once in a lifetime recession

slightly bit-crushed Mr. Incredible

once in a lifetime pandemic

monochrome nightmare fuel Mr. Incredible

it was a very easy pivot from removing hateful boards to removing Luigi memes and posts critical of Musk, unfortunately. honestly, I think it’s because of advertisers. Reddit admins dropped their free speech absolutism when they saw the ad revenue they were missing out on.

unfortunately, advertisers are now starting to feel uncomfortable on platforms with lgbt or “radical left” content. it’s why FB and YouTube now allow transphobic hate speech. we’re a political liability to them and their ad revenue stream.

it wasn’t a slippery slope, the hill changed directions on us.

mRNA technology premiering on the eve of a killer pandemic leaps to mind.

that’s fair. progress in medicine more generally has been good. we’ve started curing fatal genetic disorders, we found the cause of multiple sclerosis, there’s a new antipsychotic with a novel MoA for the first time since chlorpromazine…

None of this was indicative of better economics or a functional political system.

Obama, Reagan, Bush and Clinton weren’t fascists. even Trump wasn’t a fully-fledged fascist in his first term. he is now, and what’s happening to the Federal Government is unprecedented.

look, I know the Weimar Republic had its problems, but you can’t claim Hitler was just more of the same. so it is with the US in 2025.

America: third world country, first world prices.

it’s extremely rare to find such a cheap used car. my partner spent $8k on one that lasted a year. also, you might be surprised to learn that driving isn’t optional in most of the US - it’s literally impossible to live without a car. I live in a suburb. it’s several miles of dangerous roads to get to a grocery store. there is no nearby public transit. even large cities like LA were completely designed around cars. zoning and urban planning here completely screwed us.

yes, it sucks, yes I’m aware, yes I’d love to live in a walkable European city with commuter rail and cafes on the street corner, no I don’t have a choice.

Westoids live in the wealthiest, easiest, most affluent era of human history.

decades ago, houses were affordable, college was cheap, Americans weren’t crushed under mountains of dischargeable student debt, wealth disparity and effective wages were far better, and we had a far more functional political system.

I can’t think of much that hasn’t gone downhill since 2016. the world isn’t ending, but it’s ahistoric to claim that history is the steady march of progress. dark ages happen. empires decline. democracies wither.

weeds are to gardens like my house is to HOAs.

The idea that, if all Trump supporters simply had access to better information, if they all had better education, if they were exposed to the right argument… then they’d see the light and turn into democrats - is a supremely liberal idea. We need to understand that no amount of epic slams, no amount of late night talk show roasts, no amount of facts and logic will steer us out of fascism.

Well said. And honestly, it’s even counterproductive, because that assumption is a core reason why people view the establishment Left as patronizing and elitist.

It also reminds me of one of my favorite Onion videos: https://youtu.be/lpzVc7s-_e8 (I like Judith Butler, and I’ve even read some of Gender Trouble, but the premise and execution just gets me in stitches every time.)

nix collect-garbage, comrade! there’s also another command to clean up older generations. if you’re using git to version your nix config, you only really need to keep two generations: the current, and your last successful boot, since you can recover by git checkout.

look into NixOS! there might already be a package for it. and NixOS can be very good about not duplicating dependencies.

is this… somehow… real?

could you make this?

Lockpicks. One day the bathroom door somehow locked from the inside without anyone in there, and I really needed to pee. Really came in handy. Turns out you could just use a flathead screwdriver, there wasn’t an actual lock cylinder, but don’t take this from me!

I’ve literally read the code for Signal’s double-ratchet protocol. It’s extremely high quality cryptography, written in Rust, open source, with several independent audits.

The server code isn’t open, but we know they (used to?) use Intel SGX enclaves so the contact metadata is sealed from even the Signal Foundation. Admittedly SGX fell prey to a number of speculative execution attacks, but Signal had no way of foreseeing that.

Also, Moxie hasn’t been involved since 2022.

What on Earth does Signal requiring phone numbers have to do with Israel?

is there a matrix client for Android? last I checked there was like, one, and it wasn’t very good. whereas there’s like 14 different Lemmy apps, many of which are fabulous.

they thought the bird came from Turkey iirc, that’s why it’s named like that. 🦃

oof.

fun fact: Windows uses 9p for bridging the Windows and Linux filesystems with WSL2. the devs had excellent taste in protocols.

Isn’t jfx still actually using HTML and CSS, though? like it’s cool that the UI logic is in Java, but doesn’t using CSS mean you still need to lug a rendering engine around, even if not a whole browser?

Java (and Object Pascal, I’m assuming) have very old-looking UIs. Discord’s gonna have trouble attracting users if their client looks like a billing system from 2005. Also, what do you do about the web client? Implement the UI once in HTML/CSS/JS, and again in JForms?

So if you’re picking one UI to make cross-platform, and you need a web client, do you pick JForms and make it work on the web? or React and make it work on desktop?