@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

qkslvrwolf

@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social

Gardening, hiking, bike riding, game playing, inactive poly, left-ish/liberal-ish/radical-ish, partisan, urbanist, separated air force, RCV

Very interested in social media and how community is built

software engineering manager by trade

he/him

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

brettk, to random

I should be able to track endless time yard work as in Strava...

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@brettk YES.

Spent 4 hours pulling weeds taking down bittersweet this morning. Definitely a good workout.

qkslvrwolf, to random
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

Had a great removal party along the rail trail today in as part of the city cleanup day.

We're hoping to do this regularly and then start counter-planting with !

Would be happy to help anyone else in the get started on their own sections!

pluralistic, to random
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Weak Institutions: It's not a fair fight

https://doctorow.medium.com/weak-institutions-a26a20927b27

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@Heather @12thRITS one of the first things to know about improved voting methods is that very opinionated and often unkind nerds will come yell at you if you talk about them

qkslvrwolf, to random
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

I have been melancholy all day. No reason why, AFAIK.

I dislike it. Snap out of it, me.

MissingThePt, to random
@MissingThePt@mastodon.social avatar

Why did Bluesky choose to call a repost a “skeet” when they could have chosen “bleet”?

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@MissingThePt I assume because jack, like elon, is still a 13 year old asshole boy-child.

OpenIntel, to random

FIRST ON CNN: CDC set to stop tracking community levels for Covid-19

https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/28/health/cdc-covid-community-levels

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@OpenIntel booooo

Also hilarious they got COVID from their stop tracking covid conference.

dangillmor, to random
@dangillmor@mastodon.social avatar

Now the willful incompetents at the New York Times political desk are normalizing George Santos. It's hopeless to expect better from this crew. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/nyregion/george-santos-washington.html?smid=tw-share

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@dangillmor they're not incompetent. They're quite good at propaganda. After all, they've convinced you and millions like you to keep reading them, even though they're openly oligarch propaganda, just by allowing an occasional good article through, while maintaining a highly toxic and untrue narrative in the general arc of what they publish.

seldo, to random
@seldo@alpaca.gold avatar

Also this is an astonishing exchange between two of the founders of Twitter.

image/jpeg

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@dimatosj @seldo @tylervu they're still a company in that regard, but isn't the point that they should be more resilient against being forced to do bad things in the name of "fiduciary responsibilty", because public benefit is legally an equal responsibilty?

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@pthenq1 @seldo and like Linux, people will forever think it's harder to use, even though it's not.

(Hopefully not, but the entrenched CW makes it cool for people to think it, which is a problem that tends to last generations)

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@jf my partner is not a techy. She uses Linux with no help from me all day every day.

Conversely, mac and windows are intolerably painful to do anything on. I'm forced to use a Mac for work, and I regularly have to ask IT to do simple things for me because it's not worth my time to figure them out. It's a nightmare.

If by "app support", you mean things aren't built for Linux as opposed to windows or Mac, dunno what to tell you.

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@jf I suspect at this point lots of things could be bought through steam, 'cause proton just works a lot of the time.

But this is what I mean. Nearly everyone I know has MORE problems using windows or Mac than they would Linux, but they ascribe those problems to their own knowledge, not the OS. Because the OS is culturally "cool and easy".

They have fewer on Linux, but any problem is the OS's fault, because culturally it's "hard and nerdy"

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@pthenq1 @seldo nothing I've seen, technically, is any worse than any other site.

It's just cool to claim it's hard.

They get a fail whale, they chuckle and come back the next day.

A fedi server doesn't pull replies from another server fast enough, and it's an unsolveable nightmare and they switch to bluesky.

There is a cultural hivemind to this stuff and it's impenetrable.

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@jf it does not only cover games

https://www.makeuseof.com/windows-apps-steam/

Proton is just advanced wine with the hard and annoying parts done automatically.

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@jf regardless, I don't actually care what you use.

My point is that people have a collective imagination about what's hard, what's easy, and what's cool, and it is often unmoored from reality.

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@jf wut? IT departments would do what they always do. Buy one thing and support only that.

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@jf sure, but have you ever been to a windows or Mac support forum? It's not like they're any different from a Linux one.

They're not easier.

Mac is so bad they had to open stores in population centers to help people out locally 'cause folks can't figure it out without a "Mac genius"

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@jf but my point is that Macs aren't easier. People regularly claim they're easier, and they're not. And if anyone was willing to pay the Mac premium for support on a Linux box, it'd be just as easy to get support. But they're not. Because culture.

Your point is they get support for spending twice the money on something just as hard to use.

If they were willing to spend twice the money on a Linux box, they could get that support there, too. But they're not.

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@jf Naw, plenty of folks have tried to do cadillac linux + hardware combos, but this just gets back to my original point: the general cultural gestalt is that linux is Hard and Free. It's much harder to build a counter-culture cult than a culture cult.

Mac is a culture cult that's Easy but Expensive. Best case scenario for a business. What they actually sell is a narrative. Their products are decent hardware with a pretty bad operating system and a narrative of ease.

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@jf And sure, yes, good marketing and and the ability to build a cult make for a nice network effect. But it doesn't actually make the products themselves easy.

Anecdotal point: my mom was convinced to buy a mac because they're "better for photography", but she has no network there.

So now she does about 1/4 of what she used to on her windows box, because the mac is harder to use AND she has no support for it.

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@jf and she paid twice as much for the privilege.

But your network effect exists because of cultural fictions, not because of actual ease of use. Cultural fictions carefully planted and grown by marketing folks.

I wish we could do an experiment where we had people who'd never used an OS before and we could teach them on all the biggies without exposure to the world.

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@jf Right, but the mac store gets to exist because marketing convinced a bunch of people that these expensive pretty machines were easier and better than other options, so folks paid a massive premium to buy them.

They weren't easier.

But the premium was still paid and that ALLOWED the stores to be opened.

Again: its easier to build a cult following on top of existing culture. Cults, famously, are good at collecting money from their followers.

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@securescientist @pthenq1 @seldo

I hear ya, although in some ways I'd say it's actually pretty close to the facebook model.

Just shorter form posts and a different crowd.

I think this is the best statement of the issue I've seen, though.

arrdem, to random
@arrdem@macaw.social avatar

Decentralization is an impediment to the average user people. It's not a feature. Stop trying to act like it is a key differentiating feature. People just want to be in the same "town square" as their friends and the people they're interested in

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@arrdem the point of federation is that decentralization doesn't mean a non-shared town square.

Not getting that is like not understanding you can email people who don't have a gmail address.

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@burnandtremble @arrdem I see 10 replies, but not entirely sure what point you're trying to make?

Is not seeing all replies a technical flaw or an intentional choice? Generally i'd've thought the former, which can be corrected.

qkslvrwolf,
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

@burnandtremble @arrdem gotcha. Yeah, fair enough.

I doubt bluesky will be without flaws, and twitter and Facebook certainly have and had many in their day.

I will probably never understand why folks ( not you, just the faceless masses) always seem to conclude that some problems are insurmountable and unreconcilable, while others are just annoyances, and that the former are open source, and the latter corporate.

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