Unless you want content and more people to interact with.

Like, people keep saying “oh yeah you can jump instances” as if that wasn’t possible on Reddit. You could go to different subs or make your own. But what good were most of them? As long as there’s a “default”, a main “hub”, people will go there, and that’s where everything will be happening. The alternatives and smaller instances will be starved out.

Centralization is not about the software, it’s about the people. Users centralize where others are. So when the big hubs are allowing threads to poison the well, it’s poisoning the thing most people want to drink from, and the thing new visitors will be most likely to drink from.

Threads represents something that a lot of people came to the fetiverse to escape. If threads wants to join, fine, but I believe it is in the best interest of all of us if there is a large alternative “cluster” that is separate from it rather than being tied up with it.

A separate galaxy in the fediverse, that says in big red neon lights, “Get your corporate bullshit away from us. This is our space, for people, not for you to make money.” And if we let them in immediately, it becomes increasingly difficult for that galaxy to retain that identity.

And I’ll just gently point out that once Threads joins, separating from it will not be easy because you will have Threads users here actively pushing back on the separation.

How is that different from Reddit? If trolls want to search and scrape and find information on people, they’re going to. You can’t put your information on the open Internet and not appreciate there’s always a danger of that.

See, the fact you think the IQ tests matters in any way means your uniformed about it, which comes back to the topic at hand.

IQ tests are bullshit; it’s been proven many times.

Yet you were told they weren’t. And that informed how you think.

I could call you stupid for bringing up an IQ test.

Or I could accept that people not having all the knowledge in the world is just part of being human, and that there are many things you know that I probably don’t.

George Carlin did an incredible job making a certain type of person believe being a nihilistic asshole was the height of wisdom.

You, of course, are firmly in that 10%, I assume.

Nothing does quite so good a job revealing how highly they think of themselves as sharing that Carlin quote. It’s the clarian call of the faux intellectual.

Reasoning is based on knowledge. There have to be things you accept as truths first before you can start reasoning, and those truths are not universally shared, nor do they have the same weight for everyone. That includes you and me.

There are things we don’t “know”, and things we don’t know that we don’t know, but we nevertheless think of ourselves as informed and capable of reasoning. To someone who knows more than us, they’d consider us stupid. It’s not about objectivity, it’s about looking down on those that don’t know things you know and declaring them less-than.

The basic point is there are countless factors big and small that influence any individual’s thoughts and ideas at any given moment. Our minds are very complex things, and our lives are messy, absorbing all kinds of information and stimuli that affect it in ways we don’t properly understand or even realize.

When we talk about people being stupid or smart, we’re just reducing that complexity so we can make simplistic insults that make us feel better about ourselves, but ultimately aren’t saying anything meaningful about the human condition.

And there’s a lot of dark history behind this, too. The history of psychology is riffe with falsehoods about quantifying intelligence, and often it was simply about prejudice.

You want to call people stupid for doing stupid things, sure, I get that. I do that. We all do. But the more you try to create these general arguments about human stupidity, the more it unravels, and the more it reveals about you.

My guess is that it’s trying to reduce spam and fake account generation.

Thus preventing the growth of any small providers and further entrenching Microsoft, Google, Apple, and a handful of others as the only “viable” options.

deleted by creator

Yeah it’s almost like the whole thing was fucking stupid from the get-go.

“Prove you’re not a machine by training this machine to pass this exact test.”

And we know what the response will be, here. More and more of the internet gated by incredibly invasive verification methods.

If you’re not willing to let the OS/web browser fist fuck your computer’s most intimate areas, down to the hardware, and work it like a puppet just to make sure you’re not a bot, then you’ll just be hard blocked from every site.

Never mind how that will incidentally allow them to report that you’re using a VPN or an ad blocker to websites, or some other unapproved software, and even take action against all that while harvesting data…no, truly the biggest concern is the bots.

Firefox for Android, with uBlock:

Select either of these. The left one is the Zapper and will let you tap on an element on the screen to remove it temporarily until you reload the page. The right one is the Picker and will let you create a filter that will remove that element any time you visit that page.

I’d recommend only using the Zapper at first until you get the hang of how to target elements. If you mess up, just refresh and try again. The Picker makes permanent rules, and if you accidentally filter something you need, you’d have to go into the filter list and erase it.

