If you're looking for some logic in this mess, it's that we generally use metric for things regulated by the government and imperial for more informal things.
So road signs and food package sizes are mandated to be in metric, so we're forced to learn kilometers and grams there. But measurements of people and cooking temperatures are mostly used casually so we've stuck to old habits.
This leads to some ridiculous situations. For instance, we understand distances and fuel volumes in metric, but for a long long time we'd only talk about fuel economy in miles per gallon. Anyone who wanted to calculate fuel economy had to memorize the formulas to convert km to miles and litres to gallons.
Around me, this has finally changed in recent years and mostly it's just old timers still using MPG. (Which is good, not just because metric is easier in this case, but because measuring economy as a ratio of fuel over distance is just plain superior to the other way around.)
Since on most fediverse instances you don't automatically upvote your own comment, do you do it manually? What's considered "proper etiquette"? Because on Reddit your stuff is self-upvoted automatically, while in YT comment sections comments with 1 like sometimes get called out for liking their own comment. Do we have an...
That's why kbin should self-upvote by default. If only Michael Scotts are upvoting their own comments, then the Michael Scotts have an inherent advantage in comment visibility.
We're going to hear more from the Michael Scotts and less from the humble Pams.
As a new user, I’m enjoying Mastodon’s vibe so far but the one thing that is a letdown is the trending hashtags. I’ve been checking them regularly over the past couple of weeks and it seems like they’re pretty much always like this....
Are tech/privacy enthusiasts known for being super into Wednesdays?
I'd expect them to be... I don't know, complaining about Prime Day sales today. Or taking about something remotely interesting. And I bet they are, but Mastodon isn't finding it.
There have always been a lot of wingnuts in the U.S., but at one time you could assume that if someone reached a position of power in the military or government, they probably weren't completely insane.
After the whole reddit API fiasco, I wanted a way to browse the AskHistorians subreddit on my phone without using the reddit app or website. It also bugged me to have all this valuable information on a site that might make it disappear on a whim....
Anything that can be done about that, such as detecting comment chains where a person replies to their own comment?
Other than that, this is really a superior way to browse askhistorians. There are no moderator comments to skip over, and no threads with 30+ replies that are just a sea of [deleted].
I'm not surprised that desperate politicians are still going to this well, but I'm pleased to see the media no longer taking the bait. You can practically hear this journalist's eyes rolling. "This shit again?"
I'm old now. I've finally realised I get more enjoyment from watching someone play than to actually play the game. Why is that? Do you experience that as well?
Yeah, if I'd been given a chance to buy Twitch in its first year for $100, I would have said no. I play a lot of video games but watching video game streaming for fun is beyond my comprehension. It was one of my first "No, it's the children who are wrong" moments.
Really interesting case. I can kind of see both sides.
But this was all way too informal for my liking.
The buyer, Kent Mickleborough, later spoke with Swift Current farmer Chris Achter on the phone and texted a picture of a contract to deliver the flax in November, adding “please confirm flax contract.”
Confirm what? The farmer claims he was just confirming receipt of the contract, which is plausible given the vague message. Maybe this will at least teach everyone not to use text message shorthand for five-figure contracts.
Saskatchewan farmers have had an outsized impact on the law. They should put this 👍 emoji on display next to Percy Schneider's hat and the tractor fender with the farmer's will carved into it.
Is this working though? I turned that setting on a week or more ago and I've never received a notification despite getting comment replies. I thought maybe I just didn't know what notifications look like, but I got one when someone mentioned my username.
The insurrection case against Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin will be closed, and he will move to Belarus, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on June 24.
Yeah, I wish people would stop spreading this lie, especially when the truth is no better: As reddit's admins, spez and the others explicitly oversaw, tolerated and defended r/jailbait and every subreddit like it on the site, for a period of multiple years.
Shared universes between franchises are a bad idea. I don't mean commercially. They're a great idea if you want to make a billion dollars. But they're bad for storytelling.
Reason 1 is that the story being told is always in service to some other story. By which I mean, the writer has to make decisions that aren't about making this story the best it can be, but about making it make sense in context with everything that's come before it. For example, Batman can't just be a story about a smart, athletic vigilante in a costume. He has to be the smartest, most athletic human being who has ever lived, because he has to compete with, and remain relevant amongst, actual superheroes and supervillains.
Reason 2 is that it undermines the impact of each story because, again, the stories have to be considered within a massive context. In Watchmen, we can imagine the awe and horror people felt about Dr. Manhattan because, like in our world, nothing like him had ever existed. If you put him in the same universe as Superman, he's just another superhero.
Obviously I'm talking about large comic-book style shared universes with multiple authors and largely independent stories. I have nothing against franchises that use other works to expand on previously introduced concepts and do it in a coherent way.
