There's a very legitimate chance that Donald Trump could be convicted in multiple cases of multiple crimes and still win the presidency.

The implications of that are terrifying.

We're early adopters. Early adopters have a higher tolerance for (and ability to deal with) things like bugs, confusing UI, uncertainty, and probably continual change for the short term.

But hey, someone's gotta do it. The end result of this will be an established community and a more polished product. Over time, more and more people will show up as this place gets better and better, and Reddit continues to worsen. (Everyone knows that old.reddit is going away, it's just a matter of when.)

It's hilarious to me that South Park has been on the air long enough that they had to essentially apologize and admit they were wrong about their edgy climate change contrarianism when reality started catching up.

The fake outside has such a postapocalyptic feel to it.

Is this a legitimate question? Seriously?

It's funny that we never see headlines like "The rich already have lots of money. So why are they so upset about proposed tax increases?"

Have you all not seen Interstellar? Obviously the fifth force of nature is love.

The classic tactic is known as EEE (Embrace / Extend / Extinguish).

It's not impossible to imagine a scenario where in the future, if the Fediverse is thriving, a seemingly good-intentioned corporation chooses to Federate its own instance on its own hardware. This opens up the capacity of the network even more and makes it more accessible and less intimidating to a broader audience. This is the Embrace phase.

Then comes the Extend phase, where they dedicate a lot of resources to improving their technology and platform and capabilities. They may add some functionality that is not defined in the ActivityPub standard, but it seems really cool or useful, and so a lot of people switch to it, and it becomes the de facto standard place to go on the Fediverse. Everywhere else is a ghetto that doesn't have Feature X.

Eventually, the corporate site, now the de facto, wants to continue to build on its capabilities, and adhering to an open standard is only a liability, especially given that the only people left on the Fediverse are unmonetizable weirdos. So they announce that they're going closed. The majority of people on the platform don't care because it's where most everyone already is. This, of course, is the Extinguish phase.

So yeah, it's certainly a possibility that could come to fruition. The kind of scary part is that to begin with, everyone could have the best intentions. But corporations are amoral and driven by profit incentive, and historically, that need to drive growth and profit has led to staggeringly similar decision-making (see Twitter and Reddit as examples of that). And so even if a company comes in with seemingly truly noble intentions, eventually the need to turn a profit has a high likelihood of leading to the fate described above.

Stable Diffusion Web U by Automatic1111 is pretty excellent for doing image generation on your own hardware.

its unfair on both sides because boy children aren't allowed to have anything fancy, and are only seen as what they can offer to society as opposed to being people in and of themselves, while girl children are seen as only for being pretty

This is a great example of what people mean when they say that the patriarchy hurts everyone.

There were multiple El Nino events during the period of 1982-2022 and yet none of them come close to 2023.

I love that "wait until the enemy is drunk to attack" is totally a valid military strategy.

It worked for George Washington against the Hessians!

And getting into a car with a stranger

Is getting into a car with a stranger a crime?

If the cops ever find my Uber history, I'm in trouble.

From the article:

Melissa Gira Grant of the New Republic contacted Stewart, using the email and phone number included in the lawsuit. He denies having sent that request, pointing out that he is already married, to a woman.

Person whose name and phone number appears in lawsuit is contacted, denies making a request, is married to woman.

Yeah, super crazy fucking reality here.

Yeah, I've certainly found myself subscribing to any and every magazine that looks even remotely like it could be interesting. Getting inundated isn't a problem around these parts just yet. But the volume definitely has gone up recently.

Just imagine if he hadn't hitched his wagon to the S.S. Trumptanic. He could be working a comfy legal/political analyst position at Fox News or CNN and not have to worry about losing his license, his credibility, his money, and his freedom. Oh well.

Because of course he did. It's like he's choosing to do the worst possible thing at every single step.

Productivity has a long way to fall before it gets back in line with wages, so I don't think workers should be too concerned.

Judging by the downvotes, it seems Terfs are unwelcome here.

You could take that as a sign.

A couple shitheads in this thread. 😂

Reminder that you can click on a person's username and then block them pretty easily!