There was an interesting paired poll done, asking about federation with Threads and federation with Tumblr.

66% of people were wary of or actively opposed federating with Threads. Fewer than 20% were wary of or actively opposed federating with Tumblr.

It’s not “defederate from every corporate player”. It’s passing this message on to Meta:

Is there a faction of “just shut the fuck up already about your rage polarity”? That would probably be my tribe.

For months at one place I worked senior developers and even junior managers had been haranguing the higher-ups with an alarm bell on how important the Internet was going to be and how we needed to start pivoting toward outfitting our product with the ability to interact properly on the Internet. We were steadfastly ignored and our concerns were quietly scoffed at because our product was a “best of breed” product in our space.

Then we got hit by a huge wave of lost sales because we had no viable scheme in place to proper interact with Internet-based applications.

The then-CEO called a “developers all-hands” meeting in which he pranced around on the stage at the front of the auditorium to complain to us that nobody had been telling him how important this Internet thing was going to be and that we were supposed to be keeping an eye on the leading edge of technology so he can make plans for these things.

This sparked a VERY LOUD outcry as about 150 software developers who’d been ignored and scoffed at for months just flipped a switch into revolution mode. Lots of people started talking loudly (then shouting). One guy with a laptop connected it to the big projector display and started scrolling through an email folder where he’d collected the notices warning about the importance of the Internet and management’s (including the CEO’s) condescending replies. By the end of that little skirmish the CEO was making a lame excuse that he was “joking” and was “taking our feedback very seriously” after 20 people (half of them very senior) just flatly quit in front of him and walked out of the auditorium.

That’s probably the worst “read the fucking room, dude!” moment I ever saw.

Websites are indistinguishable from each other except for their content.

Newspapers are indistinguishable from each other except for their content.

Books are indistinguishable from each other except for their content.

Movies are indistinguishable from each other except for their content.

Yep, it’s just as vapid no matter what media you plug in there.

By stopping asking how to make it more popular and starting making it a place that could become popular.

I would agree to algorithm-generated timelines if I could opt-out of them and not have them turned on behind my back like what happened constantly with Facebook (to the point I had to use a browser plug-in to force the feed I wanted!) and Twitter. If other people want to abrogate their own responsibility to curate their own world for the ease of letting someone else decide what goes before their eyes, that’s no skin off my nose. It becomes a problem only when that’s forced on me.

If you redefine politics to the point of it being an utterly useless word, yes, you’re absolutely correct.

Of course then you’re also absolutely useless to talk to.

Lots of mundane things get politicized by the right …

Response to that.

Generally you can assume anybody who uses terms like “sheeple” unironically, or equates human beings with livestock, is a cunt whose opinions can safely be ignored and whose existence can be excised from your digital life with blocks and other such tools.

Use of those tools is also good for your mental health.

Yes. It’s only the right who politicizes things. There’s never anybody on the left making things about politics. Right.

Oh God I hope not. I’m oh-so-fucking-weary of everything being politicized.

What. Fucking. Analogy?

I’m sorry that the Chinese classify things differently from you. I’ll get right on asking them to change it to suit your thoughts. (As it so happens, the classifier 张 is, in fact, “flat objects”. Fancy that! Perhaps reading what I actually wrote instead of what you wanted me to write so you could “well akshually” me might be an advantage.)

I’m reporting what is, not recommending.

I love German’s case structure! Except that the gender system slices through what could be an elegant way of piecing sentences together in any order without ambiguity and turns it into a muddled mess that requires you to memorize the silly gender of every damned noun in the language. ☹

Speaking one language that is mildly gendered (English), two that are strongly (and in the case of the second bizarrely!) gendered (French, German) and one that is almost entirely ungendered (Mandarin), I have not found any utility whatsoever in grammatical gender.

I suspect that grammatical gender is just an ur-form of grammatical classifiers that has stuck around for non-useful amounts of time. I suspect this because one of the grammatical “gender” divisions that’s in use in many languages isn’t masculine/feminine(/neuter) but rather animate/inanimate. So I suspect that grammatical gender was a classification mechanism whose system and utility was distorted into uselessness over the thousands of years of spread and development.

So why do we have classification mechanisms? Well, in Mandarin there’s classifier words. (In English too: “a sheet of paper”, not “a paper”, but it’s waaaaaaaaaaaaay stricter in Mandarin.) The classifiers in Mandarin, given the sheer amount of punning potential in oral language, are likely a redundant piece of information to help nail down which specific word you mean in contexts where it might be unclear. For example in a noisy environment, or if someone is speaking unclearly, “paper” (纸张[zhǐ zhāng]) might be confused with “spider” (蜘蛛 [zhī zhū]). But if I say 一只蜘蛛 [yī zhī zhī zhū]—a spider—it’s harder to confuse that with 一张纸张 [yī zhāng zhǐ zhāng]—a piece of paper.

So I’m positing that perhaps at some point grammatical gender was used as a primitive form of classification for disambiguation that some languages just never grew out of. Which is why in German men are masculine, women are feminine, boys are masculine, and girls are neuter. It has nothing to do with actual physical gender and is just a weird, atrophied, and somewhat useless remnant of language.

What a conservative thing to say.

You’re smelling mostly the scatole. That’s the primary contributor to the smell of faeces.

Scatole is used in making perfumes, incidentally. And vanilla ice cream.

Not. Just. Your. Hands.

Post-Soviet decline?

Their last attempt at a lander was in 1976 which is (checks notes) smack dab in the middle of the Soviet era … and it crashed too.

Matrix is a piece of hot garbage on the UX front. Maybe when Matrix stops sucking so hard it can take matter out of galactic core black holes it can be taken seriously as a platform.