There were lots of games back then. And many of them were as bad or worse than the shittiest shovelware and template swaps we’ve got today.

Thing is, most people don’t remember the 200 Action Games 3 disc pack at the bottom of the bargain bin cause they sucked.

I’m not disputing that there is more “stuff” these days by raw numbers, with the barrier to creation and distribution of games and such dramatically lowered by ubiquitous and easy to use tooling. But I bet the ratios of good games to shitty games won’t have changed too terribly much over the years.

DMVs are sometimes where states will dump troublesome or underperforming employees they can’t outright fire.

On the other end, the DMV is one of the places where employees have a job interacting with the public for sometimes-complex transactions. And, generally speaking, the public is dumb, unpleasant, and unprepared. Especially when dealing with low-level government beaurocrats who are telling them something they don’t want to hear.

When you sign up [for Mastodon], you join a server (called an “instance”), which resembles a forum and is based around a shared interest.

What an incredibly ineffective and possibly outright misleading way to describe that.

I have no illusions that if Facebook and Google had started with proprietary and non-interoperable chat systems that XMPP would be flourishing today. I think that, by and large, we’d be in the same place with it.

People chatting from XMPP to Facebook to chat with folks probably by and large would’ve gotten Facebook accounts for the non-chat functionality that was never interoperable and not part of real time chat communication. Think groups and events.

If you only interacted with Facebook people over XMPP, you were locked out of a huge portion of functionality unless you signed up for Facebook even while XMPP worked.

A lot of people are focused on “extend” in the vein of Facebook and Google playing fast and loose with the XMPP spec and implementation until the whole ecosystem got fucked and then walking away. Which is a real danger. I mean, in a lot of ways Mastodon itself has already proven that. How much fedi drama over the years has been caused by Masoton unilaterally deciding something that other AP microblogging platforms just needed to deal with? Lots of people have beef with Eugen for a reason.

But even more insidious than that will be luring people onto Threads for ancillary benefits and then cutting off that large swath of the fediverse after the drain is complete. Then we would definitely not “end up exactly where we are now.”

Imagine in 3 years. “Ohh threads supports a live chat thread feature but those threads don’t federate. My friends are gonna do one while they all watch the season finale of Marvel Bullshit Infinity. Guess I could sign up for Threads to take part. Hmm I can still follow all my friends in the broader fediverse from here, I can just make this my primary account. Scratch that I’ll make this my only account. Oh, what Threads is turning off federation? Oops sorry everyone else I have no way to reach you anymore, maybe you can switch to threads?”

Sorry, argv_minus_one, we Oregonians and Massachusettsers aren’t allowed to note all the things wrong with our states because we get weed and abortions.

I get how it can feel a little inconsiderate for us to gripe in the presence of folks in states where their rights are newly under attack. But also maybe there’s a reason both of our states have high costs of living, low rates of diversity, and pretty bad housing crises?

Of course, sorry I didn’t mean to imply that things aren’t relatively better here. I just get wary when someone talks about how good single-party rule would be for them.

Certainly yes, we have legal weed and nobody is making us register with a government I’d when we wanna look at porn.

However, many - or even most - efforts to address inequality are not real or effective.

The greater Boston area is one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country. The city itself is largely out of reach for folks not in tech, biotech, or finance. Meanwhile it has a very rich history of discrimination and segregation that continues to this day with no end in sight. Meanwhile, NIMBY “progressives” continue to vote down proposals for new housing - affordable or otherwise.

Lots of folks being priced out of most of the state and moving down south. And kots of folks wanting to move up here, but can’t make the numbers work.

The trouble with single-party rule is when they get too comfortable. MA has been essentially a single-party state for a long time now. Rather than continually doing good (or bad or anything at all) the legislature has grown lazy and corrupt.

The MA state legislature is one of the least transparent legislatures in the nation. Many legislators are firmly in the pocket of corporations and special interest groups. Our public transit is actively crumbling. And they have sent hardly anything of consequence to the governor’s desk this year.

Single-party rule - no matter the party - is bad news. Which makes it all the more unfortunate that they were able to FUD the ranked-choice voting initiative out of existence in 2020, so there’s no end in sight.

Let’s say you run a moderately successful flea market. You own a moderately sized field. You employ a staff of accountable organizers to vet and select your vendors to ensure they aren’t selling anything you don’t want at your market (say Nazi paraphernalia, guns). You have security staff and volunteers at the event itself to ensure vendors and customers are safe - they ensure vendors aren’t selling anything they shouldn’t be, they ensure customers don’t try to steal or assault your vendors, they make sure nobody accidentally sets the field on fire, they manage the parking lot and portapotties.

