I think you got hit hard by Poe's Law here. Except it's more like people couldn't tell if you were jokingly or genuinely getting your math wrong... Even after you explained you were joking lol

I would encourage people to code switch rather than adhere to one style of language over another in every case. Imho, it's kind of problematic that language itself has become racialized in America to the point where people can actually be criticized or made fun of for speaking in the "wrong" style associated with their perceived ethnic background.

By that logic, there's nothing guaranteeing iMessage on iPhones is secure or private either because it's closed source. If you don't want to trust Beeper mini, you'll be free to run their iMessage bridge on your own Matrix stack when they open source it at some point, which they're promising to do (and you still won't know that Apple isn't scraping your messages on the iOS side). When I decide to trust a company, it's because I look at what they're transparently communicating to their end users. Every indication is that they are trying to get out of the middle of handling encrypted messages. Their first move to make this happen was allowing people to self host their own Beeper bridges (which you can still do with Beeper Cloud if you prefer and you will know that your messages are always encrypted within the Beeper infrastructure). They aren't going to release the source for their client ever because that's the only way they make any money.

To be clear, you're not going to find many displays that can reach 4,000 nits yet. A lot of HDR content actually is mastered for 1,000 nits and that's considered kind of the target for the mid-high range OLEDs right now. My pretty much top of the line QD-OLED Samsung S95C maxes out at something like 1350 nits. A 1000 nit capable Steam Deck OLED has plenty of range in luminance for HDR to be effective there. And I'm sure it's got pretty good color reproduction which is the other big aspect of HDR.

One thing we haven't talked about is the possibility that the Steam Deck is enhancing SDR content with dynamic tone mapping to such a degree that it's difficult to tell the difference when you actually enable true HDR. I'd really have to see this with my own eyes to be able to say with more certainty what's going on.

Yeah, the difference should be easily visible assuming one has quality source material and a nice display. I was kind of assuming OP was talking about using the Steam Deck in docked mode, but maybe that was a bad assumption.

The federal government should charge Texas for the costs to remove the unauthorized barriers. The fact that the rest of us are paying for their idiocy is appalling.

Thank you for laying it all out there. It sounds like you're doing it the right way 🙂

Thank you for providing some context for this. It kind of sounds like a fork might not have been necessary if Ernest was willing to make @melroy a maintainer. Do you know if there's any philosophical reason he wasn't willing to do that? Real life stuff comes and goes, but it seems silly to halt the "official" project that others are relying on and still wanting to improve upon and thereby force a fork. As it stands right now, it sounds like it will be awkward for Ernest to come back in and try to restart work on kbin and will be increasingly awkward the more that mbin progresses, becomes the standard, and the code bases diverge.

It's kind of interesting to watch in open source which projects survive and which get forked and essentially made irrelevant. It basically becomes a referendum on the vision of the original individual or team and how well they're serving the collective user base. If they aren't accepting PR's and competently managing development, they'll likely be forked. So I'm glad to see that folks are making progress with mbin and I can't help thinking that its entire existence is probably due to individuals not being able to agree on a roadmap for the platform. If anybody has any info on any drama that led to this, I'd be curious to read about it.

I don't use hotspot on my phone on a daily basis, I use it if I'm out in the field somewhere and my work laptop needs Wi-Fi and then the hotspot feature turns itself off automatically when my laptop is no longer connected to my phone for a period of time.

I'll occasionally use hotspot for my Wi-Fi only personal tablet as well while I'm traveling. But that's about the extent of my use for it.

I agree, any loss of votes in a swing state could theoretically be significant.

Does your phone not turn off hotspot automatically when nothing is connected for a period of time?

Well it's not really numerically the same as voting for the candidate you hate the most, it's numerically the same as not voting. And to be honest, it really only matters if you're in a potential swing state. And I'm saying this as someone who still votes despite having lived in a deep red state where my presidential vote always doesn't matter (but I go anyway because down ballot votes do matter and I might as well vote the whole ballot).

What you're describing is only possible on de-anonymized platforms that essentially have "know your customer" type policies where users have to provide some kind of proof of their identity. While I agree that there is value in social spaces where everyone generally knows the people they're interacting with are who they say they are, I don't think this is ever going to be feasible in a federated social platform. I think Facebook is the closest thing we have to what you're describing, to be honest, and I believe Meta has even kicked around having a more sandboxed Instagram for minors (though I don't use Instagram, so I'm not certain on the details there).

For me, in most cases on a platform like Lemmy, a person's age is not something I care about. I care about what people are sharing and saying. But then again, none of my interests for online discussion at this point in my life are really age centric. I think there are clearly better platforms than Lemmy if people want to guarantee they're only interacting within their age specific peer groups.

I don't want to make it sound like the Lemmy situation is rosier than it is, but considering how sharply users dropped off, say, Threads... I think Lemmy is doing alright. There are a number of factors that might contribute to user counts dropping, but mostly it's unavoidable when you have a sharp uptick of anything. I think accounts and activity are going to flatten and then start trending back upward. If Reddit keeps fucking around, that'll definitely bring more people in and this cycle will repeat. I'm actually fairly pleased with how many people have been sticking around on Lemmy.

The event staff fucked up thinking they were ejecting some no-name punk. This young man has a platform and the ability to do damage to campaigns that are afraid to answer tough questions and who instead toss out the people asking them. He's built up a following online and has made a bit of a name for himself in New England.

