Fucking Christ, multiple people opening up about how they feel shunned by the very queer community that's supposed to accept them because they're bisexual, and here you are shunning and silencing queer people.

Are you this much of a flaming bag of dog shit to everyone in your life?

I'm pretty sure he was agreeing with you...?

Funny, I tweaked my Linux PC at work to look like Windows XP. It's so cursed, I love it.

my company announced today that they were going to start a phased rollout where AI would provide first responses to tickets, with it initially being "reviewed" by humans with the eventual goal being it just sending responses unsupervised. The strength of my "OH HELL NO" derailed the entire meeting for a solid 15 minutes lmao

He says himself that he was there to protect businesses, but he had no relation to the business beyond that of a standard employee, and his help was never requested--he didn't know the owners, his family didn't own the business, and he wasn't even a frequent customer IIRC.

The most charitable interpretation is that an untrained, underage civilian took a semiautomatic rifle across state lines, to a protest happening in a town he didn't live in, to guard a business that he had no special relation to, and that never asked for his help.

The more probable interpretation, given posts on his social media before the shooting (that weren't allowed to be shown in court), is that he wanted to play action hero and shoot some scumbags, and he got exactly what he hoped.

EDIT: Apparently he worked at the business he was guarding, but the point still stands--he never got permission to defend the business, nor was it ever offered.

Make no mistake, this may seem reasonable on the surface, but it's a Trojan horse that anti-choice extremists are hoping to leverage so they can get another case in front of our extremist supreme court to argue that fetuses should get full protection under the 14th amendment, resulting in a full nationwide abortion ban. NPR recently released an article about this: How states giving rights to fetuses could set up a national case on abortion

More like they were a darling up until they were compromised by Russian intelligence and turned into the propaganda arm of the protofascist party in the US.

I never want to hear the phrase "Biden tops Trump" in my life ever again. Thanks for that mental image... 🤮

You need to learn your Internet history. It wasn't so long ago that we had a diverse, interoperable community of instant messaging platforms based on XMPP, an open, federated protocol. Anybody could host their own XMPP server, and communicate with any other XMPP server. Then in 2006, Google added XMPP support to their Talk app and integrated it into the Gmail web interface. But there were problems:

First of all, despites collaborating to develop the XMPP standard, Google was doing its own closed implementation that nobody could review. It turns out they were not always respecting the protocol they were developing. They were not implementing everything. This forced XMPP development to be slowed down, to adapt. Nice new features were not implemented or not used in XMPP clients because they were not compatible with Google Talk (avatars took an awful long time to come to XMPP). Federation was sometimes broken: for hours or days, there would not be communications possible between Google and regular XMPP servers. The XMPP community became watchers and debuggers of Google’s servers, posting irregularities and downtime (I did it several times, which is probably what prompted the job offer).

And because there were far more Google talk users than "true XMPP" users, there was little room for "not caring about Google talk users". Newcomers discovering XMPP and not being Google talk users themselves had very frustrating experience because most of their contact were Google Talk users. They thought they could communicate easily with them but it was basically a degraded version of what they had while using Google talk itself. A typical XMPP roster was mainly composed of Google Talk users with a few geeks.

Only a few years later, Google would discontinue Google Talk, migrated all their users to Hangouts, and decimated the XMPP community in an instant. Most of the Google users never noticed, outside of some invalid contacts in their list.

That's why everyone distrusts Meta. Even with Threads being a relatively unsuccessful platform by commercial social media standards, its active userbase still dwarfs the entire Fediverse combined. There's absolutely nothing stopping Meta from running the exact same playbook:

• Add ActivityPub support, but only partially

• Add new features to ActivityPub without consulting with the rest of the Fediverse or documenting the extensions, degrading the experience for everyone not using Threads

• Entice Fediverse users to migrate to Threads--after all, why use Mastodon or Lemmy when 95%+ of ActivityPub traffic originates from Threads?

• Deprecate ActivityPub support after most of the Fediverse is on Threads, leaving it smaller and more fragmented than if Threads had never federated at all, while forcing everyone who migrated from another Fediverse platform to Threads into an impossible choice between abandoning the vast majority of their contacts or subjecting themselves to Meta's policies, tracking, and moderation

Theoretically it can happen. In practical terms, 99% of those cases are out of three things:

• A charade to get an angry customer to go away (pretending to fire an employee)

• The last straw in a series of incidents that add up to justify firing the employee (i.e. the employee has repeatedly made a mistake with no improvement over a long period of time)

• Misconduct egregious enough to warrant firing them on the spot (for example, the employee punches a customer, or shows up to a job site blackout drunk)

The remaining 1% of cases are truly shitty managers that are a nightmare to work for.

You know it's coming. Why would a streaming company want a consumer buying one month, binging a single show they're interested in, then immediately cancelling the subscription after, when you could guarantee a 6- or 12-month revenue stream for them?

It drives active users and increases activity on the site. Reddit tracks site usage metrics, and active user count + engagement are two of the most important metrics, since more active users = more eyeballs on ads, and more engagement = more ads that can be placed in front of those eyeballs.

The fact that the majority of the new active users are bot accounts that can't be advertised to is secondary, since the people who would invest in a reddit IPO wouldn't typically look that deep, they'd just look at the top line metrics and go "oh, there's a big bump on activity, this is a healthy website."