arquebus_x

This is how we ended up with Q and anti-vaxxers.

“I lost a brother once. I was lucky. I got him back.”

“I thought you said men like us don’t have families.”

“I was wrong.”

Wow, right up front, they’re being disingenuous:

“The effect of this would be to force an independent browser like Firefox to build and maintain two separate browser implementations — a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear.”

…No? Apple won’t bear that burden because they’re going to keep using WebKit. Firefox can keep using WebKit. Not using WebKit is a choice, with pros and cons.

I’ve been an Apple fanboy for years, too, and I still am. The alternatives aren’t exactly better. And anyone who is surprised that Apple is dragging its heels and trying to do the bare minimum to comply, well, get back to me when you’re no longer twelve. Companies aren’t your friends, even when they look like they are. Hell, Google’s sudden about-face regarding Right to Repair is 100% intended to fuck over Apple. It’s not about the consumer, it’s about the money. Always, with every company, every time.

Developers want alternate app stores because they want to make/keep more money. There’s no other reason. Every other reason given just comes back to more money. Is that a more valid argument simply because they’re smaller?

I’m in favor of Apple opening up iOS to alternate stores. I think it’s going to be a privacy and security nightmare, but the horse is pretty much already out of the barn and the barn is burning, so… whatever. But I’m not so naive to think Apple’s going to fully embrace the ideal concept of alternate stores unless somehow it’s a way to beat Google’s or Samsung’s face in, and take their money.

It wasn’t awful, it was just hapless. It probably would have gotten its sea legs in a second season.

Sad story: the actress who played the little girl died a day after her honeymoon and 8 days before her 22nd birthday, from a heart attack. (She’d had a heart transplant when she was 15.)

The big problem with “Lost” is that many in the writer’s room (and the showrunners themselves) were raging racist assholes who decided to steer the show toward all the white characters, which meant changing a lot of their early plans.

I just want a Babylon 5 reboot! Goddamnit!

Ever try a hot cola?

I once drank a Coke that had been sitting in my car console for a day during the summer.

It was a revelation.

If Kbin defederates from Threads, I’ll just leave Kbin, and stay with Threads. Defederating over vibes is not how the fediverse is supposed to operate. And for everyone advocating for this dumb idea, I’m just using this thread as a honey pot.

Star Wars, drive-in, 1977. I was 4.

Jesus Christ that NYT article has so many weasel words in it. “Seen as”, “appear to be,” blah blah blah. I hate the NYT.

Honestly that's the uploader's fault. They're too lazy to manage their ad locations and let Google do it for them. Google always adds way too many. I make sure my videos never have more than 3 in 30 minutes, and I craft the videos so that they have precise break points like old school television. You'll (almost) never see an ad on my videos that interrupts something important. It takes so little effort to do this.

Bots aren't a "problem" for Twitter unless the advertisers think there are more of them than there are real users. But if you can convince advertisers that you're reducing bots, while also not actually reducing bots, you've got a winning formula. Bots are reliable posters, they contribute a lot more than a regular user, and they make high-engagement tweets/posts/tweex that end up getting a lot of views, aka advertising opportunities.

In other words the idea might have the opposite effect - keeping potential new human users out, but allowing the bots in

The galaxy brain shit here is that I suspect the bot problem actually doesn't concern Musk in the way he claims. If he can make it seem like there are fewer bots (because of these policies) while at the same time not actually getting rid of them, the engagement level stays up and the advertisers are happy in their ignorance. Bots are better users: they're not fickle, they don't go to sleep, they can be reliably expected to be posting more regularly than normal users. The trick for Musk is convincing everyone they're gone.

They’re going to try to pull a Microsoft: embrace, extend, extinguish.

Once Selig announced that he could not keep Apollo going after June 30, I was done with Reddit. That was days before Huffman said anything publicly - even before the AMA in which he pasted prefab answers to 14 questions.

The effect has been fairly small, but the effect itself is not even the thing that’s going to get Huffman’s nuts in a vice when the IPO comes. The thing that’s going to ruin him is the awareness now that poorly received changes can cause chaos to the functioning of the site. That’s not the case with social media sites like Facebook, or even Twitter for that matter. Those don’t rely intrinsically on the agreeable participation of unpaid labor (Reddit mods), so Zuckerberg and (to a lesser degree) Musk can run around naked with their balls out all they want and it won’t move the needle that much. But when Huffman does it, there’s thousands of angry people ready with clamps and gelding equipment.

I’m treating the blackout like a strike, and I don’t cross picket lines, and neither should anyone else. No scabs. No one should be agreeing to moderate a sub that has lost all of its moderators to forcible removal.