ryan

@[email protected]

I admin the.coolest.zone, the coolest site on the net for online social engagement.

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ryan ,

You bring up a good point. It feels like Romulans have also learned to control their violent emotions, but rather than suppress them entirely that energy is just focused all into tactics and smarter ways to be ruthless.

[Analysis] ‘I would do it all over again:’ State Rep. Armando Walle of Houston defends profanity-laced tirade about proposed immigration laws ( www.houstonpublicmedia.org )

Walle, a Democrat and Latino, called out a Republican state lawmaker for successfully ending debate about a proposed law that would allow any police officer in Texas to deport someone who is in the United States illegally.

ryan ,

Walle said his outburst was in response not just to House Bill 4 and two other proposed state laws aimed at curbing migration at the Mexico border, but to a years-long trend in the Republican-controlled legislature of passing anti-immigration laws and allocating billions of dollars toward border security, which is the responsibility and jurisdiction of the federal government.

The Texas House early Thursday passed House Bill 4, which would make it a state crime to enter Texas illegally from Mexico while authorizing police to arrest offenders, drop them off at ports of entry and order them to return to their countries of origin; along with House Bill 6, which would allocate $1.5 billion in funding to build more physical barriers along the border; and Senate Bill 4, which would impose a minimum 10-year jail sentence for smuggling immigrants.

Regarding Senate Bill 4, Walle expressed concern about scenarios in which Americans could be driving a vehicle with undocumented friends or relatives who might be traveling to or from the same gathering, such as a church service or birthday party. Under the proposed law, Walle said, such Americans could be considered human smugglers and susceptible to a 10-year prison sentence.

So after Republicans voted Wednesday night to prevent new amendments to the bill and halt debate about it on the House floor, Walle said Thursday that the "Holy Ghost came over me." He approached his friend and fellow state representative, Republican Cody Harris of Tyler, who had made the motion to cut off debate, and gave him a profanity-laced tongue-lashing that was captured on video and shared widely on social media.

"Y'all don't understand the (expletive) that y'all do hurts our community. It hurts us personally, bro. It hurts us to our f—— core," said Walle, a Latino who represents the north part of Houston. "Y'all don't understand that. Y'all don't live in our f—— skin, and that's what pisses me off.

Go Walle. It's not even like he swore AT Harris. There was just emphatic swearing involved. And I want to see gloves off fighting from Democrats. I want to see this shit get into the media. If emphatic swearing is what gets this stuff noticed, go for it.

ryan ,

lmao cries in San Jose

I mean, the thing is, it's not even that great a city. Like, sure the tech jobs are here, and the bay area overall is nice and has temperate weather, but San Jose itself is a giant sprawling suburb. Downtown is "okay" and we do have public transit in the form of the light rail but it's pretty slow.

I'm paying $3.4k to rent a 2x2.5 townhome with my partner currently. It's very nice, and my landlords are just a very nice couple rather than a company, but dang is it expensive just to live here.

And before anyone asks, I live here 1) because I work in tech and the jobs are here, and 2) because my family all lives in the Bay Area and they're very important to me.

Anyway, my formal recommendation to any of you looking to move to San Jose is to basically not do that. Find a remote job and work in tech that way, or hybrid so you can live further out and commute only a couple times a week.

(US) Introducing Comingle: An opt-in UBI (Universal Basic Income) to provide a stable weekly income based upon users contributing 7% of their income ( comingle.us )

Comingle is an interesting idea that would act as a pseudo emergency fund to provide a stable week to week income for their users. It could act to stabilize your income if you have an irregular income or as an backup plan or insurance for when you lose a job or income source. It works by distributing the average of all their...

ryan ,

I like the concept. I'm highly concerned by the fact that they only seem to have gotten to the "we can move around monopoly money" stage and are asking $75,000 via Indiegogo to do all the "user verification and fraud detection" stuff. Do I trust this startup to have all my bank and credit report info? (And sure, they say they "may" need a soft credit pull, but let's be realistic - to prevent people from connecting just one dummy checking account and pretending they have no income, Comingle's gonna have to pull everyone's credit and link all the bank accounts.)

Can I get firefox to act as two separate browsers? ( fedia.io )

Say I have a window of mostly music that I want to open with shortcut a, and a window of work stuff that I want to open with shortcut b. Is there anything I can do to get firefox shortcuts to remember the windows separately? I don't want to use chrome or a different browser as the second window, but that would work for...

ryan ,

You can have two separate profiles, and two different task bar shortcuts that open up the different profiles. They'd essentially store different user data like history and bookmarks and previously opened tabs, and you could have a music profile and work profile. I did this for work at one point in my life. One helpful thing was making sure they each had different theming to be visually distinct so I could keep track of where to open things.

ryan ,

On one hand I agree with you, and on the other hand it tickles my nostalgia bone for season finale cliffhangers.

