God, the coverage of machine learning in general is absolutely infuriating. I sometimes listen to the BBC daily news podcast while I shower, and today they thought it was newsworthy that a soccer "AI" could predict where a penalty kicker would put the ball 52% of the time. Fifty fucking two percent. A straight up coin flip. They were acting like it was some huge achievement. They wrote that, recorded it, edited it, broadcasted it, and at no point did anyone say, "wait, this is fucking stupid, cancel this useless story."

I need to find a different global news broadcast to listen to.

Edit, just because I felt like I was going crazy, I decided to look up the story again. The text article says it was 64% accurate, and in the opening news summary the BBC actually also said 64%, but then in the main story the number they presented was 52% (at about 16:20 in the episode titled "Israel to open humanitarian corridors into Gaza"). So I dunno, maybe that's supposed to be some separate stat somehow, but anyway it's still crystal clear this shit so ass

I was trying to preempt the argument that picking an instance is confusing and is the big "ease of use" barrier. Which it probably would be, except that most people don't bother with that: they just sign up with the big one. I don't mean to imply that's a good thing, I agree that a stronger system to distribute users among instances would be cool, but I don't think it would make a difference in the number of people joining in the first place. I think that network effect is easily the biggest hurdle, and there's not much we can do about it systematically outside of keeping the network we do have alive and making incremental improvements. I'm not sure there's any killer feature we could invent that would really swing the needle. Bigger, better funded orgs than us have tried.

Otherwise, it's just about us as individuals, doing what we can to push the people in our lives away from corporate social media.

Ease of use, I disagree. 99% of people already go to the one big instance of whatever service, whether it be Mastodon.social, Piefed.social, Lemmy.world, whatever; you type in your email and a password, maybe click a verification link in your email, and bam, you're set. Compare that to Facebook where you do that plus they'll ask you to set security questions or 2 factor auth, maybe even make you take a selfie or a picture of your driver's license--signing up in the Fediverse really ain't that hard. It's arguably easier! I'm not sure why people still say otherwise. Maybe to ease what little guilt they might feel about supporting monstrous corporations? But the truth is most people don't want to sign up for anything, period. IF, and that is a BIG IF, they go for a new service, they'll want to click the button that says "sign up using my Google account" and be done with it.

The real problem is the same one every gaming service that has ever tried to compete with Steam has: the default is already set. This is the type of problem that Epic hasn't been able to solve by offering tons of free games, nor GOG with its lack of DRM, nor Microsoft with its $1 Gamepass. Those services survive, sure, but the position of "top dog" has never been in doubt.

You might point to Bluesky as a success story, but it only got the audience it did because they ran an effective ad campaign with the original founder of Twitter, right as Twitter itself enshittified to a nigh unbelievable degree. It lost core features like reliable checkmark verification and blocking other users, and the new owner was making Nazi salutes live on national TV. And Bluesky still haven't truly managed to take the throne! Twitter is still the biggest service of its kind! Meanwhile the myth that Mastodon is any harder to join than Bluesky or Twitter is still pervasive, so people don't even give it a chance.

So, publicity, sure, that's a real problem we have, but that's a paradox that's damn near impossible to solve: people don't want to move away from where everyone is already signed up because that's where the most content is, and the most content is there because that's where everyone is already signed up. All we can do in the meantime is continue to exist as we have been.

My cope is that I don't want to interact with people who are so incapable of signing up for new services anyway. Whatever their reasons for their impatience, whether it be their nature, or if they have a stressful, time consuming job, or if they don't know how it works and just use whatever their grandkids signed them up for--whatever the reason, it's going to extend to their ability to disseminate what's happening on the platform, too. Those people are (in general) way more susceptible to misinformation, to spreading it themselves, and to generally being a toxic online presence wherever they go. So fuck 'em, we don't need 'em!

Not 30 minutes ago I burned myself on my cast iron pan because even though I could tell the handle was warm, I figured surely I could deal with it long enough to scrape out the crumbs. My oven mitt was literally within arms reach and I just... didn't bother.

Idk if that helps answer your question but there ya go

Yeah maybe there's some in-show context I'm missing but he's really not orange enough here

leave it to tarantino to understand that spider man needs to start saying the n word

Lol I never really though of it like that. That is almost morbid, isn't it?

That system is more commonly used at airports throughout the US, and I believe it's widespread internationally, too. Why the fuck don't we just have frequently running trains that have a stop at airports? I know my local airport technically has a bus service, but they only move directly between there and downtown (an hour away) and only during specific times of day.

Ehh being annoyed at someone else for being an asshole isn't equivalent to being annoyed that someone else exists. You don't seem hypocritical to me

honestly it's kinda fitting. if witches were real you just know that harry potter would be a total bastardization of their culture and practices

I've worked repetitive, hot, boring jobs before, but I don't know how the people working those trucks can keep their sanity with that music on repeat. I get sick enough of Christmas music in stores after hearing them like twice, and the blaring of an ice cream truck is 100x worse!

One just started coming through my neighborhood like 2 weeks ago, and there's a kid a few houses down who seems to always be ready to run out and stop the truck. Takes easily 10+ minutes for the music to fade out. Like, I hate to be a grumpy old man, but that music drives me fucking nuts! I'm on the verge of trying to beat the kid to the truck just so I can bribe the guy to drive away as fast as possible