Hmm, after a quick Google - I vote for Slice. That’s what you call a group of lemmings. A slice of lemmings.

When you look at someone else’s life, you only see the Highlights Reel. You don’t hear about all the boring in between moments, their struggles with imposter syndrome and insecurities, their relational arguments or troubles with their family, all the BS.

Life isn’t about keeping up.

It’s a parlor trick, magically coming into existence for a fraction of a moment in this infiniteness of time and space. The best thing we can do is cherish the miracle and squeeze the most happiness for the time we have. It’s respecting life.

For some, that means service to others. For others, it’s patenting science projects. And then there’s those that find it in an honest job, being good to people they love, and exploring hobbies from time to time.

Happiness is definitely not a contest. Especially one that you put yourself through fully knowing you won’t win.

But if you feel like you need more value in your life, it’s never too late to do something new.

He’s a Putin puppet

A common misconception.

Lukashenko has been around longer the Yeltsin. Putin, Medvedev, and Putin 2: Electric Boogaloo. I would bet money that he'll be around after Putin's demise as well - whenever that will be.

As much of an idiot lackey as he seems - he's always been to squeeze what he wants out of Russia while squeezing from the West as well. Visa relationships, for example - are a good metric for international diplomacy. Americans can travel visa-free through Minsk Airport for up to 30 days. Think about that. And also - he's managed to survive his own coup/revolution attempts. And yes, with Russia's support - but he's still done it.

The war put him in a precarious balancing act where has simultaneously play nice with Moscow without getting Belarusian troops actually involved in battle. It keeps him in power.

I'm not saying Luka is smart or cunning. But he's maintained power for 30+ years. He's experienced in it.

why would Prigozhin cut a deal with him?

Nobody knows.

But I'm speculating Belarus offered him something very special. Maybe Moscow will oust Shoigu, and Belarusian 'diplomacy' will be seen as legitimate.

A distracted Moscow would be a premium opportunity for Belarusian activists and freedom fighters to organize another revolution. Last night, Lukashenko flew his family to Turkey. So... we can speculate as to how confident Luka was feeling.

Was the whole thing a psy-op to give Putin an out?

The "out" would've been for Putin to recall troops to Moscow to 'deal with the Wagner problem'. It would've given him an out and he would've seemed competent to do so.

Afterwards, he can say "its clear need to fix problems in the Russian military before we can help our lost brothers in Ukraine" and call an indefinite ceasefire. Then funnel money into military development indefinitely, like a fascist does.

But that's not what's happening... Wagner might just go back to fighting in Ukraine later today.

The news is happening at lightning speed. Nobody knows what's going on. Absolutely wild times.

At some point, he deserves a lifetime achievement award from the academy.

Lemmy has a long way to go in terms of user experience before it can effectively compete with Reddit. The majority of new accounts in the last weeks have been spite users. That is, they're here not because they love Lemmy - but because they hate Reddit.

That's not a bad thing, per say. It doesn't matter how people get here. It's more important that they have a good reason to stay.

And the average user doesn't care if something is federated or centralized. They just want a product that works and is simple to grasp. In my opinion, app developers are going to be the gamechanger Lemmy needs Stuff like Memmy (on the iOS app store today!), Mlem, Liftoff, Thunder are pretty much better than the official Reddit app. And that's how most people consume content these days. When there's no enshitification ads or microtransactions - there's clearly going to be a winning experience.

It'll take time, but as more Federation communities build - the less Reddit is necessary. As well, it usually takes a long time before people start catching on that the tools they once loved have turned to into bots and spam.

Mastodon is in it's 7th year, and has like 8 million active users. Twitter had 200 million users by it's 7th year. On one hand, Mastodon is the biggest Federation app. On the other, Twitter was 25x as large. Of course, Twitter is no longer the relevant "town hall" it once was - and is hemorrhaging users and respect. So who knows. It only takes a few celebrity endorsements to get countless folks switching. Who knows

The content on Reddit has gotten noticeably worse - but less as a result of Lemmy's existence and more of a reaction to killing 3rd Party Apps.

Unfortunately for me, some of my favorite communities haven't migrated over to Lemmy. So I'm still using Old Reddit Desktop to access them.

Obviously - we get u/chooter from Reddit to join the Federation and do it. Beloved by all, rivaled by none.

AMAs can be posted to a different instance each round based in a lottery system. That way, nobody gets all the traffic with each celebrity.

However, I would start with Lemmy.ml or Kbin.social since those are flagships.

Of course it will hurt the migration. Lemmy.world should've halted open registration and directed folks elsewhere until they were able to get their house in order.

Instead, a migrant's experience was as follows:
"I can't create an account, the site won't load".
"Okay, now I have an account, but I browse anything because the site won't load."
"Okay, now I can browse, but I can't make posts or comments because the site won't load".
"The site's been wishy-washy for 5 days, I guess it's always like this".

Most don't understand they should've joined a different instance. But hey, this QoL stuff affects all Lemmings, because the biggest communities are in the affected instances.

So instead of a great Reddit alternative, migrants got a product that didn't work as advertised. And a message board, no less - a technology that's existed since the dawn of the internet.

So, I get it. But I'm not upset because I understand Lemmy is an emerging technology that'll require a little patience. Replacing one of the biggest websites of all time is not going to be easy.

r/Lemmy is going to reflect the layman. We should listen to their feedback, help them out and take criticism seriously. I'm of the camp that Lemmy needs as few barriers to entry as possible - which is why I'm loving the progress of some of these mobile apps. Some (like Memmy) have an onboarding guide for new users. We need more of that.

Whats it say in the employee handbook regarding time off?

It’s not the manager’s job to decide if someone’s personal obligations are necessary or not. It’s their job to assure there is coverage and the work is complete.