A thought I've been having that might be more controversial: Star Trek isn't sci-fi.
It's basically a series of morality fables with magical premises. There's always a paper-thin sci-fi explanation, but for all that these matter to the story, they might as well just say "fairies did it."
(And many of Gene Roddenberry's "godlike being" characters, like Q, are almost literally fairies).
There's also its treatment of space. Just as Star Wars' combat was an excuse to do WWII fighter combat in space, Star Trek is an excuse to do WWII submarine combat in space. They're equally unrealistic in that regard.
This is probably the most realistic prediction of reddit's downfall I've read.
There was an article on here earlier that compared reddit to Digg, which I think is way off-base. Digg never had the mainstream userbase that reddit has, and the cause of the current migration from reddit is in no way comparable to what Digg did.
Here @JustinHanagan instead predicts reddit "dying" in the way that Facebook has. Which is kind of a surreal statement, as Facebook is still the largest and most popular social media platform in the world. But almost everyone agrees that Facebook is stagnant or in decline. The coolest and most creative people have left for other platforms. We only stay on there to hear about sales from La Senza and life updates from our racist uncle so we don't have to talk to him in person.
And that's a very plausible future for reddit. Think about all the unusual communities and concepts that make reddit what it is. Love these or hate these, it's the place that brought us AMAs, reddit secret Santa, AmITheAsshole, MildlyInteresting, BestofRedditorUpdates, AskHistorians, WallStreetBets, and so on. All of these were invented by users/moderators, not by reddit.
It's easy to imagine a future where those communities all continue in some fashion and reddit keeps its hundreds of millions of users, but the creatives and visionaries move on. Which means reddit's chances of being home to the next /r/PhotoshopBattles or /r/TodayILearned are hugely reduced.
I don't understand the timeline. It's been reported elsewhere that the tourism company didn't report the submarine's disappearance for eight hours. This article says "The Navy began listening for the Titan almost as soon as the sub lost communications."
Did the crew sit there trapped for eight+ hours and then the sub imploded? I thought any hull failure would happen a lot faster than that.
Or is this article confused? It would make sense that the navy is always listening, and deduced what they'd heard after they learned of the disappearance.
I had the same visceral reaction to this law as most old-school internet dwellers, but I've changed my tune. My view now:
Yes, it's ridiculous to charge someone money for linking to your content, but it's less ridiculous than the status quo.
We're at a point where foreign corporations are extracting most of the profit from local journalism simply by hosting links to the content, while the people who actually produce that content at considerable expense are going broke. This situation is the result of those foreign corporations building a virtual monopoly on news by out-competing / crowding out all the old places we were exposed to headlines: from newsstands to flipping through the channels to media homepages to RSS feeds.
And sure, hosting links to those news stories is mutually beneficial, except that almost no one clicks the links. The headline, teaser and photo are scraped and displayed on the third party app, and that's all anyone cares to look at. We're all to blame for not clicking, but those same tech companies are especially to blame for fostering this culture of five-second attention spans.
This law will probably not be effective in the short term, and might even backfire due to Facebook's content blackout. It's easy for them to give the middle finger to small markets like Australia and Canada.
But major players like California are considering similar laws, and you can bet Facebook will suddenly find they can pay content producers when the alternative is losing the world's fifth largest economy.
Agreed, and the fact that the hateful parent comment is still sitting at the top of the thread also makes me concerned for kbin's ranking algorithm.
At the moment it has 28 "upvotes" and 51 "downvotes," which on reddit would have it buried and hidden at the bottom. Here it's remained the top comment since the article was posted.
Possibly because it has three "boosts"? I don't understand the difference between boosts and votes. But this site is going to have to do something about it, because normal people are going to run from this place if this kind of sociopathic content is elevated here.
I've seen that number floated around and am also skeptical. But if it's accurate, Reddit should just... do it. Full control of their site of hundreds of millions of users for the payroll of a medium sized business? They'd be stupid not to.
And honestly, I wouldn't even be mad. Paying their mods would effectively pop the balloon of my moral outrage.
You want to deny your employees the tools they need to do their jobs? Fine, it's your productivity that will suffer, no one else's. You want to rule the site with an iron fist? At least you're not being huge hypocrites and pretending it's community-run.
They were actually told to get bent but not fired, which is even funnier. Imagine insulting and belittling a key department in your company but letting them continue to run things.
I read an analysis of scenarios for the sub, and the best case is that they had a power failure but managed to surface. This is plausible because if something went wrong they would just need to drop their weights and float up naturally.
In that case, they're floating somewhere on the surface without communications and just need to be spotted.
But even that isn't a good situation because the ocean is ginormous and the sub is locked from the outside, so they're still limited to another day and a half of air supply.
If they're alive but under the surface, the search is nearly hopeless.
