The point Dylan makes, that I think there is truth to, is that these people don't see the difference between the two. If they struggle to put food on the table it's not because of rich elites hogging the resources for themselves, or for our economic system failing to provide for everyone; it's because the immigrants are taking their jobs, women are taking over their positions in society and depriving them of the opportunities their fathers had, etc.

Then again, I struggle to fit hatred of LGBTQ+ into this framework. So for sure there's also more other mechanisms at play.

Dylan's Only a Pawn in Their Game is a song about identity politics that holds up pretty well I find.

Funny. As a European political scientist, when I think of identity politics the first thing that comes to mind is nativism, right wing populists, and all those people crying out in public about outgroups who are not like themselves.

We always had trans people. They didn't politicize themselves - there's not many enough of them that they could have even if they wanted to. They became politicized by a group of people who chose to identify themselves in opposition to them. The same goes for immigrants, gays, whatever. We vote less according to economy, and more according to identity.

The only way the Republican party is allowed to exist in it's current form is through identity politics. Women not wanting to go thorough with unwanted pregnancies is *not* identity politics. It's more a matter of fucking survival. A bunch of conservative couch fucking male shitheads who want to limit women's ability to decide over their own bodies on the basis of their own hypocritical set of beliefs, however, very much is about identity politics.

And then trans people wanting to simply be allowed to live their lives in peace has also become a matter of identity politics, as their very existence has become politicized. But that's a development driven by right wing nut jobs, not by the left who (at its best, at least) wants to focus on economic issues while guaranteeing human rights as a mattet of common sense and decency.

Pretending that the political left are the ones pushing squishy identity politics while the right are focusing on hard economics and traditional politics is just plain wrong, and portraying it this way is yet another failure of the American media.

/rant

Honestly, the gift part always made the people of Troy look a bit naïve. It would perhaps have made more sense if they paid good money for the latest and greatest gigantic wooden horse made by the finest Greek artisans.

I can't say I ever really understood what Newsmast is up to, but Channel.org looks pretty nifty. It seems like a good way for organisations consisting of several independent people to get together and present all their federated content in one public channel.

The score was amazing!

I'd rank it up there with the first one - less quirky, but more of a wild ride. My partner preferred the sequel, though she loves both.

I really struggle to understand how anyone could like the original and not like the sequel, unless they only like the old one out of a sense of nostalgia but they've actually grown to have their taste change since.

This is something I really loved actually. I never knew where the plot was going to go because there were so many different dynamics going on. At the end everything was tied together, but having so many things in motion made it unpredictable and fun to watch. To me, at least.

I'm sure I've seen better comedies, but I really can't remember when.

I guess it might be relatively low for the sequel to a cult classic made by a famous director and with a star spangled cast. A lot of directors probably wouldn't limit themselves when they know they don't have to.

Exactly. Nothing about the original screams blockbuster, and nothing about the new one (except maybe some of the casting) does either. It's just a really fun and, in my opinion, overall great movie. There's nothing $50 million could have done to improve upon it. And it is absolutely worth seeing in a cinema.

Fellow Dvorak user here. Can't recommend it enough.

In one of my classes at the beginning of my doctoral studies we talked about parth dependency, and QWERTY was used as an example. All studies showed that even experienced typists would increase their typing speed within just a few days of switching, and that it's just a superior set-up. But because of path dependency we all write QWERTY.

I changed my layout the same day and I haven't looked back. If you want to start messing around with your keyboard and you use it for typing, switching to Dvorak should be the obvious first step. Colemak is a compromise solution that is still a lot better than QWERTY and probably quicker to learn.

No need to get a new keyboard. Dvorak is designed around touch typing, you won't be looking at the keyboard anyway.

Except maybe RFK jr, of course.

The hatred is partly fuelled by people in the open source community getting really riled up when they find out some open source projects are developed by organizations that need to earn money and pay their employees, be it Red Hat, Canonical, GNOME, Mozilla, or anything else. Female leadership will tend to push people over the edge.

In addition to the usual rage-fuelled misogyny of open source forums, there is however also valid concern out there. It can be difficult to hear through the noise.

