sab

sab, 4 months ago

Welcome back! I hope you had a nice holiday between the formalities and the personal matters.

Besides the federation issues a couple of weeks ago, I think the user experience here has been great lately. Looking forward to see what the new year has in store!

sab, 3 months ago

Biden is fine. It's your fascist problem we're worried about.

Sincerely,
Europe

sab, 3 months ago

I was listening to BBC World Report this morning. They made quick mention of it along with some other things happening in the conflict, then went on to introduce their "expert" who would illuminate the situation.

Their so called expert was an employee of some Israeli institute of security or whatever, and he talked on for ages with minimal push-back about how the israeli army is doing everything by the book and how "Gaza is safe for civilians, and if it's not it's the fault of Hamas".

That was all the coverage they did.

What a fucking joke.

sab, 5 months ago

It's the Satanic Temple, they do some great stuff.

Then again, my left buttcheek has done more good for humanity that the Bible Trumpers ever will.

sab, 3 months ago

Super Mario. It's been milked for what it's worth and more, but whenever there's a new Mario game you just know it's going to be good.

sab, 3 months ago

If the poster is not a gigantic racist, he or she may also have referred to the ape species living various places in Africa coming into town and eating trash.

sab, 4 months ago

Not "they", but Paul McLeary, the Politico defence reporter. Each point on the list is essentially an opinion piece by one of their journalists.

And it's not necessarily saying it's a good thing: It's a thing you might have missed. You could also question whether "the U.S. is producing more oil than anytime in history" is supposed to be a good thing.

Furthermore, as to McLeary's point: Some - such as anyone in the region except the Chinese - might argue it's important that the influence of China in the South China Sea is balanced out by other powerful players. It's not about going to war with China, it's about the continued independence of Taiwan and other fairly fragile balances in the region. It doesn't take a moron to see that the situation is complex.

sab, 4 months ago

Anyone who has a passion for open source and wants to learn Spanish should check out LibreLingo! It's also a nice project for people who want to contribute to something that is not owned by a company, though it's a bit too early for contributors who have language skills but no coding experience.

sab, 1 month ago

Full beards are great. I can go a week without any maintenance and still look presentable. Any other style of facial hair is just too much effort.

sab, 2 months ago

That's @potus, for those on platforms that can view microblogs and that are not defederated from Threads.

Remember that comments are not federated to/from threads yet. If I understood correctly, likes are federated.

sab, 4 months ago

I can accept that the two officers in the suicide watch were just incompetent fools. And I completely believe Epstein killed himself - the failure is merely that he was allowed to do so.

But he had already attempted suicide. And the whole damn world was dying for his testimony. Tell any old idiot off the street to watch him to make sure he don't kill himself, and they'd drink whatever amount of coffee it would take to watch him for a week straight without blinking an eye. Still these idiots manage to hire two morons for the job that cannot be arsed to do the bare minimum.

If you took the job seriously, considering the information Epstein had and the fact that he had already attempted suicide, wouldn't you make sure to put officers you knew you could trust on the job? Rather than the two only idiots on this planet who apparently don't care enough about uncovering a network of child rapists to do even the bare minimum of their jobs?

Sure, it's probably just idiots all down the line, and just a funky accident that it ended up serving the interests of the rich, powerful, and morally corrupt. Even so, it just doesn't sit right with me, and I don't think it ever will.

sab, 4 months ago

Yeah, I think it became a bit of an impossible solution the second Ernest's proof of concept suddenly attracted a whole bunch of users and attention after the Reddit exodus. Kbin was clearly not ready, and I admire him for staying on course with the development after that despite pressures.

That said, users are not wrong to want easy to implement features asap. So I personally think the fork makes a lot of sense, though everyone could do without the occasional bad faith from some of the people involved.

sab, 4 months ago

My understanding of the situation is that Ernest, the main developer behind Kbin, thinks of the current Kbin as a proof of concept, and he is doing profound rewriting of the codebase to better fit his vision of how it should be working.

