So I just got back from a Menards run and I've noticed something fascinating:
Menards has always had a lot of store brands. But they're really pushing a new food brand called Marcella. Stuff like coffee, jams and jellies, prepared foods, sodas, etc. A lot of it is fairly unique - I bought a maraschino cherry cola on a whim and it was pretty great!
The weird part? They're pricing this in-house stuff higher than name brands. The soda was a tad more expensive than the Sprecher's next to it!
"The best thing that can happen is that they die a natural death and, in doing so, create a minimal amount of harm to the community. That's ultimately how this is fixed."
This smells like a real story. The headline says “mystery fundraising firm,” but there’s no evidence of a fundraising firm. There is a Delaware LLC, apparently a ghost or a shell—no address except a post-office box—that has received $3.1 million in Trump campaign cash.
@JamesGleick Trump has more than $600 million reasons to hide money: $450 +/- million to the State of NY & another $90 million owed to E. Jean Carroll. These totals don't include the interest that's accruing every day on those 2 obligations OR the money he owes multiple lenders waiting in the wings for the court monitor to dole out pmts on outstanding debt.
The registered agent for #LaunchpadStrategiesLLC is a big company that acts in this capacity.
No point in moving your identity if your content server shuts down unexpectedly. I'm actually working on nomadic content over ActivityPub right this moment. Centralising it destroys everything I've done with nomadic identity over the last dozen years. We have clonable identities (identity and content) right now with live synchronisation. If your server cert expires or goes offline right this second, go to your clone and nothing has changed. You have all your content, friends, and settings. Everything. I'm not giving this up and neither should you. Content-addressable mechanisms don't work because the url changes if you edit the object. Every project has completely different URL paths and object-type mappings.
I'm currently convinced the only way to solve this is with a mapping table, so that /item/something on my system can be found at /object/something on your system (or whatever). We also have 30-40 different object types that most other projects haven't even considered. This is the only way to make them portable. Just store the object in the mapping table instead of the local path mapping for that object. Done. The portable url could just be $apgateway/$did/$resource-id. If my software supports that kind of object I'll redirect to where we store that kind of object. If it doesn't, I'll just return the portable object.
@smallsees@erlend@dmitri (also the spec indirectly explains how to build a microservice that could run for $1/mo on a little heroku-style platform you could point myname.com at-- we can hopefully provide a prototype soon and, if people demand it, add more explicit detail about how to build one's own or adapt the idea to other form factors?)
“Artificial intelligence” (#AI) is the wrong term for the many services for which the term is being used. These are not generating intelligence. They are generating text or images or music—that is, information.
But it's not real information. It's ersatz* information. So when you hear "artificial intelligence,” I suggest that you substitute “ersatz information.”
This is of a piece with the discussion between Melanie Mitchell and Alison Gopnik that I just posted, at almost the precise second you posted your comment 😂
Currently working on an important first update to Tusks that will address many of the early pain points/limitations. Should be submitted for App Store review no later than tomorrow night.
This is the #Scotus headline at talkingpointsmemo.com. I don't know why it isn't the headline at the NY Times and the Washington Post and everywhere else. It’s certainly accurate. The Supreme Court is granting itself powers not anticipated by the framers, who thought Congress and the executive branch had a role to play.
Six Republican Justices, already embroiled in scandal for receiving millions in “gifts” from oligarchs with business before the Supreme Court, overturned the clear will of Congress today to legalize bribery-after-the-fact. Or as they call it, “gratuities.”
Justice Jackson, dissenting, has some choice words: (1/5)
@JamesGleick
This is very similar to the bump stock ruling that willfully ignores the plain mean of the law passed by congress and declares that bump stocks are not yet illegal.
With this court, the words written by congress have no binding power
Nebula gift cards are now available ... and you can pay for them with iDEAL!
I have had so many people tell me over the years that they would sign up to Nebula, but only if they could do it via iDEAL. Now that it's available, I am expecting half of the Netherlands to sign up by the end of the weekend.
iDEAL and Giropay are NOT yet available for normal subscriptions, but you can "gift" yourself a subscription if you'd like!
@notjustbikes
Okay, I overreacted. Mistake, not malevolence. Sorry for that. I still have to wonder: how is it possible that a mistake in the referral url changes the product? I guess it says something about me that I am unwilling to give companies the benefit of the doubt, but I've seen too many dark patterns to do so.
I think I'm becoming utterly disillusioned on tech stuff lately. I'm hugely aware of the "you like stuff you grew up with" and "you have less patience for stuff as you age" biases, but even so...
Streaming is shit.
Searching is shit.
Researching is shit.
Shopping is shit.
Troubleshooting is shit.
My phone is shit. Autocorrect, touchscreen keyboards, Bluetooth, AI, Android Auto, Spotify, all shit.
It's not even capitalism or consumerism, I'm just tired of arguing and fighting with things I own.
And here's the thing: None of this stuff makes me angry. Annoyed, sure, but I've been around computers since I was a toddler, and I have to solve shit problems like these for myself every day.
What makes me angry is: What about all the folks who aren't computer people? How the absolute fuck do they survive in a world where you can no longer function as an employee, a family member, any sort of citizen without encountering this stuff?
Those people are fucking heroes, and I'm angry for them.
This shit is why, when banks announced they were going to stop processing physical checks and a whole wave of elderly folks protested, I understood. It's one of the last fleeting vestiges of anything in their lives that still makes sense, and arguing about the cost of supporting obsolete systems is an absolute red herring.
It's not about the money. It's not about the tech. It's about kindness, and being fucking human to each other.
Should people convicted of serious crimes be barred from voting permanently (as in many Republican states) or should their rights be reinstated after they are released from prison?
Which crimes do you consider most serious: falsifying business records, tax fraud, or rape?
@JamesGleick 1. Please do 5 pushups and 10 situps. 2. Lets do the Montreal cognitive test now on live TV. 3. What are the names of the hosts of this debate? 4. Here are some questions from a grade 10 US history exam...5. When is your wife's birthday and what are the names of your children?
@petrescatraian I don't have any plans to visit the Balkans at this time, but if I do, I need to have a reason to visit.
Nobody wants to watch a video where I complain about all the things wrong with a place they've never been to. I would prefer to focus on something that is done well, and then mention some of the things they could do better.
I really by and large have mostly lost faith that anything short of a miracle will get #ActivityPub to where I would like it to be, and the forces working against success here are just hard to even look at
I support the groups that are trying to define a way forward, and I suspect in many, many ways the battle is lost until and unless one of those efforts succeeds well enough to define a better way forward, and there's no way to know what that would look like or if it is even possible.
@hrefna There's a lot to be said for worrying about the compatibility layer later. It's such a bizarre situation ... the 2022/2023 adoption had so many people with deep distributed systems experience, and while there are some very encouraging projects (Letterbook for example, and the data portability stuff Lisa Dussault has been working on) the overall ActivityPub ecosystem has really failed to capitalize.
But I feel burnt out. Refraining from making these arguments again. 😬)
Wrt. FeatherPub I'd recommend organizing such that you keep decent level of control on evolving the spec. In a similar way to e.g. ATProto take a greenfield approach, learn from the past, be open to feedback, but otherwise make decisions in smaller dedicated group or alone.