Given their choice of logo, I am advocating for everyone to start referring to it as Twitter/X11.

Teaching critical thinking has absolutely nothing to do with presupposing the existence of objective truth in political matters.

But there are % signs after all the numbers…

I’d be interested in hearing what it is about the language that has gotten you so excited about it.

Pretty soon he’ll have so much control over his platform that he can practically cron kings and manipulate outcomes to fit his personal political agenda.

Huh… do kings normally consist of commands that need to be run on a regular basis at scheduled times?

Sure, but what’s the end game supposed to be, then? Just making the same request over and over again indefinitely?

One of my current favorite alternative is, “X, the web app you access at twitter.com”, though given the logo that they chose I’m tempted to start referring to them as X11.

Ok where do I invest my money then?

Well-diversified mutual funds, or something equivalent to that, and in particular you want a mixture of asset classes such as stocks and bonds. You also want to have a hierarchy of investments, ranging from very low-risk but also low-growth investments for your emergency savings that you can tap at a moment’s notice to high-risk but also high-growth investments for savings that you do not need to tap for a long time (such as for retirement, assuming that is far off). “High-risk” in this context doesn’t mean “risk of your investment disappearing” so much as “risk of your investment suffering from a dip in value at the time when you need it”.

But to reiterate: the most important thing here is diversification, because diversification means that some of your investments can drop in value by a lot or even become worthless without causing you to lose everything. Putting all of your money into a single asset or kind of asset, such as a cryptocurrency, is basically the opposite of what you want to be doing.

Being absolutely terrified of the ambient noises in Doom.

Yeah, when I was a kid and Doom had first come out, I got scared to death when I walked around a corner and ran into my first pinky; it was horrifying!

I was curious to hear what argument they were making but the article is behind a paywall. Could someone with access to it summarize for me?

I am curious because this seems a bit implausible to me given that the protocol selection process involves an open competition.

If that is what you are worried about, then isn’t the easy solution to build thicker walls?

If we talking about preserving birds I would still address the cat issue before the wind turbine issue.

I for one fully support never allowing cats outside unless they have a wind turbine attached to them.

Nice parks are one of the amenities that can be put in a “15 minute city”; the nicest city I’ve ever lived in, Brisbane (in Queensland, Australia), had beautiful large parks within easy access of the downtown areas.

By contrast, currently I live in a suburb, but it doesn’t really give me a nature fix when I need it so I have to go to elsewhere anyway.

In the sci-fi book Hyperion (which takes place hundreds of years in the future) they use this convention throughout and it works really well, so I’ve also wished that it were widely adopted in our society. (Except for androids, where the title is A. rather than M.)

I started down the path to atheism when I tried proving that my faith was the correct one and got stuck when I realized that all the other religions also think that they are the correct one and the greatest predictor of what you believe is simply what your parents believe, so what exactly made me so sure that I was the right one?

To clarify, it is not that you won’t see content from other instances, it is that your instance only stores content from another instance when someone on your instance has subscribed to it. So if you decided to subscribe to a bunch of things on other instances with hashtags matching your interests, then you and other people would start to see this content showing up when searching for the hashtag on your instance.

Unlike Twitter, hashtags don’t perform a global search, they only perform a local search on the content that people have pulled into your instance via subscriptions; this is a downside of it’s federated nature. So what you are finding out is essentially that people on your instance don’t share your interests.

If you want to improve your feed, you should look for instances where people who are interested in the same kinds of things as you congregate, and subscribe to the people there who interest you. If you find an instance whose community really clicks with you, you might consider switching to it, and then the hashtags will work better for you.

In general, it helps to model the fediverse as being not one community but a big community made up of a bunch of smaller communities that all talk to each other, so it’s more like a Twitter alternative than a Twitter replacement (even though it is sometimes sold as the later rather than the former). Personally, I find Mastodon to be infinitely better than Twitter, but that’s just because I personally never used Twitter due to lack of interest so I don’t have a basis for comparison. :-)

I never used Twitter save for occasionally hearing about tweets, but I have been enjoying using Mastodon because in practice it’s basically just a way for me to have a feed of cool astronomy pictures.

It only does not have a significant adverse effect because enough people actually do pay for the media that they are able to make a profit off of it. If no one paid for it then they would lose all of their revenue from selling copies, which would definitely be a significant adverse effect on their profits.

I mean, maybe you don’t consider that to be a problem. Maybe you think that copying media should be free and that instead of making money selling copies people should live off of the money they make from performances and/or patronage, even if this means that there is less money available to create media so in practice there is less of it around. I don’t agree with this position, but I also don’t think it is an inherently unreasonable one as long as you are being honest about it.

The point is, though, that whatever moral position you take on piracy, you cannot justify it with a claim that only holds as long as other people act differently from you.

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