If you haven't been following the Interstellar magazine, I've added a lot of functionality since the last thread here, including views for magazines/users/domains, better navigation for wider screens, QoL additions (like the @ button to reveal originating domain, inspired by Artemis), and a lot of different bug/functionality...
@Damaskox Apple Store- does this mean you'd rewrite for iOS, or is it already compatible? If so, would you be able to throw up a .IPA on the github? With a stock iPhone, users can sideload apps for testing purposes for up to a week at a time- you wouldn't need to make testflight or put it on the store until you are ready. Altserver is something people use to refresh the permission indefinitely.
Flipboard has recently begun federation, starting with 25 accounts. These accounts can be viewed from Kbin with their posts showing up as microblog posts....
@ThatOneKirbyMain2568 we have to preemptively defederate with any corporation! The fediverse must always stay small and never improve other companies. The vision is for open technology that few can use, right? I'm just worried that if Flipboard helps make the fediverse more appealing by providing more content for our users, that they can pull a fast one and defederate from us later, and then all of our users will leave and go to Flipboard instead! The only way to prevent that from happening is to make sure they never hear about Flipboard in the first place. Please reference any arguments used for defederating from Meta if you need more "sky is falling" arguments to whip you into a frenzy of senseless fear.
@Mmccue I was being sarcastic, I think the fediverse is about improving how people use social media- not driving all existing social media extinct. The idea that people would be unhappy that enormous companies are adopting the fediverse, which inherently loosens their grip on their audience and relinquished some of their power- it seems insane. Pre-emptive defederation seems insane.
from reading the comments, it sounds like the pixel pass bundle was just a convenient way to bundle, paying for the device as well as other Google services. It wasn’t an upgrade program. At the end of two years, you still would have to buy a new phone if you wanted to upgrade.
from the description, it originally sounded to me like you paid a little extra every month to get a free upgrade every two years, and presumably you would have to trade in the old device. that’s apparently not the case. The stuff about being on the newest pixel device every two years was apparently telling you that after two years, you could buy a new bundle, linking your phone payment and other Google services. The benefit seems like it was very dubious to begin with- basically just a promise that you could buy a new pixel phone a google service bundle after you pay off the first one.
from what I’m understanding about the announcement, people who have purchased a pixel pass, will continue paying the same price for their bundle until the phone is payed off, but once the phone is payed off the promise of being able to do it again is broken. They can still buy a new phone, but they can't bundle the payment with Google services. So, at the very least, they did break their promise. But they probably can't be sued for much of anything since there wasn't a free upgrade being offered down the road, the promise was just, if you buy this today, you can buy it again later. No discount or special deal for buying it later, everyone who would have bought a pixel pass for the pixel 8 had it been offered would pay the same price, regardless of whether they purchased a pixel pass previously. so that promise has very little monetary value since pixel pass owners weren’t accruing any future benefit with respect to upgrading.
I've seen a good bit of debate on Kbin surrounding downvotes, so what are your thoughts? Should they exist? Should they be shown separately? Should you be able to see who downvoted?...
Yeah, non-trans women don't enjoy being forever 2nd because they weren't born men in physically competitive sport
Some sports just have totally dominant competitors. I don't think all the men who lost to Michael Phelps enjoyed losing to him because they didn't get to be born complete genetic freaks that look like they were engineered in a lab to win at swimming. In many women's sports, the top (cis) competitors tend to have really beneficial genetics, including really high levels of testosterone compared to average. Losing to someone because their genetics help them be faster/stronger/taller is just how it goes in competitive sports. Losing to a trans woman is no different than losing to a cis woman who hit the genetic lottery.
Dell's Australia arm has been slapped with a $10 million AUD (about $6.49 million) fine for "making false and misleading representations on its website about discount prices for add-on computer monitors," the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) announced today. The Australian regulator said the company sold 5,300...
@Madison_rogue I've heard there's some debate over how much the refund should be for. The obvious complication is that, the actual price they paid matches what they expected to pay, the issue being that the list price was faked. I think the refund should take the advertised discount (60% off) and apply it to the real lost price, and refund them the difference. That makes the consumer whole, providing them the discount they were told they were receiving.