A study paid for by casinos shows casinos are a benefit to society instead of a drain? *Shocked Pikachu face*

It's easy to look at all the positives when you just ignore the negatives, after all.

It all starts with defining what morality means. The way I would define morality is behaviors that maximize flourishing for sentient creatures and minimize suffering. While it is clearly difficult to quantify flourishing and suffering, there are behaviors that clearly cause suffering in this world and impede the opportunity for flourishing and, by the above definition of morality, are plainly immoral. The way I see it, rejecting the possibility that flourishing and suffering can be quantified at all is the only argument that can be made against moral absolutism. Everything else is just quibbling over relevant variables across the spectrum of available behaviors to determine what makes them more or less moral. There is always a behavior that is objectively the more moral choice, but it might be difficult in practice to determine which is the more moral choice due to a lack of available relevant data. The absence of said data shouldn't be assumed to be because it doesn't/can't exist, but rather that it hasn't been collected. Rejecting the idea that there is always a more moral behavior amongst several choices is the dangerous assumption, imo.

I've never heard a rational defense of moral relativism that made any sense. If there are no moral truths, then serial killers have done nothing wrong for example. If a moral relativist admits that there are some moral truths, then moral relativism is completely indefensible. At that point, you're just arguing over what is and what is not a moral truth.

Yeah, I'm holding on to the lifetime grandfathered premium and don't foresee myself using anything else until they end it.

I stopped paying for YouTube the moment Google killed Google Play Music and forced YouTube Music on me. Now Google gets no money from me and Apple does because they still offer a true music library service.

Yes, Koch has apparently funded a good amount of Ken Burns' work. I have no reason to suspect that Ken Burns has let Koch influence the content of his work, however.

A lawsuit when 23 states were already doing it? GOP's voter rolls are going to grow too.

This isn't even a new phenomenon, accusations of antisemitism were also often thrown at anti-Zionists when there were plenty of good political reasons not to establish and prop up the state of Israel. (What's also funny about that is there were/are actually antisemites who were/are in favor of getting rid of Jews from their country by exporting them to Israel.)

He probably doesn't deserve a devil's advocate, but that said, I'm pretty sure Louis didn't masturbate in public, but rather during phone calls and in private in front of unconsenting or at least not explicitly consenting company, from the accounts I've read. I'm not defending it because it's abusive and wrong, but it's also not quite the same thing as masturbating in public.

Yeah, except Bernie's supporters voted for Hillary at higher rates than Hillary folks voted for Obama, so maybe Hillary, her dumb fucking insecure email server, her lack of personality, and the DNC who helped her cheat her way through primary debates are the real ones to blame, not the progressives. She was a terrible candidate who the right hated and independents didn't like much better and she proved she was a terrible candidate by losing to the worst Republican candidate in the last hundred years. She had all the help she should've needed from progressives.

I have no idea how anyone could have more than a passing familiarity with that woman and still vote for her. She's truly a trashy human being.

Ah, I'll be honest, I don't actually read these emails closely often, but you're right. Looking now through my inbox archive, I see that Amazon added an "I don't know the answer" link in their email sometime between April and May of 2019. It looks like initially they had the text somewhat smaller for the "I don't know the answer" link, but they seem to have increased the text size to match the "Answer/Respond to this question" link sometime between February and March 2020. At any rate, those emails were going out for many years before 2019 without an "I don't know..." link and I think they could still probably make it clearer to people what they're actually doing by posting "I don't know" as an answer.

Yeah, I would really like to see them either stop doing that or make it very clear in their email that you should only respond if you know the answer to the question.

I used to open some configuration files in WordPad because Notepad only supported Windows style line endings, but then I discovered Notepad++

I would highly recommend the recent Freakonomics Radio series about whaling. It's Episodes 549-551 and the bonus episode from 2023-08-06. If you're firmly against killing any living creature (or at least sentient creatures), I highly doubt it will change your mind (and I don't think that it should or that it tries to), but I also think it is really fascinating learning about the history of the whaling industry and hearing the perspective of a modern whaler in the bonus episode. Putting aside the obvious ethical issues with killing sentient creatures, it's interesting to consider things like whether there's a sustainable level of whaling, what a sustainable quota would look like, and how much we're in competition with certain whale species for harvesting fish as food for our own species. I personally appreciated how unbiased Freakonomics tried to be in their discussion of the topic.

Tell me you're Gen Z or Alpha without telling me you're Gen Z or Alpha.

If the Boston marathon bombing had happened within a year prior to this I might understand, but come on...

Ah, dang, yeah if you don't have admin rights on your server I'm not sure there's anything you can do manually 🫤

Are these bridge puppet users from 3rd party chat services? If so, I don't know if it would mess anything up, but you might be able to edit those users in Synapse admin (assuming you have that set up). You might even be able to change avatars that way. I'd try it with a contact you don't care about accidentally breaking first.

You mean ole Stitter didn't help sweep this under the rug? Maybe you just have to be family for that kind of help.

If it came out today, it might hit that sweet spot of being too edgy for liberal parents and too "woke" for conservatives

18 is old enough to give them a rifle.

Actually 17 with parental consent.

The best work schedule I ever had was a Navy watch schedule that was 4x12', 3 days off, 3x 12', 4 days off before a switch to night schedule. Aside from switching from days to nights every 2 weeks, I absolutely loved it.