Take the passive-aggressive nerd approach:

1. Start a niche online movement that only cares about one aspect of computing and convinces people all their problems are caused by your pet peeve

2. let the company dig its grave

3. create a FOSS alternative

4. sell a premium version for businesses (it includes phone support and management-friendly marketing matetials)

5. congrats, you are now the de facto standard software in your field

I think it’s just the utopia image with colors inverted, which is a visual gag that I’m loving

Here’s the journal article itself

This whole thing stinks of advertising. They use a sample size of 24 people. The results are underwhelming: “Each disease cohort concordantly demonstrated increases in the NAD+/NADH ratio but did not reach significance individually” (“when we massaged the numbers, the result we wanted popped out”). Looking at the graphs, it looks like the upper half (highest baselines) of the patients worsened over the 12 week study.

My favorite lines?

“The objective of the Phase 2 REPAIR-MS and REPAIR-PD clinical trials was to investigate the effects of CNM-Au8” and “CNM-Au8® is a suspension of faceted, clean-surfaced gold nanocrystals” and course:

“Clene Nanomedicine, Inc., funded this study.”

None of the above. This study is as fishy as they come

So we’ve extracted so much gold from the earth there’s not enough left for our bodies?

I know this probably isn’t the case, but the image of extracting precious metals from human tissue solely to squeeze every last drop out of nature is hilarious to me. Plausible, but hilarious nonetheless. Mine owners leaving toxic lakes in the middle of Parkinson’s patients when the earth runs out of gold.

shit stash

“Gluten Free Vegans” at that. OP doesn’t dislike animal rights, they just specifically dislike people with a potentially life-threatening allergy standing up for animal rights.

Let’s be honest though, they’ve just written both off as “overly restrictive fad diets followed by people who annoy me by talking about their lifestyles”

OP is the human embodiment of a conservative stand-up comedian, or as Tim Heidecker put it

I honestly don’t get the parallel here… They both annoy you when they talk about their respective “thing”?

You clearly used one of those adapters for a regular toilet. If you do it right, and get the new plumbing installed and an actual bidet, you can have confortable temperature water spraying on your dirty rosebud.

Also no, I don’t own one… yet. I’ve just looked into it.

It’s terrible for secure/private communications, it requires hacks that violate the TOS and EULA to modify the client to get rid of ads and change themes, it’s not FOSS, and it locks features behind a paywall…

But it does what skype already did, so I’m glad we all have to migrate to the new fad site that strips even more of our dignity and privacy every 10 years that’ll die anyway because it offers nothing and has a terrible business model.

The original version constantly behaves differently at runtime

It actually doesn’t, since rand() is deterministic.

When no seed value is specified, rand() is automatically seeded with 1 at the initial call within any program It then uses the previous output as seed for the next, so it will always have the same output sequence

A lot of these replies have high hopes for 5 year olds

It’s like if Twitter, Threads, and Bluesky all were the same behind the scenes and gave you access to read the posts and follower the on the other sites. “Mastodon” is just the collective term for all those sites that are linked together.

Also you can have a lot more control over what you see and who you interact with, but you don’t have to if you just want to login and look at memes. You can also run your own site ti have even more control, but, once again, you don’t have to.

If you mean you just don’t get the appeal of the “microblogging” format, or the culture that arose online surrounding it, I can’t explain that. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea.

As someone who’s not familiar with federated services, I don’t know what to base my instance decision on.

As I said elsewhere, many people just want a place they can go to share memes, news, opinions and misinformation. But on the other hand, there are plenty affiliated with interests/hobbies/identities/ideologies where you can to share topical memes, topical news, topical opinions, and misinformation (as long as it’s on topic).

Snark aside, I’m on two instances: one for socializing, and another for my interest in cybersecurity. So I’d start with: do you want an experience that’s more typical of social media with a more general pool of people, or do you want to focus on a specific interest but with the understanding that entails a smaller userbase and a slower feed?

If the latter sounds best to you, what communities do you find yourself most active in on other platforms (e.g. reddit, lemmy, facebook, twitter)? If not, we can find a relatively well-populated instance that’s likely to have staying power.

