And yet?
Mastodon is full of actual conversations between people. Someone says something. Someone else replies and an actual conversation happens where people respond to each other.
Lemmy? It almost always devolves into people trying to one up each other and aggressively talk at each other. It is like we speed ran reddit and went from “How dare you have a different opinion” to “I am going to cherry pick a sentence and build a whole fucking straw city from that”.
Yeah, Rawlings is awesome. I forget if Matt Easton ever did anything for GS or if he only does Insider (and scholagladiatoria) or what.
For me it is mostly that everyone else has fun and does the “Okay, this wouldn’t work but it is really cool. It might be inspired by XYZ”. Whereas the armor guy just gets incredibly smug and complains that the armor on that Ork isn’t historically accurate.
And yeah. Had a bad feeling when they skipped the week after the Fandom layouts were announced. And last week (the ArmA 3 DLC one) has a note from Dave saying that is the final episode because he was fired.
For what its worth, Jonathan and the rest of the Royal Armouries do weekly-ish shows. Less video game oriented but the same gun nerd logic and the discussion of historical context.
Honestly?
I vastly prefer almost everyone I have interacted with on mastodon over basically every lemmy user. Because lemmy still thinks it is reddit but also is totally over their ex but do you think he is thinking of me and can I send him a picture of your dick to show it is bigger?
Whereas mastodon? People kind of just want to talk. We largely understand that twitter has been a shithole for… most of its existence. So rather than try to reinvent it (bsky and threads) we are learning from it in the same way cohost learned from tumblr (and died even faster…).
And the lunatics who need to scream about what federation is and why it is The Future? They aren’t talking about basically anything else. They are keeping to themselves and talking about how amazing the community can be… while the rest of us are actually being a community.
Because the mastodon evangelists are horrible.
Back when there was any question of what platform to migrate to? Threads and bluesky were “Get an invite and make an account”
Mastodon was people insisting that EVERYONE needed to understand what federation is and the underlying philosophy. When really they should have just said “Sign up for one of these instances. It is like email where it doesn’t really matter what provider you have”. Countless times I tried to explain to folk on a message board or discord and would say “Just make an account on one of these four or five instances”. And, like clockwork, someone would “well ackshually” me and insist that people can’t use Mastodon without understanding the fundamental concept of federation and how picking the right instance is important and people can just delete and remake their accounts until they are satisfied.
So when it was time for the big influencers to move? They went to where people were already congregating and where they didn’t need to host an educational seminar to tell someone how to make an account.
Just to expand on the phone thing because it amuses me:
In a past life myself and a few others had access to cell tower records for a specific company. As a research project, we applied what we would now call AI/ML concepts to sanitized data (basically all customer IDs were mapped to a different ID set and then the mapping was thrown away).
For poops and giggles I checked the tower nearest the local happy ending massage place. And, lo and behold, we were able to immediately get a list of everyone who turned their phone off for 30-60 minutes.
and Fandom owns and is Giant Bomb.
So yes. Giant Bomb laid off two staff and replaced them with contractors.
The various editors at the blog sites generally don’t want to do mass layoffs either. But the end result is the same. People lose their jobs so someone can get paid much less and have no benefits do that job instead.
The fundamental issue is still giving people a false sense of security. It is why it is INCREDIBLY important to be very very specific about what you do and don’t get from various actions. Otherwise you have the same problem as all those people in countries where being LGBTQ was criminalized who realized elon musk owned their DMs.
Also: Putting your phone in a farraday bag half a mile from a protest doesn’t take much effort to detect.
Who reads written text over their favorite YouTube personality, or the SEO garbage that pops up first on their search, or first party articles/recs on steam, and so on?
Few layers to that.
SEO still heavily favors sites like IGN and Eurogamer. Most people aren’t looking at the by-line to see who actually wrote the article.
The other much more insidious aspect? A lot of the legacy influencer outlets ARE still using contractors.
Remap (formerly Waypoint) is awesome and are generally well regarded for having great rates for both written and on-air content. They are also a very “lean” org consiting of three people but pay Janet Garcia to show up for a podcast every week and even a stream or two a month. Janet is ALSO a “cohort” on MinnMax where it is less clear who are contractors and who are core staff.
And, to clarify, I don’t have a (significant) problem with that. It is how you get a broader range of voices out there. But it is still similar to having most of your writing team be contractors (… also, Remap contracts out a decent number of articles).’
But then you look at other outlets. Gamespot spent years HEAVILY dependent on “reaction” content. If you ever watched Jonathan Ferguson talk about guns in video games, that was Dave Jewitt’s work. And… they fired Dave two-ish weeks ago. Haven’t heard if Jonathan plans to still do reaction content for them but you can bet they can find other contractors (like the douche bag who rants about armor).
And… on the other side of the Fandom family you have Giant Bomb. Who have outright fired two core staff members (Voidburger and Jason Oestreicher) as well as a regular collaborator from Fandom proper (Bayley) all so they could repurpose that funding for contractors. And… at this point there are good arguments that Mike Miniotti is in more content than most of the core staff.
