Cyrus Draegur

seize it via eminent domain.

You’re right, absolutely spot on, about several things but ONE IN PARTICULAR is this:

A human being helping a customer is, quite literally, an act of circumvention. Customer service EXISTS, SPECIFICALLY, for scenarios that require exceptions and skilled, knowledgeable internal maneuvering within, between, and around the cold mechanisms of machinery and policy. We tend to think of, say, purchasing items at a store as standard operation, for instance. But really, from the perspective of the business, its objective is to RESTRICT access to goods and services. The cashier manages exceptions to this goal. If the company has its way, it would take your money while relinquishing NOTHING.

I wonder if it’s quite like anti-red

Stare at the center of a bright red circle for like 30 seconds,

Then look away at a white surface.

It looks like what those people in the article describe, especially in the “holy shit I’ve never seen that before” feeling.

professional catfishing has always been a thing.

using AI to do it was inevitable, but i do wonder if it’ll backfire.

chatbots are so pathetically unreliable.

Buy european: Eutelsat.

Lol suck shit reddit. Rot in piss you won’t be missed!

It might be at least a little missed for all the useful info and history that it had accumulated over these decades… But oh well.

They shat this bed they get to lay in it

Windows 11 seemed to kick and scream relentlessly to make coexisting impossible. So I called its bluff and nuked its stupid ass. It refuses to play nice? OK; It never gets to play again. Fuck windows. I have a separate machine for windows if I really need it.

every passing day i feel increasingly gratified to have switched my previously win11 laptop to linux mint. aside from the sheer principle of microsoft being ass, i also fucking despise all of windows’ AI bullshit. Fuck copilot for eternity.

When I told my best friend about mastodon, it misimprinted on her brain in a flash as “walrus chat” and now she can’t for the life of her remember its actual name.

yes, that’s what boosting is on mastodon. see how ineffectual their ‘boosting’ nomenclature is? that’s why they should be renamed.

also rebrand it from Mastodon to Trunky.

1. Trochaic meter is more addictive: 2 syllables with accent on the first. just like YOU-tube, FACE-book, GOO-gle, TWIT-ter, TIK-tok, SNAP-chat, RED-dit, WHATS-app, etc; there are a FEW exceptions like Insta, Messenger, Telegram… but they are the clear minority and were propelled in spite of their names. it’s part of why TEEN-age MU-tant NIN-ja TUR-tles and MIGH-ty MOR-phin POW-er RAN-gers was popular.
2. Trunky is full of bright bouncy sounds that pop, the T and the K both hit nice, the R is exciting and powerful, the y ends it on a high timbre, it’s cute.
3. A mastodon is an extinct lumbering beast from the ice age which is the antithesis of anything trying to break out as a hot new service. But this would allow the service to keep its pachyderm branding.
4. While at it, change “favorite” to “trumpet” (as in trumpeting praise), again it’s trochaic (TRUM-pet) and carries less cognitive LOAD than “favoriting” which feels heavy and committed. Just because you LIKE something doesn’t mean it’s your FAVORITE thing you know? this would decrease the friction of interaction (which is GOOD).
5. Also while at it, keep tooting as the analogue for tweeting, rename boosting to re-tooting for brand consistency, and add a bookmarking function called “Remembering” (because ELEPHANTS NEVER FORGET, right? :D)

A mall is a private real estate instrument built by speculators to extract rent from businesses and it’s actually rather predatory. This is fundamentally not real estate and fundamentally does not exist to extract rent, so it’s more like “what if you took a mall and removed all the mall-ness from it”.

If malls were collectively owned by the stores that comprise them and pieces of the mall could appear and disappear at will of whoever’s participating… Is it actually even still a mall really???

the only thing I’m hoping for is that this can serve as a proof of concept that human brains might be able to learn to control limbs made of synthetic muscles like that…

Maybe they’re attempting to make it ‘learn’ how to move itself using neural networking instead of programming discrete movement presets.

Hmmm. Actually maybe it can be leveraged.

There should perhaps be a default instance that it funnels everyone into but makes a “power user” option available from a drop down where they can CHOOSE an instance. Make it an opt-in thing instead of a mandatory hurdle.

If they don’t like the way the default instance is managed (content moderation, defederation) they can think “oh wait, there’s a solution for this! Well, now that I know what I’m getting into it’s not intimidating anymore”

Mastodon needs this too.

…

Mastodon needs this ESPECIALLY.

Yup.

“they can’t do that, that’s illegal!”

Shame the law doesn’t mean Jack Fucking Shit now.

The law is whatever they want it to be at any moment.

The coordinated enshittification is rather disheartening.

I’m still daily driving a Samsung Galaxy Note 9 because all the phones thereafter felt like a downgrade, and the problems like the one referenced in this article have only convinced me further…

I miss 2014, when the note 4 was the flagship. Note 4 kicked ass.

You’ve heard of the Dead Internet Theory, now get ready for the UNDEAD Internet Theory!

Actually, on that point, I love it when a game becomes a platform for continuous content. Minecraft is a bit trite as an example but it fits: You buy it once, and you can beat it in a couple hours if you really want to, but you can extract as much enjoyment out of it as your imagination will allow, and the developers are constantly adding more stuff to do (although not all of what’s added feels great all the time…)

That’s the fun part: you don’t! :D

That is to say, they tried. And now there are basically no fucking games on whatever they’re calling the latest X-turd, and barely anything worth note on the PS5.