This comes from a memory of a digression during a lecture in an ecology class I was in 20yrs ago… so you know, grain of salt.

From this particular professors point of view. Symbiotic was the term to describe mutualism until recently. And then. A few papers started using symbiosis as an umbrella term for all relationships with sub-terms to describe the “benefits math”. This, to him, was annoying pedantry. But eventually all the textbooks adopted the new hierarchy of terms and the world moved on.

If you took a biology class with a text published pre-2000s, it’s very possible that your book described symbiosis as a mutually beneficial relationship between species.

Long story short: the language is fluid and ever changing, even in science fields.

I have to know what the Detroit soccer team did to get so high on that list. Somebody here must know. Please!

It’s such a silly concept. This massive superstructure of division to replace the simple idea that “I have a lot in common with peers in my age cohort”.

As soon as somebody says “technically you are a member of generation___”, you can ignore them. Anyone who puts a generation label at the center of their identity probably doesn’t have a lot else going on.

I know that software developers want to be called engineers. But honestly it is a horrible analogue

Software is honestly almost more of a scientific discipline. Sure it’s applied (things are built to a specific function), but the actual work proceeds much more like a rolling series of compounding experiments.

Computer scientist is a great piece of language that I think software developers should wear with pride.

Also, without a PE role who has legal responsibility for the design, you just can’t call it engineering in my mind. I make my living validating software that other people make. It’s gotten better but 20yrs ago we were expected to release test drugs on instruments running toy grade software. If an engineer designed a bridge with flaws equivalent to lab software that can’t do a linear regression properly they would end up in jail.

This is a thing that sounds like some crazy uncle bullshit but it is actually completely true and non-controversial.

The scariest thing to a central banker when it comes to inflation is that wages might start to go up. When that happens the inflations is basically permanent.

Studying evolutionary biology in my undergrad had a big impact on how I look at systems. Judge them by their effect, and not their parsimony. If the mess inside starts to negatively impact efficacy, it will almost always get replaced and almost never get fixed.

Getting obsessed with “how the sausage is made” is a pointless endeavor. If it’s good, eat it, if not make something that tastes better.

This year we deployed a CURE for sickle cell! Cured a congenital disease with gene editing. It’s hard to do and crazy expensive, but the end of suffering from this disease is actually in sight.

The mRNA vaccine tech that got a boost from Covid is now being used to cure certain melanoma cancers. This is a potential sea change in the fight against cancer.

More and more of our energy is coming from fully renewable sources. We are behind (way behind tbh) but humanity is actually moving the right direction at this point. We could honestly be seeing peak carbon in the next few years. The climate will change, probably already has, but we might actually survive this.

We’ve got problems, lots of them, and some pretty nasty. But you are almost certainly better off living today than just about any time in human history.

Oh my, I live in MI and I always thought the DC fans were sort of wholesome. People taking pride in their city and building traditions. I’m not going to find out what you saw there but it bums me out.

This is a real rogues gallery of internet. And… a soccer team from Detroit. What the fuck did those guys do?

Stardew Valley will probably be the game that looms largest in my kid’s nostalgia. They have both played the life out of that thing. Other things that come to mind: Minecraft, phasmaphobia, fnaf, Skyrim, duck game, BOTW, and Nidhogg 2.

There is no guiding aesthetic driven by the technology, just whatever is available and cool.

Re: loot boxes, there is no denying that fortnight is(was?) a huge deal in this gen of kids. I’m sure at least some kids are going to have fond memories of getting v bucks for their birthday.

This take seems really counterintuitive to me, but I’m no expert in Israeli politics I guess. Seems like you could use 9/11 as an analog though. In that case, the people bent over backwards to make sure that the bush administration had all the support they could ever want. Huge wins for the GOP in the 02 elections, fairly straight path to reelection in 04. It was fully five years later in 06 when voters finally started to sour on Bush and the Neoconservative project.

Do things really work that differently in Israel or is this article pandering click bait bullshit?

It wouldn’t surprise me terribly if it came to pass that the US populace was ready for blood over this. Nobody in my circle is down to get involved but god only knows what is going through the head of the average person in this country.

Deep in the hangover from the abject failure of the Iraq war, there were goofballs singing “bomb bomb Iran”. We are a warmongering people.

Your knowledge of the history exceeds mine, but I can’t help think your context furthers the point that this term is rather complicated. It still seems like a really strange word to be using in this context. It carries some historical weight that doesn’t quite fit in the modern wheel barrow.

Regarding the broader politics, modern anti-capitalists tend to “no true scotsman” the 20th century horror show. I have changed as I got older and come to accept that 19th thinkers lacked the creativity needed to incentivize collectivism at the state scale and fell back on force of arms. We (the 21st century left) must be more creative or those who suffered and died in that mess died for nothing.

I put it this way:

I want to maximize the level of equality in our societies. I want a floor of poverty below which a citizen cannot fall and a ceiling of wealth beyond which a person cannot rise. I do not think the tested and failed ideas of a 19th century philosopher are worth putting more time and human misery into.

We can do better, we SHOULD have learned something in the last 100ish years.

I am a bit uncomfortable with the word tankies. It really applies to a different group from a different time. It was a right wing slur that was used to paint trade unions and vanilla liberals as enemies of the state.

I would like a new word to help us describe the highly online left that was radicalized. Whose hatred of capitalism got so hot that they started to lionize horrifying 20th century communism.

I guess tankies will do, but it’s a really complicated word from a complicated time.

Wait, you already have defederated you instance from threads?

As best I can tell threads does not yet support activitypub and cannot be federated to a lemmy/mastodon/etc server.

Is there really anything to do at this point or is it more of a pledge to so in the future?

Agreed. EEE, at the end of the day means using your superior resources to build attractive features that lure the market away from the “vanilla” FOSS project and into your proprietary ecosystem.

Are current fediverse users likely to be lured to Facebook by cool features? NO

Almost all of us are here because we no longer want to participate in the centralized corporate social media machine. The only thing FB could do to “extend” activitypub in a way that interests me is to not use it at all.

If you though Mastodon was gonna “win” the microblog wars, condolences, I can see why this is upsetting. That doesn’t mean they can somehow come in and ruin what it is right now.

Further, I am very dubious that Threads is going to federate with existing servers. When they talk about a fediverse, they are talking about a network of services that they have full control over. Insta and FB are going to get activitypub support and the new “zukkit” link aggregator will be announced within a year.

Will they though? From what I can tell, Mastodon/lemmy users would get ad free access to threads content without turning over any personal data. If I’m not off base on that, that seems like a thing that meta is going to avoid.

I don’t want trash from meta crowding up the place and would probably leave a server that federated with threads but I am pretty sure that’s never going to happen.

If the fate of your posts is the concern, threads and whether or not it is federated with your server doesn’t matter. It never mattered

Anyone, anywhere on earth (including meta) can gather your public statements and do with them as they please. Legal or not, it’s a big world and the law doesn’t cross borders as easily as information does.

They don’t need threads to harvest and sell something you have posted online freely.

They don’t need threads to gather enough data to start associating your user name with a real name. Especially if you have an account on one of their services.