Melmi @ melmi @lemmy.blahaj.zone

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2 yr. ago

The $193 million figure is misleading because the majority of it is stock, so that number isn't cash and is just an estimate of value since there isn't even an open market for the stock. The IPO will show how much it's really worth I guess.

He was paid a little over a mil in actual salary + bonus, which is still too much but not nearly as ridiculous.

Do you have any source for your claim that comments on the Internet are public domain? It's a common sentiment that anything posted on the Internet is public, but I don't believe it has any legal basis. Often websites have a ToS saying that anything you submit belongs to them in perpetuity, but programming.dev doesn't have that.

For it to be called bad implies any sort of intentionality at all, I think.

Reality just sort of is. Games are attractive because they have rules, they make sense. They're designed to be fun. The universe isn't failing at accomplishing those goals, it just never had those goals to begin with.

You can learn to master the rules of D&D. It's designed to be understood and played. Whereas reality is emergent, built up from so many nested systems that we don't even understand how they all fit together yet. We're all just trying to get by within it.

My instance has downvotes disabled, so if those comments are downvoted to hell I wouldn't know. As a result they show as reasonably highly upvoted on my end. Even if those opinions are controversial, the number of upvotes they get (plus the fact that there's several such comments, even here) show that there's lots of people who share the opinion. We just happen to be in a community that tends to be biased towards Discovery, so those opinions are in a minority here. Go to other communities, and suddenly people will be complaining about "woke Trek" left and right and getting majority support.

People came at you because you responded to a meme about bigots complaining about wokeness, which even you seem to concede exist, to make a complaint about how legitimate criticism gets construed as bigotry—which the meme in the post is not an example of. It comes across a little like a self report. It's like if you make a post saying "Nazism is bad" and some conservative randomly responds "this is hate speech against conservatives". You were talking about Nazis, not conservatives, but their response comes across as them admitting they're a Nazi.

That said, people came at you really aggro. It's easy to get caught up in labeling people as bigots and then get carried away in the dunking. I don't want to handwave away that fact.

The microblog side of the fediverse is really hostile to scraping or indexing of any kind. On the one hand, I get the idea of safe spaces and not wanting your data to be public, but then why are you on an instance that federates openly?

It seems to me that anything that's being federated out by ActivityPub is public by nature. If you don't want it to be public, you should use an allowlist, or just don't post publicly.

I guess I just assume that everything I'm posting is being scraped and archived forever, because there's no way to ensure it's not. It's ironic that the fediverse is so hostile to this fundamental fact of the internet when ActivityPub is basically designed to just hand out information to whoever asks. It seems like there's a conflict between the protocol and the culture.

I do agree with Ada in broad strokes. The Fedipact is just a petition. Meta doesn't care if you sign it. And it's not binding either—you can sign it and end up changing your mind and federating anyway, or you can defederate without signing it (like Blahaj).

It's still interesting data though. It may not represent every instance's stance on Meta, but it does reflect the stances of those that sign, and suggest that they're more active in the discourse.

You're right on the money with it being about admins and not users, too. Users aren't even allowed to sign it, only mods and admins can.

It's hard to extrapolate too much just from this data, I think.

That said, my read on it: Mastodon is way bigger than any other fedi platform, and with popularity comes outsiders to fedi culture and politics and people who just don't care. Also, a lot of the big instances want to federate because they have more of a growth mindset, so they when they see Meta they just see more potential users.

It's interesting though that Mastodon is the platform that would be most affected by federation. We here on Lemmy don't have great interoperability with the microblog side of the fediverse, so we're less likely to see Threads activity.

Interestingly the source you linked says that they do have an in-house web index, they just use it alongside other sources rather than using it as their only source

Incest doesn't inherently cause genetic disorders, it just increases your chance of being born with recessive genetic disorders. Most of those disorders are mutations, and if the Garden of Eden is so perfect there probably aren't genetic disorders to start out with, meaning incest is fine from a genetic perspective. All the genetic disorders would be mutations later down the line. Maybe they're punishment for the original sin or something, to fit it into the themes of the story.

Harry Potter spaces are not unique in creating structure. There are tons of fandoms, with millions of members. It's not the first modern fandom by any means either. It's not like if HP suddenly disappeared there wouldn't be any fandoms of equivalent or larger size to provide "structure" to vulnerable people. Lots of them have more queer people in them too, and less transphobia.

I'm not sure what makes Harry Potter uniquely digital in your mind either. I'm sure you can interpret it as being about that, but I don't think that's the interpretation most people walk away with. Even if it really is a lens some people use to understand the Internet or whatnot, I certainly don't think it's the first story to be used in that way... There are a lot of stories that can claim that title that far predate Harry Potter, many of which have fandoms of their own.

I just don't think HP is an essential backbone of culture. It's important to a lot of people, for sure. And I can't imagine what it's like to realize that the creator of a work that's so important to you is a terrible person. That has got to be a really shitty situation to be in. But there are other fandoms out there. There's other great fiction, written by authors who won't weaponize your consumption against minorities. It's not a dichotomy of either you embrace Harry Potter or you must write your own.

I don't think it's particularly hard to find authors who aren't actively spreading hate, actually. And I don't think Rowling's level of transphobia is a particularly specific purity test.

Plus, Rowling takes an active role in promoting hate. She's loud about it. She has a big platform because HP is so popular, and I think that makes her especially dangerous.

She certainly seems to put her money where her mouth is too.

I love to be able to reclaim works from their hateful authors, especially cultural ones. I'm a big fan of Lovecraft, and that dude was hateful. He makes JK Rowling look sweet and kindly. But it's a lot easier to reclaim the narrative and make it a part of our culture when the author is literally dead.