I have really liked how SNW has harkened back to the broadcast era. I like only having one episode a week to watch and be able to discuss and be on the same page with everyone, and I like how they have been individual satisfying stories. Because not everything is a cliffhanger, it's made the season finale cliffhanger feel more impactful and exciting.

ryan ,

While I really am not a huge fan of the Gorn, I do like the little sprinkling of "maybe we can communicate with them" (especially with the territory map sent) and I hope that's expanded on a little more. Star Trek is really an idealistic show about exploring and finding common ground with others unlike oneself, and if the writers execute this well with the Gorn going from "terrifying lizardlike unknown" to "we may not like each other and we may have territory lines but at least we can communicate" then I'll be pleased.

ryan ,

Of these [alternative platforms researchers have moved to], Mastodon, which has seen significant growth since Musk’s takeover of Twitter was announced, was the most widely used. About 47 percent of researchers said they had started using the open-source platform in the past year. LinkedIn and Instagram were the next most popular, drawing 35 and 27 percent of researchers, respectively. Interestingly, Meta’s Twitter competitor, Threads, took the number four spot even though the app launched only days before Nature conducted the poll.

It's great to see wider adoption of the Fediverse. Mastodon is a great and stable Twitter alternative.

ryan ,

I make about $150k but I also live in the San Francisco Bay Area so, while I'm comfortable renting an apartment and being able to save for retirement, I know I am far from being able to afford property. (I could move away but all my family is here.) So I'd say I'm currently satisfied only because I've come to terms with never having that complete housing security.

ryan ,

TLDR: It’s broken, but It’s still a fun and enjoyable platform!

Very true. It's a lot more stable than it was even a couple months back - I used to upgrade my instance and run into constant problems, and now I can happily git pull without destroying everything.

From a user perspective, a lot of the issues you encountered early on were due to a couple factors - kbin.social was dealing with more traffic than it could handle, and the developers of lemmy added a sneaky thing that would specifically block kbin user agents from being able to federate out to lemmy instances, leading to constant error logs and issues.

I would say that, aside from platform stability, the biggest looming threat on the horizon is spam. Think about email (the original federated message system) - nobody even thought about the possibility of spam when developing email, spam exploded in the 90s, and currently spam control is managed by whichever email platform you're on rather than by the protocol itself, as well as a sort of trust system where newly registered domains are more likely to be seen as spammers. The Fediverse needs to take lessons from email and start implementing the same sort of controls before the issue becomes unmanageable.

ryan ,

Unfortunately I don't know. It could very well have been that their own instances were being flooded by traffic from kbin.social and this was their solution. However, to my understanding this was added to the source code itself so all lemmy instances upgrading suddenly become an issue for kbin instances. I had to change the user agent in my own kbin instance to stop the flood of errors as it was absolutely messing up the.coolest.zone and I basically couldn't troubleshoot any legitimate failed messages.

Whatever the case is, I'm very glad it's resolved now.

ryan ,

It's pretty slick looking. Unfortunately, looks like no option to link to accounts for auto-import of transactions.

I did the whole manual accounting of finances thing for a while, got absolutely sick of it, and now Intuit has all my data because Mint may be trash but it's trash that does the work for me.

ryan ,

I'd say Kirk being here for multiple episodes was necessary to resolve La'an's growth as a person. Whether it needed to be Kirk himself, obviously not, but since they started that thread they had to complete it. I do hope he doesn't just continue hanging around next season, though. He has a post on the Farragut to attend to.

Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x09 "Subspace Rhapsody"

LoglineAn accident with an experimental quantum probability field causes everyone on the USS Enterprise to break uncontrollably into song, but the real danger is that the field is expanding and beginning to impact other ships—allies and enemies alike....

ryan ,

I agree. As a fellow musical lover (I'm posting from the intermission of a touring Broadway show) the writers clearly understand what the music in musicals is meant to represent. La'an's and Uhura's solo numbers definitely gave some emotional insight into both characters that I feel benefited the show beyond just being decent musical numbers.

The autotune was painful in a few moments for certain actors but hey, they're not professional singers, and I would have loved a bigger dance number, but I know that's pushing it.

ryan ,

I don't have any regrets here. I vastly prefer the vibe of the fediverse. I feel like I can actually contribute and have people respond to me meaningfully.

I do think it was a "reality check", as you say, for some people that the exodus wouldn't completely bring reddit to its knees. It'll be a slow decline into irrelevancy that will take a longer amount of time as new mods become overwhelmed and give up, people slowly realize the content creators and commenters have moved on, etc. It could take years.

