Living in the not-so-distant future, a New York couple takes a wild ride to parenthood after landing a coveted spot at the Womb Center, which offers couples ...
There are calls to support the SAG-AFTRA strike by cancelling your streaming subscriptions temporarily. I'm not against that.
A while ago when Spotify did their right wing extremism I cancelled my subscription and moved to TIDAL. I could because TIDAL was there as an option, has all the same songs, and every song is available to buy on other platforms anyway. So I'm still at TIDAL and buy all songs from the artists I support, DRM-free on places like iTunes.
But I've long known that if a similar thing would happen to a streaming service, I couldn't do the same. Virtually all content of actresses I support is exclusively on one service and not available to own on DVD or blu-ray. Believe me I check regularly and internationally. So I'm locked in, essentially a prisoner to the subscription system. Add to that the early bird discounts I have where I pay 50% less for my lifetime, which I would lose if I cancelled temporarily.
And I believe it may not be temporarily. If like with Spotify they don't fix the problem, I would want to be able to stay away.
A minor thi
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There are calls to support the SAG-AFTRA strike by cancelling your streaming subscriptions temporarily. I'm not against that.
A while ago when Spotify did their right wing extremism I cancelled my subscription and moved to TIDAL. I could because TIDAL was there as an option, has all the same songs, and every song is available to buy on other platforms anyway. So I'm still at TIDAL and buy all songs from the artists I support, DRM-free on places like iTunes.
But I've long known that if a similar thing would happen to a streaming service, I couldn't do the same. Virtually all content of actresses I support is exclusively on one service and not available to own on DVD or blu-ray. Believe me I check regularly and internationally. So I'm locked in, essentially a prisoner to the subscription system. Add to that the early bird discounts I have where I pay 50% less for my lifetime, which I would lose if I cancelled temporarily.
And I believe it may not be temporarily. If like with Spotify they don't fix the problem, I would want to be able to stay away.
A minor thing I can do if I stay on these services, which I already did anyway: whenever you search for a film, instead of the title search for the actor or actress name you want to watch the film for. This shows up the acting talent as a valuable resource in their statistics.
I was astonished when I realized what rendered in my web-UI didn't render at all an app. See the images in the first comment to see what choices A and B would look like. If you see lines rendered without leading symbols or italics, the rendering engine is eating the markdown silently, which is choice C.
This is quoted text starting with a right angle bracket and a space.
This paragraph includes italics quoted by a single asterisk and bold quoted by double asterisks.
This is a bulleted list item starting with an asterisk and a space.
This is a section header or title starting with a hashtag and a space.
Please boost for more visibility.
Hit up the comments to add further detail, especially if choice C is applicable.
But of course what's already in the can will still be released, but without promotion. E.g. Zoey102, the film sequel with the people from the Zoey101 series, comes out 27 July on Paramount+. The important one for me in that cast is and always has been Erin Sanders as the legendary Quinn.
Of course it's Aimee Carrero who has the best words, as always. Actors are on strike and of course they deserve to be paid properly for their work, even if it's on streaming, and deserve guarantees against misuse of AI, like the writers do. instagram.com/p/CupRXuuprsa/
SAG-AFTRA Strike
For the first time in over 40 years, union film and television actors are on strike.
I'm reflecting on the importance of unions.
Though *never* above reproach or improvement, unions harness the power of the collective.
Together, we can alleviate the crushing weight of unfettered capitalism.
Together, we can slow the terminal spread of endless consumption and growth-at-all-cost.
At their best, unions represent the hope that the worker is not a pawn, that The Man is not invincible, and that the fight for human dignity cannot and will not be deterred.
Unions are the ever-rare reminder that power is really in the hands of the people.
Watching Clinical on Netflix because the promotion for this film features India Eisley rather prominently (even though she's only seventh on the cast list). Seems an intense character from her. #Clinical #IndiaEisley
India is third on the credits instead and this fits more with how important her role is. Both hers and the main therapist characters are great, but the other characters don't always feel right nor does the film script. Still an interesting watch. I wish I could see India Eisley as the lead somewhere.
Following the example of the German government and the European Commission, the government of the Netherlands is now running their own Mastodon server! No middlemen between them and their constituents! Welcome @minbzk!
Meanwhile the UK government are still deciding which of their mates to bung a few billion £s to to provide a server. Which will probably never get delivered.
this is so awesome to see. Well done Masotdon team! Free communication that is not controlled by evil American corporations will become a reality everywhere!
Rewatching We Hunt Together one episode per week, now they are finally showing it on the BBC (One) after I had previously seen it on the BBC (First) and caught up with the repeat on the BBC (Entertainment).
