Funny. As a European political scientist, when I think of identity politics the first thing that comes to mind is nativism, right wing populists, and all those people crying out in public about outgroups who are not like themselves.

We always had trans people. They didn’t politicize themselves - there’s not many enough of them that they could have even if they wanted to. They became politicized by a group of people who chose to identify themselves in opposition to them. The same goes for immigrants, gays, whatever. We vote less according to economy, and more according to identity.

The only way the Republican party is allowed to exist in it’s current form is through identity politics. Women not wanting to go thorough with unwanted pregnancies is *not* identity politics. It’s more a matter of fucking survival. A bunch of conservative couch fucking male shitheads who want to limit women’s ability to decide over their own bodies on the basis of their own hypocritical set of beliefs, however, very much is about identity politics.

And then trans people wanting to simply be allowed to live their lives in peace has also become a matter of identity politics, as their very existence has become politicized. But that’s a development driven by right wing nut jobs, not by the left who (at its best, at least) wants to focus on economic issues while guaranteeing human rights as a mattet of common sense and decency.

Pretending that the political left are the ones pushing squishy identity politics while the right are focusing on hard economics and traditional politics is just plain wrong, and portraying it this way is yet another failure of the American media.

/rant

I can’t say I ever really understood what Newsmast is up to, but Channel.org looks pretty nifty. It seems like a good way for organisations consisting of several independent people to get together and present all their federated content in one public channel.

The score was amazing!

I’d rank it up there with the first one - less quirky, but more of a wild ride. My partner preferred the sequel, though she loves both.

I really struggle to understand how anyone could like the original and not like the sequel, unless they only like the old one out of a sense of nostalgia but they’ve actually grown to have their taste change since.

This is something I really loved actually. I never knew where the plot was going to go because there were so many different dynamics going on. At the end everything was tied together, but having so many things in motion made it unpredictable and fun to watch. To me, at least.

I’m sure I’ve seen better comedies, but I really can’t remember when.

I guess it might be relatively low for the sequel to a cult classic made by a famous director and with a star spangled cast. A lot of directors probably wouldn’t limit themselves when they know they don’t have to.

Exactly. Nothing about the original screams blockbuster, and nothing about the new one (except maybe some of the casting) does either. It’s just a really fun and, in my opinion, overall great movie. There’s nothing $50 million could have done to improve upon it. And it is absolutely worth seeing in a cinema.

Fellow Dvorak user here. Can’t recommend it enough.

In one of my classes at the beginning of my doctoral studies we talked about parth dependency, and QWERTY was used as an example. All studies showed that even experienced typists would increase their typing speed within just a few days of switching, and that it’s just a superior set-up. But because of path dependency we all write QWERTY.

I changed my layout the same day and I haven’t looked back. If you want to start messing around with your keyboard and you use it for typing, switching to Dvorak should be the obvious first step. Colemak is a compromise solution that is still a lot better than QWERTY and probably quicker to learn.

No need to get a new keyboard. Dvorak is designed around touch typing, you won’t be looking at the keyboard anyway.

The hatred is partly fuelled by people in the open source community getting really riled up when they find out some open source projects are developed by organizations that need to earn money and pay their employees, be it Red Hat, Canonical, GNOME, Mozilla, or anything else. Female leadership will tend to push people over the edge.

In addition to the usual rage-fuelled misogyny of open source forums, there is however also valid concern out there. It can be difficult to hear through the noise.

Mozilla’s job listings provide some insight to what many consider to be a red flag for the way forward. To work on FireFox, they are looking for:

• Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
• Senior Director of Product, Firefox Growth
• Principal Product Manager, Generative AI
• Senior Software Engineer - Layout (CSS and ICU4X Support)
• Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
• Staff Full-stack Engineer - Generative AI
• Senior Front End Engineer, Gen AI
• Senior Front-End Engineer, Firefox
• Front-End Engineer, Firefox
• Staff Software Engineer - Credential Management
• Staff Software Engineer - Release Engineering
• Senior Front-End Software Engineer, New Tab

For fairness I include every position, highlighting in bold the ones I think are likely to do more harm than good. This is not the direction I want FireFox to take, and I believe Mozilla are misguided to try to place themselves as the ethical AI actor. That said I’m not 100% against it all of the time - I do think the local in-browser machine translation feature of newer releases is great. But I don’t think I want much more than that, and even this feature should probably have been an optional plug-in.