Then, the fine they receive on top of that should be double. Send a strong message that if you defraud consumers, it's going to hurt. If all 5300 monitors cost the example price of $990, then the refund amount would be $600 each, for a total of 3.15 million in refunds and 6.3 million in fines. Sounds like this might be exactly what regulators had in mind since my number came pretty close to theirs. Dell is extremely fortunate they sold so few monitors. Because the advertised discount was so high, the fines alone appear to more than wipe out the revenue they made from these monitors, and whatever refunds they have to pay out on top of that puts them even further in the hole. Crime doesn't always pay.
my experience is eerily similar to yours. Used it a bit in the first few days, popped in on occasion. Deleted my account today. When I first went on, one of the questions I asked was "is this FOSS or privately owned" and got bombarded with that cadre of users explaining why it's better and safer for it to be owned by one person and that Jake would never make bad decisions like this exact one. At one point a user was being so agressive about how I should just trust Jake that I said I must be talking to his mom.
I also briefly had a Voat account when I thought Reddit was cracking down too much/too arbitrarily, and quickly realized that I was not in good company. I’ve been very optimistic about this Reddit exodus because it really doesn't have the same ideological bent to it, so the diaspora isn't just the dregs of reddit.
Season 1s are great, setup, some payoff, a bit of lead into the overarching story. Then season 2 to X. The heroes win and then lose in the final episode, cliffhanger to next season. People get bored. Final season is announced and they wrap up the show.
@delitomatoes Many sitcoms have an overarching romance arc between two leads that gets stretched out for eternity. I don't know how much I can vouch for "The Office" handling other storylines, but the getting Pam and Jim together 1/3rd of the way through the series, and then not having them constantly breaking up and dating other people and then getting back together (like Friends) was a real breath of fresh air. The show really proved they could survive as an anthology without having the main romantic arc to fall back on. Of course, later on they introduce serious romantic arcs for other characters.
It sucks when a show is spinning it's wheels and a significant actor moves on to greener pastures, but you get it. It really sucks when a show rockets off and actors leave because the show has made them into a star who get offered bigger projects to capitalize on their fame. Mucking things up for the thing that made you famous is such BS.
There are examples in the second link, but I can paste them here for you:
Scrubs:
J.D. started as fairly emotionally needy due to him wanting a father figure to replace his own dysfunctional family. Fast forward to season five where J.D. is an appletini (light on the tini)-swilling "sensey" (that's "sensitive person") who can't hold on to his "man cards" (which would be taken away from him if he did something girly) for a full day. This is lampshaded by Zach Braff in the bloopers to Season 8.
"You haven't been here in a while, my character's really gay now."
Carla was initially a tough cookie Team Mom. As the seasons went on, the writers Flanderised her obsession with gossip and her domineering tendencies over Turk. She also went from giving advice to forcing her opinions on everyone else and admitting that taking the moral high ground "is like crack for me".
Elliot went from being a pretty normal, slightly quirky, girl with no interest in kids and a high degree of efficiency coupled with no personal skills to highly neurotic, obsessed with getting married and having kids, and the most compassionate doctor in the hospital that was only there because she wanted to help people. The family part is at least somewhat justified by the fact that she as she got old she had a stronger desire to settle down.
I want to take back ‘Retard’. Because I want it to apply to things that are infuriatingly stupid, instead of it being used as a derogatory term towards special needs people.
The Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game franchise says it won’t allow artists to use artificial intelligence technology to draw its cast of sorcerers, druids and other characters and scenery.
@Madison_rogue it does. The artwork was detected as being created with AI due to significant quality issues, not through thorough forensic analysis/mathematical models.
@picandocodigo it's averaging about 20M units a year, so assuming Switch 2 makes the Switch 1 totally obsolete, we'd need another year+ of strong sales to rise to number one. If the Switch 1 continues to be sold after Switch 2 is released (not fully backwards compatible, Switch 1 price drop, Switch 2 is just more expensive), then less than a year or strong sales plus another couple years of long tail sales to get over the hump.
If it overtakes, I can imagine the most likely scenario to make it happen are - Switch 2 is considered unambiguous successor at $350-$400, Switch 1 price drop of only like $25-$50, basically just to clearance out the old stock, except no switch lite replacement for the first year, so the now $150-$175 switch lite continues to to rack up sales at a ridiculously apealing price. Obviously they could easily reach 1at place if they did a really agressive price drop but that doesn't seem likely for nintendo at all- a small price drop on the lite, especially if the choices are $150 Lite, $250 V2, $300 OLED, $400 Switch 2
@picandocodigo@slimerancher I think you're underselling how important the price cuts were to the PS2's longevity, and I don't think Nintendo is willing to go nearly that far. The PS2, like the Nintendo Switch, launched at $299. 2 years later it dropped to $199. Then steady price cuts all the way to $129 preceeding the launch of the PS3 in 2006 at $499/$599. I think it's safe to say that the enormous price difference played a huge role in it's ongoing sales past the PS3 launch. PS2 launched in March 2000, and 7 years later it had sold 117 million units, taking us just a few months past the PS3 launch. In the next 5 years the PS2 sales racked up another 40 million units, or about 25% of all PS2's sold occurred after it's successor's launch.
