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mainstreemm

3 karma · joined December 15, 2020

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mainstreemm··on Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
Under the new Administration Twitter will assuredly ban anyone who doesn't appropriately mouth the narrative. The bans are already picking up steam, and have been since the election.

Trump: gone. Khamenei? Still tweeting about how America is the devil and the Holocaust wasn't real. Where's the explainer under this tweet [0] telling me that this information is disputed wrongthink?

0 https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/1321494146989907969?r...

mainstreemm··on Donate to Signal
I had a bad time with this a little over a year ago and stopped using Signal over it.

If my phone was off and I used Signal Desktop in the meantime, when I turned my phone back on the sync would often take as long as half an hour, with my phone buzzing for each message received during the duration in which I was online.

I contacted support and, well, it's a free product, what do you expect?

I stopped using it after I received a text message from my then-fiance about a medical diagnosis and couldn't call her back until Signal stopped overloading my phone. Awful. Purged from my device and I never recommend them anymore.

mainstreemm··on A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize
It's OK, once Google gets a union then you'll lose your 600k TC job and get moved back down to the 250k job because you haven't been at the company long enough and promotions and pay ranges can be based on tenure because that's more equitable.

Your responsibilities will be the same, though.

mainstreemm··on How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress
I'm too young to have used it, but I bet Borland C++ was nice, too. And I bet it was more work to configure Emacs to write C++ in the 90s than it was to just use Borland. But which one is still around?

I wonder if it's more time wasted when you have to change editors every few years because of changes in the funding model of the corporate patron of the product and relearn how to use the entire environment with "sane defaults" versus creating some custom keybindings that you like essentially one time and then using them for 30 years in an editor that has a license and community that makes it unlikely to suddenly cease to exist.

People act like there's all this extra work to using software like Emacs over corporate IDEs, or GNU+Linux over corporate OSes, but I contend that it is merely different and better-documented work. The corporate environments just make more promises, and then everyone is surprised when the promises are broken.

mainstreemm··on Starting Sunday, cable companies can no longer ‘rent’ you the router you own
Congress needs to pass a law so this stops being a political football under control of the Executive. You'll know if all the fuss about Net Neutrality was empty rhetoric if the Democrats don't propose any legislation in the next session. It's my controversial opinion that most of the debate around this issue at the policy level is political theatrics based more on partisanship and personalities than material differences in proposed and enforced law or administrative policy.
mainstreemm··on Covid-19 is 10 times deadlier for people with Down syndrome
Abortion is not optional to the baby.

I was a late-life child. High risk for Down's. My mother didn't get the test, which could've introduced more problems. She believed I was already alive, because I was, and I was therefore sacred to her, and the outcome of the test would be irrelevant to her choice. Notice in all of this, I didn't have a choice.

I'm glad she didn't abort me. If I don't want to be alive now, now it's my decision.

I guess you can keep arguing that killing unborn children diagnosed with Down's isn't eugenics but my perspective is pretty heavily informed by the fact that I'm alive thanks to my mother being bothered by the idea that she might kill me in utero if I had a developmental disorder.

I'd like to see you explain the position that a baby diagnosed with Down's should be aborted to someone with Down's, frankly.

mainstreemm··on Covid-19 is 10 times deadlier for people with Down syndrome
Could you please provide a citation for this claim? It's fascinating if true, but I wonder which societies did this and what documentation there is for this practice. My understanding was that prior to the 20th century child mortality -- and mothers dying in childbirth -- were both common enough as to be practically mundane, or at least, as mundane as any death ever is.
mainstreemm··on Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas
The Midwest has that too. But it also has unions. :)