I’d been on Reddit for 15 years, predating the Digg exodus. Actually, I find that my memories of the early days makes moving to Lemmy easier. Present-day Lemmy is already ahead of Reddit back when I started, both in terms of content and features/availability.

It’s good for this to have an airing, but can I just say that Singapore is privileged to have such a small-potatoes issue to be considered a political saga? Even by the standards of Singapore’s own history, this is tame: LKY’s condominium-purchasing scandal from the 90s was 100x worse.

I think that’s just how the US signs off on every meeting with world leaders.

Russia was always Turkey’s number one geopolitical antagonist; even in the best of times, a dangerous frenemy. Now, Turkey is probably the number one beneficiary of Putin’s botched war. Its main antagonist is defanged, maybe permanently, and it’s become a geopolitically indispensible regional power that the US and Europe desperately need to keep onside. It can dick around with stuff like hosting Putin visits, just to flaunt its own importance. Everything is coming up Erdogan.

Material degradation is a very serious issue for these perovskite cells, so it’s a bit concerning to see it brushed off with a “lol we’ll just have to see” comment. Also, these materials contain lead, so disposal/recycling becomes a significant concern.

The grim reaper is coming for old.reddit.com any day now.

Let’s all be grateful that Google handled GChat and its successors so incompetently. There was a window of time in which the world might have gotten hooked into using Google for instant messaging, which would have been a privacy disaster. Lucky, they fucked it up.

Given TikTok’s precarious situation, it’s no surprise they’re going out of their way to bend to the whims of US politics. Face it, there are a lot of Republicans ready to justify banning TikTok by pointing to teenagers getting abortion advice from the platform.

Sure, just like you can run an SMTP server that blocks incoming connections from Gmail. It’s not illegal, obviously, but it goes against the spirit of an open, interoperable internet.

To me, the argument for accepting Meta into the Fediverse goes beyond gain and loss. If you run an Internet service, you have a moral obligation to make a good faith attempt to interoperate with anyone using the protocol as intended.

By a similar token, if you run a mail server, you should accept SMTP connections as far as possible. Yes, you can ban spam, but you should not ban connections from Gmail even if Gmail is a privacy-destroying bad idea. By all means, allow individual users to set up their own block lists, but this should not be done at the server level.

Shouldn’t it have been the Odyssey? By the time you unsubscribe, ten years have passed, nobody recognizes you, and your wife is fending off suitors.

The counter argument is that standardized open protocols are important. So if a big corporation moves to adopt a standardized open protocol, it’s a good thing for everyone, even if said corporation is sketchy, evil, or whatever.

It’s kind of like Microsoft’s adoption of XML for Office save files. Yes, they had ulterior motives, and the result isn’t completely satisfactory for third parties who want to parse the save data. But it’s still miles better than the previous situation where things were completely closed off.

It’s GPL compliant, so there’s no problem. It’s a good thing for companies to explore a variety of business models that are FLOSS-compatible.

How was syncing done in Usenet? It has a very similar decentralized model, and I don’t recall there being problems of data loss due to desyncing between servers.

That’s Microsoft’s playbook. If you don’t offer a better product than your competitor, pull out every dirty trick in the book to undermine them.

And one of these days, someone will rediscover the magic of having a uniform editing environment for manipulating text in multiple different contexts.

Emacs. Still the best way to edit any kind of text in any context.

Spez won’t agree to the API demand, because it’s a matter of ego and credibility for him now. His whole big shot tech-bro CEO shtick depends on ramming this through, like his hero Elon.

So I guess we’ll see if there’s anything interesting in the corp data…

They’re okay for niche applications, but the use case is pretty narrow: situations where you want high efficiency solar harvesting, but only for a limited period (because the material degrades). Oh, and you can’t use them for (say) cheap solar powered kids’ trinkets, because they contain lead.

Yeah, I tried for a long time to use DuckDuckGo, but honestly the results are worse than Google, even given the present day enshittified state of Google search. And it eventually just became too annoying.