If the Switch were to follow the same trajectory and a Switch 2 launched this holiday season, we'd see another 40+ million units sold over the next 5 years, ending in over 170 million units sold. But there are a number of reasons to doubt this will happen.
#1 there might literally just not be enough chips left to do that- it's speculated that Nvdia stopped production of the chips and there's a finite number left, which may fall short of that goal.
#2 Nintendo seems very reluctant to drop prices. The PS2 by this point was less than half of the launch price and only 65% of its cost after the first major price drop. The Switch is 100% of its launch price, and I believe in some regions it even got a price hike.
#3 it seems implausible that the Switch 2 will cost as much as a PS3 did at launch (more expensive than the Series S and PS5 digital, equivalent to Series X and PS5 disc). That means the price delta between the Switch and Switch 2 will necessarily be far narrower than the PS2/PS3, so continued sales after the Switch 2 launch are unlikely to be as robust.
#4 Sony wasn't trying to pump up the PS2 numbers, selling it nearly until the PS4 came out was a strange phenomenon born of unusual circumstances. I don't think Nintendo will have any interest in selling the Switch alongside it's successor except to clear out inventory, for the same reason the Wii U and Switch V1 were both discontinued promptly after their successor's came out.
One guy banned me from 18 magazines for downvoting him. (Side note: this is why being able to see downvotes is bad. Even if anyone could see them by spinning up their own instance, that's a lot of work compared to pressing 2 buttons.)...
@EnglishMobster every day on there's a main character on the internet, and you never want to be it. @Deliverator, how about instead of this getting totally blown out of proportion, you ease up and unban the guy, as well as make it a personal policy not to ban people from every magazine you own over a petty grievance. Going nuclear like that should be reserved for something extreme like CSAM, not just doing something that irritates you.
@EnglishMobster@KairuByte an analogy isn't a strawman. He didn't say you were trivializing gun violence. He said the defense you used was faulty because it could just as readily be deployed to something more clearly harmful. It doesn't even prove the thing you are defending is bad, it just demonstrates that your argument defending it is a bad one.
I appreciate that you're attempting to put this in formal logical terms, but I think you're a little out of your depth. Your interlocutor was simply asserting that you are discounting the validity of systemic critique. He didn't imply that you had any position whatsoever on guns. He said your argument, if applied elsewhere, would lead to absurd results.
A strawman would be saying that you denied criticizing systems is ever valuable, and it's all down to personal responsibility. That's somewhat similar to what you said, but by reframing it as an absolute rule, it would be much easier to counter.
You're somewhat struggling to formulate the syllogisms here. I'll present the interlocutor's argument more precisely.
P1. If an argument works just as well to justify doing nothing to address systemic causes of gun violence, it is a poor argument.
P2. Your argument works just as well to justify...
C. Your argument is a poor argument.
Here would be your original syllogism.
P1. A system of rules that prioritizes freedom should not be blamed for actions of people who purposely abuse that freedom.
P2. The person who responded this way to downvote was misusing free access to downvote information.
C. Kbin's system that prioritizes freedom is blameless for a user responding to downvotes.
And here's how we would apply that to gun violence
P1. A system of rules that prioritizes freedom should not be blamed for actions of people who purposely abuse that freedom.
P2. A person who commits gun violence is misusing that freedom.
C. The USA’s laws that priotize freedom is blameless for gun violence.
@rafoix I'm confused about the defense of "they should have closed off the roads". He drove around a barricade according to the story, so it sounds like it was shut off. Also just kind of weird to say "yes, I intentionally ran into those people, but the cops should a have done a better job of stopping me." He didn't negligently hit them, right? It was on purpose? You can try to share some blame when an accident happens and say <I was negligent, but the harm should have been mitigated by other safety measures which also failed>. But it doesn't work when you're actually trying to cause harm.
