And although scientists who visit the continent to study its life and demise have a clear place here, many sightseers bring a whiff of “last-chance tourism”—a desire to see a place before it’s gone, even if that means helping hasten its disappearance. Perversely, the climate change that imperils Antarctica is making the continent easier to visit; melting sea ice has extended the cruising season.
I hate it here.
It makes sense. Protests are meant to be disruptive; that's the point. People are talking about the Wimbledon protest, and lots will grumble, and some will support what they did, but at least it becomes a matter of conversation and is brought to the public consciousness.
If those protestors just handed out flyers outside of Wimbledon instead, no one would have given a shit.
Here's what Jack said about Elon around the time of the Twitter acquisition:
"Elon is the singular solution I trust... I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness"
Is this a legitimate question? Seriously?
It's funny that we never see headlines like "The rich already have lots of money. So why are they so upset about proposed tax increases?"
As an American, I look around today and realize that a polite insistence on "don’t feed the trolls" is in large part how we got where we’re at today.
That could very well be rewritten as "don’t challenge the ideas espoused by trolls."
So I think I'm going to continue to correct blatant misinformation, and if you don't like that, you can feel free to hover over my name and block me forever. AWESOME! 👍
This is my approach, and for those who don't know, you can use those line numbers that come back from history to rerun the command. Like if your output is something like this:
$ history | grep tmp
501 ls /tmp
502 history | grep tmp
You can run !501 and it will just re-run ls /tmp
From the article:
Melissa Gira Grant of the New Republic contacted Stewart, using the email and phone number included in the lawsuit. He denies having sent that request, pointing out that he is already married, to a woman.
Person whose name and phone number appears in lawsuit is contacted, denies making a request, is married to woman.
Yeah, super crazy fucking reality here.
So then it would seem like SMTP is a pretty poor example of an open standard? Acknowledging that a technology will only work in practice if everyone adds their own unpublished rules around it is kind of admitting that the standard and protocol isn't sufficient.
Who can "buy" ActivityPub? Who can "buy" SMTP or HTTPS?
A company doesn't need to own the protocol if they own enough of the traffic on the network. Email is a good example here. Google has such a large marketshare of email that they can impose structural barriers for outsiders sending email to Gmail users. The barrier for sending a lot of email to Gmail users is incredibly high - even if a sender is using proper DKIM, SPF, and isn't on any global spammer lists, Google can and often does rate limit the email coming in. At this point, if you're sending email, you don't have to contend only with the SMTP standards for sending email, you have to contend with Google's arbitrary limits, which are most likely entirely opaque. And because Google owns such a large marketshare, senders need to play ball if they want to actually reach users.
The classic tactic is known as EEE (Embrace / Extend / Extinguish).
It's not impossible to imagine a scenario where in the future, if the Fediverse is thriving, a seemingly good-intentioned corporation chooses to Federate its own instance on its own hardware. This opens up the capacity of the network even more and makes it more accessible and less intimidating to a broader audience. This is the Embrace phase.
Then comes the Extend phase, where they dedicate a lot of resources to improving their technology and platform and capabilities. They may add some functionality that is not defined in the ActivityPub standard, but it seems really cool or useful, and so a lot of people switch to it, and it becomes the de facto standard place to go on the Fediverse. Everywhere else is a ghetto that doesn't have Feature X.
Eventually, the corporate site, now the de facto, wants to continue to build on its capabilities, and adhering to an open standard is only a liability, especially given that the only people left on the Fediverse are unmonetizable weirdos. So they announce that they're going closed. The majority of people on the platform don't care because it's where most everyone already is. This, of course, is the Extinguish phase.
So yeah, it's certainly a possibility that could come to fruition. The kind of scary part is that to begin with, everyone could have the best intentions. But corporations are amoral and driven by profit incentive, and historically, that need to drive growth and profit has led to staggeringly similar decision-making (see Twitter and Reddit as examples of that). And so even if a company comes in with seemingly truly noble intentions, eventually the need to turn a profit has a high likelihood of leading to the fate described above.
Super introvert here and a few years back, I did a Disney World trip. When I did it, you booked everything online (and I mean everything, down to FastPasses for rides six months in advance.) This also included restaurant bookings, as well as the hotel itself.
Not sure how it works now, but back then, we actually got the Magic Band wristband shipped to us ahead of time. With these wristbands, we could get into our hotel room - we didn't even need to go to the front desk to check in.
So yeah, regardless of whether you'd enjoy it or not, Disney did make it very easy to build an experience on your own online without needing to interact with a bunch of people.