I was never, at any point, as much of a child as I was told I was.

Are you sure that you actually know how to browse the rooms? I just opened my app, and I see, just for some examples, Linux gaming, vegan, and pine 64 all having activity within the past hour or so.

I mean it’s no discord by any stretch, But you’re actually straight up saying that even the most active ones are 100% dead, there’s something going on with how you’re browsing and looking at the rooms.

I feel like one of the biggest communication problems with stuff relating to open protocols or fediverse stuff, is that no one knows the lay of the land, there’s no broadly held consensus of whether things are active or not, what the culture is like, and you end up with people making confident matter of fact statements that are just transparently not true based on cursory examination.

When Mastodon was new, reporters would just make matter of fact claims that one of its downfalls was that instances couldn’t connect with each other, even though that was called federating and just one of the most basic built-in features. Not that I’m the biggest fan of Blue Sky, but now that people are talking about blue sky, I’ve seen people just matter of factly claim that Blue Sky was 90% furry porn and rage bait. A totally outrageous claim, not even remotely aligned with my experience, but, just because there’s no settled consensus about what’s going on, there’s not really any disincentive for someone just coming in and randomly saying that.

Because it’s pointless.

This is like Marvel Movie brain except applied to OSs. This mindset suggests that the only conceivable rationale for an OS is that it’s tied to shiny brand names and commercial rationalizations.

Despite this insistence, numerous alternative OS’s do in fact exist and have been listed here. And the range of motivations extends beyond just having glossy icons for whatever the first 3 or 4 companies that pop in your head.

You have:

• experimentation and novelty/niche interest that don’t align with specific commercial interests (e.g. Menuet OS, TempleOS)
• user-oriented design philosophies with specific definitions of speed and useability (e.g. Haiku OS)
• study/teaching in academic context
• niche/emerging product categories (QNX)

If you are able to understand why people would have these kinds of interests, it’s the kind of thing that lights a fire in your mind, and for some people, sets them on a career, or opens up a major new interest, or leads to them having fun with projects that scratch their own itch, so to speak in ways that do lead to commercial applications (lest we forget that every FAANG has an origin story about how it started with tinkering in a garage). “Because it’s pointless” makes me feel like I’m witnessing that inner fire of curiosity and sense of possibility die in real time.

It doesn’t mean there’s no barrier to market penetration or no difficulty creating a kernel, but there’s so much more to the WHY of creating an OS than getting listed on Nasdaq.

This was a longstanding fediverse complaint, which was quite remarkable to me. It was described as a “missing” feature even though you never had this ability anywhere else let alone the fediverse.

If you get a new email address, it doesn’t bring your contacts or your history of emails with you. If you make a new twitter account, same thing. And of course, don’t even think about trying to port, say, your facebook stuff into a youtube account. But if the fediverse can’t, then it’s a dealbreaker.

If you truly want to channel the limitless depths of human creativity, give a Comment Section Skeptic ™ every fediverse feature they say they want. Then wait and watch as that creativity goes into action, as [insert new feature] is now the new dealbreaker. It is and always will be an endless game of whack a mole.

social hierarchy studies have primarily been done on lobsters and wolves

I’m skeptical. I’ll grant you wolves, but even then, wolves I feel are no more or less studied than a bunch of other species which are subject of extensive interest, especially primates, dolphins and orcas, but also lions, hyenas, meerkats, bees and ants. At least those are all studied well enough that we have plenty to pick from.

I appreciate your point though that its ideologically driven anyway and that it’s all moot and 100% agree.

It wouldn’t even matter if it was “right”. The idea of looking to wolves for models of ideal human behavior is wrong for like 17 different reasons, even if it were technically true as a description of wolf behavior.

P.S. why do AlphaBros specifically look at wolves, or lobsters, to instruct us on social hierarchy? There are so many other animals, those seem pretty random choices. And pretty far afield from humans. Wouldn’t you at least want something more proximate to us humans on the evolutionary tree? Heck, why not just use humans as a reference point?

And the original concept, as it pertains to wolves, is evidently not a thing. So if we’re just saying things, the software metaphor is as good as any other.

