rm_dash_r_star

Discord is great for real time chat, but really bad for threaded conversation which was what Reddit was good at. Didn't anybody mention the Fediverse and Lemmy/kbin to them?

We have more freedom here, don't have to worry about stepping on any corporate toes. Also the viewership is a lot smaller and the people that are here are more interested in actual information and discussion. I don't think that will change a huge amount, but as the platform grows we may see more shitposts.

Also it takes a little more effort to deal with the decentralized platform here. It kind of weeds out the user base. I mean I've been astonished by the lack of effort seen in some Reddit posts. For example posting a question that can be answered straight away with a simple search.

The other stuff didn't bother people enough to leave, but rebranding? That's the step too far. Anyway Mastodon usage has fluctuated a good amount over the last few months so I don't think that's a good metric for people fleeing Twitter, or should I say X (what a terrible name).

Twitter's value was in its branding as the case with any ubiquitous product. There was zero reason to change it other than to further damage the entity. Fine with me Elon, go ahead and kill it, one more failed corporate driven media site. We don't need any of them.

Producers got away with going to non-replaceable batteries because "most" people replace their phone before the battery wears out. Only a portion of consumers have a problem with it.

I'm sure there's a few of us that can comfortably get six years off a phone. In fact the phone I'm currently using is coming up on three years. I could probably get another three years out of it, but I'm going to have to replace it soon because of battery wear.

Non-replaceable batteries are bad for the consumer and bad for the environment. It forces obsolescence putting more financial strain on consumers and increases environmental impact with higher production and waste.

A phone replaced before three years could be sold second hand with a battery replacement. Otherwise consumers could keep a phone twice as long. So they're basically doubling the rate of production and waste to squeeze as much money as possible out of the consumer. Then there's zero regard for the environment. But you know that's typical of how corporations do business, rape the Earth, screw the consumer. We have to keep a leash on these guys.

Normally it's pretty quick, but sometimes it can take a few minutes. Other times it seems to get stuck. If you cycle it one or more times it may hook up right away. Doesn't matter though, you still see a community's posts even though it says pending, really just an indication issue. They should get it working better pretty quick as Lemmy develops.

This thing with subscriptions has become insane. You can easily spend several hundred a month getting roped into all the subscriptions companies are pushing. It's the latest way to squeeze as much money as possible out of the consumer.

I've gone into subscription boycott at this point. I had too many and said screw that. I still have Amazon Prime where I think I get my money's worth. I shop there a lot and use their streaming so it's worth it to me. Subscriptions for appliances? No way in hell.

Stupid because it makes zero difference for any screen that uses a backlight, which is most of them. And then they could just set dark mode as the default if it actually mattered, which it doesn't. You can be stupid, but to be really stupid takes a corpo like Nestle.

I think the most outstanding issue is how Reddit is trying to turn mods into employees that work for free. Nobody does that job to benefit Reddit, they do it to build and support a community. You take that away and there's no incentive. Without mods you have no community.

That guy was a backyard inventor and charlatan, like those 19th century backyard aircraft inventors. It's one thing to take yourself out of the gene pool through your own recklessness, it's another to take others with you.

Rush bypassed over a hundred years of engineering lessons learned the hard way with the rationale it stifles innovation. He even fired and sued one of his own employees for calling him out on it. The sub had zero certifications and then he lied to customers about it saying his designs were approved by NASA and Boeing who never even heard of the guy.

Aside from the lack of safety engineering and lack of proper fail-safes in his design, there's a reason engineers don't use carbon fiber composites in subs. They have a tendency to delaminate. When used in aircraft, composites have to be examined and certified at a regular service interval with special inspection equipment.

I think that sub was an accident waiting to happen from day one. The hull probably failed due to inspection negligence and a failure to detect delamination. That's even if the hull could have been rated properly for 4km. If it wasn't the hull, it would been one of the other jury-rigged systems.

I can't believe people smart enough to acquire the wealth for that excursion weren't smart enough to check out the qualifications of the company hosting it. I think it was plainly obvious just looking at the sub yourself. A navigation system that consists of a consumer laptop PC and Logitech gaming controller should have been a dead giveaway.

This is the reason why all corporate media has become the dumpster fire it is (not just social media). They use negative emotion like fear and anger to promote engagement. So all you get as a viewer is stuff that gets you fired up. The quality of journalism is so low now they're fabricating stuff to engage the viewer. Then there's no journalistic accountability when they do get caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

Haha, kill -9 all Google processes, and the little daemons they rode in on too.

That's good they won't be adopting WEI, but if my bank or some other critical site decides to enforce a desktop browser with it, I'm still in the same boat. I did think of a way to avoid a WEI browser on my desktop if it comes to that. I can probably substitute a phone app for any critical services, but that's still a drag. I don't like phone apps much, I use a desktop browser for everything.

