Because they didn’t turn on federation until last year, and at that point it was still limited to fewer than ten users per alternate server, and you had to manually request federation through a Discord server from an actual human. This year they’ve automated the federation process, but you still have to start with a tiny server, and they claim they’re going to raise the user limit gradually as new servers remain federated with the main server.

But yeah, the upshot is bsky.social has 13 million users, and there are no other servers with notable numbers of users. That’s a pretty notable difference from ActivityPub.

Yeah.

According to this site: https://usafacts.org/articles/what-percentage-of-the-us-population-is-transgender/ about 1.14% of the US is trans.

And according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces there’s about 1.328 million active duty armed forces in the US.

1.14% of 1.328 million would be 15,139, so 15,000 is pretty much exactly in line with the typical stats. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it is in fact an estimate based on such data, rather than there being a survey ready-to-go which identifies how many such service members there are.

“Judean People’s Front!? We’re the People’s Front of Judea! And if there’s one thing we hate worse than the Romans, it’s the bleeding Judean People’s Front!”

I really don’t think it’s that stupid. Your particular machine has a lot of ports, yeah. But there are plenty of machines out there, like the 12-inch non-pro macbook, that have ONE USB-C PORT and absolutely no other ports. That’s clearly limiting. Like, you can connect it to ethernet, if you buy an additional USB-C ethernet adapter, but if you want to be able to ethernet and have it connected to power at the same time, you need to buy a special power brick that combines the two functions, because they didn’t include any other ports.

Plus, there are a bunch of things that still use USB-A. I’ve got a bunch of old thumb drives that work like that, especially for transferring video files to my TV, which only supports USB-A itself. Wireless dongles for mice and game controllers, which still offer a latency advantage over bluetooth, tend to be USB-A as well. I’ve also got a wearable pulse oximeter that requires a special cable to load data, and the other end of that cable is USB-A only. Again, you can get an adapter dongle, but that’s never as convenient as just having the right port in the first place.

I went a bit out of my way to get a laptop with a decent collection of ports (and it’s a bit of a less portable laptop as a result, maybe more like a desktop replacement), but even it has for some reason dropped the SD card reader, which I would have used a lot. I had to get a dongle for that. And I had to get one that used USB-C in particular, because my USB-A ports are usually both filled.

Basically the selection of ports used to be something that laptops used as a point of differentiation and pride in a crowded market; but Apple managed to invert this, making the prestige marker having a slimmer laptop with as few ports as possible, and that was a dumb change. I do the the pendulum is swinging back, as with your Pro macbook, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be frustrated with the way this element of the market went in such a consumer-hostile direction for a while.

I’ve been seeing that one mentioned a lot lately because the sequel just came out.

I dunno, I think you may be underestimating ARM here. I’ve heard that the overhead from translating the machine code is a lot lower than you might think, because so much X86 code is optimized down to a RISC-like subset of the instruction set already. And if that overhead isn’t too daunting in the common cases, the more robust power management on the ARM side of the chip market might be able to make up the difference in a handheld environment for most users. Obviously it’s a huge amount of work to nail the software, and it would be on top of the work they were already doing on Linux, so I’m not saying it’ll definitely be in the next iteration, but I could definitely imagine it happening eventually.

Same with The Mysterious Benedict Society. I did find a site that would sell it to me on a disc, but once I received it, it became clear to me they didn’t actually have a license to do so and just sold me a bootleg. Oh well. I dunno why Disney just didn’t want my money in the first place.

It’s the “with which we are okay” that sounds a little stilted. Most speakers would probably phrase that part of the sentence as “which we’re okay with.” It’s just because “okay with” is so common that it almost feels like a transitive form of the verb “to be okay,” so splitting apart sounds odd.

Note that there’s already a different transitive verb “okay” which means “approve” or “authorize,” as in “the boss okayed your plan to use the forklift,” implying that the person doing this has authority or control over whether the thing happens. “I’m okay with it” by contrast typically means something like “I have no control over it but it also doesn’t trouble me.” “Unfazed by” (spelled in this way, not related to “phase”) would be a similar expression.

Capitalism is already a superintelligence, and its goals are misaligned with those of humanity.

Kinda feels like moving out of America ought to be covered by my health insurance, really

Sound doesn’t travel as far through warm humid air, so the world feels a little more muted and calm. (Contrast this with the dry, dense air of a frigid winter day, when the sound of cars carries for miles as a dull growl.) The light is almost entirely diffuse thanks to clouds, rather than the sharp glare of a sunny day; your skin isn’t dried out and burned in the same way either. Public spaces aren’t as crowded. Indoor rooms are often lighted more gently as well without sharp sunbeams drawing lines. Add the sound of rain itself and the faint smell of petrichor, and the improvement in the air quality as the rain washes particulate and pollen into the gutters, and you get a perfect day to curl up with a book, a cup of tea, and a cat on your lap.

“No, I am not going with you to a concert in the park! There’s a zombie horde out there! We’ll get bitten!”

“Hey, even the WHO says it’s not an apocalypse anymore. The zombies are endemic now. You can’t live your life in fear.”

“Your mom was eaten by zombies literally last week.”

“Yeah but she had diabetes. There’s always gonna be people with preexisting conditions who are gonna be more vulnerable.”

“At least wear your denim jacket to make it harder for them to bite you!”

“There was a study in the Lancet that said heavy clothes don’t work.”

“You know full well that what they found was that requiring heavy clothes didn’t work because people just got bitten at the times when they weren’t wearing them.”

“The author himself said jackets don’t work.”

“He said that after he was bitten and just before demanding our brains!”

“Okay, sheeple. Oh, hey Mom. We’re just heading out to the concert.”

“Wait, your mom is here? I thought she was…”

“BRAAAAIINSSS…”

“You LET HER BACK IN after she died and came back as a zombie!?”

“Dude, she’s not infectious anymore. She caught it like four days ago.”

“That is NOT how this works! What… DON’T HUG HER!”

“Bye Mom, love you…ow!”

“She just bit you, didn’t she.”

“Nah, I’m fine. Let’s go to the concert.”

The code name of the first Steam Box, before it was released, was Piston, which fits the theme pretty well. e.g. https://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3849284/piston-valve-steam-box-xi3

Maybe they should patent it, to protect their TCP IP.

Switching my phone screen to black and white actually does help, but the temptation to switch back is powerful.

I don’t think it’s most yet, but it’s improving fast thanks to the Valve Steam Deck. Bazzite is probably the distro to look at for a machine that’s primarily for gaming; it’s based on the Steam Deck OS, but works on more machines. There are some high-profile games like Fortnite that won’t run on it, but a lot of stuff will, especially if it doesn’t rely on any fancy anti-cheat stuff.

Definite “Friday was the name of his horse!” energy here.

Wasn’t the phrase supposed to be “Primus sucks”? I seem to remember that being a self-identification thing for fans back in the day.

If I’m remembering correctly, this phrase was immortalized in a Primus track at one point. There’s a weird, short track (or maybe an intro to a longer song?) on “Sailing the Seas of Cheese” that’s just one guy singing along with running water, and as I remember them, the lyrics are: “As I stand here in the shower, singing opera and such/pondering the possibility that I pull the pud too much/there’s a scent that fills the air; is it flatus? just a touch/and it makes me think of you.”

Which apparently is still in my brain, even though I didn’t think I’ve listened to that album since the 90’s. My brain is weirdly prone to storing old audio, though.

Honestly it just reminds me of the moral panic over “cock ring Ken.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earring_Magic_Ken

(also amusing in this context to note that his earring is in his left ear, so I’m not sure even the homophobes were consistent about this)