Be wary of spiteful Reddit users ( kbin.social )

In the past week and a half, I've noticed Reddit behaviors starting to try and poison all of the places that people are taking refuge in to get away from the toxicity, myself included. They've started to DDoS Lemmy for a while, which is a Reddit thing to do and what they're notorious of doing whenever they feel they don't like...

ryan ,

Are you the same person as this guy? You seem to keep making new accounts and posts to hide your post history and complain about redditors.

I certainly can't know whether what you've experienced is actually toxicity or just criticism, as I can't see your post history. But any site with sufficient mass will be flooded with people like this. All the way back to 1993.

Part of being online anywhere with open signups and free discussion is just dealing with that sort of thing. The only way to prevent it is to spin up your own defederate instance and only allow people to join who you deem worthy of conversation with.

ryan ,

Solara Salazar, a director of Cielo Treatment Center, which serves young adults in Portland, now receives about 20 inquiries a day about rehab services. “And the majority of them we can’t help,” she said.

Cielo offers outpatient therapy and sober housing. That is great for people who have already begun managing their addictions, but Ms. Salazar, who survived addictions to meth, OxyContin and fentanyl, keeps hearing from those in acute crisis who need a bed in a residential program right away.

She gets pleas from people leaving hospital detox, who have not yet gone through inpatient rehab. Oregon’s Medicaid patients can wait months for a treatment bed, she and others said.

“You just can’t skip a step and expect people to be successful,” she said. “We have a really low success rate that way.”

“I talked to a woman the other day who’s living in her car, and she was sobbing and crying and so desperate for treatment. I’m trying to give her some hope and I say, ‘Just keep trying and you’re going to make it,’ but I know that’s a lie. She’s not pregnant, so she doesn’t meet the benchmark for an immediate bed. And I’m going to tell her she has to call every single day for four months and then maybe she’ll get a bed?”

There's no way to help people without truly helping people. We can't just try decriminalization without any proper social services and say "welp that didn't work, let's jail them all." Criminalizing drugs is not the way to cure a society, but writing tickets without helping people just leaves people desperate on the streets.

[Discussion] What are your opinions on "Open Socialism"? ( kbin.social )

"Open Socialism (OS) is a rethink of how to manage a society. It starts with an optimistic base concept that focuses on broad scale cooperation, but then layers on processes and ideas to keep people motivated and prevent corruption. It looks at human nature through the lens of our evolution and attempts to recapture the good...

ryan ,

Ok I've been clicking through that site and, besides requiring knowledge of docker to contribute (which will cut out a lot of people) I had to dig a few pages in to figure out what they want to do differently from any other socialism.

Society in OS is managed by small autonomous teams known as circles. There is a hierarchy of circles from the top of society all the way to the bottom. eg. Main Leadership -> Health -> Disease Prevention And Treatment -> Cancer Research. Circles define the purpose and charter of sub-circles, however they do not control them. Business has shown us that top-down orchestration is highly ineffective.

Not wrong, but god this is so tech bro-y. And hey, we have a word for your circles, they're committees.

Circles are focused on leadership and do not perform actual work. Instead a circle will create a project and assign members to enact a specific piece of work. A clear separation of leadership (circle) and producing value through work (project) helps each of these concerns be better and more explicitly addressed.

oh my god do you not see already the clear separation between the circles, the elite who get elected and re-elected to their positions, and the workers?

Circles use ideas like consensus seeking decision making, openness, sub-circle and project creation to do their job. However, society is large with many different areas. Agile software development practices has shown that there is no one size fits all practices and flexibility is required.

Jesus fucking christ I do not want my government to be run on a sprint model. I do not. We can't run a government like "whoopsie looks like what we released accidentally stops food stamps to pregnant women we'll log that as a bug and put in our backlog teehee"

As someone who works in tech, agile and a lot of what they have mentioned here is great for tech, and I don't fucking trust in the slightest that it could be applied to a government.

ryan ,

Are you telling me that moderating is a shitton of work, and that the only people crazy enough to put in that much effort are simultaneously gonna be pissed off about Reddit crippling their ability to do that work?

And that new fresh faced moderators are suddenly being faced with a pile of trash and told to have at it, totally unequipped for what faces them?

Shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

Email vs Capitalism, or, Why We Can't Have Nice Things - Dylan Beattie - NDC Oslo 2023 ( youtu.be )

As email is the original federated system, it might be worth looking to our history to see our future: what was once a utopia for nice people communicating with each other has become a spam-filled arms race dominated by only a few domains....

ryan ,

I'm a self-made man. Isn't that what they want?

No, not like that!

