blivet

Yes, the whole thing is especially frustrating because the app was quite nice. Harriette did a really good job really quickly.

Not much good at anything, but incredible at self-promotion so people think he is

A friend of mine once made what I thought was an absolutely brilliant observation: “Self-promotion is the only skill that is consistently rewarded.”

I think governmental organizations should do the same. It’s absurd that FEMA or whoever essentially has to rely of Elon’s goodwill.

Conservative is a misnomer, really. They don’t want to conserve anything. They are trying as hard as they can to wreck it all.

Palm Pilots seemed so futuristic back then.

One reason might be that they couldn’t even be bothered to say what the moment they enjoyed was.

Yes, the name of the company, the logo, and the idea of “tweets” are all a charming evocation of a world filled with brief messages. Twitter has problems, but branding isn’t one of them.

I think we are in the midst of a worldwide epidemic of mental illness, and even the wealthiest and most powerful are not immune.

Yeah, I think it was Scorsese who said that he did “one for them, and one for me”.

I think it’s strange that it’s categorized as a comedy, though. It has some really funny moments, but on the whole I would call it a very intense drama.

I’m grateful to this strip because reading it caused me to learn the correct spelling of “abstruse”. I’ve never heard anyone say the word, and for some reason I had always read it as “abtruse”, without the first S.

I agree. The information should be easily available if they are interested, but end users shouldn’t be required to know about the underlying mechanics of the fediverse simply in order to create an account and browse.

to the people who read all the things it’s tedious but doable, for the rest it’s “Which one is the RIGHT choice?” and just stay at the door

Exactly. I’m a programmer and I do server administration on a small scale, but when I went to sign up for Mastodon my first reaction was, “How the hell am I supposed to know what instance I want my account to be on?” and I left. After a couple of weeks of absorbing random bits of information about how federation works I went back and completed the account creation process, but I really doubt that the average user who just wants to sign up for a service and use it is going to get past that step.

I remember Damien Chazelle saying that they had considered an intermission for Babylon but that there was no natural break point in the story. Having seen it, I can state with perfect confidence that it does contain an appropriate point for an intermission at just the right time. I suspect that Chazelle just couldn’t bear the thought of the audience not watching his opus straight through.

Yeah, 10 or 15 years ago I read an article about how Google brings up new storage modules when they need to expand, and their modules are essentially shipping containers full of hard drives.

You’re right, of course, but the person you’re replying to is also correct in that the firing of Victoria years ago was an early indication that Reddit seems to have decided as a matter of principle that it will not under any circumstances pay anyone to manage content.

I agree with you that high karma doesn’t indicate anything besides popularity, but someone with negative karma is almost certainly either a troll or a political extremist of some sort. I do find it useful to know when I would be better off not engaging with people like that.

Individual users having some sort of reputation is useful. I always thought it was handy on Reddit to be able to distinguish people I happened to disagree with from actual trolls. The latter always had pretty high negative karma scores, and it was good to know that there was no point in engaging with them.

Since Musk is doing such a good job of ruining Twitter, Zuckerberg might be exploring the idea of a Twitter-like Meta product.

I wish the micropayments model people were proposing twenty years ago had taken off. I don’t have any interest in subscribing to The New York Times, for example, because I just don’t read it very much, but I wouldn’t object to paying a few cents every time I happened to read one of their articles.