It can be a little tricky and it takes some getting used to. Websites sometimes don’t make it easy to target single elements, you have to also target the element’s wrapper, and avoid filtering needed elements. The addon interface for uBlock is also a little finicky on mobile.

But once you get the hang of this tool, it is indespensible. You can clear any web page of any element.

The true winners are of course all the marketing departments out there that are just ecstatic about the fact this stupid award shit is normalized now.

How fun to know you can brute force an award show into being “legitimate” by spending a lot of money and being cozy with studios.

Yes you could but he didn’t and clearly his style was self evidently effective.

Depends on how you define “effective”. Because by his own admission, it gets shit done, but also alienates people in the project and turns off others from joining it.

So yeah, you’ll get the update pushed, and it’ll work, but down the line you find yourself struggling to keep up without the help of people that don’t want to work with you.

Linus’ mistake is a classic one: really self-sufficient tech person doing fantastic work with a team but not appreciating that there’s a whole social layer to it that is every bit as important as the standards and procedures at keeping everything working.

And the death of Firefox along with that. Oh boy what a great future.

That’s on your IT department.

Well, it’s also on Microsoft for selling their “modern” security theater bullshit to every IT department in the country while not designing it in a sensible fashion or working with third parties to provide meaningful alternatives to the Microsoft branded shit every employee will soon be required to install on their personal devices…

But that’s also on your IT department for not warning you or allowing you to keep the SMS/phone verification as a backup for these exact situations. Those aren’t depreciated yet, but some companies have let Microsoft’s recommend security practices (co-written by their sales team) scare them into downright idiocy.

As someone in IT, here’s what you do: Next time that sort of thing happens, just reach out to them immediately and have them reset everything. They may get annoyed, but you know what? They shouldn’t be. It’s more secure to have an employee call in every single time they need to change a password or re-authenticate a device. It’s inconvenient, unnecessary, and downright annoying, wasting everyone’s valuable time, but hey…it’s more "secure’. If it’s more secure, you aren’t allowed to be against it.

You just unlocked some memories. My dad used to play this all the time when we got our first PC. I was too young and wasn’t interested in it then, but damn if you haven’t piqued my interest in digging it up.

Netflix at least didn’t plan to be what it became from the start, they even experimented with releasing some of its originals on Blu-ray for a bit. But when every shitty heavy hitter in the entertainment industry comes after you, you’re gonna learn to be shitty real fast.

Microsoft is a whole different brand of monster. They have a long, long history of terrible anti-competitve practices, fucking over their own consumers, flagrantly ignoring complaints, and making deeply underhanded moves. In many different markets, for decades. The Xbox One release was almost literally a thesis statement. They could not possibly have broadcast any clearer who the fuck they are and what the goal is.

And still, still, people defend them. They downplay everything and fall head over heels for their marketing bullshit.

That’s why we’re truly fucked without regulations. It’s not just because corporations are terrible and will do incredibly underhanded shit at the drop of a hat to raise profits, it’s also because the vast majority of the consumer base is fucking stupid. Incapable of pattern recognition and imagination, and unwilling to change their patterns even slightly. It’s really, really, really easy to see the negative effects of a Microsoft dominated gaming market. And the consumers can’t see it.

It’s worth remembering that for all of the numerous issues Western nations and especially the US have with freedom of speech and expression, for every convert to some racist ideology, there is also a new supporter of LGBT+. The rise in hate we see is paralleled by a rise in acceptance of the marginalized. Freeze peaches is a double edged sword and always has been.

The paradox of tolerance is certainly an issue, but the very fact we’ve evolved as a culture to the point we’re having a discussion about it says something about the benefits of that freedom. Our culture isn’t stagnant. We have the capacity for growth and change, and while the government usually maintains the social status quo, we in turn can affect what the status quo is.

Which is why they said it’s not being discussed much over there.

They don’t want to defend it, but they can’t bring themselves to be critical of Russia either, so they just don’t speak up.

Rolling Stone first out of the gate with the true elbow-drop of a headline this news deserves, and a beefy polemic to back it up.

This article, along with every other news site’s, has been sitting there primed and ready to release for years and years, needing nothing but a minor edit to add the relevant details of his passing and the date. Someone at Rolling Stone is delighted today to have finally hit “Publish” .

And too right they should. It’s a great day.