I know, I know, this is not the platform. But however I dislike the war (which sounds across-the-board unpopular except with Republican senators) having love for a regime that massacres protestors by the thousands is cruel and perverse.
Good point but I don't understand how you're calculating those numbers. For example there were 1,639 people executed in 2025 for a population of 93.1 million
> (which sounds across-the-board unpopular except with Republican senators)
Having love for a regime that massacres school children by the hundreds sounds cruel and perverse, and 40% [0] of the US still approves of that regime. Guess 40% of the US is just as cruel and perverse as this person, in other words it's barely worth mentioning given how common it is.
Criticizing the US's actions against Iran is in no way condoning the things that the regime has done to it's own citizens. Especially since those actions are contributing directly to the Iranian people's hardship.
I'm not saying that you, personally, are being deliberately obtuse and unnuanced about this (and I'm not even saying that there aren't people who are sympathizing with the Iranian regime) but there are absolutely people being deliberately obtuse and unnuanced about it.
I 'love' this sort of posh framing. Is there a war you like for a change? Thousands of civilians are dying on whims of an old mentally sick man, with nobody having balls to stop him anyhow. He can claim he is setting up a genocide of entire nation to whole world and... nothing? I know, one of the less bloody senseless wars US waged, ending up defeated again, but still. Everybody's US taxes are helping financing this.
Nothing substantial achieved, at least not positive for US. Israel is toying with you like with a donkey and carrot on stick. Is that not insulting to your own pride and self-worth? You lost all partners globally, everybody hates dealing with US and rolls their eyes on another daily set of whims of your oligarchs.
China is damn happy, russia is very happy so there is certainly that. And Iran, they will keep doing their thing, regardless of what you do and cia has to accept there isnt much they can change about that. Iran would be stupid to not throw everything into getting nuclear bomb for themselves. russians would be stupid to not help them there at this point.
I, too, only use Macs when my employer forces me to do so. Here's how I made it bearable: MacBook lid stays closed at all times; plug it into a Thunderbolt hub (requires just 1 Thunderbolt port for everything); connect a proper matte monitor, external keyboard, Logitech mouse.
Now the only annoying things are the MacOS window manager (uBar attempts to fix this, but is flaky) and the weird keyboard mappings for things like "start of line", "end of line", "previous word", etc. Karabiner fixes those if you're willing to invest 3 hours in setting it up.
> weird keyboard mappings for things like "start of line", "end of line", "previous word"
Those are Emacs keybindings, and they're also present by default in Bash since they were copied by GNU Readline. They're one of the few things I really like about macOS. (But I'm an Emacs user and I'm also used to using them in my terminal.)
The window manager never stops sucking. Rectangle and Contexts or Witch help. Ice helps with the stupid menu bar design and problems with overflowing icons or oversized menus.
I found external, non-apple mice had terrible functionality. There was forced acceleration and other ways in which the Magic mouse and Mac were purposely configured to work "differently" from normal mice and it made using anything other than a Magic mouse work terribly.
Which sucks because the magic mouse is the worst mouse money can buy.
Do you still have to install third-party software to keep it running when you close the lid?
Does it still not support "Windows Hello" style face unlock when closed? I remember I couldn't touch the fingerprint sensor when closed and the MacBook was unable to use my Windows Hello camera.
Design aside, the quality is undeniable, the price is reasonable and the M chips have been in their own league of efficiency. (Tho the new Intel and Qualcomm chips look to be catching up)
Pattern recognition - people who are on bsky are overly concerned with pronouns and extreme leftist ideology and/or extreme hate for trump. There is no actual discourse. Just a bubble where there is no tolerance for debate or difference of opinion.
Agreed, Twitter suspended accounts for "misgendering" and sharing Hunter Biden laptop stories. It was a bubble that protected leftists.
X, however, is pro free speech. Everyone is platformed. Everyone can discuss. Everyone can debate. It is a bubble that protects free speech from censorship. The left struggles to understand it and retreats to bluesky.