A collective of artisans admire your success and buy up an adjacent field. While your flea market focuses on second hand and vintage goods, they want somewhere to sell handmade things. The organizers of your event work with the organizers of that event to share strategies and ensure both markets can reasonably remain safe and popular. Since they by and large hold themselves to the same standards as you, you agree to share a parking lot and build paths between your two fields.

A local farmers co-op eventually joins your meta-organization in the same way to offer fresh meat and produce.

Now you have a bustling megamarket. The billionaire that owns the local mall sees a drop in revenue due to folks going to the fields for secondhand clothes, fresh produce, and local art. People aren’t shopping with you as much anymore.

The billionaire comes up with a plan to recapture the market. Open air markets in fields are popular now? The billionaire buys the rest of the farmland around your fields and flattens it. They pour a paved parking lot with a dedicated interchange with the local highway. They promise a mix of big corporate vendors and allow smaller vendors to set up their own tents and sell right alongside everyone else.

You think, wow this is a great opportunity to grow all of our markets even more. You start building pathways from your field into the billionaire’s field so customers can easily get between your markets.

But soon, you start to notice something. People start parking at the billionaire’s field because it is paved and has easy highway access. Some of your vendors have started pulling out of your markets so they can go set up at the billionaire’s field so folks see their tent before they have spent all their money. Vendors who don’t move start having to pull out as the market is no longer worth their time or money. With fewer vendors, even more people avoid your fields and stay in the billionaire’s field.

And you start to notice something else. The billionaire started posting folks at the oath between your fields. Your markets have a few vendors the billionaire and their corporate vendors deem unsavory - erotic art, microbrewed beer, that sort of thing. They won’t allow in any customers who have bought anything from those vendors because they run a family friendly establishment. Soon, the people who still come to your side of the field are avoiding those vendors.

You notice an additional thing. The billionaire isn’t as diligent at vendor management as you are, especially with the amount of resources they’re using making sure nobody is carrying around erotic art from your market. While the side of the field near the parking lot where all the corporate vendors are is bright and shiny, you’ve noticed some questionable things happening near your side of the field. The antiques dealer is selling Nazi paraphernalia. The information tent for the local gun club has started to sell firearms with no background checks. The carnival toy vendor is secretly selling opiates. Folks who shop there keep trying to get into your markets and your security folks are having a hard time keeping a handle on things. You don’t have the resources to screen everyone who comes in. You end up having to fence off your paths to prevent folks coming from that market from causing harm to your vendors and customers.

But by this point most of your customers are accustomed to using the fancy parking lot and shopping with the corporate vendors. They’re confronted with a decision: do they just keep going to the billionaire’s field and get their clothes from the TJ Maxx tent or are they willing to make two stops so they can still peruse the cute vintage clothing?

Driving all the way around the fields to get to the other parking lot is pretty inconvenient so don’t bother. Eventually you can’t make the property tax payments for your field and you have to sell. The dream is done. The billionaire buys up the fields and expands their market.

Now rewind. You are an enthusiastic customer of the farmer’s market. How do you feel about the billionaire’s plan to buy up adjacent farmland?

(I was not able to work in a metaphor for meta “extending” activitypub with “new features” that aren’t part of the spec and forcing the rest of the fediverse to comply or get left behind)

Many of these have the same underlying external cause of money no longer being free so they can’t keep the merry-go-round going for their debt and/or their investors are no longer content to just pour more money into the engine.

did you know a release of a new fully open source LLM called OpenLLaMA just got announced by the Researchers at Berkeley AI Research?

I didn’t know that. Have you created a post about it in this community? I don’t see one.

Y’all’re great!

Here’s part 1 of a 4 part podcast series about Wim Hof and the Wim Hof Method https://ohnopodcast.com/investigations/2020/7/19/ross-and-carrie-cool-off-with-wim-hof-part-1-iceman-edition

A 45 minute “round table” with multiple rando masto instance admins? That doesn’t sound like enough time for the table to get very round.

It sounds more like 5 minutes introduction, 30 minute presentation by Meta, 10 minutes Q&A. But oops our presentation ran just a bit long, and I really do have a hard stop at noon so we really only have about 5 minutes for questions thanks for all of the valuable feedback we’ll be sure to circle back offline.