The Juicero was seriously a major point in my personal ideological journey. Around 2013, I was still very convinced that Silicon Valley (and VC-backed startups in general) were a source of innovation that could do a lot of good in the world. I was starting to question that a little bit because I had noticed that every new startup was described as “like Uber for <other thing>,” but I still largely believed that most SV startups were innovative and improving people’s lives, or at least had the potential to do so.

And then the freaking Juicero came along, and I was like, “What the fuck? Do these people actually have no idea what they’re doing? Oh my god, they don’t.”

Look, I’m not saying that if the Juicero didn’t exist, that I would be some Elon Musk fanboy right now. Something else probably would have woken me up instead.

But in this timeline, in this current universe we are in, the Juicero made me see things differently. No one wants to believe that they were changed by the Juicero… but I was. And I… I… I don’t know how I feel about that…

The way that they pulled off this attack is interesting from a cybersecurity standpoint, but we can’t ignore the fact that Israel had no way of knowing who was near the devices when they exploded. They very nature of this attack made it impossible for Israel to know how closely they were targeting the bad guys or how many civilians were nearby.

I’ve been loving RFF the last few months, it might be my favorite new thing I’ve found since I switched from Twitter to Mastodon. It also always shows you the artists’ fediverse usernames so you can follow them, and they usually have a Bandcamp link if you want to buy an album.

They recently said that they could use some volunteer help. I haven’t been able to check out what they need yet, but their matrix channel is #radioFreeFedi:matrix.org, I think that’s where they organize things.

I’ve found that, currently, this kind of works and kind of doesn’t. I’ve boosted a few lemmy and mbin comments from my Mastodon account, and it shows up in feeds just like you would expect it to. Unfortunately, the parent post of the thread only shows as a link to the lemmy/mbin thread, rather than showing the full text of the original post. So it’s hard for people to see the context of the comment.

Mastodon appears to see lemmyverse comments the same way it sees Mastodon comments, but the top-level post that started the thread is somehow different.

I’m hoping that this will “just work” when Mastodon gets quite-posting. You could take a Mastodon post, and then quote-post it into a community by mentioning that community’s name.

This would create a separate thread of replies, which is good. A person shouldn’t be able to suddenly thrust a bunch of community replies onto someone else’s post. So basically it’s what quote-posting is for, but sharing it with a community instead of just your own followers.

I also want interoperability between microblogging and threaded services, but unfortunately I’m a little skeptical about the account mirroring concept. Or, at least, I’d like more details about it.

Do users need to opt-in to have their accounts mirrored, like how they do with brid.gy right now? If there are a bunch of users with Bluesky accounts that don’t have Frontpage accounts, that would mess with the ability to have all comments showing up between the two services, and it would prevent some people from posting a comment on someone else’s comment if one of the commenters has not opted-in to have their account mirrored. Or, can a plain Bluesky account comment on Frontpage threads, but not start a thread?

I like the idea of being able to quote-post link aggregator threads to your Bluesky account, but I think ideally this would only require one account. Which would mean you could also use your Bluesky account to start a thread on Frontpage.

I would definitely pick it up – I was always curious about this game. I remember hearing about it when it first came out and I didn’t even really understand what the game was. It sounds like it was the perfect, quirky, in-group fanservice full of inside jokes for Dreamcast owners.

This is one of many reasons why I’ve been trying to buy physical PC games lately.

I found a boxed copy of the GTA Trilogy recently. It was for Mac, and had probably been sitting on a shelf in some office supply store for 15 years. I don’t even have a Mac, but I bought it since I figured that, not only would it be the original, non-remade version, but it should (hopefully) have the original music as well.

I haven’t opened it yet. I’ll probably post a thread here when I do. Maybe it’ll run in a virtual machine.

Same. And especially for a live service game, it’s just gone. If someone made some great 3D models and animations for an offline game, even if the game doesn’t sell very well, their work is still out there. But with a live service game, that’s just it. No one else gets to see it for more than a few days.

I also hate the fact that the dev studio will face the consequences of this, while whatever braindead exec with a master’s in bullshit administration will probably still be employed.

But at the same time… I can’t help but enjoy the spectacular failures of these anti-consumer products lately.

It’s good that no one is actually criticizing Mongolia for this – they are not really in a position to handcuff Putin, much as we would all love to see it.

Yep, that’s basically all of it. ActivityPub allows a reader to send messages back to the original poster. Those messages can be a comment, or a like, an upvote, a downvote, or a many others. That’s what ActivityPub unlocks compared to RSS.

RSS only goes one way: the reader can read messages from the poster, but not send any messages to the poster.

edit: if anyone is curious about what the “many other” messages can be, the list is here, under Verbs: https://github.com/activitystreams/activity-schema/blob/master/activity-schema.md#verbs

Technically, that is part of ActivityStreams, not ActivityPub. But there is a lot of overlap there, and ActivityStreams is a necessary addition. For example, downvotes on Lemmy are not part of AP, but you’ll find them in AS, called “dislike.”

I watched Batman: The Animated Series recently. Obviously still very good, I think everyone agrees with that. I don’t think I appreciated the uniqueness of art deco Gotham when I was little.

I also watched a few episodes of Animaniacs a while ago, and I definitely did not pick up on some of the jokes in that show when it was first on. :P

Man, AnandTech came from the earlier type of Internet, where independent media outlets were fully in control of their own presence on the web. (E.g. they were not a YouTube channel.) Even though they weren’t still independent for a while now (purchased by a publishing company in 2014), I’m sad to see one of the originals go.

I was watching a livestream of this game’s reveal trailer. The chat was excited at first during the cinematic trailer. Sure, it looked like a Malt-O-Meal Guardians of the Galaxy, but it still looked like it could be fun. Then as soon as they said “5 v 5 live service game” there was a giant, collective “oh nevermind lol” from the chat.

As someone who is not familiar with the Animal Crossing series, I first read this as Assassin’s Creed: New Hampshire.

They also fund the Epoch Times, a right-wing news outlet that is partially responsible for half of your relatives being absolutely insane these days. (That’s mentioned in OP’s link, and also in your wiki link, but I figured I should mention it for those who didn’t click through.)

Glastonbury, by Stirling Soap Company. They’re one of those small soap makers that focus on the traditional wet shaving community, but many of their soap scents are available as colognes. Glastonbury is only available in the spring, but they have one called Baker Street which is a good one, too.

I also really like their Bergamot and Lavender scent. It’s not available as a cologne, but they have it as an aftershave, and it still lasts all day.

Israel’s actions are appalling; that does not mean anyone should want a hard right theocracy like Iran to have nuclear weapons. I don’t even think it would serve as a deterrent; if anything, it could unite all of Israel behind Netanyahu. Scared people go further to the right. And remember: Iran’s government hates more countries than just Israel.

I love when anti-progressive people “take a stand” against California by moving to Texas, and then they move to the most famously progressive city in Texas.

Austin: For those who are stupid enough to relocate based on culture war bullshit, but not stupid enough to think that you’re hiring software developers and creatives out in the boonies.

This looks great. I was thinking about buying an Android ebook reader and a bluetooth keyboard in order to cobble together something like this for myself. But if this is less than the cost of an ebook reader by itself, that’s even better.