Lovecraft is a cornerstone of modern fiction, despite being a bigot. We can acknowledge how he was a terrible person, even analyze it, but we know that our enjoyment of Lovecraftian fiction isn't benefiting Lovecraft's hateful causes, especially because the work is public domain.

In contrast, JK Rowling is not only still alive, she is active and vocal about her hatred, how she spends her money towards hate, and how she considers support of Harry Potter in light of her hate to be support of her vile views.

Consumption of media is not a passive action. Even if you do not actively give any money to the franchise, promoting the franchise encourages other people to do so, and then their money goes to fund hate.

I understand that HP is important to a lot of people. It was a cultural phenomenon. But we aren't leaving it behind just because JK Rowling said something offensive. We're leaving it behind because the author is actively using our consumption to fund hate and campaigning to deny rights to trans people.

There are plenty of other forms of media, new and old, that aren't being piloted by known bigots. If you want a cultural backbone, using one that is currently controlled by a bigot will probably make a lot of trans people feel unwelcome at best and at worst, if HP continues to be a cultural phenomenon on a large scale JK Rowling will use the platform and the money to further the oppression of transgender rights.

Ending prices with 99 is manipulative. We accept it from businesses because we're conditioned to, they're businesses after all! Being manipulated by businesses is just how our current society operates, part of the environment we live in. But if an individual offers us something for a price ending in 99, we're much more likely to be suspicious of it.

The article actually explicitly mentions this, and suggests you list things for 25 under instead of 1 under, for example, as it won't immediately trigger recognition that you're doing this.

All the better to psychologically manipulate our fellow people in pursuit of profit, my dear.

I'm reading between the lines here and I think it's actually talking about adaptation rights, and not selling the entire IP? Otherwise this doesn't really make any sense.

Except if the guard manages to rip a hole in the bag from the inside, they can destroy the bag and everything inside it will get scattered across the Astral Plane. Pretty bad for the guard, but better than a slow death being suffocated. Plus you don't need to eat or breathe on the Astral, so they could live there indefinitely.

I guess it existed in the DIS era, starts to get phased out by the SNW era (we see Nurse Chapel wearing white but not Dr. M'Benga), and then is phased fully out by the time TOS rolls around.

At least until the LD uniforms come, and they partially reintroduce it in the form of white boots.

It's definitely true that some people with legitimate criticisms get misread, but I think it's inaccurate to say that it's "a lot more common" to see legitimate criticism construed as bigotry than actual bigotry.

Just look at this thread, there are a bunch of people whining about queer characters being forced in your face just for being a part of the show. The bigoted fans come out in force with talk of "STD" (ugh) all the time, which is what created that expectation in the first place.

I feel like dismissing all the bigotry out there (including in this very thread) as "it's just the internet" while dwelling on a few dumb comments you read in the past (probably on the Internet?) is disingenuous.

I'm confused how you got to this conclusion because in my opinion, Discovery is pretty much a masterclass in treating their queer characters as normal. Stamets and Culber's relationship is core to a lot of episodes, but the fact that they are gay is not—I can only think of a single time the word "gay" is even said. They're full characters in their own right that just happen to be in a relationship. Queerbaiting would be if they hinted at a queer relationship but didn't show it, but they show it plenty. They aren't perfect either, they literally almost break up. They're whole people.

And Adira and Grey... Adira has to come out, yes. I don't know what's wrong with that. You seem to think it should just be a "normal thing" that isn't discussed, but coming out is an inevitable part of the non-binary experience. People in Star Trek aren't mind readers, and seem to still assume binary pronouns by default. So it's only natural that if someone wants other people to use they/them pronouns for them, they have to come out, even in the future. I think the fact that Adira was able to come out in a single brief scene and then it's never mentioned again is great and not unnatural at all.

And Grey's transition is alluded to as something that happened in the past, but is literally never directly mentioned in the plot. I don't think the word "transgender" is ever uttered. He seems like the perfect trans character for you, his transness has nothing to do with who he is and is never directly mentioned but he's just accepted for who he is. What's wrong with his portrayal?

The fundamental problem is that all this data needs to be hosted somewhere. P2P systems have the issue of persistence: either posts only stick around as long as the people who posted them keep their server online, which is then a burden on anyone who wants to be active in the community, or everyone shares the responsibility for hosting, and then what happens if someone posts CP? Is it just mirrored across the entire P2P system, and each person has to individually root out the CP or just be okay with hosting CP?

Torrents work because you have to actively join a torrent. But discoverability is handled from the outside, through trackers. Trackers choose what they want to host.

Tor or really I2P are the closest equivalents, but they work because everything is encrypted going through them. It's a privacy thing. With social media, everything is public by design.

Climate change is indeed the perfect example, because if we bothered to do anything about it on a societal scale instead of saying "oh well, use paper straws I guess" we'd have had a chance at stopping it and it wouldn't be so apocalyptic.

But instead, we've consistently done very little because it's always seemed too far away to matter, but by the time we start to feel the effects it's basically too late. Realistically, I don't think it's about anxiety necessarily, I think people just don't want to change their way of life. It seems like everything might work out, and little changes like carbon taxes and paper straws might mean we can keep going normally and feeding the consumerism machine like normal while driving everywhere.

As an aside, the heat death of the universe is utterly irrelevant, we'll be dead long before then. And if not, then that will be such a glorious existence for humanity that I'd be happy to die with the universe itself. I just would rather not die stuck on our own rock, choking on our own emissions that we refused to do anything about.

You should ideally be updating manually so you can handle any issues as they arise and you don't wake up to a silently broken system. Manual intervention is occasionally required. Usually it's associated with a breaking change that's announced on the mailing list, but sometimes it'll just happen.