If you talk to people about homelessness, they will readily admit they just don’t want to see it. If go to any cheaper grocery store you definitely are rubbing shoulders with people who use foodbanks. Food insecurity doesn’t go away just because you have a roof over your head.

The rub is a foodbank in a grocery store will attract the more visible “unreliable access to showers” type of user, which would be unacceptable.

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Honestly, I’d be more curious what topics where the media does nail the nuances of. Are there any at all?

If he’s someone that’s normally good at being funny - that is good at finding humorous observations and wording things that get people to laugh - then I’d say he’s messing with you.

I would mess with him right back by acting like I’m very seriously trying to understanding the joke and ask increasingly dumb questions until he realizes that yes, I knew exactly what he was doing. Or a knowing smirk if that’s too much.

(Yes this comment is very revealing about my childhood)

This might not be what your friend is going for, but I smirked slightly and this is how I interpret it:

I particularly like jokes that take something absurd and launder it through the structure of things that do make sense. Everything in your friend’s joke is factually true. It’s structured as a logically consistent argument.

And yet it is completely nonsensical. No one has ever thought that windows make something move. It invoked a slightly confused response in me, which is why I found it funny.

It’s not a great joke, but I might tell it to feel out someone’s sense of humor plus whether they pick up on that I’m doing so. I think the analogy to Windows makes it a weaker joke, but I would give that as an explanation just to mess with someone a little.

The layoff includes Mary Kirby, who’s been a core writer in the Dragon Age franchise since the first game. Saw takes that the layoffs are just eliminating multiplayer positions, but that’s not true.

I’ve long suspected that Dreadwolf will make or break BioWare. Since it’s following the same script as Andromeda and Anthem - endless delays, no public progress just lots of b-roll and concept art - I don’t think development is going well. ME: Legacy might have bought BioWare some breathing room but I can’t interpret this as anything other than death throes for the studio.

BioWare is dead, long live Larian and Spiders?

Specifically Endless Dungeons, which is a spiritual successor to Dungeon of the Endless and comes out in a few months.

A little while ago, I read an argument that Traverse City, MI will be the next Portland. I think that’s right. There’s a lot of outdooring within a day drive, and it’s pretty affordable.

Your main downsides are summer wildfire smoke will presumably be a regular thing going forward, and winters are cold with lots of snow thanks to lake effect. Michigan politics are interesting, and Traverse City is in a historically red part of the state - but I think that’s changing.

500k will definitely get you a good house unless you want something extremely new or right downtown. That particular listing is also one block away from one of my favorite breweries of all time.

Is there any actual analysis this went down as written? This sets off two eyebrow alarms for me: 1. AI doing something revolutionary without serious issues and 2. clean cut police work, which never happens (at least not anymore).

Honestly I’d put money down the police caught him by chance and went backwards to find a good explanation for how. I’d also be highly skeptical of an AI system that actually catching drug dealers without also catching like everyone else.

You might interested in the slowcore genre, notably the band Low.

Embrace, extend, and extinguish (EEE) - We don’t think they can. If anyone can explain how they technically would, please let us know. Even if Meta forks Lemmy and gets rid of the original software, Lemmy will survive.

It doesn’t start out with maliciousness. The rank and file technical staff at Facebook aren’t evil. Facebook understands the value of top tier tech talent and top dollar buys you smart people.

The initial federation is rough, but the problems are resolved surprisingly quick. None of the doom and gloom comes to pass, and Facebook consistently acts as a trustworthy actor. Their employees aren’t really different than their open source counterparts. They make good faith contributions to open source codebases. Their collective experience with distributed systems proves useful in solving growing pains as the Federation grows.

They eventually start to make proposals to ActivityPub. There’s outrage but no one can come up with good technical objections, so they are approved. The doom and gloom didn’t come to pass, and looks like it never will.

Facebook doesn’t need malicious intent for what’s going down. It slowly, maybe quickly, becomes the dominate actor in the space. Facebook is pouring money into making Threads the best it can be, and what’s wrong with them trying to build an audience?

Thread’s improvements set an increasingly high standard for what people expect. More uptime, cleaner UI, more responsive API calls, more personalized frontpage algorithms, higher resolution videos - more and more features. More and more cost. Even people who kneejerk reject Facebook recognize how much better their site is. There are still important reasons to go with Lemmy or Kbin over Threads, but FOSS projects have never been good at making their case in ways random-not-technical people can understand, let alone why they should care about them.

After a while, Facebook starts walling people into their platform. Starts with little things like how Reddit added video and picture hosting to replace Imgur et al. It’s not malicious, but rather from TPMs who are under pressure to increase engagement. After a while what else is there? Just don’t turn the heat up too many degrees at once.

It’s wrong to think of Facebook as a uniquely bad actor. This isn’t 90s/2000s Microsoft with blatantly transparent EEE aims. There have always been bad actors. There will always be bad actors. There are bad actors with us right now.

Facebook needs to make money, and they won’t do so by directly charging users. There’s only one path forward for Facebook in this, and it will come at the expense of its users and everyone else in the Fediverse.

Build something useful, then put up walls around it, and then exploit it for profit; the internet’s monomyth. You don’t have to read the writing on the wall, but it is there. Federating with Threads is signing your own death warrant.

If the Fediverse experiment is going to survive, it needs to be able to withstand these bad actors. One of the ways it can do so is to recognize and reject them. Facebook has so many resources and so much power and we don’t have to run the experiment to know where this will go. It is important to explicitly say “your goals do not align with what we are trying to build, and therefore we will not voluntarily interact with you.”

I don’t have a medical background, but my suspicion is the process of formulating a thought, deciding what meaning you want to convey, and then settling on what words accomplish that is far more complicated and delicate than we give it credit for. I suspect any sort of issue can wreck the whole process, which might explain why really good communicators are so rare.

For myself, ADHD medication really helps slow my brain down and thinking things through before opening my mouth. Turns out that’s an important part in (properly) verbalizing thoughts.

FYI https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/399 There’s a userscript so it’ll probably make it in as feature in the not too distant future.

The defining, and exciting, feature of the Fediverse is it enables instances to try out different strategies to things like moderation. Duplicate communities is a side effect of that, but I think it will settle down. I’m expecting there will be a lot of small specialized instances for related topics, and people will broadly subscribe to communities on the instances they like.