

Yup. Tax refunds are about to become a thing of the past. For the bottom 99%, that is.
Hail Satan.
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THE FINALS: Season 4 Power Shift - #45 Worldwide
Yup. Tax refunds are about to become a thing of the past. For the bottom 99%, that is.
Mainly just that you need to maintain a fairly high seed ratio to keep access. A lot of trackers will limit how many concurrent torrents you can have, based on your seed ratio. And depending on the tracker and the media that you want to download, you sometimes run into situations where just nobody else wants what you’re seeding, or where the torrent has so many seeds that you barely get to contribute.
Last time I was on a private tracker, I was one of only like 3 other users who were downloading episodes of Doctor Who. I could seed those for months, and never go above 1.0 because there just wasn’t interest in that.
I’m not sure if this is considered a good practice or not, but what I ended up doing was occasionally torrenting something that was really popular, even if I had no interest in it, just so that I could seed something. It definitely helped to keep my ratio up, and as far as I can tell it’s overall a net benefit to the network as a whole, so I don’t think tracker admins would have issue with it. But it just felt weird, to me.
Next question.
As an American, that idea makes me very uncomfortable. Don’t get me wrong, I hate the fact that we have as many nukes as we do, and I hope to never live to see them used. But many of our national alliances exist only because we have as many nukes as we do; either to protect the ally, or to ensure they stay an ally. When you remove the threat of a military retaliation, the US doesn’t really have a whole lot of true friends in this world. Should China or Russia fail to uphold their end of such a bargain, I doubt many would come to our aid if things went bad, and I’m just not built to live in a post-nuclear wasteland.
I just hope that in the future people will avoid using software names in their server branding, because it only confuses people.
100% this. For instance, one would think that “Lemmy World” is something that’s officially related to the Lemmy project development. But in actuality, the “official” Lemmy instance would be Lemmy.ML, which is notoriously defederated from many of the big players in this space. It’s all very misleading to the uninitiated user.
Herein lies a problem I’ve had for a while, actually. It’s hard to tell people about Lemmy, because “Lemmy” isn’t really a website, or an app, or even a platform, really. It’s a protocol that anybody can use. For instance, we’re not really posting comments here on Lemmy, as much as we are posting comments via Lemmy. Right now, I’m posting a comment on Lemmy World via Lemmy, from Fedia. The average new user is very quickly gonna get lost in the sauce with that.
So even the main recruitment page, “Join Lemmy”, is kinda misleading because how do you join a protocol? It’s kinda like saying “enlist with TCP/IP” or “create an account on HTTPS”. Like… what does that even mean to a user? It leads most people into thinking that “Lemmy” is some centralized community with a hub of some sort, which is ironically antithetical to everything Lemmy stands for in the first place.
I think one solution to this would be to stop referring to things as being “on Lemmy”, and instead use terms like “a Lemmy site” or “a Lemmy instance”, which I think would help articulate the fact that “Lemmy” is a piece of software and not the community, itself. So when trying to refer friends to join a Lemmy instance, we should use the instance’s name, instead of “Lemmy”. But this brings about another problem; how does an instance form an identity to begin with?
Take Lemmy World here, for example: What is LW’s “identity”? What kind of site is this? What’s it about? What is the community here for? It’s called Lemmy World, so is it about the Lemmy software? To the outsider, it just looks like an off-brand Reddit; which may be what some are looking for, but there’s no real identity to be found in that.
You do have some instances that are a bit more focused, however, and have a distinct “identity” about them. Unfortunately, a lot of those are defederated from the major instances because of those identities (Lemmy.ML, Hexbear, etc). But there are also a lot of really good ones like the solarpunk or literature instances, and interestingly enough, LemmyNSFW, which all have their own focused subject matters but are still part of the Fediverse at large. When you sign up to one of those instances, you know what kind of community you’re getting involved with. You’re there for a reason, just like everybody else.
I think Beehaw does a good job in this, specifically; even though they’re a “general purpose” instance much like Lemmy World, they have very clear guidelines and expectations for how users behave and what they post, which helps solidify its identity. If I tell you “think of a Beehaw user”, you can probably concoct an idea in your head about what that person is like. If I tell you “think of a Lemmy World user”… can you even narrow it down enough to create a caricature at all?
I don’t have any real point to all this, just rambling about some frustrations I’ve had for a while with the terminology of things around here. I dunno what the solution should really be.
Tesla is a terrorist organization.
That’s true, but I don’t think we’ll see that sort of rapid growth on Mastodon. At least not for a while. For now, Bluesky is sucking up most of the users seeking Twitter alternatives. I imagine that the growth will be slow enough that it’ll be easy enough for mod teams to scale up to.
Haha, what a bozo! Now we’re going to relentlessly shit-talk them in this sub-thread that OP has no ability to moderate nor stem the flow of vitriol from.
(Further continuing the example.)
Oops, you’re right. I think I typo’d it originally, and then locked that into my mind as I looked further and never corrected myself. Either that or I assumed a human pregnancy is 21 months.
That would’ve been around December/January-ish of 22/23, so just shortly after he took over Twitter. I think that was around the time he was first starting to (at least publicly) donate large sums of money to republican politicians. I think 2024 was around the time he first started really going mask-off, though.
This is why I failed math class, thanks ripcord.
They’ll confirm him as the new head of the Child Abuse Hotline.
Good. I get why they were originally resistant to it, but fringe, outlier situations can be dealt with when you have actual mods maintaining things. The reason quote-retweeting was used so heavily for bullying on Twitter was because there were no repercussions for it, and Twitter never enforced their bullying rules for the practice. Mastodon instances have their own mods enforcing their own rules, to a much better degree than Twitter ever has. While the potential for bullying still exists, it’s far easier to mitigate on Mastodon.
Kinda crazy to think that the mascots behind a wildly popular children’s vitamin tablet also sold cigarettes.
The Princess Bride, Requiem For A Dream, and Hot Fuzz.
I usually won’t rewatch a movie I’ve already seen, but I make exceptions for these ones.
I fear this is meant to be challenged, and will eventually be used to get SCROTUS to block all mail-in abortion pills, nationwide.
Oh no, we should tell them! Someone get Big Balls on the horn, stat!
Not mad.
This thread has now occupied 90% of your comment history, tho. Isn’t that neat? For me, you’re a blip on my radar; but for you, I’m nearly your entire account. Kinda makes you look obsessive.
Sucker Punch. Objectively, it’s not really that great of a movie. But it’s one of the most fun movies I’ve ever seen. It’s got over-the-top action sequences, an amazing soundtrack, and a genuinely unique idea for a story that I haven’t really seen done before.
The final cut ended up removing a very key scene that ties a lot of the story together, which I honestly feel is part of why the movie was so poorly-received, because the theatrical release just doesn’t make sense and ends abruptly. If you decide to watch it, try to find a version that has the deleted scene with the High Roller near the end. It’s a full five minutes of dialogue that ties the entire story together and Warner Brothers scrapped it and it drives me so crazy. It’s like an “I Am Legend’s deleted ending” level of directorial blunder, IMO.