That format was pretty good for “Come see us live at the Sodbury Theatre in Glurpfortshire, Feb 32nd @9PM!”

I remember an instance where a Cracked.com article pointed out something like “5 creepy places on the internet” one of which was a dicussion forum in which one account was posting over and over, many times a day, about public appearances and such of the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and readers showed up en masse to harass this person. Turns out she was off-label using a forum engine as her own little microtwitter to publish alerts to a fan club. But when the Cracked author rejected that context and substituted his own, it smelled a lot like Humanbeing151.

But yes in general I find discussion boards to be more useful; I think it’s why they were invented first; Reddit and Lemmy are basically just different approaches to implementing Usenet.

Depends on the soldering iron. I’ve got a Craftsman brand one that runs on drill batteries and it’s got a little too much oompf, it’ll burn itself up if you leave it on high. But shit like that “Cold Heat” one they were selling in infomercials? Nah those have never produced a single solder joint.

On PC, not N64.

fear a man that carries a framing hammer and a gas powered soldering iron in the same bag.

Eventually every article just reads “Delve delve delve delve delve delve delve.”

So talking about portability, I had a job in another city, I would do some of it from home like CAD work and then drive into town a few days a week to run machine tools etc. I had a system of bags I lived out of. My backpack which contained my laptop and my portable “office,” my tool bag in which I have a wide variety of capability, and a duffel bag with clothing, toiletries and such to keep a man running for 3 days. I could carry all three at once with a free hand and I can be ready for a 4 day, 3 night away mission in minutes.

Team Fortress, I’m assuming you mean TF2, was one of the very first games to have microtransactions. They aren’t required for play but they’re definitely there.

He’s probably feeling deja vu.

Cut Google Fiber off and it can be a separate ISP.

Cut the Chromebook and Pixel phone divisions off. thay can support itself with device sales.

go ahead and kill the projects they’re gonna abandon in the next few years anyway, don’t let them replace them.

I bought a commercial digital signage TV. No Roku/Chromecast/whatever, but the damn thing STILL has Ethernet and Wi-Fi and nagged me about setting it up on the internet. I’m only buying computer monitors from here on out.

I think the genuine answer is “no but they are closely related.”

As my junior officer Ensign_Crab pointed out, Ginger is a rhizome, not a root, but both started out as low ABV brewed beverages flavored with spices (ginger and sarsaparilla or sassafras respectively) that with the invention of the soda fountain transformed into soft drinks made by mixing flavored syrups with carbonated water.

Yeah both root beer and ginger ale were historically made via a brewing process, often brewed to rather low ABV because the flavor of the spices was mostly the point, and with the invention of the soda fountain it became typical to make them by adding soda water to flavored syrup.

You will get different things if you ask a bartender for a “ginger beer” or a “ginger ale.”

Possibly an interesting and useful bit of sci-fi, that pair of episodes.

We live in an age where we’re confronted with new and untested ways of interacting with other people and their intellectual works and having to ask ourselves what we’re okay with. Case in point: Deepfake porn.

Star Trek would often do hilariously infeasible things with the computer. Remember how far-fetched asking the computer to just create a new scenario in the style of a Sherlock Holmes adventure? We can actually do that now. How long will it be, with things like LLMs and generative AI, before we can ask a computer to simulate a living person and it works like it did for Geordi? Is it okay to do when you need to talk to an expert? Is it okay to form a friendship or relationship with that simulation?

The writers of TNG thought of this in the early 90’s.

Then abandon the platform as doomed.

Those are your options. Open one or more accounts on one or more existing instances as an ordinary user, run your own single-user instance to federate and defederate from who you want to, or GTFO.

I’ve seen people grousing about this topic since I’ve been here “uuh uuh what if too many defederations because tankies? uuh uuh…”

This happens on or to other platforms already. Either you get the “r/popularthing” vs “r/actualpopularthing” dichotomies where if you vote red you go to one and if you vote blue you go to the other, or if you’re politically extreme enough to be a problem for ad revenue you get kicked off the platform entirely and end up on the likes of Voat. Engagement algorithms already sort people into information silos, so each platform is already actually two or more that intersect only at right angles in the fifth dimension.

If pinching off the occasional Maoist or Nazi instance means I see slightly fewer reposts of the same news articles and memes everyone else reposts, I’m willing to accept those terms.

Something I think would be healthy for the Fediverse is for instances to be a bit more interest-focused rather than attempting to be general-purpose. I think that would knit a tougher non-political fabric with which to hold the fediverse together, then we can just pinch off the problematic extremists.

make your own instance then.

So? We’re federated.

Feels like there’s a very simple solution to that. “We can’t use free software, you get what you pay for. We’re not switching to GIMP.” “Okay, what about Rasteditor? It costs $99/year.” “Sounds good, get a license for everyone on the team.” And Rasteditor is just a fork of GIMP with a different logo and the subscription model just donates to the GIMP project.

At this point it’s the only assed Adobe has. No one who uses Adobe software actually likes it.

So far being a sh.ithead is working out pretty well.

It’s practically a sequel, they’re adding so much to it. And the original game is pretty good as well.