German Discussion class starts Tuesday.

I've bought a few more German songs (mostly covers to anime songs I've appreciated over the years). I probably should start looking for traditional / mainstream German pop / rock bands however, to get more "normal" music that typical Germans listen to.

Signed up for German at my local community college. It's a non-credit German Discussion course. I'm hoping this will help solidify my skills to something that can be lined up to an actual German class level.

It really seems like Community College is one of the best opportunities for learning language. Check your local community college for summer semester (or fall semester if you wanna plan ahead a bit).

Actual self study has very much slowed down. It's harder to be motivated now that I have no trips planned. I joke with my friends that I need to spend money on a German vacation to motivate myself again lol.

I still do Anki each day but my Grammatik aktiv work has slowed considerably.

I will say that I've upgraded my level of effort on Anki cards. I now consider myself at the level where all verbs must be checked with infinitive, 3rd person present, 3rd person past, and 3rd person past perfect (lassen, lässt, ließ, hat gelassen). That has increased my error rate dramatically and wore me out a bit. But I don't think that I've worked as hard as before yet, even if I'm still studying each day.

My overall focus is to get my speaking up even if I'm going to be stuck at A2 a while longer. I know my speaking is lagging behind and I'm willing to put effort and focus on this problem rather than continuing to my B1 stuff.

I do have enough understanding that I'm beginning to enjoy German VTubers. But it's not a complete understanding of what they say yet... More like I get the overall gist and only with ample hints (exaggerated cartoon faces, meme images and other such context clues). I'm unable to just understand the native level German on its own / isolated.

Lex Luthor literally becomes president in many versions of the Superman cartoons.

The idea of a rich billionaire with a narcissist Messiah complex with a bone to pick with heroes and actual helpful people that becomes popular and eventually the US President is practically a trope. Apparently this generation has forgotten the message.

The problem wasn't the glass.

The problem was using wtf touchscreen controls to shift between drive and reverse. Mrs. Chao confused the two then died.

Shitty UI kills another person. Tesla fucking up basic UI design is the real villain here.

AirBnB is just as corporate and lobbyist bullshit as any other company. Arguably worse, in that AirBNB breaks the laws and then tries to get laws changed.

Hotel chains at least try to lobby to change the laws before breaking the rules.

They became the Government and are using their power to mass fire everyone to get rid of the Deep State.

Why do you think MAGA is so willing and ready to fire huge swaths of the US Government?

Not that I'm familiar with Rust at all, but... perhaps we need to talk about this.

The only thing that could have prevented this is better moderation tools. And while a lot of the instance admins have been asking for this, it doesn’t seem to be on the developers roadmap for the time being. There are just two full-time developers on this project and they seem to have other priorities. No offense to them but it doesn’t inspire much faith for the future of Lemmy.

Lets be productive. What exactly are the moderation features needed, and what would be easiest to implement into the Lemmy source code? Are you talking about a mass-ban of users from specific instances? A ban of new accounts from instances? Like, what moderation tool exactly is needed here?

What bothers me about this is that the administrators at sh.itjust.works, beehaw.org, and lemmy.world are all being adults about this.

While this Reddit-like stampede is already trying to create an us-vs-them environment.

It's fine. The adults are adulting. Maybe a bit of Reddit deprogramming is all that is needed for people to become more reasonable.

Eggs aren't fertilized and thus aren't embryos tho.

We are on the 25th month?

We need to save and remember this moment. The assholes are already rewriting history as we speak.

Lemmy, the social network, started off as a leftist hangout spot.

From the perspective of "Open Source developers who are anti-Reddit pro-Fediverse", it makes a lot of sense for Leftist/Communist and anti-corporation leaning people to hang out.

After all, the more extreme the viewpoint, the more driven to action (ie: write tens-of-thousands of lines of code and release for free) people get. In some regards, its the nature of Open Source + volunteer effort to attract a more extreme ideology. IE: Free Software is driven by ideology, not by money. So you get ideological people, especially when the software is small and niche.

The July 2023 Reddit Blackout was a big challenge for Lemmy's old community and the new community, as the new community basically "invaded" a large scale leftist hangout spot. But hopefully we all learn to work together and the nature of our neighbors moving forward.

I think anyone here (likely everyone?) is at least on the anti-corporate anti-Reddit side of the discussion. Which is enough of an alliance to keep us together, for now.

It does mean that we'll have to keep up with the far-left old-timers on this network who wish to push their viewpoints. But they are the legacy and the start of Lemmy in some respects, even as the hypergrowth (starting in July 2023) has moderated the community pretty severely.

It's the money.

US Fed has raised interest rates, destroying money for the first time in decades in an effort to stop our inflation problem

The knock on effects is that banks literally have less money to lend to companies. Some companies are affected more than others by this environment. Tech was hit hard, extremely hard.

With hundreds of thousands of layoffs, tech industry is contracting. Silicon Valley bank literally evaporated in the span of 3 days. Twitter was losing money and had to sell out. StackOverflow is losing money and is currently selling out.

In this environment, Reddit is about to launch it's long awaited IPO, the time when the public is allowed to directly buy Reddit stock and invest into the company. That's what Initial Public Offering means. If Reddit does well, Reddit will pull in lots of money this year through this IPO.

The CEO of Reddit needs to prove Reddit is profitable, or if not profitable... Will eventually be profitable. Stockholders don't care about Reddit drama for the most part, but most are smart enough to read financial sheets. Reddit needs to show growing revenue, growing profits and cutting costs to attract money.

As such, all of what Reddit's CEO has done makes sense in the context of the IPO. He is betting that shareholders won't notice the drop of high quality content creators from Reddit, since that's not a financial number that's reported. He can IPO, raising millions, maybe even billions for himself. The golden parachute outta here when everything gets screwed up in a year or two and collapses.

I think today's investors are smarter though, and the bearish economy and high interest rates means more investors will pay attention to underlying issues.

I raise you Emperor Ferdinand I Armor, specifically it's Codpiece.

I'm just saying. Sexualized armor is very historical.

Because Threads and BlueSky form effective competition with Twitter.

Also, short form content with just a few sentences per post sucks. It's become obvious. That Twitter was mostly algorithm hype and FOMO.

Mastodon tries to be healthier but I'm not convinced that microblogs in general are that useful, especially to a techie audience who knows RSS and other publishing formats.

Alan Turing, the father of modern computers, has an incredibly depressing ending.

Chemically castrated due to being an illegal homosexual, he died in dishonor over bullshit homophobia and new drugs that the 1950s possessed.

Mark Hamill showing how he's such a Joker.

Nothing is guaranteed before the election.

And since Jan6th is how Trump left the last election, nothing is guaranteed even if the election wins. But an election victory in massive numbers would be our best bet moving forward. It cannot be close, Trump must be soundly defeated for the country to move forward effectively.

True. But it keeps happening.

Be it two thousand years ago or 500 years ago. Sexy armor proves that humans haven't really changed.

Kings and generals don't really find themselves alone on the front lines. The armor is nearly ceremonial, no one is supposed to take a shot at the king. Even if the king were expected to visit the front lines.

As such, kings, princes and other nobles never had practical armor. It's all armor-fashion and status symbols (including sexualization, when said sexualization was in fashion).

Elections matter people.

Biden admin was pushing for a breakup. Trump admin does this