(but seriously, 👏 I'm gonna shamelessly steal your great joke for real life convos)

ryan ,

They tried to get away with not having it, hoping people would be happy consuming curated (paid) content and making them advertising bucks. I bet they had it ready to go from the get-go and were hoping they wouldn't have to turn it on.

ryan ,

Agreed. If you set aside the comedy bits for just one second and examine the plots, they're very standard Star Trek, and I love how LD is able to simultaneously be funny and also good Trek.

Frankly, I'm thrilled that it's something different. Especially now that Prodigy has apparently been canned, and I was fascinated by that one because it felt Star Trek but also like they were bringing in some Star Wars-esque character designs and villain...

I do think the key to making Star Trek the "expanded universe" Paramount wanted is to make various different subgenres of shows, but make sure they all adhere to core Star Trek values. (I still want my Starfleet Medical Drama, dammit. I want Star Trek Law and Order where every episode is a courtroom drama. Maybe an anthology series where they just kind of throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks for new shows.)

I don't know what's going on with the Starfleet Academy series but, frankly, I don't care if it's Riverdale level trash as long as the actual Star Trek bits are authentic. Let the teenagers enjoy things.

ryan ,

Hostile architecture, yup. Nothing better than the one-two punch of poorly accommodating people's sitting needs while simultaneously ensuring the unhoused have to suffer even more!

Not to mention what all these "creative designs" do in terms of making some of these benches basically unusable to people with certain physical or sensory disabilities.

ryan ,

SNW S2 so far has been hitting hard on standard Star Trek stories. Everyone's behaving as if they're in Starfleet, the stories have been a good combination of character-driven and interesting sci-fi, and I haven't found myself wanting to take any back to the draft table and re-write them (with the exception of the special green strong boy juice in "The Broken Circle" which I felt could have been accomplished with a less silly phaser fight and maybe M'Benga punching a Klingon or two.)

Similarly, I've said elsewhere that I really liked Picard S3 for the character-driven narration, even if there wasn't a lot of sci-fi to it, and I'd love to see a Star Trek: Legacy to see how Matalas tackles individual stories and such.

And Lower Decks is fantastic, full stop - always a treat to watch.

Honestly, I'm hoping for this season of SNW to finish out like it's been going, just returning to "basics of Star Trek", and then with a solid footing and understanding they can start branching out to larger ongoing plotlines and such. So maybe not 1997 yet... But I feel like the groundwork is being laid, and I'm optimistic.

ryan ,

Sure, but if elections were only a few months long, how would we get people all riled up and angry at each other all the time? Are you telling me we'd just have to live our normal lives?

What's your views on PIC season 3?

I’m currently rewatching it, and at first I admit I hated the season and didn’t understand all the praise it got, but on this second viewing, I am actually warming up a bit to it. It still is deeply flawed, with a lot of things that don’t make sense or could have been done better, but I kinda like it regardless. What do...

ryan ,

I think it really captured the "human element" of Star Trek. The conversations and the way people interacted with each other was on-point. I feel like the writers were able to bring back the TNG characters in a way that felt appropriate both to who they were and who they might have become in the following decades.

However, there really wasn't much to chew on in the sci-fi department, to the point I really wouldn't say it was even science fiction but a people-driven drama that happened to be set in space. I can understand why some people would've been thrown off by that.

ryan ,

Per a Des Moines Register poll published in March, 61 percent of Iowans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared to the 35 percent who think it should be illegal in all or most cases.

No wonder they have to sneakily ram this through. This isn't democracy in the least.

ryan ,

My understanding is:

An app itself has a single OAuth client id. So rather than per user, it would seem to be per app.

This would kill third party apps used by a lot of users, but individually created tools that developers created using their own client IDs would be fine, so like if I spun up a bot on a user account and called into reddit, I'd be fine because I probably wouldn't hit those limits. That's what they mean by "The vast majority of third-party apps and bots fall into the free usage category and should not see any disruptions" - all these little individually run bots and such.

Bots good, third party apps that allow people to actually browse your website in any meaningful capacity bad, I guess?

ryan OP ,

Really though, I just would have wanted to see Archer on the big screen, regardless of quality.

ryan ,

"And then this lady left a gun in my room and very pointedly told me I'm right where I need to be."

It was an odd shot too, like the camera focused on her putting the gun down. It felt like it was meant to, or is meant to in the future, come back, but maybe it's just a dangling thread.

Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x03 "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow"

::: spoiler Logline La’An travels back in time to twenty-first-century Earth to prevent an attack which will alter humanity’s future history—and bring her face to face with her own contentious legacy. :::...

ryan ,

You echo my exact sentiments. I was so prepared to be disappointed by "yet another time travel episode to modern day, oh boy" and the writers pulled it off.

I've been incredibly impressed by S2 so far, gotta say.

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