Your point about Joinmastodon is too true. It’s a terrible starting point for someone who just wants to test the waters: “I have to learn about an entirely new type of digital networking AND commit to an instance? I bet Bluesky doesn’t have all these layers of obfuscation.”

It would be easier if the community would just agree that there is a default instance with open enrollment—preferably the biggest and mosy popular, or at least one that’s maintained by a group with staying power—and just send all the newbies there. If they want to dig deeper, nothing’s stopping them, but that way their first impression isn’t analysis paralysis.

To your other points:

1. for discovery, there are the usual methods: trending, hashtags, the search, and people sharing their usernames elsewhere.

2. I assume that people who are making the hard decision to leave the site where they know all the people they want to follow already are, are also prepared to accept some amount of loss to that pool. It happens all the same whether it’s Threads or Mastodon

I mean, that’s fair, but it’s not relevant to usage. I go to mastodon.social, I sign up, I use. At no point is the concept of federation necessary in that process, that’s for the owners/operators/maintainers to figure out.

If people want to know more, they will seek out that arcane knowledge, but it’s not something someone who’s just there to satisfy their FOMO ever needs to know.

Bluesky wasn’t as confusing as Mastodon

I’m so tired of this bullshit. I went to the mastodon.social; clicked the big button labeled “create an account”; read and accepted the rules; filled out a form asking for my email address, a username and password; confirmed my email; and could immediately post.

How the fuck is that confusing, that’s standard fucking practice. Jesus fucked on a pike.

Very nice! Jsyk, you can also use Shift + Ctrl + V for the one handed paste (likewise Shift + Ctrl + C to copy), or Shift + Insert (and Ctrl + Insert to copy) works too. If you’re on Windows, right clicking in CMD/Powershell pastes, Enter copies anything highlighted, and Ctrl + V work as usual… Ctrl + C copies too, except when a command/script is actively running, in which case it sends the halt signal, so use it at your own risk.

I usually stick to the Ctrl + Shift shortcuts, but it messes me up when I’m trying to copy from firefox into my terminal and I accidentally bring up the devtools instead

Here’s my list of “maybe somedays” that I’d love to have all run off a single machine:

1. Hash cracking. Red teaming isn’t my career yet, but it would be nice if I had the tools ready when I get to that milestone

2. locally served “Cloud” gaming. I’m tired of being limited to a single desktop when I could be playing skyrim on my phone, but I hate supporting *aaS models—I want to own my cake and eat it too.

3. VM server. Basically turn everything else into a thin client. Also, what @[email protected] said. If I ever want to do realistic training, and not just stick to hackthebox indefinitely, I’m going to need to mimic a full network’s worth of computers with multiple VLANs. Or have multiple different OSes emulated to do all kinds of pentesting.

4. Finally start those Mastodon/Matrix/Lemmy/every other federated app instances that I’ve been right around the corner from hosting for ages

5. media server

6. Websites and web-apps, even if only locally served. Possibly have copies of wikipedia and archive.org and other highly usefulness-to-power-consumption ratio sites for when I eventually go off grid

7. maybe email… maybe. I hear it’s more of a headache than it’s worth, though, so maybe not

8. home IoT server. Handling all the functionalities so I don’t have to stream security cam footage to some random company’s untrustworthy server across however many hops along the way

and probably a few other ideas i’ve had over the years that I can’t think of at the moment.

Could I accomplish all this on a couple powerful towers and a half dozen smaller/cheaper/more power efficient devices? Certainly, but this reduces cables, network overhead, and weird edge case problems having that many devices on a single-maintainer network causes. Instead of dealing with updating, upgrading, and hardening a dozen or more devices, this would give me a single point of failure that I can build resentments against whenver it has a hiccup.

No one’s gonna throw shade at the ≣ key? Aka the Menu Key?

It’s next to useless. It’s almost always used to open the right-click menu, which is specifically for GUIs and based on the mouse position… so why not just right-click? What silly person is using their mouse except to bring up the context menu?

I’d say the same about the Super Key (❖) Aka The Windows Key, but I got i3wm on my laptop and I am loving having a GUI without needing to use my mortal enemy: the Trackpad. Plus it’s a minor time-save above moving windows/clicking menus with the mouse; still doesn’t apply to Menu when your finger’s already hovering over the RMB.