I think Google's destruction of the Internet is most simply a matter of influence. If Chrome didn't have the huge market share they wouldn't be able to pull off this kind of thing, open source or not. Unfortunately people have a herd mentality with everything on the internet so we allowed it to happen by doing what we always do.

This is how the tried and true agenda goes using Meta's threads.net and the Fediverse as an example.

• Meta's site gets wildly popular because of corporate backing
• Meta's site does something on purpose to cause poor operability with the rest of the Fediverse
• People not on Meta's site can no longer properly communicate with people on Meta's site, they go to Meta's site
• The Fediverse gets fractured and nobody cares because everyone is on Meta's site
• Meta's site is the sole survivor and the rest of the platform dies.
• Meta enshitifies their site as corporations typically do (think Twitter)

So yeah, ban the shit out of them. The proper term is defederate them, but do it with extreme prejudice.

Even the people that haven't left Reddit seem seem to be pretty hostile toward Reddit. It's like why are you still here? You can make more of a statement by leaving.

BTW, thanks for the Reddit free link, don't want to even give them my traffic.

Further down the rabbit hole. Seems like they're doing everything they can to get to the bottom as fast as possible.

The singularity would reverse the big bang.

Now that's a funny comment, haha.

Dogs were instrumental in early human survival and they've benefited for it. There's almost a billion dogs in the world, but only a quarter million wolves. So in a natural selective sense that was a good move wolves made by becoming companions with humans.

Behavior has been bred into dogs going way back to the beginning. Fetch is one of those behaviors. I recently watched a documentary that showed the unique interaction of dogs with humans. Dogs are really good at understanding human body language. For example you can point at something and a dog will cue on it. No other animals reliably respond to that gesture, even chimpanzees which are genetically closest to us.

Just more subscription hell. It's ridiculous anymore. I'll need a subscription to flush my toilet at some point. I mean how much of this are consumers willing to put up with. Anyway Reddit is well on the path of monetizing themselves to irrelevance.

Back in the day when the only copyright protection was scare tactics. Anyway looks like an ad for a software product, not actually anti-piracy propaganda. Nostalgic none the less. There was a time when all software was obtained through floppies. I sure was glad to see those go, damn things failed more often than they worked. I kept a big box of blank ones and copied everything off three times in case the first two failed.

Yeah let's make sure AI is ethical by some religious standard before we put it in charge of the nuclear arsenal. What an ass.

and am stunned when I see the web without an adblocker.

True, True, it's damn near unusable. You take it for granted what a job your blocker is doing for you.

Funny, when I was a little kid my grandmother had a Zenith TV with that exact remote. I still remember the long throw and clank of those buttons. TV remotes were uncommon then so I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Yeah dating myself here.

I think you should try to find a VPN that supports it, but you can live without it if you have to.

If you don't have a listening port other clients can't request a connection. You can still limp along without accepting incoming connection requests and it may not even make a big difference. Still it's a lot better to have it. You'll connect to more peers.

BTW, It's not always necessary to use port forwarding to enable a listening port, but commonly it is. Machines with a public facing IP don't need to use port forwarding, but most people are either on a private network or VPN where it's required.

They're getting indexed, but search rankings are so low they're buried. If you put <search term> site:<server> you get post results. For example lemmy site:lemmy.world

A smart sort would be great. Maybe even some custom settings for it, like weights for community, upvotes, replies, etc.

So Meta is up and running now on threads.net, news to me. Hell yeah, ban the crap out of them.

1000 billionaires, sounds like a great plan. They did so well last time.

Getting the flotation is actually not that difficult in terms of engineering since Venus has a crazy thick atmosphere. Not hard to float a balloon at an altitude of a few Earth atmospheres. Problem is your life is dependent on the reliability of the floatation system. It would take a lot of attention to fail safe design. That OceanGate organization would be like "the wrong stuff".

There's other engineering challenges in colonizing Venus such as solar radiation. Venus has no magnetosphere to protect against ion radiation from the Sun and being closer it's much more intense than Mars. Then you'd have to tether the balloon somehow, Venus has some strong vertical winds. That's going to be like thirty miles of cable to the scalding 900F surface. Venus has clouds of sulfuric acid so that's going to present a materials challenge. It's a tough sell, greatly easier to colonize Mars.

It's like when Elon started blowing smoke about colonizing the moons of Jupiter. If not already aware, Jupiter emits the most radiation of any solar body second only to the Sun. The moons around Jupiter are seriously toxic to human life. They can't even get a probe to last more than a year around Jupiter due to radiation exposure, let alone a manned spacecraft.

I'm still using Chrome, but it keeps getting shittier. At some point they'll push me over to Firefox. Hope Firefox can avoid getting shitty.

Good to see the FCC going after this kind of thing. Put them in jail even better.

