I’ve never even heard of this before. Is it mostly a rendering library or is it a full game framework like Godot or Unity?

Wait they’re still there? How the hell are they still there?

And thanks to the AI customers you can’t afford it anyways.

Yeah, likewise. I’m upset about the terrorism of Hezbollah or Hamas, but Israel has quite obviously decided that two wrongs make a right and so is using this nightmare as an excuse to land-grab and settle scores, and the civilians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon are suffering for it.

Right now I could go create 30 sock puppet accounts to respond to this. Is that really a good thing?

Let government offer the service of “here is a way any human can certifiably identify themselves online” and let people decide what providers they want to give that info to.

If you want to use or run anonymous social media, that’s fine.

I don’t.

I know a lot of people are cranky about digital IDs, but realistically there’s no avoiding it at this point: we need real, government-backed, links-to-a-specific-human-with-a-birth-certificate unique digital IDs. Then service providers can (optionally) demand it in order to register, and can prevent you from creating multiple accounts, and can ban you from their service permanently, and can vouch for you to other services that you are indeed a Real Unique Human Being.

Old Casio watches managed to do it with just screws. We live in the future, I’m sure there’s a way to fasten a phone together waterproof with just rubber gaskets and mechanical fasteners instead of glue.

The problem is that always the economically cleanest approach is to add fees, which are political suicide.

Like, if you add a “disposal fee” to electronics, that creates incentive to build electronics that last long. But Ford chased Wynne out of Ontario Government using their e-waste fees.

The alternative is stupid bulky bureaucracy and regulation. Which voters say they hate, but their actions speak louder.

Carrots are politically better than sticks, but how do you offer a carrot for not doing something? Fee-and-dividend is supposed to do that, but now we’re at “axe the tax” under a fee-and-dividend model.

So maybe bureaucracy and regulation is the way to go.

Ban glue in portable electronics assembly? I’ll never forgive Apple for inventing that nonsense.

Require that any device that is E-Waste have a big ugly “this is e-waste” label on its exterior that end users are totally allowed to remove, but replacing the “this is e-waste” panel with something clean-looking must be at least as easy as replacing the battery.

Part of it is just today’s polarized political climate, especially since the popularity of the Fediverse is partially a backlash to reactionaries taking over Twitter and the corporate enshittification of Facebook and Reddit.

Everything is a war now, and solidarity and boycotts are basically the only weapons that small, independent actors have. So people apply “don’t cross the picket line” thinking to everything, even where it doesn’t make sense.

Want to act properly? Contribute money and labour towards your instances. Help them build better moderation tools so they can handle the flood of crap from Threads, and onboarding tools and better UX so they can steal away the Threads users.

Dumb. Federation is how we escape from every cloud-based service being a dictatorship of the person who owns the platform. That includes federating with privately own orgs to provide them an exit.

By all means make good tools to allow individual users to block Threads (or other private instances ruled by amoral coporations), but doing it at instance level is just dumb.

edit: also, number of instances doesn’t matter. Number of daily active users matters. Most users are on mastodon.social, mastodon.cloud, lemmy.world, hachyderm.io, lemmy.world, etc. And all of those are federating. The only large instance that is not federating with threads is mas.to

But did you die .gif

I don’t think you realize how unwatchably blurry VHS is. I can’t believe we ever watched those things now.

DVD is still a bit of a nuisance because of aspect ratios and they’re a little blurry because SD, but VHS is just garbage.

Parking structures are insanely expensive. Like, each parking spot in a parking structure costs like 30X what it costs to build a surface parking spot. It’s a crapload of concrete, and with climate change, concrete ain’t getting cheaper (concrete is extremely carbon-intensive, it releases CO2 intrinsically, not just from power-generation).

edit, since I’m getting downvotes and I assume this post is being read as an endorsement of city-destroying surface parking: The correct solution is just to not do parking at all except for extreme needs and focus on human-scale transportation.

It occurred to me the other day that the people who are Very Angry About Pronouns are literally Grammar Nazis.

A bird died for this.