Hermione Corfield and Eve Myles, double the reason to watch. #WeHuntTogether
I get my email notifications on multiple devices, so I had a 'Did Mastodon have yet another security release?' moment. But no, it's the same one this time.
With our government stepping down because they couldn't agree how to make their very right wing policies even more right wing, and the current mood in the country going towards extreme right wing, I'm dreading the upcoming elections. Let's hope people come back from the 'farmers movement' and surprise me and vote for policies to repair the climate and social justice. #DutchPolitics #NLPol
I dislike how groups of people try to control how individuals think and experience things and come down en masse to make people feel bad about themselves. Whether about tech opinions or sexuality. Because I witnessed both, today.
Found via "Do large language models know what they are talking about?", a good article by itself. The answer is obviously "no" (as fedizen Betteridge will tell you), but the point is why and how.
Nothing new if you've been listening to DAIR people or I suppose computational linguists in general, or linguists in general, but maybe there's some part of the argument that makes it click for someone.
I didn't know that my conclusion about the Chinese Room thought experiment was the same as that of Ray Kurtzweil!
Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, Pixelfed, PeerTube, dare I say it even Twitter, all have websites that work perfectly fine on mobile. I don't understand this obsession with 'I'm on mobile so I should select an app' or 'I want to see the website so I should use a computer'. The sites may even work better than the app. Often you can save them to your home screen too.
You may consider the feature that apps of mainstream social media provided of extra tracking and snooping to be a nice bonus, but you're not going to get that anyway in fediverse apps.
Apparently picking up my keyboard, fumbling it, and watching it ultimately tumble to the floor somehow causes it to launch Microsoft 365, software I wasn't even aware I had. Weird hotkey.
I vaguely recall there being a hot key that launched a buy screen for MS Office. Maybe that was 365. And maybe it was Windows 7... But whatever it was I accidentally discovered it one day and since then always assumed several gigs are being used just to house software they want us to pay to unlock.
Great to see Prof Francesca back. Reshared, not because of the tech advice request, looks like she got a lot of answers already, but this is of course a very serious and important archaeological photo.
Hello all! Is there a way to update the Mastodon app? It doesn’t seem to be working well for me (I have an iPhone - is that relevant?) … By way of an apology for such a boring request, here’s a pic of me admiring an apotropiac phallus on the Greek island of Delos last week …
Why would someone boost a four year old Mastodon post of mine and have I really been here that long(*)? It's the one I got a warning(**) for too, I think.
(*) Has it been that long since I gave up on Tumblr because of it breaking all the time?
@daedalus Right! Give me an old newspaper and I look at the ads, show me an old picture of a city street and I am reading the signs and shop windows. The meta data and ancillary info that puts something in context is often as interesting as the media itself.
Ok, two weekends ago. This is the elastic file storage part of the bill. That's NFS, still storing the same data. Other services I still need to reduce.
I'm getting into Sanditon a few series late, but episode one of series three did a good job of getting everyone up to speed including late joiners. Now I'm starting episode two and it's as if I missed another year.
The lead role of Charlotte in Sanditon is played by Rose Williams. I may not like how the scenes are edited and filmed, but she is certainly the good thing about this series. I'll keep watching it.
I think the Dutch national women's volleyball team did really well over the last couple of weeks, despite the result. They were playing with a very much junior team due to injuries etc among the usual players and they grew during the tournament. Some new players really stood up to compensate for the missing (fitness of the) top players. Once everyone is back, the coach is going to have to make some difficult decisions, born out of luxury.
I have sympathy for the weekend workers that must repair the garbage changes. Maybe on Saturday and Sunday, Twitter is run in Beta mode? A change doesn’t count unless it makes it until Monday morning.
I saw speculation that it may be his service providers throttling his service level back, since Elmo hasn't been paying them for some time. This level of service will lead to advertisers suing for not getting the eyeball count they paid for.
I think it's a favour to all those volunteer instance admins who have a day job and only have time for this kind of shenanigans in the evening or weekend. 😉
I don’t know why everybody keeps giving Elon a hard time. He has done wonders for decentralized social networks and kicked down doors for the rest to follow suit. Keep up the good work! 😂
It's great actually. Forced panic mandatory weekend overtime crunch will cause more engineers to quit twitter. The more that twatter hemorrhages employees, the faster it will crash and burn.
