Hmmm maybe we should ignore #1 and focus on #5 then

If Mastodon wins out in the long run the only reason will be persistence.

All these other “like Twitter but ______” micro blogging or whatever sites only stay viable while they’re profitable.

If Bluesky or Threads become (net) unprofitable, they’ll die. Mastodon is already unprofitable, so that can’t kill it.

I think we could compete with #1 just by word of mouth.

For #2 some person or group needs to develop a Mastodon app (FOSS obviously) that has a “just do this part for me” option, probably automatically enabled.

#3 is on us. We have to do what we can to make Mastodon (and Lemmy) more open and accepting without falling pretty to the paradox of tolerance.

#4 is hard… Although I think if Mastodon follows or tries to replicate the “early” Facebook user experience where most or all of the content people got was from people they follow, that could be better. The only challenge is that algorithms tickle our anger/hate/disgust impulses to drive and maintain engagement. That’s some very strong “lizard brain” stuff.

So… let’s get going y’all! :)

Слава Україні!

Xemu: Not Too Much Lead

https://youtu.be/MKTN2OiR2R8

I read a pretty convincing article title and subheading implying that the best use for so called “AI” would be to replace all corporate CEOs with it.

I didn’t read the article but given how I’ve seen most CEOs behave it would probably be trivial to automate their behavior. Pursue short term profit boosts with no eye to the long term, cut workers and/or pay and/or benefits at every opportunity, attempt to deny unionization to the employees, tell the board and shareholders that everything is great, tell the employees that everything sucks, …

Every time I install Windows the first thing I download is total commander. I can’t function without it.

It looks like midnight commander with some upgrades

I dunno I think there’s probably been one or two “honest” inflations where a vendor has seen her costs increase and has only raised her prices just enough to cover those increases.

But yeah, I bet the majority of inflation has been rooted in avarice by shareholders and owners.

It’s fascinating that this isn’t something that is always thrown back in the so called “pro life” person’s face. They’re only pro birth. They don’t care if the baby that comes out is fed, clothed, housed, eventually educated, etc. Or at least, they don’t believe there’s any collective responsibility to take care of that baby.

It’s the hand these lawyers have been dealt to try to make this argument fly. They are duty bound to provide the best representation they can for their client, and if somehow this completely bonkers argument wins the day, I think that’s pretty much it for American democracy.

Or Biden has all this on standby just in case…

If I thought the people who run for profit hospitals and insurance companies had human souls, I’d say they should be made to do this work so they could maybe see that it shouldn’t be about profit.

But then I remembered they’re all non-human garbage who should be first up against the wall in the revolution.

Doctors should be left out of this. It’s not their fault America (and probably some third world countries) allow profit driven medicine.

If only there were some way to get individuals you want to capture or kill without also killing everyone around them. Oh well, maybe one day someone will invent a way to do that.

Seriously, y’all. How is “there’s a bad guy in that hospital” somehow an acceptable justification for blowing up the hospital?!

Dear Israel: use your world renowned special forces and world renowned secret police to go get the assholes and disappear them to a prison cell or whatever without killing a bunch of innocent civilians!! For fuck’s sake…

What’s frustrating to me as a person who’s generally against violence is that Israel has a pretty elite secret police force and pretty elite special forces that they (apparently) haven’t used at all to deal with the actual perpetrators of the October 7th massacre & kidnapping.

They just started bombing thousands of civilians to kill dozens, maybe hundreds of Hamas militants.

Like, surely they could have cut the head off the Hamas Snake with surgical strike teams infiltrating Gaza, probably the West Bank, and international locations in Qatar or wherever the leadership is.

Reasonable people could conclude that Israel had to respond to Oct 7th, and that the best target would be Hamas. I can’t fathom how any reasonable people could conclude that bombing groups of people with 90% or more innocent civilians and the rest possible militants is a good response.

I can imagine that UNreasonable people might conclude that all Palestinians are guilty by association (because Hamas is their Netanyahu-supported elected government) and they’re all militants (even the babies). Or those unreasonable people might believe that Palestinians aren’t people worthy of protection.

So goddamned frustrating.

The First Peoples of North America definitely didn’t have such sharp, well defined border lines. It’s not as of they had a bunch of written treaties establishing hard borders.

Hahahah oh man my thought of what funny stuff those sorts might lead to mostly centered around kids at school getting in trouble, but this is way, way better. :)

On the darker side of things I was also concerned about people in abusive situations with hidden phones getting outed, which probably also happened. :(

(I am not a bright guy so I can’t take credit for coming up with that on my own, I saw someone post about it on Mastodon.)

Honestly I could see this being a strategy a country might try (in fact I’m sure that the US and USSR probably tried stuff like this during the Cold War). Break up partners by sowing distrust. China doesn’t have to win, they just have to make sure we lose.

Are you comparing a person speaking and maybe even organizing with an actual (presumably armed) revolt?

Because that’s ALSO what Russia does (and China). And what most authoritarians do, too.

Unless I missed the part where the Canadian citizen India assassinated in Canada was somehow engaged in active violent resistance in India.

There’s international agreements to deal with actual criminal activity, and if there was actual criminal activity that India could prove they should have come after the guy they diplomacy not extrajudicial, sovereignty violating murder.

You’re exspecially not supposed to fart in front of girls!

They’re probably right in a very general sense, at least in the short and medium terms. Fossil fuels have a lot of qualities that make them hard to out compete for some tasks. But we can get the usage of them back to levels that aren’t destructive to our habitats. And in the long term it’s absolutely possible to eliminate their use.

Unfortunately it’s an easy sentiment to promulgate. It taps into feelings of fairness and justice. Those are some very foundational emotional drivers for humans

However, I think there’s a chance to turn that sort of reasoning around. Like if we appeal to the idea of right and wrong. If using fossil fuels is like stealing or assault or worse, then the fact that someone else is doing it doesn’t suddenly make it ok. It makes the person doing it a bad person.

The problem with fossil fuel use currently is that so many people are using them and whole countries and ways of life have been built around using them. Getting rid of fossil fuels has the potential to be as disruptive as getting rid of slavery.