Sometimes the identity of the messenger is important.

Twitter was super easy to set up with the API to periodically tweet the output of some automated script: a weather forecast, a public safety alert, an air quality alert, a traffic advisory, a sports score, a news headline, etc.

These are the types of messages that you’d want to subscribe to the actual identity, and maybe even be able to forward to others (aka retweeting) without compromising the identity verification inherent in the system.

Twitter was an important service, and that’s why there are so many contenders trying to replace at least part of the experience.

In addition to the stone/clay based works that you might be thinking of, I find certain metalworking sculptures to be interesting, too. Alexander Calder made a bunch of red steel sculptures, almost architectural art, in addition to things like dynamic mobiles. Louise Bourgeois’s “Maman” is an interesting one, too.

There are small metal sculptures, too. From little trinkets made from wire, to welded metal parts, to elaborate chandeliers, these all involve artistic creativity in manipulating materials in a three dimensional space, and it’s a skillset that I admire and respect (and do not have any, myself).

Weight distribution and jiggle control is something I can’t relate to though

It’s not hard. Put on a really heavy backpack and leave the straps super loose, and go try to move around, maybe a few athletic moves that involve changing speed or direction. Compare to a tight backpack with a waistband and shoulder straps properly strapped to your body, and try to move around again. The straps help control the extra motion so that you’re in better control.

Or run around in shoes 5 sizes too big. Or go for a run with your arms loose and intentionally left limp, swinging around like pendulums.

The whole world has a million examples of why providing bracing and support makes for more efficient and comfortable movement.

Some electric BMWs do the same on the literal automobile, too. It’s an EV that sounds like a high performance ICE both inside and outside the car.

Yeah, sounds like a phone call recording app that is allowed to operate on the App Store under the condition that the recording is loudly announced.

Or is a by product of its former format, the live laughs with a crowd while filming?

This is the reason. Television comedy derives from stage shows where the audience sits in one direction from the stage.

A lot of early television comedy programming was often from variety shows, where the live studio audience is an important feedback mechanism for the actual performers. A standup comic needs a laughing audience to respond to (and often, so do other stage performers, including sketch comedy).

So television comedy comes from that tradition, and a live audience was always included for certain types of programs. Even today, we expect variety shows to have audiences. For example, John Oliver’s show without an audience felt kinda weird while that was going on in 2020. And even some pre-filmed sketch comedy shows, like Chappelle’s Show, would record audiences watching the pre-recorded sketches as part of the audio track for the broadcast itself, while Chappelle himself was filmed essentially MCing for that audience and those sketches.

So sitcoms came up on sets with live performances before studio audiences, just like sketch comedies and variety shows or daytime talk shows. That multi camera sitcom format became its own aesthetic, with three-walled sets that were always filmed from one direction, with a live audience laughing and reacting. Even when they started using closed sets for safety and control (see the Fran Drescher stuff linked elsewhere in this thread), they preserved the look and feel of those types of shows.

Single camera sitcoms are much more popular now, after the 2000’s showed that they could be hilarious, but they are significantly more expensive and complicated to shoot, as blocking and choreography and set design require a lot more conscious choices when the cameras can be anywhere in the room, pointed in any direction. So multi camera still exists.

Yes, software that is in a package manager is similarly easy on a Mac. There’s an app store, which can be used to install the dependencies for homebrew (which is a good package manager for most of the stuff that Linux package managers maintain, including building stuff from source). Going outside of a package manager is relatively easy (but needs to be enabled, as the defaults basically discourage users from installing software not verified by Apple), but that method of software installation still beats running .exe/.msi installers downloaded from the internet, beats running random shell scripts, probably beats downloading docker containers and flatpaks, and is not that far removed from installing from the AUR or something like pip/conda: you still need to know what you’re doing, and you have to trust the source/maintainer. None of that is unique to any operating system, except those that simply don’t allow you to install software not reviewed/approved by the manufacturer (Apple mobile devices, Android devices by default).

High DPI screen support in Linux is still troublesome, especially between multiple screens with different DPI/resolution, especially between GTK and Qt programs.

And I haven’t played around with Asahi yet, but it’ll be hard to top the built-in power/suspend/hibernate/resume behavior and its effect on battery life (especially in being able to just count on it to work if you suspend for days, where it seamlessly switches to hibernate and starts back up very quickly). But on my old Intel MacBook, the battery life difference between MacOS and and Linux is probably two to one. Some of it is Apple’s fault for refusing to document certain firmware/hardware features, but the experience is the experience.

