wheats

>I’d be more interested in making sure that such technology is never required for basic living

Cell phones are a requirement for basic living. That's a large part of why it matters.

>It's difficult to track infant mortality across countries, because countries have different standards for reporting infant mortality. My understanding is that our ranking there is in significant part an artifact of measurement.

I hadn't heard that before. What specific artifacts are you talking about and do all organizations in the U.S. always use different standards than all other developed countries... have you seen any studies that control for those?

I've always heard this is the measure chosen specifically because it is the easiest to track as nearly all infant deaths are reported in developed countries and death doesn't lend itself to nuanced definitions.

The insecurity is an issue, sure, but also just the fact you are turning over a crucial human activity to be far more strictly regulated. A "no fly lists" could be extended to "no drive lists" for instance; turning off the cars that don't pay vehicle registration, etc.

>as the individual its so hard to get any meaningful change

When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run,

There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;

Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one

But the union makes us strong.

I agree with everything you said, and also want to point out Twitter doesn't really have much of a "core experience" shared across its entire userbase either. Trending topics and promoted tweets on Twitter are largely determined by your language, location, who you follow, and interests Twitter has determined you have. You and another Twitter user are going to see very different content shown to you even beyond the things you subscribe to.

>"The best thing I did was become the shameless type of person who actively tries to create/join/combine social circles. It pretty quickly put me in touch with other people who do the same, and my social circle grew naturally after that."

Any advice? That's a hard thing to do!

>"planned, organized, or arranged in advance (often of an event or situation intended to seem otherwise)." - Oxford English Dictionary

Seems to me it's the very definition of staged. They arranged all aspects of the route in a way that typical driving wouldn't allow and then selectively released information about how it went. Seems unlikely Musk's intended readers to know how the actual drive went when he tweeted "Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot"

The only real argument that can be made here is some variant of "all demos are staged and everyone should have known not to believe the car can actually behave that way outside of a demo"

Well, it would be application dependent of course. For instance at that price we are talking about a machine that was purchased because it needed to have 1.5TB of RAM and channels able to take advantage of it. I would imagine it indeed could be more than twice as fast if everything being done is cached in RAM instead of having to reference a disk. We are talking about having 4 monitors simultaneously display 8K video editing, or heavy database workloads you usually wouldn't see on consumer PCs for machines like this.

Has there been any word on a timeline for the MacOS Steam version?

>streamline most/all of the features in DF

What features did they streamline? I thought they just replaced the ASCII graphics with sprites and changed some hotkeys?

Someone correct me if I am missing some nuance here but I think the two MacBook options aren't contenders for best laptop running Linux. The drivers simply don't support basic things like the touchpad or wifi (at least not without extensive reworking and a modified kernel). Perhaps in some years Asahi Linux will be functional as a daily driver on the newer ARM/Apple Silicon but it's definitely a hobby laptop right now, and not close to being "best laptop for Linux".

This is also true of Mastodon. If you join an instance and change your mind you can switch instances and take all your follows/followers/posts etc. with you.

In both situations it is a major interruption to the sign up process and forces you to confront what you want out of the platform before using your account though -- I just wonder if there's anyway around that, Reddit seems to have decided there isn't one.

>"Auto-assign a server"

So right now I am on Mastodon as if I am going to create a new account. Here is the list of approved servers I am being presented to choose from:

masto.nyc (for people living in New York City)

poweredbygay.social (LGBT+ server)

metalverse.social (server for metal music genre)

bark.lgbt (lgbt, furry server)

climatejustice.rocks (climate activism)

etc.

A majority of servers (including the largest ones capable of handling new users) are for special interests or otherwise have unique communities. Is the solution to hide this fact during sign-up and randomly assign only to most generic of instances?

I want you to be right here that there is a solution, but hiding what instances are or that they have special purposes seems to remove a lot of the point of Mastodon.

I remember when Reddit would default new users to a handful of "default subreddits" when they first signed up, but ended the practice because it typically destroyed these "default" communities while also hiding the actual purpose of signing up. Now Reddit (one of the largest sites on the internet) does what Mastodon does and forces new users to choose before using an account.

>"onboarding isn't as much a priority"

I hear people talk extensively about how difficult it is to get acquainted with Mastodon and how their onboarding is a big part of that problem.

What exactly is the problem? What solution does that problem have?

It seems to me that the issue with federated instances is that the first thing you need to do when you join is to choose an instance which is a huge choice. Mastodon starts off by explaining how federates instances work and then gives you a list of popular ones to choose from. What else should they be doing to decrease the friction here? The documentation exists and I doubt making it mandatory would help. Is it possible to make onboarding easy when learning about the federated server model and choosing an instance is an inherently difficult task?

What specifically does everyone think Mastodon is doing wrong here? Is it possible for an ActivityPub/federate instance model to replace something as big as Twitter?

Gettr, Parler, Truth Social, Hive, Tribel, Post, Cohost, etc. etc. etc.

Apparently the decentralized stuff does matter because Mastodon is by far the largest Twitter clone and that's its defining feature.

Where did he claim this? I have never seen him make any claims except that impressions are down on seeing spam (i.e. there are still bots but fewer of their posts are being displayed).

Maybe a really unintuitive system for ranking too? Like make it unclear why some posts are ranked higher than others, and why some are somehow greyed out even though there isn't an obvious way to downvote or report content. Also make it so you have to manually minimize the top reply in order to see the second most popular topline reply because there should be absolutely no limit to seeing the amount of subreplies.

As the blog post says non-responders do tend to have different opinions on average than responders. Typically they do try to demographically determine who those non-responders are so they can adjust and increase the weight of that group proportionally to their limited response. This is how most polling works in the real world and it does provide better accuracy.

I've played about 100 hours of Factorio and have often wondered if it's approaches can be generalized beyond the game. Does anyone beside the poster above believe they are?

Harvard, Georgetown, and Colombia.

OK let's go, give us your top 3 favs.

>moving to a Mastodon server with an admin with their own fun and unique ideas about moderation isn't the tea.

Well, that's supposed to be the benefit of Mastodon, isn't it? Every platform has moderation rules and owners/admins, and every platform will have these things change periodically. Mastodon is built around the idea that you can easily migrate your data to a different instance without having to leave the platform if you disagree with how it is being run. You can even be your own owner/admin of an instance if you feel strongly enough about it but still be on the same platform as other users you follow.