They said they were using stone tools. You think they’d have spare iron lying around for a bucket?

It’s not clear at all, no.

Is this proposal patently ridiculous? Yes. Do I believe there’s at least one legislator in Mississippi who unironically believes in this bill exactly as written, and is playing this completely straight? Considering all that’s happened so far, why not?

Satire doesn’t work when the obvious hyperbolic nonsense is within actual expected behavior of the satirized.

I won’t claim one way or the other that this is or is not satire. I don’t know who this legislator is and I don’t really care. But no, with the whole article you’re pasting everywhere in this thread as my only context clue, I certainly didn’t find enough evidence to be convinced he doesn’t actually believe this.

Security questions don’t care what you put in there. It’s not an exam. It’s basically just an alt password.

I just generate a string of alphanumeric text from my password generator and stuff those in there. If I lose my password vault somehow I’m cooked anyway, so.

I got a 1U rack server for free from a local business that was upgrading their entire fleet. Would’ve been e-waste otherwise, so they were happy to dump it off on me. I was excited to experiment with it.

Until I got it home and found out it was as loud as a vacuum cleaner with all those fans. Oh, god no…

I was living with my parents at the time, and they had a basement I could stick it in where its noise pollution was minimal. I mounted it up to a LackRack.

Since moving out to a 1 bedroom apartment, I haven’t booted it. It’s just a 70 pound coffee table now. :/

I think the phrasing they wanted was “The person with the least disincentive to do the ethical thing”.

These people aren’t inherently more ethical. They simply have the fewest barriers standing in the way of turning it into action.

Technically all you need is a DNS server.

No computer knows where <whatever.tld> is located, unless that route is hard-coded in a host file somewhere. It always has to ask a DNS server for that information. If that DNS server doesn’t know, it will probably try asking some other DNS server, and so on up a chain. Eventually, it reaches a master DNS server that either has the answer on-hand somewhere in a database, or it says, “lmao, that doesn’t exist”. All the DNS servers and your PC down the chain take that answer. They might memorize it for a little while and hand it out to anyone who asks them, but after a while they’ll ask their way up the chain again to see if the answer has changed since the last time they asked.

In order to “create” a TLD, all you have to do is make a DNS server that doesn’t ask up the chain. Just pre-program the list of valid domains yourself. You can make them anything you want. You can even “steal” existing domains and make them point to anywhere you want. Nothing is stopping you. Your DNS server will confidently report its pre-programmed answers to anyone who asks.

The catch is that any Internet-enabled device that you want to be able to use your fancy new custom domains needs to be configured to ask your DNS server in particular. People would have to manually set your DNS server as their master server to ask, or they’d have to set it to ask some other DNS server that is itself pointed through some chain up to your DNS server. This is an explicitly opt-in system, and getting a significant mass of people to do that voluntarily is practically impossible. But it’s not technically impossible.

The only reason you don’t have to do this manually with every single device you buy is because most devices either come from the manufacturer with a hard-coded list of DNS servers they should trust by default, or a device on the local network whispers in their ear and tells them who the local DNS server is and the device just goes along with it. It’s still technically an opt-in system; devices are simply either already “pre-opted in”, or there’s a system running on your network that auto-opts-in every device that connects, and most devices are designed to accept that auto-opt-in the moment they detect it.

Provided you manage to get the devices you want to listen to your DNS server, you may additionally want to set up a root certificate authority. The thing that makes the little padlock show up in your browser URL box to let you know the connection is secure. Kind of like the DNS server thing, this is also very simple–just run a cheeky little OpenSSL command or two and you can be a root CA in no time–but it suffers from the same “opt-in” problem. You have to manually configure any device you want to use your system to trust your certificates. Most devices just come with a list of “acceptable authorities” built-in, and those defaults are all most people are using. But nothing is stopping you from adding anything you want to that list at any time. You’re just limited to doing it on a device-by-device basis.

At my company, we’ve set up our own custom DNS server and our own root CA. We serve internal websites at a custom TLD we made up, and we sign them with our custom certificates to keep the connections secure. But that only works because we’ve manually configured our workstations to ask our internal DNS server for DNS requests, and we’ve manually configured all the workstations to trust our root certificate authority. A random device that connects to our network that isn’t configured with either of those things will not resolve any of our custom domains, nor will it securely connect to them. It also breaks if the configured devices aren’t on the local company network, since the DNS server isn’t reachable from the public web. Which is fine for us, since those internal websites aren’t reachable on the public web either. But yeah, that’s an example of the limitations.

If you want to create a TLD that will be auto-accepted by everyone who is already running the default chains of trust (which is probably what most people actually mean when they ask something like this), you have to seek out the big daddy at the root of that chain of trust and ask them to poof your TLD into existence for you. That would be ICANN, and they probably won’t do anything like that without a big fat check and a lot of corporate lobbying.

tl;dr - The tech is built in such a way that nothing is stopping you from making your own toy, and anyone can play with your toy without needing to do much. But if you want your TLD to “just work” for everyone in the world without asking every single one of them to explicitly opt-in, which is probably what you actually want, then no, you basically can’t do that.

Toy Story 4 didn’t really wrap anything up, in my opinion. It feels like its own detatched thing.

I say it’s still a decently good film, it definitely didn’t “ruin” anything by existing like so many sequel-queasy people like to screech. Woody had an arc that developed him in a direction that felt natural for the character and I was pleased by Bo Peep’s return.

