if you rely upon apple products to conceal and manage the complexity of contemporary technology, please spare a bit of sympathy for people who find contemporary social arrangements complex and fraught. where is the apple for people without malice overwhelmed and confused by contemporary mores, even while they are genuinely and importantly more just than the mores many people were raised with?

@misc I would. Very modest side effects (for me and my wife, much younger than in our seventies, literally a bad taste in the mouth was the worst of it), reduces whatever injury the virus might do inside of you. Just on first principles, given that Paxlovid effectively diminishes viral replication, it seems desirable.

in reply to @misc

@birnim i mean, surely you agree the shitposts could be more artfully rewritten.

in reply to @birnim

I find I'm in the mood these days to rewrite the internet from scratch.

I'm not sure that's an efficient use of my time.

BREAKING: Comfort and Joy

"Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with" ~Richard Rorty should have been on the Supreme Court

new marketing firms should be described as “tart ups”.

@djc there are a lot of fun language ideas in there, but having read the article i still think i would flunk the quiz!

in reply to @djc

@djc depending on context perhaps, but you may just be saying i was wrong. if i say this list is a comprehensive list of our school’s holidays, and you then tell me “this list is more comprehensive”, that implies that my original statement was mistaken. (you would not say, “yes but”, you’d say “no, …”). 1/

in reply to @djc

@djc if i say Google is compehensive, then you say Neeva is more comprehensive, that would be “yes, but…”, but it implies my original statement meant “extensive but not comprehensive”, rather than comprehensive. shades on using “literally” to mean “figurative”, which is both common and jarring. /fin

in reply to self

the perfect christmas song for 2022. youtu.be/flA5ndOyZbI

@guan @DetroitDan not related to reply visibility in particular, but it’s all so reminiscent of the early blogosphere. blockquotes were often used to “fisk”, to mock or criticize a piece by dissecting it into blockquotes and mocking and criticizing each of those. but blockquotes were also the heart of friendly, cooperative engagement between blogs.

in reply to this

it’s cool that there is a class of words for which the modifier “more” actually means less than what the word unmodified would imply.

more perfect is less perfect than perfect. more complete is less complete than complete. more comprehensive is less comprehensive than comprehensive. more exhaustive is less exhaustive than exhaustive. etc.

others?

@DetroitDan “quote toots”. on twitter you can embed a tweet like a blockquote, and write your own text commenting on it above. it’s a popular and useful feature, but unfortunately one popular use is to “dunk”, to take something someone has tweeted and criticize or mock it in a way that draws in lots of engagement (retweets or likes). some mastodoners consider this (ab)use of the feature so toxic, the platform refrains from implementing it, despite a lot of clear demand for it.

in reply to @DetroitDan

@kevix I find lists like this github.com/brodi1/activitypub-

So far, the best explanation I have is from @aredridel moments ago, that they merge and copy federated timelines to give instances a more comprehensive picture of what's going on than lazily acquiring toots from local follows would do.

in reply to @kevix

@aredridel (Thank you! That's a big help!)

in reply to @aredridel

Does anyone know of a good document describing how mastodon federation works? How do new instances become discovered, what determines whether other instances federate with them or not by default? Also (especially), what is the role of relays? I keep encountering references to relays, and lists of them, but I haven't found anything describing their function, their role in the network distinct from server instances. Any breadcrumbs would be greatly appreciated!

@Alon i kind of want to QT this, just to excerpt and highlight the useful coinage "Substack audience capture"…

in reply to @Alon

does the QT make the abuser, or does the abuser make the QT?

@akhilrao it’s the machines that are stupid.

if you mute a , does it become a ?