A new Covid variant found in Asia is the most mutated version of the virus yet, according to scientists. The morphed Delta variant was swabbed from a patient in Jakarta, Indonesia. It has 113 different mutations, 37 of which affect the spike protein – the part used by the virus to latch on to humans. The new strain has been...
@Haus antivax "just asking questions" bullshit has made us all so cagey about asking genuine questions. Really sucks. I hate that so muvh conspiracy bullshit gets spread via asking loaded disingenuous questions.
I know what you're talking about, basically if the virus mutates the thing that vaccines target, there didn't seem like a very likely pathway to mutate and remain highly contagious. That's not necessarily a general vaccine rule, but it applies to the covid 19 spike protein. No idea how this news relates to that and would love to have some really smart person show up and explain it. Maybe Hank Green will do a video on it?
OC Updates on Interstellar kbin app: account login, voting, subscriptions, and more
If you haven't been following the Interstellar magazine, I've added a lot of functionality since the last thread here, including views for magazines/users/domains, better navigation for wider screens, QoL additions (like the @ button to reveal originating domain, inspired by Artemis), and a lot of different bug/functionality...
How do we feel about Flipboard federating?
Flipboard has recently begun federation, starting with 25 accounts. These accounts can be viewed from Kbin with their posts showing up as microblog posts....
Ranked: 30 Movies You Can Claim Are Christmas Movies Instead of Developing a Personality (thehardtimes.net)
Google kills Pixel Pass without ever upgrading subscriber’s phones (www.theverge.com)
You won’t use Pixel Pass to upgrade to a Pixel 8 in October.
What's your opinion on downvotes?
I've seen a good bit of debate on Kbin surrounding downvotes, so what are your thoughts? Should they exist? Should they be shown separately? Should you be able to see who downvoted?...
International Chess Federation (FIDE) to ban and punish transgender players (www.erininthemorning.com)
With these new rules, FIDE has managed to...
Madison on why she quit Linus Tech Tips. (Content Warning: Sexism, Self Harm , Sexual Assault & Harassment) (threadreaderapp.com)
For Reasons relating to LTT on its coverage of PCGaming and PC Hardware I thought it important to share this here....
Dell fined $6.5M after admitting it made overpriced monitors look discounted (arstechnica.com)
Dell's Australia arm has been slapped with a $10 million AUD (about $6.49 million) fine for "making false and misleading representations on its website about discount prices for add-on computer monitors," the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) announced today. The Australian regulator said the company sold 5,300...
CommandFest promo Reliquary Tower (lemmy.world)
Squabbles, another recent reddit alternative, seems to be taking the doomed "free speech" path (i.imgur.com)
Are American tv shows stuck in Act 2 for their entire runtime between season 1 and final season?
Season 1s are great, setup, some payoff, a bit of lead into the overarching story. Then season 2 to X. The heroes win and then lose in the final episode, cliffhanger to next season. People get bored. Final season is announced and they wrap up the show.
What word do you want to take back and repurpose it's definition?
I want to take back ‘Retard’. Because I want it to apply to things that are infuriatingly stupid, instead of it being used as a derogatory term towards special needs people.
Dungeons & Dragons tells illustrators to stop using AI to generate artwork for fantasy franchise (apnews.com)
The Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game franchise says it won’t allow artists to use artificial intelligence technology to draw its cast of sorcerers, druids and other characters and scenery.
Nintendo financial data as of June 30, 2023. 129.53 million Switch units, TloZ: TotK 18.51 million units in less than 2 months (www.nintendo.co.jp)
Nintendo Switch:...
AITA - I downvoted a power-mod
One guy banned me from 18 magazines for downvoting him. (Side note: this is why being able to see downvotes is bad. Even if anyone could see them by spinning up their own instance, that's a lot of work compared to pressing 2 buttons.)...
Is there anything that can be done about troll powermods?
I logged into Kbin today to see 18 notifications where the same guy banned me from all of their magazines for downvoting them....
US man who killed woman by driving car through BLM protest pleads guilty (www.theguardian.com)
Dawit Kelete, 30, pleads guilty to multiple charges after hitting two protesters, one fatally, during 2020 protest in Seattle
New highly mutated Covid-19 variant identified in Asia (www.news.com.au)
A new Covid variant found in Asia is the most mutated version of the virus yet, according to scientists. The morphed Delta variant was swabbed from a patient in Jakarta, Indonesia. It has 113 different mutations, 37 of which affect the spike protein – the part used by the virus to latch on to humans. The new strain has been...