Before “Seward’s Folly” gets brought up, I invite you to watch this Premodernist video.

True. See WP:NOT and WP:CON for some idea of how this whole thing works.

I definitely avoided Lemmy the first go-round with the API fuckery because it seemed from the outside like basically just a tankie protest Reddit in a similar way to how Voat was just a neo-Nazi protest Reddit. To the Lemmy devs’ absolute credit, they don’t push new users toward any of those, though.

I thought one day after having had a Mastodon for some time that I might not have given Lemmy a fair shake, so I went back and ended up finding that most instances are basically normal Reddit fare but honestly less shitty than Reddit proper (there’s a trade-off that posts are less frequent and that small, niche communities can attract unwanted attention by having their posts almost immediately show up in ‘all’).

• “We are open.”
• “We open are.”
• “Are we open?”
• “Are open we?”
• “Open, we are.”
• “Open are we.”

So 2/3 of these permutations actually make sense.

Am I allowed to steal the chatroom analogy?

You fail to realize that this is the most meaningful action that the UN General Assembly can take against the US on this matter. The UNGA can be very effective in facilitating international cooperation and settling minor disputes but really has no tools in its arsenal to meaningfully effect action to stop something like this.

I can hopefully demonstrate this by asking you what lever(s) the UN can pull to actually directly address this. Before you say “send aid!”, they are. And before you point to something like its past military intervention in Korea, be fully aware that that’s not at all applicable here: the US has a permanent seat on the Security Council and therefore absolute veto power; the only reason the UN was able to intervene in Korea was because the USSR didn’t use their Security Council veto; and the US is not capable of being directly matched militarily by any nation on Earth, let alone in their home waters. And before you say “sanctions”, well I’ll give you one guess what organ of the UN controls sanctions.

It’s still worth voting to show the basically unanimous agreement. 187–2–1 (with one of the ‘Against’ being the US itself) is a clear expression of overwhelming disapproval – to an extent that even I, a US citizen who supports lifting the restrictions, didn’t know how pervasive and long-lasting it’s been until seeing this. It forecloses on any sort of bullshit argument that “that was then, this is now” or that it wasn’t like that for some period of time or whatever. And it showcases the complete abdsurdity that no country on Earth except the US itself and what’s effectively a US protectorate actually thinks there’s any merit to this policy.

For what it’s worth, it’s actively strengthened my already strong resolve that this policy is insane.

Decentralization actually can be really powerful to give you a backup even if you prefer Signal; Signal’s servers very infrequently go down, but when they do, you entirely lose that channel for an unpredictable amount of time.

Not joining the rooms Element suggests on its own client? Element will show you a list of suggested, popular rooms to join, and a fuckton of these are overrun by spammers and worse. If Matrix has basically zero ability to curate these rooms outside of “here’s what’s got the most members”, then it absolutely should not in any capacity be recommending them, let alone as a way to get started for new users. It’s fucking ridiculous, and before you say “Well why should they be expected to curate the rooms they suggest?”, imagine the fucking disaster Discord would have on its hands if it started recommending servers, and several of its top 100 claimed to be related to popular FOSS applications but were actually completely unmoderated and filled with CSAM and Bitcoin scams.

“20 signs you’re an introvert” listicles be like:

Hey, don’t kink shame.

I think a lot of people are imagining this as the penguins being fascinated with the butterfly and chasing it around to get a better look at it kind of like human children chasing one. It’s nonetheless, I agree, adorable seeing them hopping around trying to catch it.

Maybe it’s just me, but it looks like they’re trying to catch and eat the butterfly and this might be anthropomorphizing. After all, small crustaceans of a similar size like Antarctic krill are an important part of their natural diet, so maybe they’re instinctively like “oh shit whaddup”.

Everyone get out your tiny violins.

Oh yeah, to be clear, no disrespect to people who use trucks routinely for their intended purpose.

Up to you if you want to adopt this, but I’ve taken to calling those tiny, useless afterthoughts tacked onto modern trucks “vestigial beds”.

A truck is a tool

Nah, that’s usually the person driving it.

Just a low-effort regurgitation of a MS blog post to then sell you on an ROG Ally X affiliate link at the end. I love modern online journalism.

The final boss of PE.

Eh, I dunno, I think philosophy can be pretty cool.

• Logic and epistemology give us the tools to create proofs and algorithms, and it’s basically the foundation of modern mathematics.
• Having the tools to communicate and understand concepts in ethics makes society more secular (because ethics aren’t just handed down from on high) and hopefully more humane.
• Metaphysics I feel again moves us more toward secularism because it gives us ways to reason about the universe other than just “some big powerful boi did it (and he conveniently thinks you should give me money)”.