Mozilla's job listings provide some insight to what many consider to be a red flag for the way forward. To work on FireFox, they are looking for:

• Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
• Senior Director of Product, Firefox Growth
• Principal Product Manager, Generative AI
• Senior Software Engineer - Layout (CSS and ICU4X Support)
• Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
• Staff Full-stack Engineer - Generative AI
• Senior Front End Engineer, Gen AI
• Senior Front-End Engineer, Firefox
• Front-End Engineer, Firefox
• Staff Software Engineer - Credential Management
• Staff Software Engineer - Release Engineering
• Senior Front-End Software Engineer, New Tab

For fairness I include every position, highlighting in bold the ones I think are likely to do more harm than good. This is not the direction I want FireFox to take, and I believe Mozilla are misguided to try to place themselves as the ethical AI actor. That said I'm not 100% against it all of the time - I do think the local in-browser machine translation feature of newer releases is great. But I don't think I want much more than that, and even this feature should probably have been an optional plug-in.

There's also some former empolyees voicing valid concerns.

In short, I think the legitimate criticism boils down to:

1. Buying into the AI hype
2. Flirting with "more ethical" ads and tracking, rather than being unquestionably on the user's side of just blocking it all
3. Doing too many things nobody asked for, arguably while not paying enough attention to FireFox
4. Appearing distant from the community and unresponsive to its preferences
5. Paying company leadership too much

I don't really buy into point 3 personally. I use FireFox every day and it's by far the best browser I have ever had. It never gives me any problems at all, and password sync with Android is really useful. I wish it would support JPG XL, but that's pretty much it in terms of complaints on my end.

New in this release:

• Separate audio and video streams, so that only one audio track is stored on the server even if there are multiple resolutions for a video, and viewers can choose only to stream audio. You can also do audio-only live streams. Cool.
• Browse subtitles, search them, click on them, read them to a friend
• Better video fetching from Youtube channels, in case you post there first
• Smaller tweaks to improve user experience

Cool stuff.

PS: My favourite way to keep up to date on PeerTube content is to go to Piefed, press the search button, choose "PeerTube" under Instance Software and sort by "Recent first". It shows content from all PieFed channels subscribed to by PieFed users, so it's a limited scope, but I still think it's a nice little feed.

Holy shit. Maybe she's the one who has been eating all those pets.

The only redeeming feature about this is that it only looks about as awful as any other social media.

Which is not very redeeming at all, of course.

The comments on the post also aren't from Mozilla.social. It's not like they would have been happy to see Mozilla as a successful actor on the Fediverse either.

The trolls in the comment section at least hints at the fact that creating a more positive and constructive online space proved more difficult than they imagined.

I was curious, and joined the queue for the closed beta a long time ago. Never heard back. They explored something new in closed channels, decided not to go for it, backed out. I don't really think they need to justify the decision.

Running a social media is a huge effort, and there's a lot of trolls out there actively targeting Mozilla. I imagine it's just more trouble than it's worth.

The Commission is basically two completely different things. Actually it's probably more than two things, but the way we often talk about it, it plays two key roles.

One is that of a bureaucratic body that runs the union, delegates funds, oversees the implementation of EU legislation, submits observations to cases before the CJEU, posts content to @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu, and that kind of jazz. This is where there's a huge number of employees, and it's where a lot of EU funds are spent. We probably wouldn't be talking here if it wasn't for the Next Generation Internet programme, which is a part of Horizon Europe, which is seen as a scientific research initiative. So the Fediverse has a pretty direct relationship to things going on in the bureaucracy that I assume is positioned under the Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth.

This is, however, largely bureaucratic. Doesn't mean it's not important, but it's not where the juicy political decisions are made.

The other role is that of a executive body. In the separation of powers in the EU,

In its executive role, budget and staff might matter less. What matters is the political deals you can strike. Resources might help you craft better proposals that the Council and Parliament then needs to accept before it can be signed off to law, but the relationship to resources here is not that obvious.

Then again, another bureaucratic role of the Commission is when power has been delegated to it to decide on a specific area, for example how to regulate a specific type of products. This is bureaucratic as hell, but it also gives direct decision-making power to the Commission to just decide pretty much as they please within a limited competence. So bureaucrats could absolutely mean power as well, albeit maybe not a very sexy type of power.

It's not an obvious exercise. How "important" is migration and home affairs compared to the internal market? The internal market is certainly at the core of the competences of the EU, but maybe it's in the less established areas that more interesting developments are happening. Furthermore, they might suddenly become extremely relevant. Nobody predicted how important DG SANTE would become in 2020, for example.

One indicator of importance might be staff size. I struggle to find a good and up to date figure right now, so I'll make do with a pretty bad and outdated one from 2020, showing the size of the staff under each Commissioner at that point in time. Johannes Hahn runs the largest operation as the DG of budget and administration. Budget is unquestionably important. Administration as well, but it might produce more staff than power.

The Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth comes in second place. The Commissioner for International Partnerships comes third.

So these positions run the largest operations. Linking that to power is probably somewhat misguided - it would indicate that all three of these relatively anonymous positions were more important than von der Leyen. Entering a position with a lot of staff might even decrease your power, as you are forced into a role that might have more to do with management and less to do with politics; furthermore, if the field is already well-developed in the EU, it might not be where central developments are happening going forwards.

A better indicator could be to go through the Directorate-Generals under the control of the different Commissioners. The Commissioner of the Internal Market, for example, is also responsible for for the Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space. That might be important these days.

In the traditional competences of the EU, the DG for for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries would be considered very important. These days, and especially on this platform, people might be more interested in the DG for Communications Networks, Content and Technology.

Wherever Union competences are weak and/or anonymous, there's greater room to innovate and to surprise us by striking some crazy deal. In politicized issues that we intuitively care about, the Commissioner's power will also be relatively weaker as they are kept under strict control. So there's an inherent tension: The fact that a Commissioner is widely considered as being important might actually make them less relevant by making it harder for them to pursue an agenda. They might end up just striking smallest common denominator compromises with all involved actors, and have little to say themselves for the outcomes as such.

So that's a messy non-answer, and I guess nobody is any wiser. But it's difficult, in my opinion, to give a very clearly defined answer which positions are important and which are not.

Oooff, that's harsh. My girlfriend is currently in the process of finishing up her PhD, and my job recently exploded in my face, so I can relate a little to parts of what you're going through. At least good to hear you're dealing with the cold efficiently, even if it's hell while it's going on!

The owls in my feed never fail to lighten up my day!

I hope you're doing better, and I'm happy to hear that the community is bringing something positive to you as well! There's at least no doubt there's a lot of us who appreciate the effort. :)

Just read it for the first time now.

Wow.

Thanks for the recommendation!

The organisation that happily cooperated with fascism in Italy you mean?

The child raping one?

Yeah, it's not what he's saying. But the formulation - sending a child away from the womb of it's mother" - is fundamentally fucked up because it completely removes the mother from the equation. It doesn't even bother to explicitly deprive her of the control over her body - it simply doesn't recognise her existence at all.

I think, more than anything, that's why this line of talking is fucked up. It kind of assumes totalitarianism where no matter what, it's at least not the choice of the individual women/owners of the wombs.

What moderate Catholics will use as a defence is, I guess, the use of the word "child". No reasonable person would consider a lump of 30 cells a "child". But we all know the pope thinks it's a child as soon as the sperm hits the egg, so fuck that as well.

I'm this formulation it sounds like he's talking about government mandated abortion - it's like it's happening against the will of the owner of the womb.

Clearly that's not what he's talking about, but in a narrow charitable interpretation, he would be correct that the government has no fucking business controlling whatever is going on inside women's wombs.

The official story is that Meta is worried about being sued by people suddenly seeing their content pushed to some random website without their consent if it's enabled by default, so they won't risk enabling it by default. At least not before the fediverse is huge enough that everything you post going everywhere on the internet is the expected behaviour.

Fair enough really. I wouldn't want to be sued for that either, and they obviously cannot expect Congress to understand.. anything.

Love the sound of it! Are you making these on commission or just as a hobby?

I can imagine making bows is an incredibly delicate matter - I don't have time to fall into the rabbit hole of the history of bowed instruments right now, but I can feel myself slipping!

That's beautiful!

Will you make a bow as well? Would it be possible to get a presentation of what it sounds like?

They define decentralisation as an even distribution of users? Or did I get that wrong skimming the paper?

This seems arbitrary. Mastodon is a decentralised network, no matter how big Mastodon.social is. Lemmy is equally decentralised, even though there's a dominant actor.

The other hubs in the network don't revolve around mastodon.social/lemmy.world. they connect to each other bilaterally - if the central hubs disappeared over night it wouldn't affect them all that much.

I think the notion that decentralised networks can't have hubs of varying sizes is plain wrong, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what decentralized means.

Very cool - thanks for the info!

I'll probably try to get the body from a flea market, or from my dad's collection of old junk if he'll let me touch it. But getting some professional help getting the neck right wouldn't be a bad thing at all.