There’s also some former empolyees voicing valid concerns.

In short, I think the legitimate criticism boils down to:

1. Buying into the AI hype
2. Flirting with “more ethical” ads and tracking, rather than being unquestionably on the user’s side of just blocking it all
3. Doing too many things nobody asked for, arguably while not paying enough attention to FireFox
4. Appearing distant from the community and unresponsive to its preferences
5. Paying company leadership too much

I don’t really buy into point 3 personally. I use FireFox every day and it’s by far the best browser I have ever had. It never gives me any problems at all, and password sync with Android is really useful. I wish it would support JPG XL, but that’s pretty much it in terms of complaints on my end.

New in this release:

• Separate audio and video streams, so that only one audio track is stored on the server even if there are multiple resolutions for a video, and viewers can choose only to stream audio. You can also do audio-only live streams. Cool.
• Browse subtitles, search them, click on them, read them to a friend
• Better video fetching from Youtube channels, in case you post there first
• Smaller tweaks to improve user experience

Cool stuff.

PS: My favourite way to keep up to date on PeerTube content is to go to Piefed, press the search button, choose “PeerTube” under Instance Software and sort by “Recent first”. It shows content from all PieFed channels subscribed to by PieFed users, so it’s a limited scope, but I still think it’s a nice little feed.

The only redeeming feature about this is that it only looks about as awful as any other social media.

Which is not very redeeming at all, of course.

The comments on the post also aren’t from Mozilla.social. It’s not like they would have been happy to see Mozilla as a successful actor on the Fediverse either.

The trolls in the comment section at least hints at the fact that creating a more positive and constructive online space proved more difficult than they imagined.

I was curious, and joined the queue for the closed beta a long time ago. Never heard back. They explored something new in closed channels, decided not to go for it, backed out. I don’t really think they need to justify the decision.

Running a social media is a huge effort, and there’s a lot of trolls out there actively targeting Mozilla. I imagine it’s just more trouble than it’s worth.

The official story is that Meta is worried about being sued by people suddenly seeing their content pushed to some random website without their consent if it’s enabled by default, so they won’t risk enabling it by default. At least not before the fediverse is huge enough that everything you post going everywhere on the internet is the expected behaviour.

Fair enough really. I wouldn’t want to be sued for that either, and they obviously cannot expect Congress to understand… anything.

Love the sound of it! Are you making these on commission or just as a hobby?

I can imagine making bows is an incredibly delicate matter - I don’t have time to fall into the rabbit hole of the history of bowed instruments right now, but I can feel myself slipping!

That’s beautiful!

Will you make a bow as well? Would it be possible to get a presentation of what it sounds like?

They define decentralisation as an even distribution of users? Or did I get that wrong skimming the paper?

This seems arbitrary. Mastodon is a decentralised network, no matter how big Mastodon.social is. Lemmy is equally decentralised, even though there’s a dominant actor.

The other hubs in the network don’t revolve around mastodon.social/lemmy.world. they connect to each other bilaterally - if the central hubs disappeared over night it wouldn’t affect them all that much.

I think the notion that decentralised networks can’t have hubs of varying sizes is plain wrong, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what decentralized means.

Pretty deadly for the sherpas though, who have to deal with the shit of the rich idiot tourists going there in massive numbers. So if they want to insist it’s extreme, at least there’s that.

It’s the Lemmy developers, who run Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad.ml, who decided not to promote Lemmy.world on their “about Lemmy” website. This is completely unrelated to the admins of Lemmy.world. :)

Not of Lemmy.world, where you are writing from. And I’m not even writing you from Lemmy. :)

The developers of the platform are not in control over what it’s used for. Which is what’s neat about these place.