But the themes explored in this film definitely don’t feel core to the overarching narrative the original trio had. The toys’ relationship to Andy was the point. The passing of the torch to the new kid was the bookend. Yes, playing with the question of how toys come to life in the Toy Story universe is neat and all, and I think they handled that tastefully. But that didn’t seem like a question that really needed a spotlight on it.

Every narrative issue explored in Toy Story 4 felt like a solution looking for a problem. The hallmark of a phoned-in story. It was phoned in quite well, all things considered, but it was still phoned-in.

Oh, I expect they well may, in Wreck-It Ralph 2 fashion. They might make it the target of a quick tongue-in-cheek remark at its own expense, but its mere appearance will nonetheless be an ad for the brand.

Does it even count if you’re advertising on your own platform? If I’m able to see the “ads” in the first place, I’m already using it.

I also wouldn’t exactly call a donation drive “advertising” either. They’re not trying to onboard more users to the service, they’re nagging people who already use the service to give them money. Which is itself leaning a bit on the wall of what is and isn’t “free”.

Show me a Wikipedia ad that they paid money for?

Correct. It’s not a scam. Because it’s not free. The sandwich had a price posted, you paid it, you received the product. Valid business model.

What would you think instead if you saw a NYT front page ad taken out for Free Sandwich Mart, the all-you-can-eat totally free sandwich emporium?

Or in this case, a free browser extension that paid to sponsor five thousand YouTube videos that promises to help you pay less money to every store you activate it on at no cost to you?

There is no such thing as a free and benevolent product with an advertising budget.

I use the poor man’s emdash (two hyphens in a row) here and there as well. I guess I never noticed Reddit auto-formats them. I have been accused of being an AI on a few occasions. I guess this is a contributing factor to why that is.

Funny how Reddit technically formats it into the wrong glyph, though. Not like anyone but the most insufferable of pedants would notice and care, of course. I find it merely mildly amusing.

it’s a venture capital-backed startup that has been very eager to exit its growth phase and enter its aggressive monetization phase so it can start making its shareholders some money. They’ve already tried a few things that didn’t work, like trying to turn it into a Steam competitor.

The service to date is mostly fine. If you’re like most people who don’t mind exchanging some privacy and control for access to an app that has a nonzero professional UX design budget, it’s pretty fantastic. But the writing has been on the wall for a long time that enshittification is near on the horizon. It’s not a question of if, but how soon.

Average Familiarity

Florida has only ever been a punchline for as long as I’ve been around.

There are many amazing things that came from Florida and are still in Florida right now. But as a package deal, I certainly haven’t heard of a time where they’ve been above par.

Or would that technically be “below par”? Isn’t being under par the objective? I don’t know, I don’t play golf. Florida’s got acres of fucking golf courses, surely someone there could tell me the answer.

I’ll do ya one further: Copyright should have the same lifespan as a patent. 20 years max. No extensions, no exceptions. I’d even cosider less time than that.

If you retained the unilateral rights to copy your idea for 20 fucking years and you haven’t made your healthy profit on it already in that time, tough. Your work will forcefully enter the public domain so people who were likely actually still alive when it was culturally relevant get a shake with it.

There is no reason why something created during my childhood ought to still be languishing locked up in trust of some dead man’s corporation by the time I’ve withered away of old age and my grandkids have done the same. The severe generational lag of culture and accessible technology created by copyright in its current form is absurd.

If you want to chase your golden goose forever, keep making new iterations of it that have their own copyrights that fairly compete against everyone else’s in the marketplace of ideas. Get off your laurels. Get on your toes. Keep making new, inspired things. Earn your goddamn right to continue being seen as the rightful creator to follow up what you’ve previously made in the past.

Doesn’t necessarily mean it’s what users crave, just why they keep coming back for more.

Yes. And they do come back for more. A lot more. More than “genuine content” ever made them do. It is very much the intended effect, and it is demonstrably working as intended.

So why is it that when a platform like Bluesky does gangbusters while Mastodon languishes looking to pick up table scraps, people here treat it like a wild mystery?

The Fediverse is a cure to an addiction very few people actually want cured; at least, based on their actions taken to solve it. That’s how addictions work. Even people who recognize the harm and say they want out actively choose to not get out when presented an exit.

The Fediverse would succeed if it was the only choice. But in a head-to-head competition with a competently-built centralized platform that dabbles in all the trapping features its predecessor did, it’s severely outmoded.

and don’t say algorithms. the general public constantly laments about how algorithms have ruined everything.

Right, right. Much the same way the American public complains that fast food has ruined their health and yet 2/3 of the nation is overweight. Or how chain smokers know full well their lungs are fucked six ways to Sunday but they keep reaching for those nicotine hits. It’s almost like people say they hate the things they continue to reach for all the time. Funny, that.

Do I think the Fedi is reasonably within the grasp of understanding for most of the general public? Sure. But do I think anything on the Fedi stands a ghost of a chance in competition against centralized services that cater to the dopamine rush people are already conditioned to expect and continue to reach for even when several of them claim to hate it? Oh fuck no, absolutely not.

In all likelihood that experience will be temporary, in one of two ways. Either Lemmy becomes mainstream enough to enshittify beyond your tolerance, or Lemmy atrophies into obscurity and ceases being a platform with any benefit.

Which will happen, and on what timescale it will happen? Who knows. But I wager one of those outcomes is inevitable before too long. The “chill, somewhat unknown but appreciably active platform” position is long-term an unstable one.

Until then, we’re all just in time to bask in the warm glow of this little experiment for at least a little while.