Meanwhile, other people wanted to contribute to Kevin directly, developing a better product on top of what Ernest considers to be too shaky foundations. So he's not all that interested in pursuing that part of the development before he is happy with the core.

This also leads to a dynamic where he still has his own vision for the project and it goes through him, whereas other contributors want to make it their own more and develop something different.

It's hard to see how to make everyone happy here without forking. Hopefully both projects can still gain from each other in the future: Mbin can benefit from the rewritten codebase of Kbin, and Kbin can implement features from Mbin after seeing that they are good and work well. In either case, the continued development as separate projects is probably not all that bad.

sab, 1 month ago

As a leftist, I find them annoying because they make me look like an idiot by association.

sab, 4 months ago

I used to dislike Taylor Swift along with all other contemporary pop stars. Maybe even a little bit more, because she had the audacity to call herself Country: Spitting in the face of personal heroes like Kristofferson, Nelson, and Cash.

Then I stopped being an edgy teenager, Swift released Shake it Off, and I had to recognize it was a fun song to dance to. In an ironic kind of way of course, but nevertheless.

And then, in 2015, Ryan Adams released his cover album of Swift's 1989, playing every single song on the album in a folksy way. I dug it. And with it, I had to appreciate that Taylor Swift is one hell of a songwriter: I loved the songs, I just don't love the sound of pop music all that much. That's personal taste, not everything I dislike is bad.

Then Ryan Adams fell from grace with metoo, so fuck him. At least it triggered Father John Misty to publish (and later remove) his legendary covers of Swift in the style of the Velvet Underground.

Fast forward to 2020, and Taylor Swift dabbles with music I can actually enjoy listening to with her album folklore. Pretty cool. I actually got my expectations up for her next album, evermore, low-key hoping that it would be musically inspired by the Battle of Evermore. Sadly I was wrong, but again, it's a matter of personal preferences.

What matters more is the fact that she's reinventing herself from album to album - she's successful in one formula, and she just ditches it and moves on to something different. And every time she does it, she seems to be even more successful than the last time. Her growth as an artist is astonishing.

Finally, she's just cool. Fuck the labels - she'll just casually re-records her entire discography in order to take back control of her songs. She's caught up in all kinds of stupid celebrity drama, but it tends to be the rest of the industry falling over like toddlers trying to drag her into shit for PR while she acts like the only adult in the room. She also scores points for casually hanging out with Billy Bragg and encouraging people to vote and shit.

sab, 4 months ago

There's something like 50 million Threads users. Chances are there's at least a few people out there who would be happy to be able to connect with at least some of those 50 million people, without having to use Threads themselves.

As an academic, I would just be happy if I could reach my peers on Mastodon. I don't really give a fuck which platform they choose to use - I've chosen mine, and that's enough for me.

Furthermore, what's even the point of open standards if you don't want them to be adopted.

sab, 4 months ago

I also don't see why anyone would choose a social media experience in which they need thick skin. The world can be annoying enough already, no need to make it worse.

It sucks if Blåhaj feels the need to defederate from programming.dev, especially since there are so many prominent gay and trans programmers in the open source world and the Fediverse. But that's life, they have aimed to create a safe space since the beginning and that's what they should stick to.

sab, 4 months ago

That's what social life is all about! Very few people walk around talking to everyone we see on the street - generally we limit the types of social contact we participate in. If I want to talk about painting model aeroplanes I might not be very interested in hanging out with the lumberjack community.

sab, 4 months ago

It's dumb, but if it catches on we can begin referring to his Chinese colleague as Poohtin. So I'm all for it.

sab, 3 months ago

And http still works in any browser I know of.

I kind of get your frustration though. I set up my personal website precisely to get away from big platforms; yet my HTTPS is validated by Google. It feels like a defeat still having them involved in the process.

sab, 5 months ago

This is such an easy decision that seems weirdly difficult to grasp for so many people.

Side with civilians. Oppose whoever commanding the murdering of civilians. Sometimes that means despising both sides of leadership in a war situation. And that's normal and healthy. Quite often it's all fucked.