“Everyone” isn’t platformed on X, I’ve seen enough stories of Musk himself banning people he doesn’t like from the platform with plenty of audience cheering him on.
What’s more, the EFF numbers seem to tell a story of shadowbanning as another commenter said, not merely dying engagement.
You don’t have a “free speech” microphone on X. You just have a place where you can hang out with others that are also sharing views most of the people outside the US find atrociously medieval. Power to you I guess.
(And before you call me “the left” - I’m not; I just don’t live in the Overton window that is across the Atlantic).
Really seems like western europe is sandwiched between fascist trends that have taken hold, diverting their own via brexit's failure - maybe something to do with how yellow vests were received in france too? Sure seems like Europe dipped its toes in the water for awhile and is changing its mind.
Defending my own shared identity, I have to repeatedly mention how bifurcated our society is. We are still trying to get out of the water.
No reactions beside: monopolies are bad for innovation and why we cannot have nice things. You might hear some people say "but these big companies innovate". They were mostly done innovating two decades ago, now they just snuff out innovation and acquisition is one of their main tools.
well if you are waiting for the monopolies to be broken don't wait they will not be broken monopolies are here to stay, capitalistism for the rich and socialism also for the rich they best thing you can do is be rich yourself
I'll post this as a top level comment, because I think it is crucial: A few people are saying that it is expensive to run a relay but others have done it for as low as $34/month [1]. So unless somebody presents other proof that it is expensive I would say that those posters are either wrong and trying to mislead us on purpose.
Edit: actually the article links to somebody doing it for $18/month.
I've also done a full network replica (all the data indexed in a postgres) on a raspberry pi (with an 8tb nvme attached via a hat). Its really not expensive to do . And if I wanted to drop data older than say 3 months, it would be even cheaper still.
Case in point! This is an often mentioned statement on which the argument that "atproto is no decentralized" largely hinges. There are honest atproto digs out there but that is not one.
> There are honest atproto digs out there but that is not one.
Which one? The expense, or not being decentralized? The latter remains valid because the majority of the userbase chooses ("only" by default ofc) to coordinate through a single operator. Network effects mean that you either play by their rules or you aren't allowed in the garden.
It's good to learn that a full mirror is so cheap but I think the criticism still holds to the extent that it's a high enough price that unless something changes it will continue to discourage the network from ever becoming truly federated. Compare to activitypub where you can stand up a fully self sufficient node on more or less anything that's capable of networking. The obvious downside being that the network is more fragmented and often less reliable overall (ex nodes are regularly flaky or go missing entirely, no single unified view of the network, etc etc all the perfectly valid complaints about AP).
I think AP, AT, and nostr all get certain things right but all have major downsides baked into their designs. Note that I don't mean this comment to be negative, merely to respond to your remark that the dig in question is somehow invalid.
> We run a full AppView + PDS + Relay for ~$1,772/mo. PDS is cheap (~$0.03/user/mo, 4 vCPUs, 32GB RAM). AppView is the expensive part; indexes the entire network (16TB DB), not just your users. Storage scales linearly with network activity. PDS scales linearly with your account count.
The thing that makes ATproto nice and decentralized is that PDSs are decoupled from the application itself. Anyone can run a separate AppView, and just a handful of AppViews is enough to give people meaningful choice on ATproto, with the benefit of being much more approachable than ActivityPub for people who are not technically inclined.
People live in different conditions, have different income and (even more crucial) different expenses.
Not to mention subjective need. I may be interested in a relay, but I don't really need one. So for me 18$ will be too much. 5$? Maybe. (This is about as much as I'm paying for Fastmail right now, for example).
I'll go halfers with you, any other takers? I feel like sharing infrastructure via small online co-ops can take the bite out of the cost. So much cheaper then the cost of being the product via meta/goog etc.
reply