Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast.

  • 4 Posts
  • 43 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • The only time I’ve seen a super conservative person change their beliefs was when two of their fundamental beliefs came in conflict with each other and the conservative side became a problem: An empathy-free asshole I’m acquainted with had a grandchild with that was immunocompromised (no idea if it was permanent or what caused it) when COVID hit.

    He wore masks everywhere except his house. He told me that that the people at his church “insulted him” and “practically kicked him out” for refusing to remove his mask. He basically made the decision at that point in his life that maybe these people weren’t the best people after all and he stopped going to church.


  • I’m going to take a guess here and say that the majority of evangelicals (which is the largest block of conservatives right now) do take issue with boob jobs. They also don’t like it when girls cut their hair short or wear non-feminine clothing, to give other related examples. At least, that’s the evangelicals here in Florida that I know.

    There’s varying degrees of just how much deviation from their cultural norms are allowed (I’d argue that’s what defines how “conservative” they are). This is why conservatives can get extremely upset when LGBTQ+ people are allowed to be themselves in public… Because it normalizes them.

    Conservatives know that if it becomes normal for their kids to see/meet gay dads/moms, trans people, or other non-binary people on a regular basis the very definition of what they believe to be “normal” will be swept right out from under them in the minds of their children. The very foundation of what they believe won’t be passed on to the next generation.

    That’s why conservatives are obsessed with children “being exposed” to LGBTQ+ topics/people in school. They know that if their kid grows up around completely harmless LGBTQ+ people that their kid will just naturally start to believe that these people are harmless (because they are), normal, and “no big deal”. That’s their worst nightmare!

    I’d go so far as to suggest that it is impossible (today) for someone to claim they’re a conservative while simultaneously claiming that LGBTQ+ people are born that way. There’s nothing conservative about that (it’s beyond cognitive dissonance). Furthermore, it goes completely against the Bible’s teachings that women are property! Property can’t just up and change itself into a man/actual thinking person!


  • I don’t think Google cares if the Fediverse succeeds or not. All they care about is that it can be indexed and people will be able to show Google ads on their instances.

    Google doesn’t have a Reddit equivalent or even any other social network competitor (anymore; they killed them all). They explicitly chose to exit that entire concept of products.

    The only reason XMPP mattered to Google at the time was they were trying to compete with Apple for messaging on mobile devices. XMPP meant that Android devices using Google Hangouts/Chat/Gmail could chat with users on other platforms/services while Apple’s chat app could only do SMS.

    I guess what I’m saying is that Google is mostly irrelevant from the perspective of the Fediverse other than the fact that it can index and maybe give priority to discussions of certain products/topics like it does with Reddit currently.



  • The majority of trips taken in the US in cars is 3 miles or less

    This statistic is true but incredibly misleading. Firstly, a huge chunk of those trips are trips to the supermarket or other shopping which is not something you’re going to do on a bike. You can only fit so many groceries in a bike trip… Even with a trailer. (Aside: I wonder if frozen foods would even make it safely all the way home in the South if you loaded up a bike with a trailer and had to travel 3 miles?)

    The second reason why it’s misleading is that it includes trips after you’ve gone to work. So you commute to work: 41 miles. Actually, you stop at Starbucks on the way and that’s only two miles from your house so that counts as a single-destination car trip. Then for lunch you take a short trip from the office to a restaurant/fast food place. That’s a single-destination car trip.

    You go out to dinner some nights at a restaurant 3 miles away. That’s a short trip that certainly could’ve been done on bike but are you really going to get the whole family on their bikes to show up at the restaurant all hot & sweaty for dinner? In the South you’d be so sweaty it’d be worthy of taking a shower and in the North you’d be trudging through snow, freezing your face off.

    Then there’s the fact that the weather doesn’t matter when it comes to cars. Rain or snow is no issue: You’re still going to the supermarket but you would not make that same trip on a bike unless it was an emergency and you had no other option.

    The reality is that while the majority of trips are 3 miles are less it’s also true that the majority of trips are not trips you’d want to make on a bike.

    There’s another problem with that statistic: The majority of people in the US live in big cities! I wonder how much that statistic would change if you removed big cities/metro areas from the data. My guess: “<3 miles” would jump to “<10 miles”.

    I live in Jacksonville, FL and we have two supermarkets that are ~5 miles away (in different directions) and we have bike lanes! Nobody uses them. It’s just too fucking hot! For about 9 months out of the year it’s >90°F with ~90% relative humidity (in the morning; late afternoon it can drop to a mere ~60% when it’s not summer! haha). The only time of the year it would be comfortable to do something like ride your bike to get something done (as opposed to just for exercise) is December through February. Any other time it’s just not realistic unless you plan (and have the time) to take a shower afterwards.

    https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Florida/humidity-annual.php

    It also rains pretty much every single day in the afternoon during the summer and sometimes off/on all throughout the day. Rarely rains at all in winter though so that’s a plus I guess.





  • Building online communities takes time. Migrating from one site to another takes a little less time but it’s still a long-term thing.

    It’s not so different from moving a retail location. Your store is moving from address A to address B down the road. You put up a sign at the old storefront telling customers, “it’s just down the road!” with instructions to get there and yet businesses that do this see massive sales drops. It’s not uncommon to lose half or three quarters of your customer traffic in the first three months after changing locations. It usually takes a year or more to stabilize to a new normal.

    I see no reason why the migration of communities from Reddit to the Fediverse will be different since this type of migration is based on basic human behavior. We need to view it as a new location getting a great big lucky bonus surge because of people angry at our competitor and not some on/off switch.

    The key is to maintain quality at the new location so the “customers” start to realize they’re getting a better experience here than they did over at Reddit.







  • I second this. I haven’t got a certification in like decades but an accessibility certification sounds fantastic.

    There hasn’t been an IT certification I’ve seen in forever where I was like, “yeah I can’t just go and learn that on my own” but one that’s all about accessibility does sound like something I couldn’t just learn on my own… since I’m not disabled/blind and don’t know anyone who is.

    What I really want is to learn about accessibility testing. Oh man that’d be like having a superpower! With a skill like that I’d be useful to literally any and every FOSS team that exists!

    Aside: I am blind in one eye so I’m one accident away from actually being blind some day. I should learn this stuff now just in case!





  • You’re bringing up a very specific problem with the FDA that can be easily fixed with the same sort of legislation that prevents congressmen from becoming lobbyists for a number of years and talking about it like it’s an existential issue. It’s not.

    The FDA does incredibly important work preventing disease outbreaks and unsanitary food for all Americans. Perhaps you yourself are a snakeoil salesman that hates how the FDA prevents you from selling bullshit like it’s real medicine?

    Not only that but the FDA has the most strict ethics body of any Federal agency. If there’s even a hint of something unethical going on with a clinical trial the whole thing is basically cancelled. Everything must follow not only the letter of the law but the spirit as well.

    There’s plenty of Federal agencies that have weak oversight (e.g. ATF, Secret Service) but the FDA isn’t one of them.