If the employee is abusing the shift-change timeoff policy, that is a different story.

If the manager is the owner, it may be a good idea for your wife to freshen her resume.

It depends on the definition of Veganism.

There’s is a popular school of thought that the diet‘s sole purpose to reduce suffering. If a living thing has no central nervous system (or brain), it has no thoughts and cannot experience pain or harm. It’s not much different than a fruit or vegetable. I know vegans that make exceptions for oysters - for example.

Others schools of thought are about avoiding animal products altogether, it doesn’t matter if it suffers or not - there’s no way to know. Therefore, it’s immoral to eat them if you can knowingly choose an alternative.

“Ape alone.. weak. Apes together…. strong”

So no, it’s baked-in the DNA of how we survive. We group to fight threats. Early days, that threat is protection from hostile wildlife like bears.

You scale that to a modern civilization - and you have groups of people fighting for resources, food, money, opportunities, land, etc. Sometimes they’re gangs. Sometimes they’re entire countries. Sometimes they’re groups of allied countries.

And heck, you see it in stupidly small scales too. “Coke v Pepsi”, “N64 v PlayStation”, “Rock Fans v Disco Fans”.

Sunni and Shia believe 98% of the same stuff. But the bit they don’t agree on pushes fringe lunatics to terrorism, war, ethnic cleansing, etc.

Same deal with Protestants and Catholics.

The only thing could make us drop “us versus them” mentality is a giant alien force more violent and sick than anything you can imagine.

Then maybe, humanity will be the “us” finally.

V’ger seems like a direct nod to Star Trek 1.

I mean, the fact that the Fediverse is not called The Federation is a missed opportunity.

Even if it were true that we came from aliens… every race can reproduce with one another. If we all came to earth for survival, then race mixing creates better outcomes through genetic variation.

What a strange take.

Keeping track of race is entirely optional.

You’re 100% free to decline including it on any personnel file or application (with the exception of acting/modeling). It’s also self-identifying.

Consider that as a multi-racial pluralistic society - our values will be different than a European country whose major ethnic groups are the indigenous people.

We have an unfortunately long legacy of systematic racism issues. Communities or color experience slower emergency response times, fewer school resources and teacher pay, redlining and gerrymandered districting, food deserts, fewer public transportation options, and often fewer per capita polling stations on Election Day.

Until race stops being an observable factor for community outcomes, we still have a lot of work to do.

Many organizations see and understand this. As part of their sense of corporate social responsibility, companies make a good faith effort to hire from a ethnically diverse pool of candidates. If all your candidates are white - a company needs to ask itself if that’s a reflection of their own hiring biases or if that’s a systemic issue within the talent pool? It’s good to know these things - because industry surveys are constant - which help local leaders, non-profit organizations, colleges and universities, and governments do their jobs.

Meeting diversity goals is good for a variety of reasons. Importantly in capitalism, it’s good to investors because customers tend to prefer supporting diverse companies. Perhaps more importantly than that, different backgrounds offer different modes of thinking when it comes to problem solving. Crowd sourcing from a bigger idea pool is good for productivity.

Imagine phone companies. An instance is like Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile or any other provider.

If you want to talk to your friends, it doesn't really matter what instance they're on.
A Verizon customer can still call a AT&T customer no problem. A Verizon customer doesn't need to also sign up for AT&T to do that. It all just.. works.

People talking about different instances is like people talking about different phone companies. "Verizon's coverage is better" or "T-Mobile has better support" or that kinda thing.

Lemmy is a non-profit that receives grant funding through NLnet's NGI0 Discovery Fund. And also - individual giving.

Individual instances can fund themselves how they want. Besides donations - there’s certainly a world where some servers start hosting sponsored content to keep afloat. Given that users have so many alternatives, there’s a limit in how much they could get away with.

There’s also a world in which small government would run and operate instances if this gets popular enough. No reason why somewhere like Estonia can’t do so as a promotion of their booming tech industry.

Experts are saying that’s unlikely, though. Why ruin the credibility of the Ministry of Defense if they needed a strong leader? Especially one that’s openly criticized the war to begin with. Pretty bad for morale.

If anything, we’ve learned Putin has a lot less orchestral than expected.

Paramilitary private armies are expensive and unpredictable. And technically illegal under Russian law.

At a time when resources are tight and public trust in government is flaky, it’s makes sense for Putin to consolidate Wagner into the Russian army.

Prigozhin isn’t a brilliant military strategist (to be fair, neither is Shoigu). He’s a businessman who earned $2B through Wagner milking State money. The dissolution of Wagner is the end of that revenue stream, and possibly his own life.

IMO, it seems to me like the mutiny is a last ditch negotiating tactic or emotional outburst as a response to losing his livelihood.

Or.. we’ll learn in the coming months and years that there’s a lot more to this story.

T’Pol would be the first Vulcan in Starfleet, no?

She started off as Vulcan High Command but officially joins Starfleet later on in ENT.

Congratulations on the release! 🎉

Watching the app come together since it’s early inception to release has been a wonder as a beta tester. Every release just expands the scope and possibilities of the entire platform.

This App is already being used by thousands of people to connect with the world. When I used Apollo - I used it to hone my hobbies, my career, my tastes, learn about places I’ll visit or where I live now, and make real valuable friendships. Surely, Memmy will continue that tradition for me - and at least thousands more. Great work!

I don’t think there’s a single piece of media that impacted more as a kid. The visuals, the gameplay, the music. Good god, the music.

A quarter century later, I work part time in music production (ghost writing, gaming OSTs, ads, etc). It feels like everything I do is trying to recreate the magic of that Quake 2 soundtrack.

Funny enough, I haven’t actually played Quake 2 since my teens. I’m not even sure if I ever beat it. So I’ll be looking forward to this.