If anyone did this in front of me I would smack them in the mouth.

Catzilla. Truly a loaf incarnate.

In fairness, they were trvializing time paradoxes from the get. There are at least two in TOS S1.

Individual data points like “I take pilates”, “I work nights and weekends”, and “I live in Smalltown, ST” might not mean anything on their own, but if you can connect this data to a single person, then realize there’s only one pilates studio in Smalltown, then look up their hours and notice there’s only one day class on weekdays, you can make a reasonable guess as to a regular time when a person is away from home. This is called data brokerage.

This is a comically contrived example; the real danger is in the association of countless data points spread across millions of correlated identities. It’s not just your data, it’s the association of your data with that of your friends and family. Most people are constantly streaming their location, purchases, beliefs, and affiliations out to anyone who cares enough to look. Bad actors may collate their data and use it to take advantage of them, and the only move they have is to ask for prohibitive legislation. As if we don’t already have prohibitive legislation.

Anonymity is expensive, inconvenient, and fragile, but it’s the only mechanism that protects individuals from the information economy, which I would put right next to ecology in terms of critical 21st-22nd century social problems. It also helps us resist censorship, but that’s a different essay.

He cannot protec
Nor can he attac
But he is a little hat

My pet theory is that NGINX was designed by a pen-tester who realized that all they needed to do to make the majority of SMBs expose their web servers to the internet was outperform Apache

That’s a good thing. Discord is chugging its way through the last half of the Web 2.0 service to social media pipeline. It’s a VC-funded multimedia enterprise extended around a novel technology core optimized for its original service offering, real-time voice/text. Nobody is immune to bloat, but because Matrix is a protocol standard, not an app, users have the option of sticking with minimal clients and servers that won’t (necessarily) get destroyed by feature creep.

If you’ve tried Element and thought “ah, slow Discord,” maybe have a scroll through https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/. I don’t want to get off topic but all my favorite software is standard/specification-based.

All it is necessary to do is to abolish all other forms of taxation until the weight of taxation rests upon the value of land irrespective of improvements, and take the ground-rent for the public benefit.
~ Henry George, Social Problems

Home slice I respect the grind but I gotta be real with you I haven’t bought a GPU since the Obama administration

Oh my God! That’s awful! Which ones?! Which sites, specifically, though?! You know, so I can call for bans.

I didn’t know freedom meant people doing stuff that sucks. I was thinking more of a “choose your own cellphone carrier” thing.

I have an idea. Every time there’s a disagreement about what forms of expression count as “limiting the freedoms of others,” we’ll call you up and have you make a ruling. Of course that’s a lot of work for one person, so let’s erect arbitrary, temporary, economically limited, pseudo-representative democracy in order to elect a committee of people responsible for those decisions. Of course we’ll need a way to quickly identify them as the special people ─ those whose senses of morality are elevated above all the rest of us rabble ─ maybe some tiny hats? We’ll make sure to pick a shape of hat that hasn’t yet been used to propel a civilization towards genocide.

edit: I’ve got it! Armbands.

It’s also not clear how the law will be enforced or to what extent.

No shit. Isn’t that the point? Use outrage to justify the growth of an impenetrable body of law addressing all social and economic behavior, then selectively enforce subjective interpretations to satisfy powerful groups and remain in power. So it goes for any population center whose rapid growth creates the illusion of independence.

Can we sell NYC to Canada yet? We’d make a bundle, they wouldn’t even be mad, and I’d sleep a lot better with the border of a superpower between me and a stack of nine million people who think privacy is a sin.

Avocado oil is great for popcorn. It doesn’t add any flavor but I love the resulting texture: very crisp and clean. I like using red or blue corn because the contrast is visually appealing. You want long, skinny kernels to get the butterfly popcorn. Personally I’m crazy for cheesy popcorn, and the secret there is to find cheese powder with some savory herbs like oregano. I also love to do it with Kashmiri (floral hot Indian chili) powder.

Important edit: Do NOT under any circumstance use chili popcorn to spice up Netflix & Chill. This is a snack for lonely degenerates who don’t even masturbate daily any more. It’s for watching war documentaries and French New Wave, not pervy cartoons and superhero throwdowns with plot designed to be ignored while you finger your frenemies. You won’t look worldly and sophisticated while you’re driving somebody to the fucking hospital. Be responsible.

Yes, I regret using the sensationalized language. Reddit is not “dying” so much as it is “continuing its transition into the same homogeneous para-social media service as the other tech giants in that space.” The elements that made Reddit special are continuing to slip away in a series of predictable corporate moves. Everybody taking out their frustrations on Huffman is par for the course, but it’s not his fault. This is just the way of the Eternal September. It will come for the ActivityPub systems eventually. The people who created ActivityPub (the federation protocol underneath Lemmy, Kbin, et. al.) have actually already moved on to the “next next” generation of social media architecture: https://spritely.institute/

Reddit is dying. Its goals as a growth-oriented corporation are inherently contrary to its original nature as a community center. I have to give them props for dragging it out as long as they have (and will). All the factors that made Reddit possible and desirable still exist; in fact, the ActivityPub federation protocol enables an even more powerful form of collaboration that transcends a lot of the negative aspects of Reddit’s design.

Give it time. Make content! Tell people about this wonderful new generation of media. Consider it an opportunity to engage with the glory days of a new form of internet media. Which it is.