That's obviously hyperbolic, but it does unleash some fun mechanisms. I think it's fair to assume many Swifties are apolitical - the demography of young voters it's traditionally hard to get to vote. Not more so than previous generations, it's just that they have other things they care about in their lives, unlike the old farts who always vote and always vote red.

This endorsement will inevitably cause some GOP furniture fucker or another to attack Swift in public. And that's when this becomes properly important - you do not want to start a war against Swifties in the current political environment.

But I wouldn't write Trump off before his dead, buried, and millions are doing pilgrimage to piss on his grave. Until then, we've learned better than to overestimate the American electorate.

Very cool!

Do you be have any idea how tolling scraping these data is for the servers?

If this is something you want to keep working on, maybe it could be combined with a sort of Threadiverse fund raiser: we collectively gather funds to cover the cost of scraping (plus some for supporting the threadiverse, ideally), and once we reach the target you release the map based on the newest data and money is distributed proportionally to the different instances.

Maybe it's a stupid idea, or maybe it would add too much pressure into the equation. But I think it could be fun! :)

I have a feeling not many Swifties would vote for Trump anyway, but Swift telling them to register and to go out and vote is probably going to make a dent.

Thanks for sharing! It's such an interesting process, love to watch the progress!

I've been wanting to make a cigar box for years - anything more is probably off limits for me.

Yeah, for sure. Doing something great doesn't shield you from also making some really shitty decisions or holding some god-awful positions.

I just think it's good to keep a nuance of language. Too many open source developers burn out, and a hostile community is listed as one of the reasons too often. There will always be disagreements, and there are valid ways of voicing it, but one should never forget that there is humans on the other side and remain kind. :)

The devs are working hard providing a public service that they make available for everyone. And the product they've developed is pretty impressive, in spite of its shortcomings.

They hold some opinions I disagree with pretty strongly, and I'm not a fan of every decision they make. But they're creating a truly common good, and for that they deserve praise. From a technical perspective, they have created something completely new that serves thousands of users and constitutes a system of huge complexity. They very much do not suck.

Anyone who thinks any person maintaining an open source project "sucks" should feel free to fork the project, fix whatever they're not happy with, and maintain the repository and handle commits and all the shit that goes down in managing a large open source project. After dedicating all this time to people, some random ingrate will inevitably disagree with some minor decision they've made and decide that they "suck".

Yeah. If they pushed it to the bottom of the list, or even removed them from the list but kept the user count, I could kind of understand it. But censoring them completely for being too successful seems like shooting yourself in the foot.

Lemmy.world is doing great and I'm happy for it and all that, but... 20 000 monthly active users does not exactly make them a tech giant that needs to be kept in check just yet. Ideally, instances of 20 000 active users should be quite normal at some point, and having stress tested the software before then should, one assumes, be a good thing.

I'm amazed at how fast this place has grown since the first time I saw a Lemmy instance (way before Reddit API drama), or since the first time I snooked around Mastodon (before Twitter exodus) for that matter. So I guess I'm inherently optimistic by the fact that where newer users might see little activity as a bad sign, I see a little activity as a huge improvement on what the status quo was not so long ago.

On a technical side, open source projects also tend not to benefit from growing too fast. It seems to me Fediverse platforms currently have a healthy activity level for the stage of completion they are in. Lemmy certainly grew faster than it could handle for a while, and arguably Mastodon suffered from the same.

The main reason I'm hopeful about the social web is, however, that it makes no sense any more to create a new platform that does not support it. No matter what kind of social networking site you're making, proprietary or open, you're going to want to make it ActivityPub enabled, simply because it gives you a user base right off the bat.

And furthermore, it encourages the development of new platforms, precisely because you don't need to establish yourself with a whole bunch of users. According to fedidb my platform of choice, PieFed, has 124 active users right now. It would not have been a very interesting corner of the old web.

I don't think the established user base here is going anywere, and I think future developments will feed into the ecosystem. So I'm pretty hopeful. But it is going to take time before all sorts of niche communities have made themselves a federated home.

Bluesky and Threads will fight it out over microblogging, while Mastodon will stick around as a smaller less corporate alternative. A year from now people on both platforms can probably follow my Mastodon handle anyway, so I don't really care all that much.

Also, consider making an effort to positively interact with organisations that have done/are attempting to do the migration, assuming you care about them being here.

Chances are they will count the number of interactions they receive in order to assess whether or not it's worth staying around. Pressing the like/upvote/favourite button costs very little, and gives a strong signal that they should stick around. Commenting something positive and relevant or boosting their content is also great, but it takes a bit more commitment.