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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Oof, I’m sorry, but perhaps it was a matter of expectations. I feel that the problem that I had with the show was that it started off on the premise of some Fallout-style retro futurism, with what I guess one could call “dangerous techno optimism” of the 50’s and 60’s.

    However, beyond the first episode where the woman gets killed by the automated postal car, this never really gets explored much further than some occasional background elements. The story could just as well have been set in the actual 50’s and it wouldn’t have changed much.

    Now normally, I don’t generally have issues with character driven stories where the setting comes secondary (e.g. Ted Lasso is a character driven comedy set on the backdrop of football), but in this case it was the setting that actually interested me to begin with.

    It’s a shame, because all the individual pieces, from acting, to scenery and atmosphere were great, it’s just that the show never clicked with me in the end, because it wasn’t what I thought it would be.


  • They are probably reusing a component that happens to sort its entries alphabetically, since that is most commonly the expected behaviour. If the form is configured in a CMS, whoever built it might not even know it’s happening and has entered the data properly, but it gets resorted in the presentation layer. It’s also not impossible that the behaviour of the component has changed at some point and this particular case didn’t have test coverage or wasn’t actually part of the specification.




  • Filing a patent means little to nothing for a company like Apple regarding future consumer products. All it likely means is that a patent engineer managed to throw something together outside existing prior art that they could file. Maybe they will do something with it, maybe they won’t. If they do, they will have a patent portfolio that will hopefully give them some legal protection from patent trolls and competitors that will attempt to block them.



  • So they have a bunch of users that have been freely paying them money for virtual coins that you can literally only use to display a few pixels of a gif next to a comment.

    Their absolute genius move towards profitability is then to forcibly stop making these people give them free money and also erase those virtual coins that they spent money on with absolutely no compensation whatsoever. Not even a shitty award or literally anything at all.

    It’s funny, I’m not sure if I should actually be impressed that they are not engaging in any marketing dark pattern whatsoever; they are just straight up alienating the people who were until now been practically giving them money for doing nothing.


  • I guess it depends on how this “Data Protection Review Court” actually functions in practice. What is written on paper doesn’t seem to really matter much to US agencies so we’ll see how strong these safeguards actually are.

    Nevertheless, it’s good to see that the new agreement is finally in place at least. We’ve had this legal vacuum for years now and it was completely unsustainable in the long run. Sans a complete legal overhaul of the nonexistent privacy laws in the US (hah good luck with that), this is probably the best we could hope for now.




  • I think many people here are immensely overestimating the value of the Fediverse user base. The entire active Fediverse, let alone individual instances, is barely a rounding error for Meta.

    There is no if or when Threads become the biggest instance, Threads apparently got 10 million users in 7 hours. The whole of Mastodon has ~9 million users in total. By now, Threads alone is likely bigger than the entire Fediverse combined, which mind you is something like >99% bots and inactive users.

    Even if every single instance defederates from Meta, their fork of ActivityPub would by far be the most significant one by not a small margin.



  • Not necessarily destabilised, but Sweden has deliberately opted not to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism which purpose is to stabilise currency exchange rates.

    Sweden is by law bound to adopt the Euro, but by choosing not to join the ERM II, Sweden by extension can’t join the Euro because they technically don’t fulfil the requirements.

    This is of course a simple loophole that could be closed by the EU, but there hasn’t really been much political will to do anything about it.



  • So imagine that you have a lemon tree that grows the finest lemons in the neighbourhood. You know that with those lemons you could make the meanest lemonade and make a ton of money selling that. The problem is that in order to do that, you need to buy a juice press, a bunch of sugar and maybe throw together a dashing lemonade stand that will draw attention to your business.

    The issue is that you don’t have any money to buy those things and even if you know you will get rich down the line, the whole project is a dud if you can’t even build your lemonade stand.

    Enter Mr. Money Bag. I have a whole €1,000 just sitting there in my wallet not doing anything. I would really like that many to become bigger so I look for a way to do that. I have however seen your lemon tree and the awesome lemons it produces. With those lemons I absolutely believe that you can make the greatest lemonade the world have ever seen and I believe the only thing you need to do that is more money.

    So I agree to give you those €1,000 in order to build your lemonade stand and in return I will take some of the money that you make from selling the lemonade. It will however take a few weeks for you to do that and until that is done the materials will probably cost more than what you’re making from the lemonade.

    That’s OK for me, though. I wasn’t doing anything with that money anyway and as long as I trust that you can still make a bunch of money when it’s finished, I’m fine with it. In fact, I decide to give you another €100 to put up a sign in order for more people to find your business quicker.

    So everything is tugging along and now you’re actually making more money than you spend, so you give me an amazing €1.200; €100 more than I spent! You also get some money, which is awesome because now you can buy yourself that rocking NiN T-shirt you’ve always wanted. Now this is great, except I still don’t actually need that money, not right now at least. So I tell you to keep that money in the company and build an additional even better lemonade stand which will make us twice the amount of money in a few weeks.

    Currently, your company haven’t made a single cent, but that’s fine because your business is sound and everything is tugging along exactly as planned.

    Eventually, I decide that I actually want to buy a new high end TV so I actually need some money that I can spend right now. I know that in about ten weeks this company will have made at least €20,000 that it can either invest in further expansion or give back to the owners. So I go to my buddies Greg and Lisa who definitely have that amount of money and tell them that they can buy this company for €20,000. Greg also owns a carpentry which he can use for building even more lemonade stands and Lisa is really good at making signs so with them the company might even make €40,000 in the same time.

    So Greg and Lisa together buy my part of the company for €20,000. I get to watch Eurovision on my new 70 inch TV, and Greg and Lisa will together make €40,000 in a few weeks so everyone is happy.

    Then after a few months, someone realises that your lemon tree can really only grow a basket of lemons a year and you can’t actually grow enough to make the money you hoped for. Everybody panics, the company’s value plummets and eventually closes down.

    Greg and Lisa are mad because they didn’t make the money they hoped for (they did however get back €5,000 from selling the lemonade stands to a neighbor who was about to start an apple juice business). You’re also disappointed, but at least you still have your NiN t-shirt. Your gardener goes to jail for some reason, though.


  • Honestly, I would probably be using both, in that case. The Threadiverse feels a lot like the early days of Reddit and I would love to be part of it and see it grow up. Assuming this keeps expanding, it’s too late for me to go back to exclusively using Reddit at this point. Giga brain Mr. Huffman made sure of that.

    However, there are numerous great communities at Reddit that haven’t found a place here yet. Especially many of the smaller subs that were already very niche as it is, and that one probably won’t not find anywhere else anytime soon.

    I’m already regularly using multiple different sites as it is. Both larger international ones, as well as smaller local blogs and forums. I don’t personally see an issue by itself to keep both Reddit and Kbin on that list.

    Hopefully, we will see entirely new communities pop up and grow in the Threadiverse. That is, communities that aren’t just different flavours of “Reddit sucks”. Not saying it’s not entertaining, but I think we need to broaden the scope a bit going forward. :)





  • I’m absolutely baffled over how much of a clusterfuck Reddit and particularly Huffman personally has turned this into.

    Why in the ever loving PR suicide by not shutting the fuck up, did Reddit think that starting a war against their own moderators would be a good idea? I’m wondering if I have ever seen a company handle a situation this badly before. This is utterly insane.

    Huffman has somehow managed to take a mild inconvenience that would blow over in a few days and turned that into a major crisis and then turned that crisis into an existential threat to the future of the company.