Supposedly, a meltdown at sea is pretty low risk because you have the perfect heatsink literally everywhere around you, and its a molten salt design, which I think(?) (source: my ass) means that the fuel would at worst leak into the sea and immediately solidify back into some inert state.

Assuming you mean “Can Mastodon instances defederate with Threads?”: Yes. Mastodon (and similar services) run on the ActivityPub protocol, which allows them to decide who they do and do not federate with. Many instances have chosen to preemptively block Threads, many have chosen not to. Pick what works for you.

by adding features you can only get if you are on their platform. Their goal is to make most people prefer the Meta version of the fediverse

Why is this a bad thing? This is the system working as intended: a company forced to make a service people want, rather than just taking users for granted. You resist enshittification because you’re not being held hostage through access to content, so the company is forced to make the service good. And this will attract other companies to produce competing services.

And besides, most people already prefer the Meta version… they already have the user advantage. There’s already way more users locked in their services than there is on the rest of the Fediverse.

I am optimistic about Meta’s investment in the Fediverse. If you don’t believe the Fediverse can survive the embrace of big tech, I don’t think you believe in it at all. You don’t want an open web, you just want to be the one in control. The goal of a decentralized internet - in my opinion - is to separate content from service. And if you believe that is the future, then you have to accept that companies are going to build new services that will try to monetize that content. But the beauty of that paradigm is you get to choose the service that works best for you without sacrificing access to the people or media you’re interested in. And really, it’s not much different from say, Google, being able to monetize Chrome because it can access your website. I mean… yeah, but that’s kind of the point?

Pre-0.19 I assume you would need to be on an instance that is blocking them.

Post-0.19 you can block them as an instance, meaning “any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden”

So, the answer still varies depending on your goals for blocking.

For clarity:

• The 41% number combines both instances that have actually blocked Threads and those who have pledged to do so at some point, so “have blocked” is a bit misleading
• As stated, this is a percentage of instances, not users. Roughly 24% of users are on instances that have limited, blocked, or pledged to block Threads.

The reasoning behind a specific system may not be arbitrary, but why is one system better than another? People have also used 8 day systems, and 10 day systems. It would seem to me that biggest reason it is still in use today is “it’s the way we’ve always done it”. The inertia of the 7-day system makes change very hard, though there have been attempts over the last few centuries by both France and the Soviet Union. So, even if you could scientifically prove that some other system would be more productive, you would have a very hard time implementing it.

The idea that I will work a few percentage points more or less over my life, as a direct result of the phases of the moon, is, while perhaps technically correct, a fundamentally silly reason.

This is a tangent, but you ever think about how arbitrary the week structure is? Like, if weeks were 6 or 8 days long, it would be a big shift in work-life balance regardless of how you split the days up. But thousands of years ago we decided on 7 and it just kind of stuck.

Assuming 8 hour days, here are some different splits for on and off:

• 3 on 1 off: working 25% of the time
• 5 on, 2 off: working 23.8% of the time
• 4 on, 2 off: working 22.2% of the time
• 5 on 3 off: working 20.8% of the time
• 4 on 3 off: working 19.0% of the time

I got the award for the “most unlucky, anti-lucky, possible player”…

So there’s that.

From what I understand, there’s (at least) two kinds of free speech. There’s free speech as in the government will not restrict your speech, which is important for criticizing the state without fear of being locked up. Then there’s the fanatical idea of maximizing speech: that the marketplace of ideas requires minimal limitations on what can be said anywhere, and the ‘best ideas’ will naturally rise to the top.

The problem with the latter is that it is incredibly noisy, easy to manipulate, and often an illusion anyway. Proponents of the latter in the US will use the former as cover, but they are different things. The 2nd 1st Amendment has nothing to do with your ability to moderate private spaces. Removing trolls, enforcing rules, and focusing discussion are all necessary for engaging in useful dialogue.

The Elon Musks of the world are both wrong and fuckin’ nuts, in my opinion. Often, what they really want is for the consensus of a place of discussion to more closely align with their own ideals. They think, “I am right, others disagree, therefore there must be some fundamental flaw in the system.” The simpler explanation is that they’re a moron.

I have two podcasts in my rotation currently:

• Remap Radio; previously Waypoint Radio, sometimes their politics feel overly dogmatic, perhaps as a reflection of the audience and culture they have cultivated, but the vibes are good and they have insightful things to say. I’d say they are currently in a transition period so they’re still finding their rhythm.
• 8-4 Play; Started by a localization company based in Tokyo, you’ll get a unique perspective of life in Japan, Japanese games, and industry connections that you can’t really get anywhere else, at least not in English.

Used to listen to the Bombcast, but none of the splinters from what it was appeal to me much. New Bombcast, Nextlander, solo Gerstmann, are all flawed in different ways imo.