blivet

Not much good at anything, but incredible at self-promotion so people think he is

A friend of mine once made what I thought was an absolutely brilliant observation: “Self-promotion is the only skill that is consistently rewarded.”

I think governmental organizations should do the same. It’s absurd that FEMA or whoever essentially has to rely of Elon’s goodwill.

That’s just privacy protection. I own a few domains, and none of the whois information points to me personally.

One reason might be that they couldn’t even be bothered to say what the moment they enjoyed was.

I agree. The information should be easily available if they are interested, but end users shouldn’t be required to know about the underlying mechanics of the fediverse simply in order to create an account and browse.

to the people who read all the things it’s tedious but doable, for the rest it’s “Which one is the RIGHT choice?” and just stay at the door

Exactly. I’m a programmer and I do server administration on a small scale, but when I went to sign up for Mastodon my first reaction was, “How the hell am I supposed to know what instance I want my account to be on?” and I left. After a couple of weeks of absorbing random bits of information about how federation works I went back and completed the account creation process, but I really doubt that the average user who just wants to sign up for a service and use it is going to get past that step.

I remember Damien Chazelle saying that they had considered an intermission for Babylon but that there was no natural break point in the story. Having seen it, I can state with perfect confidence that it does contain an appropriate point for an intermission at just the right time. I suspect that Chazelle just couldn’t bear the thought of the audience not watching his opus straight through.

I haven’t had live TV in years and it’s quite shocking to see what the average user deals with. Junk TV + ads that play 30% of the time is absolutely insane.

Yeah, I’ve had the same experience. We don’t have live TV, and when we occasionally hang out with friends or family who do I’m always flabbergasted at the frequency and length of ad breaks nowadays, and similarly amazed that despite a nearly endless list of channels there never seems to be anything I actively want to watch.

Not really. There is some discussion of “emotionally sticky nodes”, but they aren’t really defined, just described. Which is fine, and it’s actually an interesting article, but when you start throwing around terms like “nodes” it makes it sound like you want your readers to think you’re talking about something that is empirically valid, not just giving your opinion.

I suspect what the article is describing is actually happening, but I’m curious how the writer a couple of quotes deep goes about identifying “emotionally sticky nodes”. They are using verbiage that makes it sound like they are describing something objective, but I have my doubts.

I started routinely deleting my comments anyhow after someone creeped me out by searching through my history for ammunition to use in an argument. I just deleted the five or six recent ones I hadn’t done yet, and that was that. I’ve kept my account because it might come in handy at some point, but I’ve only been on Reddit once in the past few weeks.

I’ve noticed that some Wikipedia references now link to a Wayback Machine archive instead of directly to the original page. That’s probably the smart way to do it.

In my case none of the dead links I had bookmarked were all that important. I had actually decided to try to check them in the first place because I couldn’t remember what a lot of them were.

Yeah, I used to work at a university, so I’ve been around since the earliest days of the web. It’s kind of ironic that from the very start one of the big misgivings from academics about the web as a research tool was the ephemeral nature of its content. One of the examples given back in the 1990s was that a lot of websites that people had begun to rely on were really just some grad student’s pet project, and when they moved on someone else might or might not pick up where they left off.

The scale of things has certainly changed since then, but nothing seems to have become more permanent. Just the other day I went through my list of bookmarks on a topic, and easily half of them now lead nowhere, even URLs for major news outlets and blogging platforms that are still extant.

Thanks, that’s really interesting. The cancellation process used to be much more straightforward. I wonder when they changed it.

I’m curious how difficult it is to cancel a Prime membership nowadays. I’ve canceled twice in the past, and as I recall it was just a matter of clicking an easy to find link. Has the process changed?

Yeah, 10 or 15 years ago I read an article about how Google brings up new storage modules when they need to expand, and their modules are essentially shipping containers full of hard drives.

Fine by me. I never saw any value in it, even well before Musk took over. The character limit is guaranteed to eliminate any nuance, and the interface makes it incredibly difficult to follow what discussion there is.

Yeah, I’m old enough to have grown up buying vinyl records. I want to buy a physical copy of the music I like.

The idea of depending on a streaming service to keep something available has always mades me uncomfortable, and given the recent removal of content from some of the studios’ services, it looks like my gut feeling was correct.

When the API shut off early, Apollo dev u/iamthatis (@fhristianselig@mastodon.social) revoked his token so I cannot see any of this

Yeah, Reddit singled his app out to be cut off first. So petty.

Yeah, there seems to be an inflection point in the lifecycle of businesses nowadays where the leadership no longer has any interest in what the company actually does. The products it makes or services it provides are considered almost irrelevant.