At the point where they are running a custom ROM, this feels like a bad faith argument. It’s like claiming someone running Linux is clearly a Microsoft supporter when they bought a laptop preinstalled with Windows and replaced the OS day 1.

Exactly what alternative are you proposing? They don’t buy any hardware at all? It materializes out of thin air?

I like to imagine this as just a shitpost tool where you can just paste any text anyone types to get a screenshot like this and instantly invalidate their argument

Or maybe that’s what this already is and I just WHOOSHed myself

You acknowledged them which was great, and then immediately turned around and started re-educating them. It was a valuable message to get out into the world, but a victim recounting their experiences is NOT the audience you should be trying to educate.

Just say “I’m sorry that happened to you, some people are scumbags, being cis is totally fine” and redouble your zeal to spread that message in a more appropriate setting.

Edit: To clarify, I’m not saying I doubt your intentions. What I am saying is that it wasn’t very tactful or self-aware.

Also:

pointing out that it’s not universal or even the norm

That’s called “denying someone else’s experience.” Again, it’s about the worst way you can possibly comfort someone who is talking about when they were hurt. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s common: it happened to them. Even if they were the only person in the world that had happened to, knowing that wouldn’t make them feel better.

The thing that’s most alarming to me every time I hear someone say “cis isn’t offensive” is the complete lack of self-awareness, from groups that should really know better. But humans are humans so it just is what it is.

While I agree with the greater point you’re making, in context, you’re responding to someone who said “I’ve been referred to as cis as an insult” by saying “no you haven’t.” It shouldn’t take too long of a step back to realize that’s not a great thing to do.

So you’re saying the problem is that it’s infeasible to distribute the source code, which they already distribute to all of their developers with no problem, while there are numerous platforms that will host it for you for free if it’s public FOSS?..

Or you can subscribe to gamepass for games, unlimited games

Exactly the same here. Since I swipe type, I have to imagine that would be a nightmare on Dvorak with all the vowels clustered together.

While the conversion is appreciated, there’s no reason to be an ass about it. OP labeled it, so it’s not like it was confusing or making unnecessary assumptions about the audience. So really you’re the one who just comes across as completely culturally insensitive.

I think the bigger factor is, someone who already thinks they’re great probably isn’t working on noticing and improving their weaknesses. Someone who thinks they still have a lot to learn is putting a lot of effort into improving.

So, especially if they’ve felt that way for any significant length of time, it’s no wonder which person will end up being better.

Surely there’s a breakpoint with plants though, right? You could transport a few plants, but probably not a whole garden, or a flower bed, or a tree old enough to have deep roots, etc

My point wasn’t that the status quo is good or right. There’s a fundamental problem if the person most motivated to improve the property - the tenant actually living there - isn’t the one who the system rewards for doing so.

Pretending the system we have today is different than it is is just denying reality, and isn’t an effective way to realize change. The reality that we live in is that by improving your own home while renting, you’re a sucker who is being taken advantage of by the system.

There’s a fundamental difference between furniture and an improvement to the underlying property itself. For example, if you repaint a fence, you can’t take the paint with you, and the value of the paint itself was far lower than the labor cost to apply it to the fence.

That’s not a great argument at all. Assuming a rent agreement with say a 1-year term, there’s a huge difference between trying to change rent in the middle of the contract period (obviously violates the contract unless it has specific provisions for this, which is also unlikely in most places) and asking for higher rent to renew for another term (which Occam’s razor says presumably is happening here). A farmer renting farmland would never be leasing for less time than it will take their crops to grow, as that would obviously be an insane risk.

The better point here is on improving the property. Some rental contracts I’ve seen have terms where if the tenant spends money improving the property they get some kickback (part of it can be reduced from rent, e.g.). If you’re improving property someone else owns for free and expect not to be taken advantage of, then I don’t know what to tell you except that you’re a sucker.

If there are takeaways from this post, it’s either that 1) more jurisdictions should include stuff about this as part of their legal protections for tenants, or 2) don’t be a sucker and give your landlord money for free.

Edit: if I wasn’t clear, my point was that imo there should be better policies around tenants improving the homes they live in to begin with (because obviously nothing here was illegal)

TWENTY WHOLE DOLLARS

TWENTY BUKAROONIES LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, TWENTY O’ DEM BIG ONES

XP-based progression isn’t always padding. It definitely isn’t hard to find examples where it is, but it’s also a pretty good solution to a common problem: you want the game to present a hero’s journey, where you start out weak and eventually become powerful, but you want a generic way to handle the players’ progress.

It’s really the same as the debate in TTRPGs like D&D, where the DM could either reward levels based on XP earned from killing monsters, or could forego that altogether and award levels at set points in the story. In a video game setting where you intend things to be really open ended / the player should have a lot of freedom about what tasks they do and in what order, it’s hard to handcraft exactly what each player’s adventure and progression should look like, so an XP system is a really simple way to generalize it for everyone.

It’s only padding if it requires you to engage with a lot of content that you otherwise wouldn’t want to do, before you can progress the story you’re actually interested in. But that’s not the fault of the system itself, it’s in how the designers chose to use it.

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I agree in general, but 20 years ago, people were using email to actually talk to each other. There are problems with the protocol, but those aren’t related to the way it is federated imo. The reason people stopped using email to talk to each other was because the features of newer options were better – things like IMs and Skype, which have continued to evolve into stuff like WhatsApp or whatever people use now. But, unlike email that was devised in an era when things were still being driven largely by the education sector etc, all these other solutions were made by post-dotcom era profit-driven companies.

So I agree that email has lots of problems, and some of those are certainly related to its federation (e.g., the protocol has not really been able to advance in significant ways since making changes to it is nearly impossible). But I still think it’s the best example of a federated messaging protocol we have today.

Anyway that’s all a bit afield, as you said. I think the bottom line for me is that whichever protocol it is, if one of these current attempts at federation is going to meet my goals, then eventually there should be a large number of commercial entities participating. I know that’s not everyone’s goal though, but there’s a reason I don’t use IRC for example.

Something like 80% of email goes through Google and Apple. But, email is just about the most successful federated protocol we have. Also, I believe that these services would have become huge regardless, and I’m glad that they are dominant while using an open protocol instead of something they can exert much more control over.

In an ideal world, I believe the goal for federated social media is that you don’t care what platform other users you interact with are on, and they can freely move to other platforms without compromise. It’s scary if a big corpo controls too much marketshare and can break compatibility with other apps. But, if the protocol is truly open, there can’t be any barrier to corpos launching services on the protocol either.

I tend to agree when everyone is worried about an already existing major player joining federation (e.g. FB with threads). But bluesky is a new entrant to the space; they will have to fight the existing giants for market anyway. And if they’re starting small, then them being federated means that as soon as they start to get credible traction, any other company would be able to launch their own app in the same space. If the scare of big players is that they’ll choose to one day stop playing nicely with federation, then it will definitely be easier for them to say “you can no longer chat with a few random FOSS weirdos” than to say “you can no longer chat with this other major app”.

tl;dr, for me the goal isn’t to have a protocol that can only talk to other people who care about FOSS; it’s to have a way to talk to everyone. Eventually, that means that I hope we do hit a critical mass of “big players” buying in, even if they’re motivated by profit.

To some extent I feel like the inverse of this would be “do you wish Gmail wasn’t federated?”