Jon Dubovsky @jond@mastodon.social

re: #spam
URL shorteners should be banned regardless
some forums already do that

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

—Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater

If you were born in 1980, you have an unusual quality: you will turn x years old in the year x^2. (In this case, you'll be 45 in 2025.)

You share this quality with people born in 1892 (who were 44 in 1936) and in 2070 (who will be 46 in 2116). Augustus de Morgan seems to have originated this observation; he used it as a riddle when people asked his age (born in 1806, he was 43 in 1849).

Polygon and the Verge are both Vox Media outlets. Vox workers are currently attempting to unionize and they've just announced a work stoppage. Don't support Vox until the union gets their contract and their demands or met. That means if you support BDG and Pat and all yr other polygon crushes then you won't go watching their polygon vids until Vox Union announces their victory

From :

"CORRECTION: Gizmodo originally stated that drug company Mallinckrodt had jacked up the price of an anti-seizure medication from $40 in 2000 to over $40,000 today. A spokesperson for Mallinckrodt emailed to request a correction that the drug costs $38,892."

https://twitter.com/Gizmodo/status/1136585123900604416

The YouTube/Vox situation reminds me of the challenges of fighting Twitter. Or really any of the current internet communications monopolies. https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/4/18653088/youtube-steven-crowder-carlos-maza-harassment-bullying-enforcement-verdict

Vox clearly wants to fix a broken system. But how can you hold YouTube accountable? It's a monopoly. If Vox pulled their YouTube videos, they'd be cutting off the source of their influence. Their best bet is to make YouTube videos criticizing YouTube, thereby making more money for YouTube and tacitly supporting it.

I missed this Microsoft blog post last month. Their data show that the FCC estimate of the number of Americans without broadband access is very low. FCC says 7.5% of Americans lack broadband, based on polling. Microsoft estimates, based on their usage data, that 49.5% of Americans lack broadband!

They make suggestions for how the FCC can improve their methodology.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2019/04/08/its-time-for-a-new-approach-for-mapping-broadband-data-to-better-serve-americans/

Firefox Containers are one of my biggest selling points of the browser, so I'm happy to announce my new add-on, 🦝 Trash Bear 🦝, which lets you open single-serving containers that get deleted after you close the tab. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/trash-bear/

hello if you still use chrome i gently recommend giving firefox a chance. i gave up on it a few years back but now that i'm using it again i think i'm here to stay. it's not perfect but neither is chrome, and it's actually beating chrome in speed in some areas these days

also google is about to seriously hinder adblocking extensions in favour of letting their own ads and tracking shit slide through

https://9to5google.com/2019/05/29/chrome-ad-blocking-enterprise-manifest-v3/

Apparently, The North Face recently defaced Wikipedia as part of an advertising campaign, further proving that having brands on the web is totally fun and very good

Are you an oil executive worried about the public image of fossil fuels?

No need to worry! The US Department of Energy has your back, referring to fossil fuels as "molecules of US freedom", and LNG specifically as "freedom gas".

I regret that I am being entirely accurate to reality.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/29/energy-department-molecules-freedom-fossil-fuel-rebranding

If you find yourself sitting in cars now and then, this might be interesting to you and help you prevent accidents.
So if you open a cars door from the inside, you open the door with the hand that's not next to the door. This means that you turn around you body which automatically turns your vision in the direction where other cars or bikes might come from.

I was taught this early on I believe, anyways this is the way I have always done it.

#dutchReach #bike

🖼️

do you like helping people?

a streetlamp with a “TRANS HAPPINESS IS REAL” sticker helps more people than a streetlamp with no “TRANS HAPPINESS IS REAL” sticker

think about it

https://imgur.com/a/VHU6bmG

Hey y'all, Fedilab is doing a poll about implementing a feature to see if someone blocked you. This is a bad idea and is only good for stalking people, it's private data.

Please vote no on it (this toot is an answer to that vote)
Boosts appreciated

This is remarkable: an amateur built a modest array of Yagi-Uda antennas, hooked it up to hacked digital TV chips and detected a pulsar. Not only that, they observed the pulsar continuously long enough to catch a rare "glitch" in action. (1/n)

Vela Pulsar Glitch Detected with RTL-SDR Based Radio Telescope

https://www.rtl-sdr.com/vela-pulsar-glitch-detected-with-rtl-sdr-based-radio-telescope/

The conversation with Todd from Purism was completely unproductive in my mind. In his view, there are only two possible options for moderation:

• Become a complete censorship machine with a slippery slope of who can or cannot speak

• Go by the jurisdiction users are in, hiding content illegal in certain jurisdictions and then removing content illegal in the poster's jurisdiction, for example a Chinese user's dissent against the Chinese gov't would be removed.

There are two problems that I brought up that, being that:

• Purism would be participating in the injustices of those countries

• Legal but harmful content would still be allowed, thus spreading harm.

I felt completely ignored when trying to get this across to him, especially that last bit. I also tried explaining to him that a slippery slope does not exist when you have set principles that you stick to within rules, but that completely flew over his head. It also ended with him basically telling me to solve the problem with a solution that works for every country everywhere and then get back to him. So, the block & boycott of Purism continues.

Doggo wants to play.

"people shouldn't have to CW $topic! $topic is nothing to be ashamed of!"

listen to us:
- we don't CW things out of shame.
- we don't ask for things to be CWed because we think you shouldn't post them at all.
- CWs are not the mark of that which should be kept out of sight.
- CWs are used so that people with particular sensitivities to a topic don't have to unfollow or block you if you post it.
- CWs do not narrow your audience; they broaden it.

we've had this discussion so many times.