So I've seen a few posts regarding news outlets calling the protests a failure, and I don't really think that's the case. The protests have clearly made an impact, especially if the Reddit CEO is willing to oust MODS to reopen subreddits. I truly believe that something has been jump started here on Lemmy, Kbin, and all of the...
Honestly, I thought they might. Not to cancel the API fees entirely like some wanted, but to reach a compromise with developers that would increase Reddit's revenue and let the apps stay in business.
But it's become clear since then that killing the third party apps isn't an accident or side effect, but the explicit intention of the API changes. Now I can't see Reddit compromising as long as spez is in charge.
I still have a dim hope it could happen. The protests aren't over and Reddit is feeling it.
How to measure things like a Canadian? (lemmy.zip)
Saw this recently on a WAN Show (19:12). How true is this? It sounds wild.
Do you upvote your own posts and comments?
Since on most fediverse instances you don't automatically upvote your own comment, do you do it manually? What's considered "proper etiquette"? Because on Reddit your stuff is self-upvoted automatically, while in YT comment sections comments with 1 like sometimes get called out for liking their own comment. Do we have an...
Why are Mastodon's trending hashtags so ... dull? (lemm.ee)
As a new user, I’m enjoying Mastodon’s vibe so far but the one thing that is a letdown is the trending hashtags. I’ve been checking them regularly over the past couple of weeks and it seems like they’re pretty much always like this....
Burger King has been reading my dream journal... (edition.cnn.com)
UFOs can ‘fly underwater and defy physics’ claims US congressman (www.express.co.uk)
East Tennessee's Tim Burchett, a Republican, said he believes that aliens must have the technological capacity to "turn us into a charcoal briquette".
Official Minecraft wiki editors so furious at Fandom's 'degraded' functionality and popups they're overwhelmingly voting to leave the site (www.pcgamer.com)
Citing "lack of transparency from Fandom [...] loss of features [...] and toxic company culture."
I created a reader for the AskHistorians reddit archives (ask-historians-archive.netlify.app)
After the whole reddit API fiasco, I wanted a way to browse the AskHistorians subreddit on my phone without using the reddit app or website. It also bugged me to have all this valuable information on a site that might make it disappear on a whim....
After days of destruction, Macron blames a familiar bogeyman: video games (www.npr.org)
Why is it so much more amusing to watch someone play a video game than it is to play the game itself?
I'm old now. I've finally realised I get more enjoyment from watching someone play than to actually play the game. Why is that? Do you experience that as well?
Farmer ordered to pay after judge says thumbs-up emoji amounts to contract acceptance (www.theglobeandmail.com)
Meta takes aim at Twitter with Threads app, millions join (www.reuters.com)
OC Is there any way to be notified when others respond to your comments? I feel like it naturally extinguishes conversations to not have any notifications?
I've gone back and noticed that sometimes a handful of people had responded to a previous comment and I never realized it....
Kremlin spokesman: Prigozhin case will be dropped, he will move to Belarus (kyivindependent.com)
The insurrection case against Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin will be closed, and he will move to Belarus, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on June 24.
r/pics calls out spez' history as jailbait moderator, a former sub dedicated to actual CP. the post hit the front page with 15k karma in 4h, then got removed earlier today (old.reddit.com)
😂 amazing act of malicious compliance! fuck spez
What's your Sci-Fi unpopular opinion?
It's a slightly click-baity title, but as we're still generating more content for our magazines, this one included, why not?...
Reddit is a Dying Mall (www.staygrounded.online)
Why it'll only get worse from here.
WSJ News Exclusive | U.S. Navy Detected Titan Sub Implosion Days Ago (www.wsj.com)
Underwater microphones designed to detect enemy submarines first detected Titan tragedy.
Canadians will no longer have access to news content on Facebook and Instagram, Meta says (www.cbc.ca)
"Debris field" found near Titanic in search for missing sub, U.S. Coast Guard says (www.cbsnews.com)
The sub went missing while carrying five people to the wreckage of the Titanic.
After porn-y protest, Reddit ousted mods; replacing them isn’t simple (arstechnica.com)
Reddit's response about the actions they took against the subreddits (note: r/mildly interesting DID NOT encourage nsfw content and their suspensions and removal have been revoked by a diff admin)
Missing Titanic Sub Once Faced Massive Lawsuit Over Depths It Could Safely Travel To (newrepublic.com)
Court documents reveal a former OceanGate employee had several safety complaints over the tourist submersible—and then he was fired.
I've seen a few discussions about the "failed" protests and wanted to talk about it
So I've seen a few posts regarding news outlets calling the protests a failure, and I don't really think that's the case. The protests have clearly made an impact, especially if the Reddit CEO is willing to oust MODS to reopen subreddits. I truly believe that something has been jump started here on Lemmy, Kbin, and all of the...