I have my phone set up so the only numbers that chime the phone are those in my contact list. The abuse of voice and text on the cell network is rampant and it's equivalent to trespassing.

Aside from any moral or political views, it amuses me when people do criminal acts and fail to realize police can inspect personal data like text messages, email, and social media. I think people smart enough to realize that are smart enough to avoid committing a crime in the first place. Though there are smart criminals that get away with it, you just don't hear about them because they don't get caught. In any case I tend to think being stupid is prerequisite to being a criminal.

It's pretty ironic how companies will spend so much money on advertising to gain brand recognition, but then throw it away on a whim.

Propaganda is alive and well in the USA too, especially if you consider it in the most liberal sense.

There's an incredible amount of advertising in the media telling me what I need to think about any issue you can imagine. Most people just ignore it, but it annoys the crap out of me. I'll make up own damn mind, thank you.

This is a modern development, you never saw that crap forty years ago. I'm old enough to remember the before time. Most of it I can avoid simply by not watching commercial TV and blocking ads on the internet. Though sometimes it squeaks through on the TV and it makes me want to throw a chair at it.

When I do have the misfortune of seeing that garbage it's usually on TV and has an Ad Council logo on it. Who are these people and how are they able to egregiously spend the large amounts of money it takes to repeat ads on TV like that. That's a lot of money consumed in a futile attempt to brainwash me through repetition.

They could take that same ad money and actually use it to provide relief for some important social issues, like starving children. Instead they'd rather use it to try and influence my opinion in a futile way. Man that is really fucked up when you think about it.

I recently watched a documentary about the USA power grid and was surprised to find we have three, East, West, and Texas. How weird is that.

Anyway Texas set out to be independent early 20th century because they did not want to be subject to federal regulations. Unfortunately that leaves them vulnerable. They can't tap into the national grid if there's a deficit, which has happened several times due to extreme weather. Texans just have to go without power and it's always at the worst time. They know they have this vulnerability and are not dealing with it for whatever reason.

Also they can't sell surplus to the national grid because they're not connected to it. I mean nobody can force them to hook up, but if I was a Texan I'd want my state to suck it up for the sake of having redundancy in the system and sparing the catastrophe.

Fusion and fission are quite different. A practical fusion reactor does not exist. It's outside our technological capability right now. Current fusion reactors are only experimental and can not maintain a reaction more than a small fraction of a second. The problem is plasma containment. If that can be solved, it would be possible to build a practical fusion reactor.

The fuel for a working fusion reactor would likely be deuterium/tritium which is in effect unlimited since it can be extracted from seawater. Also the amount of fuel required is small because of the enormous amounts of energy produced in converting mass to energy. Fusion converts about 1% of mass to energy. Output would be that converted mass times the speed of light squared which is a very, very large number, in the neighborhood of consumed fuel mass times 10^15^.

Fusion is far less toxic to to the environment. With deuterium/tritium fusion the waste product is helium. All of the particle radiation comes from neutrons which only require shielding. Once the kinetic energy of the particles is absorbed, it's gone. There's no fissile waste that lingers for some half life.

The little blue bird on every shop window, website, and business card becomes a stylized letter that, hopefully, doesn’t look so threatening on the next iteration?

Haha, I know the most appropriate iteration, a red background with the X in a white circle.

A practical superconductor is a huge deal, it would drastically change the way we deal with electrical power distribution and electromechanical applications. So any development is going to be big news. Though we're not talking about an actual working conductor, it's just excitement over research advancement, yeah? I've seen this kind of "big news" before in other tech sectors and time often proves it unworthy. If it does present a big step toward a practical superconductor that's great, but I wouldn't count any eggs yet.

Yeah makes a lot of sense. I know, pay an exorbitant price for a ubiquitous brand then change it to something obscure. Sounds like a great business plan to me. You go Elon.

That article has been posted a lot lately. It's a looming threat, Meta is coming to destroy the Fediverse in a preemptive strike. It would take a long time for the Fediverse to grow big enough to threaten them, but they're not taking any chances.

All I can say is Netflix at 12.99 was a tough sell. That was the rate hike that made me drop them. 15.49 forget it.

When Netflix was the ticket and my sub was 8.99 some years ago, I didn't pirate anything because I didn't need to. I'd have to pay a hundred a month due to the fracturing and inflation of streaming services now, and I still wouldn't get everything. I didn't wanna pirate, but the industry backed me into a corner.

My wife is legally disabled and we're constantly going through that pharmacy crap. It's criminal how the medical system operates here in California. The runaround with doctors and filling recurring scripts on time never ends. Problem is we have no options. My wife's medical insurance greatly limits doctor choice and forces us to use a particular pharmacy chain. That should be illegal and is not. Even if that wasn't the case the pharmacy we're forced to use (CVS) has established a local monopoly by buying out all competing pharmacies in the area. We'd have to go all the way across town to find a different one.