That calcium-loving one that eats your bones if you touch it?

If your species showed affection by rubbing against others and you trusted the creature not to step on you, and you were trying to act all sweet to beg for food tho…

I don’t most years, unless a friend really wants to do something with me for it in which case I might go along for their benefit. Not really a holiday person in general though.

I highly doubt a dem president would commute his sentence if he’s found guilty, for one thing, anyone with the resources to mount a successful presidential campaign, dem or otherwise, is almost certainly going to be wealthy enough to personally sympathize more with CEOs than with people that cant get healthcare. Consider how panicked some of the CEOs and their ilk supposedly got right after the shooting, and consider that thats exactly the kind of person that a dem president, or at the very least their friends and associates, would likely be.

Wasnt “messengers sent by one country being attacked by rival they were sent to” a source of a number of historical conflicts? I seem to recall the mongols destroying some empire in revenge over that, at the very least.

In regards to the second part, I’d point out that earth isnt a closed system, and small amounts of new matter are constantly ending up on earth. Think things like meteors (if i remember correctly, a few dozen tons of them fall on earth daily) the very thin traces of gas in space (it’s not a actually a perfect vacuum) and certain types of cosmic radiation that happen to consist of atoms. As such, I’d imagine it’s unlikely we’d ever get every atom on earth having once been part of one.

Its worked out fine for me thus far, but given that one of the selling points for how expensive it is is reparability, and I’ve only had it a few months, I don’t think I can yet give a useful review beyond that it works as a phone, at least for the hardware.

A handful of quirks from the operating system (most annoying being that the option to paste stuff has a visual bug that makes the little popup button for it not appear, though it still works if I just tap where it should be), but nothing I’ve not been able to figure out with at most a quick internet search. Might not work out for everyone though as some apps (only a small handful of the ones ive tried, but still) dont fully work, so how viable the OS is will depend on if one absolutely needs one of the ones that doesn’t or not.

Not had it for long, but a fairphone 6 (the version thats sold in the US that comes with /e/OS instead of regular android).

Im beginning to think that, as annoying for users and difficult to build a userbase for as it may be, the answer might ultimately have to be for future social sites to charge people for use in some way, be it to create accounts or as a subscription or just for the ability to post/comment/vote or whatever. If it’s no longer going to be feasible to keep bots out, and there’s a financial gain for their use, then they’re going to get used, so at that point it has to be somehow more expensive to run a bot than that bot can be expected to bring in as a result of it’s contribution to an advertising or manipulation campaign, to deter them. On the bright side, I guess it might lead to a shift away from advertising everywhere. Either you charge people and therefore dont need ads, or you dont, and have most of your ads being “seen” by bots, which advertisers probably don’t want to spend money to reach anyway.

Ive seen this said a lot here lately, but like, cloud computing still requires computer hardware, so shouldnt an increase in hardware prices make that more expensive as well?

I mean, they did say “most people didnt own a car” rather than “road vehicles don’t exist”. That removes the more serious of those concerns I think, because the existence of delivery vehicles, freight trucks, moving vans, or even vehicle rental services for the occasional road trip doesn’t depend on a majority of people owning a car personally.

To be fair, any currently living but older relatives will have had the ability to access high speed internet for just as long as you, but also time with older forms of media as well.

Maybe Im not saying this right: Im wasnt arguing for the virtues of echo chambers with that, Im saying, with how fedi is designed, there is no means to prevent someone that wants to make an echo chamber from doing so, so suggesting that one should not allow an echo chamber to exist is a fool’s errand. In a more general sense, it seems to me that, either you let people decide what kind of content to see, in which case many if not most will naturally create echo chambers simply because they dont want to see views too different from their own, or you have some means to force people to see stuff they dont want to, which requires some difficult-to-escape authority have power over their media feed and as such is incompatible with decentralized federation (and of course risks that authority pushing everyone into their echo chamber). Both of those things lead to serious issues in my view, so its a bit of a “pick your poison” situation when it comes to social media design. Beyond that though, it does have to be acknowledged that there is simply more content, more messages and people wanting to spread their word, out there than any given person has the time or attention or mental capacity to process. That means that some system must exist that determines what fraction of it all you actually see (even if its just as simple as “the things most recently posted on a given platform when you looked at it”). I can see no way to do this that doesnt introduce biases.

I mean, allowing echo chambers doesnt really seem avoidable on fedi tho? Like, only one side has to defederate to break two way communication, so if someone wants to avoid you, you cant really stop them, and the whole concept of moderation in a decentralized system relies on each instance being able to selectively view or block content from other instances based on the values of that instance. You cant really say “what works is challenging people” if the people you want to challenge have an “ignore” button for when you get too loud for their taste.

Winter ending and it not being so cold out so I can enjoy going into the city again.

Not to mention, even if it proves satisfactory to the existing userbase, any new users will start with no history to draw inferences from, wouldn’t that tend to imply that any existing users unaffected are essentially “grandfathered in”, but with the same privacy concerns for everyone else in the long run?

It does say “as a baseline” so presumably its just there for comparison’s sake

I wouldn’t say print books have no place today, it can’t be assumed that one will have access to electronics in all circumstances after all and many people do prefer physical media, but it’s definitely an indictment of the sort of cheaply made basically disposable books made in larger quantities than needed to fill their current niche, and of the way unwanted (by their owners) but usable goods are dealt with in general.

Sure, but it is rather a waste of paper, ink, manufacturing and transportation capacity etc. It’s not the only instance of this of course, waste of unsold inventory exists in just about any industry that sells physical products, but it’s still frustrating to see it.

Not literally nazis in the “claim the ww2 german nazi party as indicative of their personal identity” sense, but in the way that “Nazi” gets used in modern english as a synonym for “fascist”. And arguably that user has a point; trying to build a state based on a favored identity at the expense of another group who lives on that land, re-framing marginalization and conflict with that group as self defense, is one of the hallmarks of fascism. If it were just “national liberation”, then who would they be seeking liberation from? Israel isnt under foreign occupation or some kind of vassalage, the closest thing to that you could even argue for is that they have some dependence on the US for military support, and beyond that relationship not being at the level of the US controlling Israel, the US isnt who zionists are usually fighting against anyway. If this were still the era of the roman empire or something, that kind of line might make some sense, but under the current state of affairs, it does not.