You young fellas sit back, I'mma tell you about the time in '96 that I bought a 1GB hard drive for a thousand doll-hairs. And then later that year got 64MB of RAM for another thousand doll-hairs, and the next month the price dropped in half. I could run two java programs AT THE SAME TIME!

Is he poor? Maybe. The question is why is he poor? He just sold Mar-a-lago to a company owned by Don Jr., alledgedly for something over $400 million.

He might be poor because he's hiding all his assets on offshore banks. If so, then the question becomes: why is he doing that?

Another way of looking at it: Lemmy is retaining the engagement of the vast majority of new users who have joined recently.

It's not cancel culture if everyone is just tired of your bullshit.

Because it's too hard to crumple a sheet of paper into a cube.

(Apparently) Unpopular Opinion: I think defederating Threads is the wrong move, because it just locks people into Threads. If people on Twitter had the ability to move to Mastodon AND still interact with all the people they did before, I think we would have seen even more people move. The only reason I still check twitter at all is because I have a few close friends who didn't move. Meta is likely going to have big adoption of people who aren't ready to go to Mastodon, but are interested in getting out of the dumpster-on-fire that twitter seems to continue to be. But blocking those people from being able to join the more popular Lemmy instances, given no actual policy violations, just will keep people in Meta that otherwise could leave. With the "however" being: It's not quite clear to me that Threads users will be interacting with Lemmy as much Mastodon, if Threads were a Reddit replacement, it's more directly connected.

I'm a "no, Pepsi isn't ok" guy, but I'm never drinking Coke again. Because from now on it tastes like kissing Trump's ass.

Once at work I said "My Audi sedan has a towing capacity of over 5,000 lbs, isn't that crazy?" A coworker said "That's almost as much as my Tacoma!" (Early 2000s model). Turns out 5,000 is closer to his combined vehicle weight + towing capacity.

I remember my grandfather using the Grand Prix to tow and pull out stumps and stuff instead of the work truck.

Ok. On the treadmill, at the gym.

Don't forget how the patient's family treats nurses.

Apparently: Them playing our local city square, doing a terrible performance, acting like prima donnas, and then after inviting people to come see them at the merch booth after the show, then never showing up.

It's the lead that makes it slightly sweet.

Love Doctrow, but this is a loooong article. I've used AI to summarize it:

1. Big tech companies grew explosively due to network effects, but are now too big to govern effectively.
2. Social media platforms in particular are poorly suited to moderate billions of diverse users and are prone to failure and scandal.
3. Governments and regulators have failed to rein in big tech, often protecting companies rather than users.
4. Low switching costs mean that tech companies' growth could rapidly reverse if people leave the platforms.
5. However, tech companies use acquisitions, lobbying, and legal threats to lock in users and block competitors.
6. Instead of trying to fix inherently flawed large platforms, we should make it easy for people to leave them.
7. If we could export networks of relationships from platforms, people would have the power to migrate based on companies' practices.
8. Allowing people to easily leave would force platforms to respect users and address problems to retain them, or else face implosion.
9. The alternative is an endless cycle of scandal, ineffective reform, and accumulating 'fire debt' that eventually erupts in crisis.
10. It's time to stop trying to perfect huge tech companies and instead give people the means to choose alternatives.

"Companies cannot unilaterally mediate the lives of hundreds of millions — or even billions — of people, speaking thousands of languages, living in hundreds of countries.The real problem is that no one should have that job. That job shouldn’t exist. We don’t need to find a better Mark Zuckerberg. We need to abolish Mark Zuckerberg."

"Rather than passing laws requiring Threads to prioritize news content, or to limit the kinds of ads the platform accepts, we could order it to turn on this Fediverse gateway and operate it such that any Threads user can leave, join any other Fediverse server, and continue to see posts from the people they follow, and who will also continue to see their posts."

"Tech companies are even more concerned with criminalizing the things you want to do to them.

Frank Wilhoit described conservativism as “exactly one proposition”:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

This is likewise the project of corporatism. Tech platforms are urgently committed to ensuring that they can do anything they want on their platforms — and they’re even more dedicated to the proposition that you must not do anything they don’t want on their platforms."

"The Grand Canyon is hundreds of years old." "I'm pretty sure it's millions of years old." ...later... "I looked it up, it is hundreds of millions of years old. So we're both right." - King of the Hill

You can have my fireworks when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers. Which are over there, near the fireworks.

Isn't the DA position and elected one? How do you blow someone to get a position that the populace of San Francisco vote on?

After you listen to a song, the secret police from the RIAA come and lock it up in a small, dank cell given minimal sustenance, until the next time they can send it to some seedy hotel, suburban home, or automobile, to turn a trick and make them some more money, like some sort of whoo-re for the ears.

What if the hives are rent controlled?

Naw dog. Nursing school is way more high stakes. You can get kicked out of the program for very little, it's very high stakes. There are exams that you have to get 100% on or you're out of the program. Iirc, you can get kicked out of the program for not being 15 minutes early too many times. Not for being late, for not being early. At least we compensate them with mediocre pay and shitty hours and horrible bosses upon graduation...

Both fantastic books but I'm not sure they're Expanse-like. Definitely would recommend them. Skip the moon one, Artemis?