Cylinsier

It’s honestly insanely impressive that these things are still working so long after being built and so far from us. One of mankind’s greatest achievements and even after they die they’ll still be out there somewhere floating around. Maybe long after we’re gone and the Earth is swallowed up by the sun. The last piece of proof that we even existed at all.

By sequencing the genome of this Rip Van Winkle roundworm, scientists revealed it to be a new species of nematode

If this nematode could read I bet it would be offended at being called “new.”

The researchers suggest that decentralized networks like Mastodon need to implement more robust moderation tools and reporting mechanisms to address the prevalence of CSAM.

I agree, but who’s going to pay for it? Those aren’t just freely available additions to any application that you only need to toggle on.

People are still going to bitch about this administration not doing enough for student debt relief, and that’s understandable considering how long it’s been a problem and how little effort has gone into fixing it up until now. But just remember which party is trying to do something about it now and which party built the current SCOTUS that has blocked those efforts so far. Democrats’ track record is far from admirable, but the GOP is flat out telling you to your face that you will get nothing you want or need and you will like it when they are in power.

Besides that, consider that Republican policy in general is about obstruction, regressive judicial interpretation, and brazen inaction on social issues. As such it is possible for Republicans to achieve a lot of their agenda by just holding one branch of Congress or having just the Presidency and courts without Congress. Because they achieve most of what they want via state legislatures suing to get their activist judges to rewrite the law through legal precedent. Contrastingly Democratic policy is often about taking action to address things which requires both Houses of Congress and the Presidency to have a chance at success, particularly with the current courts making litigation as remedy a non-starter for them.

Knowing that, look at the makeup of our federal government over the last 30 or so years. You will see that Democrats had about 3 months of true supermajority under Obama (72 working days to be exact) and the rest of that term with a strong majority, and then two years of a split Senate for Biden’s first term with DINO Manchin and turncoat Sinema being part of that Democratic split. So we, the voters, have given Democrats two years out of the last 30 to actually have a chance to install an agenda. Just two. And those two years ended over 12 years ago.

If you want student loan forgiveness along with other things like abortion protections, voting rights protections, climate change action, and so on, you’re not going to get it overnight with Democrats. It’s going to be an uphill battle, it’s going to take participation in primaries to get DINOsaurs replaced with younger progressives who actually have a stake in these things, and it’s probably going to take a few consecutive cycles of sustained federal control. You will not get easy and satisfying victories with just one or two votes. But I can absolutely 100% guarantee you that for every second you let Republicans control even a single branch of government, even just one chamber of Congress, you will get NOTHING on any of those topics and in fact, those situations will be made actively and maliciously worse out of pure spite. And the following Democratic administration will be that much more behind the curve and it will require that much more time and effort just to get back to zero and to even begin addressing those issues in a meaningful way.

Barbados is a beautiful country which is poorer than it should be. I had the opportunity to visit it as part of a cruise many years ago and that experience along with similar ones is why I doubt I will ever go on a cruise again. Not to say I didn’t have a good time, it was a fantastic opportunity to visit a number of small island nations in a single week and since it was a gift, it only cost me a single roundtrip plane ticket. But something was abundantly clear in Barbados, St Lucia, and St Kitts. And that was that if you were not the cruise industry or the handful of local resorts who contracted with them for day excursions, you benefitted absolutely fucking nothing from their presence. The economies of these small nations had absolutely no right to be as poor as they were with that kind of money coming into them. I went on several of my own excursions and got to see the local areas outside of the preplanned trips the cruise had in mind and saw very poor but very happy people living lives in the shadows of these high-pollution ships bringing rich people into places they themselves were never able to afford to go in their own countries.

This is all a very roundabout way of saying I hope this works out for them. Barbados is a free, self-governing nation that has a lot to offer to tourists and a lot of locals who should benefit from that but, in today’s economic realities, you can’t start making money until you have enough money to buy your foot into the door first. The specter of white colonialism still hangs over these small nations.

Except with a lot of features removed.

I think Bsky’s biggest challenge is that you can’t get on the damn platform.

God his dumb fucking grin is so phony. This asshole fires tons of hard working people keeping the lights on for him, won’t pay his bills, props up right wing talking points on one of the biggest public platforms on earth, and is a faux-intellectual bigot. But then he still thinks he can act like one of the cool kids and nobody will see through his charade. He mistakes gawking for admiration.

The lesson here is don’t let Republicans into power ever. Just 4 years of a pretty ineffective and incompetent Republican administration has still managed to set this country back decades and the damage is going to keep coming. And if you want to mitigate it, I can’t promise Democratic majorities will do so efficiently or quickly because it really depends on which Democrats get picked in the primaries whether or not a hypothetical majority of them will be motivated to address stuff like this in a quick fashion. But I can promise you if we let Republicans hold onto any branch of government or regain all of them, then it definitely will not get addressed and in fact the next Republican administration will make this stuff look tame in comparison. We’re in for a tough decade or two, time we will not get back, because of 2016. All we can do is make sure it doesn’t happen again and try to make it so our kids aren’t still mopping up this same mess when it’s their turn.

I agree with that but they have also at times banned people for just regular swearing on their own private servers.

Absolutely zero percent chance that happens. The only outcome of this is undisguised dictatorship. The only thing we don’t know yet is whether it’s Wagner succeeding and installing a military junta or Putin surviving and using this as an excuse to dissolve whatever semblance of a democracy they pretended to have.

Huffman looked at this clown and said “I want to be like him!”

It’s starting to get pretty hot where I live, gonna have to bust out the AC units soon at this rate.

Relay. The official app can go fuck itself.

It’s amazing how much of this fallout could have been avoided if Reddit had just developed a competent mobile app at literally any point over THE LAST TEN YEARS. You had plenty of time Reddit. Posted from Jerboa, a mobile app which already works better for Lemmy than the official app for Reddit works for Reddit and was developed by one tankie in his spare time for peanuts.

And yes I know I am talking from a regular user perspective and not a moderator perspective and I can’t speak to the mod capabilities of Jerboa, but I work in IT and have developed apps, it’s not that hard to pay someone to make a decent one or just buy out an existing one and don’t shit it up. The solution to this problem has been available for Reddit for literally years. Almost like if Huffman was a legitimate businessman instead of a tech bro who fell ass backwards into internet relevance, he would understand the concept of investing in the future rather than just doing nothing until a few months before IPO and then flinging shit directly into the fan in front of him.

Well stated.

Wow I actually completely forgot about the original official reddit app. I remember the only reason I switched to Bacon Reader in the first place was because they stopped supporting it, then eventually switched to Relay.

I do find myself almost reflexively returning to Reddit at times but I ended up unsubscribing from like 80% of the subs I was in including everything that has a relevant community here. That’s really helping me care less about what is going on there and I have been consistently interacting more on here than there for a week now.

Would still be poetic justice. Remember when they threw Ellen Pao under the bus? They forgot to hire a scapegoat for this round of unpopular decisions.

It’s one thing when you’re living paycheck to paycheck and the landlord fucks you over with an arbitrary rent increase. It hits different when it’s a billionaire crybaby doing it because he thinks it makes him sound cool and not because it has anything to do with sticking it to the man.