Not the last Indeed We believe, in France, that this black out has a serious involvement in a social anger growing un France. What IS French révolution happend again?😏
it does suck having it happen on a weekend 🤣 I was in the middle of watching prospect drafts for NHL hockey and poof! Gone. So now I'm here on Mastodon. Someone needs to end Twitter once and for all.
Honestly? I don't think Twitter will ever die. He just has this weird way of testing in production. What I do think is that Twitter won't ever have a stable version anymore.
Entre Elon Y Zuck al final nos destruirán a nosotros, no lo permitamos. Solo hay que aguantar un poco mas y ellos caerán primero, no nos vendamos nuestra esencia. Vienen a nosotros por que necesitan algo.
Han caído antes otras redes como face o tuiter que nadie pensaba que caerían que no logro recordar ahora.
Unfortunately if you said to the dude "9-5 work week" he would look at you puzzled like you were speaking an alien language (the even more unfortunate thing is he expects same from his employees).
in fact, nothing can replace twitter for now. i feel twitter is the newest social media platform in my opinion compared to the others. but i had no more hope after a madman acquired it. hoping for better but actually very bad.
#Twitter has completely cut off public access to posts. Twitter accounts are now unable to share anything with non-Twitter people. Direct links no longer work, which is a disaster for accounts distributing public information.
This is a textbook example of why you should have your own server as part of a federated social network. Ownership means your public links will never break, federation means you can reach a mass audience.
I don't think it is difficult any more, thanks to managed hosting companies. You don't need tech skills, a managed hosting company does all the installation, maintenance and upgrades.
That's why I set up this website, to let people know. An instance owner doesn't need to do techy stuff any more.
Instance settings are entirely through the same graphical web interface that they would use for their normal account settings.
Until it's "signing up for an email account" easy, it's still going to be beyond the skill level of a lot of people.
I'm not disagreeing about it having gotten loads better. I remember the nightmare that was running an identi.ca server. But "miles better" isn't "so easy anyone can do it"
The signup process for services like masto.host etc is about similar complexity to signing up with an email provider or registering for an account on an online shop. It pretty much is an online shop really, you just pick which plan you want and fill in your payment details.
The one possibly tricky bit is pointing the domain name to the host, because it may involve two different providers. But that is a one-off thing that the domain company can possibly deal with for a fee.
The technical maintenance is handled by the managed hosting service. They do all upgrades, bug fixes, installations etc behind the scenes, you don't have to think about it at all.
The only burden on the owner is if they decide to run a public instance that's open to public sign-ups. In that case, the moderation burden does become very significant.
Thanks, I figured moderation would be significant. I used to teach a web development course aimed at businesses setting out to get their first website up. One phase of the class was planning the site. And that phase included planning for content maintenance, updates and moderation. Kind of a lesson for managers that figured they could just dump that task on a secretary... Costs of such a managed hosting service?
Managed hosting costs are surprisingly low, starts from about $10 a month including tax for five active users. The hosting cost per user drops massively as the number of users goes up, it's about $100 a month including tax for 2000 active users.
However, as the number of users goes up, the labour cost of moderation rises significantly, so this balances out the savings on hosting costs. It would be good to encourage smaller servers where human moderation is more feasible.
links are broken?! How on earth are they going to make money out of twitter if tracking no longer works? This is a disaster I've worked in online Ad industry and every second I'm just more shocked. They should be losing money like every 10^-10000 second
I am not a lawyer, but as far as I know liability on your own instance is no different to having a website, as long as it isn't open to public signups?
For example the European Union set up their own server purely for their official accounts at social.network.europa.eu The European Commission has an account there at @EU_Commission
EU Voice is the official ActivityPub platform of the EU institutions. With EU Video, it is part of an alternative social media pilot proposed and provided by the European Data Protection Supervisor.
Meanwhile, it took me a while to notice that Twitter's new rate limits are about how many posts per day you may see (600). I first read it as limiting people to writing 600 posts per day and thought 'that's not so bad, though some people will have to limit themselves'.
Also, supposedly the amount of Twitter posts you can see without an account is zero, which they say breaks the Twitter embed functionality. So far that seems untrue, I can see the embeds just fine on my own site even in an incognito window. E.g. this one where Chloë Grace Moretz answered my question.
When I removed the wallpaper from the bedroom walls, I found the walls to be quite uneven, too much to paint over. I finally applied the material that is supposed to smooth it out (don't know the English word and neither does Google) to half the wall, since the remainder I can't reach yet. I'm not that happy with the result, it's still a bit uneven.
![Mike [SEC=OFFICIAL]](avatar/570/66d7b9e49ef23576dbc9f030d261-80.jpeg?ts=1754781750)
Gidi Kroon
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