So the influencer based outlets are rapidly doing the same. Some of it is just the necessity of working in a dying industry where funding is mostly dependent on whether fans “vibe” with you. But it is only a matter of time until we have the same content farms. Hell, I want to say that is exactly what Fandom DID until they bought cnet gaming.
From a quick skimming, it looks like their genius guides boil down to
If you actually care about your vulnerability, look what ACTUAL journalists on the run from a government or megacorporation do (dedicated hardware that can’t even power up within a few city blocks of your other devices, for one). And understand that most of those boil down to “They know it is me and they are hunting me but I can live off the grid long enough to get this story out and then maybe they won’t kill me afterward”.
You should not be touching your mirrors or seat while driving. That is what you do before you leave the parking space (… or at a red light).
Good call on the windows and gear (although… there are arguments that you don’t need to in an automatic) though. Forgot we live in a world where teslas are street legal.
I think, in general, the shift to having MOST functions be on the touchscreen is a good one.
When driving? You should generally only be futzing with (off the top of my head):
And the rest make perfect sense to keep behind menus you deal with when you are parked. And with modern cars, climate control stops being about balancing the knobs and becomes about setting the preferred temperature and MAYBE tapping the defrost/circultaion button. Which actually also makes sense to not need direct button access.
But yeah. Still 100% need physical buttons and knobs for the rest.
I think it is Subaru who have the big display screen and then a small row of dedicated buttons below it?
Sega and RGG just standing there daring Nintendo to try shit.
Keepassxc is great if you don’t need to synchronize passwords across too many locations and do not require anything where state matters (mostly related to stuff like yubikeys). It DOES have the vulnerability in that a bad actor has infinite time to crack it should they get a hold of the file whereas bitwarden still lives on a server.
But they are very different products with very different capabilities. Whether someone needs bitwarden over keepass is going to be a question of use cases.
So… I’ve had this enabled throughout the beta and it is definitely recording clips based on the thumbnail previews and the like. But when I open the timeline editor to make clips I just have a spinning wheel and it never starts playing the video.
Anyone have an idea of what package I need to install? Haven’t done a proper debug yet (was hoping Valve would magically fix this for me) but Fedora with KDE and Wayland.
Yeah. This isn’t the first time the news app and the core nextcloud updates have fought each other in weird and mysterious ways (for me or others). I forget how I solved it last time (I think it was a similar case of needing to manually update to bleeding edge and then tweak things) but… I just don’t care anymore.
I don’t know who is right or wrong in how nextcloud is maintained (my instinct is the nextcloud devs because… have you seen nextcloud? but also, most apps don’t have this recurring problem). But at this point, the benefits I get out of it are largely gone. And when so many issues boil down to “We need more people and resources to maintain this”, it kind of feels like getting off the train BEFORE it crashes rather than after.
I’m on the alpha and it still won’t update any of my feeds. And going through the github issues it is basically summed up as “We will do another stable release once we have a frontend developer” which is basically never. So, at best, it will work until it doesn’t and then I have to fix it myself yet again and… yeah.
And if my choice is to run an older version of nextcloud to support one app? Hell no.
BoI is still one of the best feeling roguelites ever.
But it also very much suffers from the design philosophies of the 2010s. Because you are going to do one of:
Because there are way too many upgrades that end up being downgrades that can just kill a run completely unless you plan for them. And there is no good way to understand that in game.
Even ignoring the workers’ solidarity aspect of it:
It is actually a really good practice to break those login/usage streaks with ALL services. I read a lot of ebooks and I generally will have a “streak” of even two or three years with amazon kindle since I try to read for at least 20 minutes every night. Over the past year or so I’ve started to migrate out of the amazon ecosystem to better support authors and… I definitely find myself hesitating when picking my next book because I COULD read this non-kindle book or… I could read this other book I have via kindle (the prices ARE good) and make number go up. And Amazon realized that we don’t always have an internet connection so they’ll log that to prevent the old streak breaking that came from not bothering to connect to the hotel wifi.
And the same happens with games. I dip my toe into ESO once or twice a year and it always amuses me how much of that is geared up to make you log-in every single day for a month.
To be fair, that is true of all miniatures and model kits. It is generally less noticeable if you are dealing with injection molded sprues as a good pair of nippers can get you most of the way. But it is still good to have some sandpaper to touch things up.
Hell, I use an old pair of nippers to remove supports and overhangs from a lot of my “normal” prints.
… and now I am really curious what a 3d printed runner would be. Might do a proof of concept/experiment in onshape.
Make sure to actually understand how those “non-profit” websites and services are functioning.
It costs money to power servers and to maintain them. Most of the fediverse instances like to claim they are run on donations and so forth. But… think about how angry people get at the idea of tipping for ANYTHING and then wonder how many of those are throwing significant cash at your favorite lemmy or mastodon instance per month.
Everyone is always shocked when they find out how social media or a “free” vpn or whatever is funded and where there information is going. But hey, I am sure it will be completely different this time.