More cool detail about a modern jet airliner than you thought imaginable all delivered in a cool 3D animation.

https://youtu.be/NZLbTuBDhJg?si=mdgytNATo5Tz9ltx

on mastodon/microblog part of the fediverse people typically put politics posts behind content warnings so yeah that kind of already exists

I made this post because demographically with early voting we are potentially seeing a historic gender divide in voting, it seems women in general want Trump nowhere near the whitehouse at this point.

We will see how the numbers shakeout when all the votes are in but if the numbers keep going the way they look like they will, and Kamala Harris wins, what people will remember is that Trump and Jdcouch fucked with women and got wrecked for it.

If this happens I am sorry I don’t have any other way to describe it other than “sexy”, but I am referring not to an attraction or leering towards any particular woman, rather the nebulous blob of feminity that is a whole range of lived identities and expressions of gender coming together to say fuck off to a fascist is the thing I was trying to call sexy. It is an expression of collective depth of caring interwoven with a practical expression of power, “badass” doesn’t really encapsulate it.

It is totally reasonable to find voting (not for a fascist) sexy?

the big appeal of BlueSky is the initialization of the interface. It defaults you to “Following” rather than “Discover” and isn’t jamming a ton of ads in your feed. There’s basically no algorithm. Its a very basic service, rather than an engineered mess. More akin to Facebook or Twitter from back in the '00s, before monetization ruined them.

The big appeal of bluesky is that it is in the early stages of monetization that hinges on effectively enclosing a commons so that everybody chooses the product and everything else effectively dies off. The next stage will come, which is when the enshittification happens.

Do we honestly believe there won’t be enshittification because the priorities of the current development in the near future is focused on benefiting users?

…or to put it another way, do you set a mouse trap with food a mouse finds miserable to eat? Do you think that first bite of cheese accurately depicts the reality about to unfold?

Here is some more food for thought, given the fact that large western social media corporations and the investors behind them have the equivalent power and cash of small nation states… why all of a sudden the interest now? If Bluesky is a genuine vision of the future why did all these prestigious, highly paid people with more power and R&D resources at their disposal than any of us could hope to ever have…show up AFTER the fediverse already did the R&D, created the vision and took the impossibly hard step of breaking ground and fighting up hill against the network effect and a generally dismissive tech press?

Seriously threads and bluesky are false promises, the rest of the fediverse might grow and innovate slowly but it is genuine growth on genuinely community owned platforms.

Bluesky and threads are visions of the past wearing the future’s clothes. They are investor backed and fundamentally and irrevocably for profit ventures.

Do not be seduced into wasting your time in stuck in the past, this is a perfect reminder we already know where it will end no matter what their precariously employed devs say.

Look I love lemmy/reddit style social networks and I don’t disagree with the shallow reasons for why twitter has a character limit but there are legitimate and interesting reasons for character limits to posts. Is it better? probably not but sometimes less is more.

deleted by creator

Bluesky is vc backed by investors, it is a false promise that I am sure a lot of people working on the project believe, but it is a false promise all the same.

Bluesky is in the part of its lifecycle where investors tolerate no return on their investment in favor of drawing more people in. That is the relevant difference between Bluesky and other social media.

There are cool parts to Bluesky but it is absolutely a false promise of a future the fediverse already provides (however imperfectly). It is also full of “liberal” sheep who tell themselves they think differently but are so locked into the mindset of the way things are that they NEED their social network to be owned and operated for a profit by people orders of magnitude more wealthy than them.

Bluesky will end up essentially the same as all investor backed for-profit social networks, it will grow into a toxic, centralized (or in this case pseudo-centralized because of the moderation system), shithole where only popular accounts get any engagement with their posts. Mark my words.

well we better start eating then!

lol are they trying get eaten for lunch by tools that generate static websites easily and without BS?

Inkscape recently also got decent multipage import and export for multipage pdfs and honestly it works great!

AI as far as big tech is concerned is simply a way to “fix” search engines so that they don’t do the awful crime of fundamentally segregating ads from search results.

it is literally the whole damn point of shoving AI down everybodies throat…

Is there anything left to microsoft that makes sense at this point? Maybe the physical doors to the microsoft offices still function… after you watch an ad?

Thanks for making me throw up in my mouth

Damn I needed some good news bad, that is fantastic!

bites lip, damn Switzerland…. that is hot as fuck

I don’t think you’re talking about the Outlook I am talking about because I’m talking about the Outlook Mail and Calendar apps, not the Office ones. And that’s fine and dandy about proprietary software and all but frankly I haven’t really seen any non-proprietary mail apps that look aesthetically pleasing. But that’s besides the point, it’s a matter of personal preference when it comes to visuals after all.

