I can’t know why you were downvoted. I generally don’t downvote and didn’t in this case. But were I to speculate…

You pointed out a distinction without a difference. And the way you defended yourself preemptively makes you sound like you knew very well you were being pedantic and what the result would be. It doesn’t contribute anything of value to the conversation and leaves one with the impression you disagree it was outrageous to fire her — else why issue a meaningless “correction”?

I don’t know why you did that, but I strongly suspect your downvotes are related to that thought-process.

Hey, friend. Just remember that broken trust speaks ill of them, not you. And as for a bad track record, I find that the most trusting people are also the most trustworthy. Right now that’s pretty much all I know about you, but it’s enough to believe you’re making the world around you better. I don’t think your problem is trust, but rather being in a position where broken trust leaves you in an untenable situation.

I don’t know your reasons for hating yourself. Those belong to you. But whatever they are, whether they are valid or not, you don’t deserve hate. Hell, I wouldn’t waste my time hating anyone — hate has never solved a single problem. Give yourself some grace and room to make mistakes and improve. And then to stumble and do it again. We all have.

No lie, part of life is just luck, and for that part I hope yours is good. But the rest of it is in your hands, and those sound like decent hands to be in.

Here’s the thing: they aren’t asking for a reversal of the policy, they just want a fix to the problem. A solution that the criminal-industrial slave complex can provide…

I’d like to see how sharing someone’s own public words is disparaging their memory. Isn’t that how he’d want to be remembered? Did he recant those words? Because if it is wrong to quote him, that implies those words shame his memory. But then why is it shameful to quote him, but not to speak the words in the first place?

"Could it be? Could the greedy capitalists not have my best interests at heart?

No. It’s me who is wrong."

Prices aren’t going up because people are just starving and going homeless instead of buying.

Poor people hate this one weird trick!

I don’t think the two cross, really. A vibe coder asks for a bunch of features and then starts refining the output, fixing bugs and adding features. A developer knows the specific architecture and from years of writing tasks knows how to break work into manageable chunks and uses AI to implement something they have already defined and know where it fits in. The skill to write a good story isn’t far off from writing a good prompt.

I use AI all the time, and every time I hear someone describing vibe coding it makes my skin crawl.

I have on occasion unblocked people just to see what was in a thread. I’ve never really been glad that I did so. I blocked them for a reason. I shouldn’t want to engage with their posts. I’m happier and it makes things more calm when I’m not fighting with morons over shit anyone can see is wrong.

The world is both bigger and smaller than our problems. There always ways to make things better — which is what hope is, right? The idea that if we just stick with it things will get better?

My wife is out of town with her dad, our oldest, and grandson. I’m here taking care of our youngest two. I could be lonely, but yesterday I took my daughter to a state park and we walked some trails. I had hoped we’d run into some horses for her while we were there and damned if we didn’t do just that. 3 Fresians and a Paint — looked like the only ones there based on trailers, and not only were we there at the same time but we crossed paths.

Thrilled my daughter and she got to tell me all about her plans and efforts to own a small farm and horses some day. If anyone else told me without any history of farming they were going to take it up I’d be skeptical, but if anyone can, she can. I’m hopeful for her. This world might just burn to the ground, but that one will achieve her dreams before it happens.

Today between my back and my feet after that walk I can barely stand, but I’m on my deck with a cigar and a beer and a bright sunny day and… the world doesn’t care about me. It has no expectations. Nothing is riding on my shoulders. I can just exist in this moment and look at nature around me and realize all the fire and ice and devastation that must’ve passed through here before has all given way and been rebuilt to the beautiful day in front of my eyes.

It’s hard not to be hopeful, really. There is so much beauty in this world that exceeds the ugliness of this little screen in my hand.

Your mileage may vary.

It doesn’t matter. They are a niche voting block too small to have swayed the election. Stop acting like they are politically relevant enough to be worth poking and just let them be. We gain nothing by pointing fingers at each other when the real villains are right there.

“NatC” is generally considered sufficient.

Honor them, ignore him.

Yeah, neither have killed Twitter or displaced it enough to affect real change, but they are nice despite — or perhaps because of — being smaller. Like Lemmy, in fact. I don’t know if being here hurts Reddit. I hope so. But more importantly I like it better in these places even if it fails to disrupt the fortunes of greedy assholes.

But the next time something happens to disrupt Twitter or Reddit, alternatives are available and will attracts few more people away. Over time… who knows. Maybe some real change will happen by accident.

I haven’t been on mast for a bit. Custom feeds can do things like give you the posts of your quieter folks, see only posts (not so useful if you could just select certain people to only see self-posts, but useful now), I can get a feed of what’s popular with my friends. Those are examples from my own, but there are tons of custom feeds.

Oh I forgot you can do things like a classifier and labeled, so I can choose to identify myself as a developer and see if someone else labels themselves similarly. There are a bunch of other labelers.

I am aware of the potential issues with subscribed blocklists, but I use a few anyway, and it saves me from doing a lot of blocking myself. It’s not perfect because it is abuseable , but I like having the choice to use it.

Custom feeds, subscribed blocklists, blocking/muting keywords for a period of time. Basically the moderation controls. My mental health is better when I can just turn off certain topics for a bit without abandoning them altogether.

If I remember right, mast has a feature where you can follow someone but only their self posts and not reposts. There are accounts that are repost machines and I don’t want to follow someone if I’m not getting to hear their own thoughts in their own words. I wish Bluesky had that.

I like Bluesky and I’m currently on hiatus from Mastodon, but when you say “too little, too late” it may be that Bluesky beat them there, but at the end of the day Bluesky is still Big Tech bullshit. It is a matter of when, not if, it will be enshittified and we need a replacement.

Bluesky is a breath of fresh air and I like the community and features there. And twenty years ago Google was the awesome upstart punching Microsoft in the balls, and yet here we are today.

I don’t know if this is planned or sheer incompetence and playing telephone.

But what I do know is, if it is planned, then either:

1. They care mostly about the immediate reaction to the news — trying to stoke the fire of stochastic violence. If the truth comes out in a few days, that’s outside the window they are hoping to create a reaction within.
2. Or maybe they expect the truth, being a non-event, will not be reported by the same outlets that spread the rumors. They outlets will simply drop it and not report on it any more, but the audience will be left with the idea that the kid was a secret trans activist.

It suggests that not nearly enough people think to themselves, upon reading it, “How the fuck do you fit all of that on a fucking bullet? Bullshit.”

– Removing original post to prevent any confusion or misinformation. –

I’d say our problems were greatly exacerbated when we stopped killing Nazis.