the meetings are entertaining and they really do help me understand America just that little bit more. Curiosity for the win!

When I set dark mode in an app, the top of the window would remain light, in XFCE. But in early January 2024, I realized it was because XFCE had a theme setting in both Appearance and Window Manager, and they were conflicting with each other. I ignored it for quite a while but now I'm happy with my full dark mode computer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_noise#Work_environment

Just background noise to listen to, because sometimes you just don't like silence.

This also screams "I am a selfish and self-centered person".

Manila, Philippines: My drinking water comes from a delivery service that drops off a few blue containers of drinking water every few days. I've never swallowed tap water but I do use tap water when rinsing after toothbrushing. The sticker on the blue containers has the company name on it, contact details (obviously), and something about "18-stages latest US technology".

So "background ambience" would be a better term to describe the city council meetings?

Not writing "Mr.", "Mrs.", or "Ms." in documents. Waste of ink, typing time, and reading time.

Does the interstate that takes 15 minutes actually take 15 minutes? If that interstate is crazy congested, the state highway might actually be faster. Or maybe this is some rural part of America, I don't know.

Didn't we use copies of that book to alleviate the toilet paper shortages back in the day?

Interesting. It looks quite dull from the thumbnails indeed. At the moment my current source of city council white noise is Spokane, Washington - the stories that people tell during open forum are entertaining and I sometimes hate how an amazing story gets cut off by the 2-minute limit.

TLDR: My optimistic view of what human culture could be like is summed up pretty well by the Orion's Arm project.

I am familiar with the Orion's Arm universe, a hard sci-fi transhumanist worldbuilding project.. shall I recommend you take a trip through the Wormhole Nexus to the Sephirotic Empires where you're ruled by benevolent S6 transapient dictators (supercharged AGI)? Because you'll see a fuck ton of entities playing around like retirees. You'll see "aliens" which actually are just extremely genetically modified humans. In fact, here (https://orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45b177d3ef3b1) is their "Culture and Society" page, which sums up a lot of my optimistic OA-based beliefs in a human culture.

Oh, and most Terragens (humans + any life that can trace its origin back to Earth) live in orbit. Story goes that we made an AI system that decided we humans were bad for the environment and then told us to get the fuck off Earth (Great Expulsion).

https://orionsarm.com

My (hopeless) attempt at explaining some of the terms:

• Wormhole nexus - OA's primary method of "faster than light" travel. You never go faster than light, but rather some transapient figured out how to fold spacetime and now you have a hole where you can throw your ships in and have them on the other side.
• Transapient - Post-singularity entites that are orders of magnitude smarter than us. An ant can't fully understand a human. It is incapable of understanding what Lemmy is, what a job is, what the Fediverse is. Just as an ant can't fully understand us, humans can't fully understand transapients. Oh and transapients come in 6 levels. We're all S0 on the scale. S6 are pretty much gods.

Were you able to find car parking in Harvard Yard?

I use Image Max URL so when I open an image in a new tab that I want to inspect in greater detail, it redirects me automatically to the highest resolution version for my viewing pleasure.

So... if I have the money to fly down to Fort Scott do I get to ramble on for 3 hours about how their city council has been such a great source of white noise, generating additional white noise for me in the process that I can use once I return to Manila?

I've been thinking about handing over control of my sublemmies to the reddit mods but I've changed my mind now that I've read this post. NO!

WE THE PEOPLE OF LEMMY AND THE FEDIVERSE REFUSE TO HAND OVER OUR SUBLEMMIES TO THE CORRUPT REDDIT MODS!

AND WE DECLARE INDEPENDENCE FROM THE REDDIT MODS! (refugees welcome)

Research. Many people I'm interested in still use Twitter. And I hate how Nitter instances globally have started to become rate limited or outright obliterated by Twitter API weirdness/

Well, Spokane enforces a 2 minute limit. What city do you recommend I listen to if I want to hear longer open forum stories?

EDIT: Oh wait, I replied from the inbox, nevermind. Fort Scott, Kansas is definitely the place.

shit i think i need to update the regex again

Investigators say it is due to a large network of alien ships outfitted with technology far surpassing our current level that NASA confirmed entered the Solar System in 1994. In 2023 these ships entered Low-Earth Orbit and began to enter the atmosphere. Videos circulating all over social media claim that the alien ships expelled a gray material into the sky, later confirmed by air quality specialists to be nanoscale bots designed specifically to phase through the skull layer into the human brain, presumably as a form of mind control.

For reasons beyond human comprehension, these nanobots made changes to the human brain's neuronal topology to then artificially introduce an urge to check out Lemmy. It is also suspected that these alien ships may have also performed mind control operations on Reddit's high-ranking employees to induce these controversial API changes to further drive traffic to Lemmy and most importantly, save on nanobots.

We assume that these alien ships would have to spend hundreds of thousands of years in interstellar space to return to their homeworld to pick up more, so it would be reasonable that they would take measures to minimize their nanobot usage.

Investigators are aware of the "Alien Blue" subject that has consistently come up in discussions. Rest assured the Lemurian Alien Encounter Investigation Board is doing its best to investigate the connections between Alien Blue and these aliens, who have now been designated "Alien Race no. 1994-2108X" through an agreement between the Lemurian Alien Encounter Investigation Board, NASA, ESA, JAXA, the Philippine Space Agency, Roscosmos, and ISRO.

A combination of both. I write paper entires sometimes, but most days I type them up in a local MediaWiki installation.