… I am not just talking about little details and preferences here? Windows products are increasingly broken and dysfunctional at every level. Features don’t work, features are randomly changed and broken, nothing is consistent, core features of the computer are made opaque, any given Linux package manager is about 1000000 times more trustable than the ad ridden, sketchy, bloatware filled Windows store where you have to hunt for actually useful and trustable tools. One of my old bosses had his work windows computer update to a new windows OS without really asking him (technically it did, but then it just kept scheduling an OS upgrade until he missed it). It didn’t break his computer, but he had thousands and thousands of hours of cad drafting work on that computer and Windows could have EASILY fucked up in the update process, or the old software we were using could have EASILY not been compatible. Windows basically flipped a coin for whether they were going to utterly grind my bosses business to a halt and cause utter panic or just have the computer update. This is not “user friendly” software design, this is not “easy to use software made by an extremely competent software company”.

I’d also like to add, nowhere did I ever mention using laptops. All my experiences are with desktops that I had a hand in building from scratch. So I’m not sure what you’re even getting at with those assumptions.

…because for 99% of people who are going to be using a computer for light email, research and text editing work they are going to be using a laptop? I don’t really understand what about my argument doesn’t apply to windows prebuilts that have good driver support for linux…?

It’s somewhat concerning that you have such a strong obsession over the topic that you would go and whether intentionally or unintentionally offend people and I hope that you are a much more pleasant person to converse with outside of this topic or even this site.

I think it is completely reasonable to be upset when someone is condescendingly foreclosing the possibility that something can happen when the evidence they are using for it is outdated and they refuse to update it in their heads. The only response at that point when someone refuses to re-evaluate their position and continues to “speak for the group” when they really don’t represent the group anymore is to make it even clearer that they don’t speak for a group, and I am sorry if my method offended here, I believe your heart is in the right place but please stop trying to tell us about how stupid and unwilling people are to learn new things. Please please please just keep your mouth closed, it doesn’t help anyone, period. Even if you were right, there would be nothing to change in our actions as it would just be hopeless to even try?

This isn’t 2015, a good Linux distribution is as polished, easy to use, and easy to explain to a newbie computer user as Windows is. If you aren’t ready to accept that shrugs I mean fine but don’t push your outmoded narrative into conversations that might actually convince someone who doesn’t know about Linux that it isn’t worth checking out as a serious alternative. You are actively doing damage to the future of this software movement by dismissing it offhand like this.

Outlook is atrocious what on earth are you talking about? Just trying to use it at work it is so frustrating and the UI is horrendous for everything. Truly even basic things like trying to read when a meeting actually starts just from looking at the calendar is a headache, and because all of this is proprietary unlike with Linux, tough luck, that is how things are and you can’t do shit to change it. Neither can an experienced computer user trying to help you.

I am sorry you really don’t have an accurate handle on the state of things anymore, I think you are stuck in your ways and stressed out by life and you don’t realize that emotion and lack of mental plasticity is leading to you assume everyone else is as stuck in their ways as you (including your future self when you are able to feel less overworked and stressed).

Windows is atrocious at this point, search doesn’t work and purposefully confuses new computer users about where is being searched and what is being searched. Ads pop up everywhere in the UI and will continue to spread like a terminal cancer in the UI.

Search on windows also just sucks and takes ages with the default settings (an inexperienced computer user will be using).

The file manager on windows in most marquee windows programs like word, excel etc… all open up an entirely different file manager half way through the process of saving a file in perhaps the most insane UI pattern to keep from the mess that was Windows 8 (even though I actually really liked the core idea at first).

Windows is buggy AND windows is constantly playing head games with its user by trying to force them to use the edge browser. It is very very confusing to a new computer user what the hell is even going on.

I mean, Windows illegally changed the entire operating system countless people had without getting consent because it would look good for their numbers.

Seriously you are WAYYY out of your league if you are going to claim a nice Linux distribution on good hardware with good driver support (such as some dells or thinkpads) is categorically wayyy worse than trying to use a windows laptop in 2024….

…please get your head out of the sand :)

I mean do you want to get into the massive security vulnerability at a tactical and strategic level that Microsoft’s co-pilot represents? This is endgame for business security, Windows is in a worse spot than it has been in probably a decade at least and they deserve it. IT people and corporations have to seriously wonder if Windows even cares about following the law, which makes trusting Windows for the software relied upon by their company a complex question indeed……

It used to be that Linux was better ideologically because it gave you agency over your computer, but now things have gotten so much worse that the reason is practical and no longer ideological.

Bringing it back to the whole thing about Linux, can you imagine how frustrating it would be to have to help debug a user’s Linux installation when they already need help with installing a browser add on? I work with tech and Linux on a daily basis and I already find it frustrating doing it for myself (fuck Nvidia drivers). No way am I gonna recommend it to someone else.

Are you honestly going to still claim at this late date of 2024 that a decent popular linux distro is actually going to be MORE of a headache than Windows?

…?

Have you tried Windows recently?