I mean if you are looking for a serious answer, it’s this. You may be able to find equivalences between US and Russian media, at the level of one instance for one instance. What you can’t find is an equivalence in magnitude. For every offense you find in the U.S., you can find the same in Russia but ten times as much, and ten times worse.

And to me, a test of whether you’re a serious person is whether you have the information literacy to understand that kind of distinction instead of whatabouting and Gish galloping it into the ground.

I think there’s a steelman version of that same argument that makes a legitimate point about how Russian disinformation does contribute to the escalation of tensions both in the United States and around the world, and I feel like not only are you not engaging with it, but you’re intentionally not doing so.

I say that because you appear to only be willing to address yourself to the completely watered-down version of the caricature argument, even when you’re in a thread that directly links to an article that makes some pretty direct points about the reality of actual Russian disinformation.

Like if you could just talk normal for a second, you might say something like, “oh in paragraph three of the article it says this. But actually that’s not true and here’s my source for refuting it.” Or even “well these are all true but I feel like it’s emphasizing the wrong things and here’s my argument for emphasizing a different thing.” Like just any signal, any signal at all, any whatsoever that shows that you’re in touch with the same set of facts. But you can’t go there, and so you’re chasing caricatures instead.

Woah, we even have auto TLDR! That’s how you know Lemmy is on the up and up. I was wondered how this worked in the years before Chat GPT, which I assume is still however it works now.

They are both carbon-based life forms. Which means that at a psychological level they’re probably identical. And there’s probably no difference whatsoever between the respective nations cultures, economic or political conditions, or their respective geopolitical interests.

If they’re living breathing creatures, and they both rely on carbon to form complex molecules that make up their bodies, it naturally follows that their countries have identical geopolitical alliances.

Agian I ask of Trudeau made the same claim, or the Prime Minister of New Zeeland, would you be making the same argument

Wouldn’t that depend on their particular geopolitical interests, which could be entirely different from those of Russia?

I feel like these questions are so absurd sometimes not because an answer is being sought but because it succeeds at the goal of degrading the quality of conversation.

Exactly. Putin is really concerned about student loan debt.

He says he wants blue team to win in 2024, but we are blue team and we hate him!

Well we’re off to an awfully bad start because this is about the shallowest bad faith caricature I could possibly imagine. Let’s put it this way:

• Putin absolutely has a propaganda strategy aimed toward the west that utilizes a number of tools and messaging strategies
• Among the strategies reported on, one has been to escalate existing divisions within the United States, with one example reported on being creating opposing conservative and liberal events and scheduling them at the same location
• Purin preferred Trump for his first term
• Putin preferring Biden can be politically damaging to Biden in the context of domestic politics
• a Trump victory could prove exceptionally destabilizing to domestic politics in the United States

I’m not even 100% saying I’m right, but every step of this is perfectly reasonable, it doesn’t rely on any outlandish assumptions, and communication about this isn’t helped by mocking people with bad faith caricatures and performative incredulity.

or escalate the war.

This seems to run contrary to everything I’ve read about Trump’s position. The first half of what you said is at least somewhat accurate. But the second half is contradicted by numerous reports from Trump that his approach would have been to “take a deal” and get out, implicitly with substantial land concessions from Ukraine. And then there’s the fact that both of them have profess to having positive relationships with one another and admiring one another.

It can be both - a terrible amoral system that concentrates wealth to the point that major world events are driven by wildcard personalities of rich idiots. And then, the rich idiots themselves.

I don’t know how privacy respecting it is but one well done AI search engine is:

https://search.marginalia.nu/

Right, and to your point, part of that is stymieing focused, direct action and ramping up of industry in the western world. So it makes perfect sense to be a global leader in every part of the EV supply and manufacturing chain while being interested in sowing division elsewhere so there’s no convergence of public interest and policy momentum that grows competitive industries. There’s no contradiction between those two things insofar as they serve China’s interests.

Sounds like the heydey of the Geo Metro, which got astonishing MPG for its time.

is one where our impact as private citizens is as close to nil as it can be

Individual choices aggregate into large scale consequences, and individual choices do matter at scale.