I gave up on Homebrew because it was difficult to install.

It just includes as a dependency the Mac command line developer tools, which can be installed pretty easily from what I remember.

And what I like is that it’s a normal Unix style shell, with almost all the utilities you’d expect.

you have to drag the icon in to install things.

I mean that’s about 100 times better than Windows’ default of running an installer that isn’t easily reversible.

Nah, that’s just anticipating customer rage. When I worked in restaurants I learned very early on that it’s better to put things in a smaller container, and put the overflow into a separate container, rather than try to give them a little extra in the next size container that doesn’t get filled up.

It’s the meme with the kid failing to understand that the amount doesn’t change just because the container changes. Only with angry adults who want their money back.

Instances don’t actually own the copyright to comments. The poster owns the copyright and licenses it to the instance. Which lets the instance use it, but not sublicense to others.

I think that it’s foolish to concentrate people and activity there even further, it defeats the point of a federation.

It defeats some of the points of federation, but there are still a lot of reasons why federation is still worth doing even if there’s essentially one dominant provider. Not least of which is that sometimes the dominant provider does get displaced over time. We’ve seen it happen with email a few times, where the dominant provider loses market share to upstarts, one of whom becomes the new dominant provider in some specific use case (enterprise vs consumer, mobile vs desktop vs automation/scripting, differences by nation or language), and where the federation between those still allows the systems to communicate with each other.

Applied to Lemmy/kbin/mbin and other forum-like social link aggregators, I could see LW being dominant in the English-speaking, American side of things, but with robust options outside of English language or communities physically located outside of North America. And we’ll all still be able to interact.

For my personal devices:

• Microsoft products from MS DOS 6.x or so through Windows Vista
• Ubuntu 6.06 through maybe 9.04 or so
• Arch Linux from 2009 through 2015
• MacOS from 2011 through current
• Arch Linux from 2022 through current

I’ve worked with work systems that used RedHat and Ubuntu back in the late 2000’s, plus decades of work computers with Windows. But I’m no longer in a technical career field so I haven’t kept on top of the latest and greatest.

When they say modules, does that mean mainboards?

They mean each part. Here’s their store for individual parts.

This announcement includes a new display, so anyone with the old display can swap out their old one for the new one. People can swap out batteries. Keyboards. Touchpads. It’s a modular design so that each module can be swapped out if broken, or if there’s been an upgrade the user wants.

I sync if I have a good Internet connection, like from my hotel room or whatever, by VPNing into my home network where my NAS is. There are distributed DNS type solutions for a lot of the big NAS brands, where they’ll let you access your data through their service, but I never set that up because I already have a VPN. So my NAS and firewall are configured not to allow outside connections to that device.

But if I haven’t synced laptop to NAS yet, then copies exist on both my camera SD cards (redundant double SD card) and my laptop.

3-2-1 backup is important. I’ve been burned with lost files before, so I now make sure they’re available in multiple places.

I also encrypt everything. My laptops can’t be unlocked by anyone except myself: Apple Filevault on my Apple laptop, LVM on LUKS on my Linux laptop. If something happens to me, my laptops must be wiped completely to be useable as a used device.

My NAS keeps my backups of all my documents and media (and as a hobbyist photographer, I have over a terabyte of photos and videos I’ve taken). It’s encrypted, but I’ve written the key down on paper and put it in my physical documents. If something happens to me, someone who goes through my physical documents will have access to my digital files.

I pay a cloud service (Backblaze) for cloud backups. I trust the encryption and key management to not actually give the service provider any access to my files.

Our data centers and backbone internet/Tier 1 internet providers are basically the best in the world. The US Department of Energy maintains a network with 46 Tbit/s connections between its labs.

I disagree with your premise. The 111th Congress got a lot done. Here’s a list of major legislation.

• Lily Ledbetter Act made it easier to recover for employment discrimination, and explicitly overruled a Supreme Court case making it harder to recover back pay.
• The ARRA was a huge relief bill for the financial crisis, one of the largest bills of all time.
• The Credit CARD Act changed a bunch of consumer protection for credit card borrowers.
• Dodd Frank was groundbreaking, the biggest financial reform bill since probably the Great Depression, and created the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, probably one of the most important pro-consumer agencies in the federal government today.
• School lunch reforms (why the right now hates Michelle Obama)
• Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP or SCHIP): healthcare coverage, independent of Obamacare, for all children under 18.
• Obamacare itself, which also includes comprehensive student loan reform too.

That’s a big accomplishment list for 2 years, plus some smaller accomplishments like some tobacco reform, some other reforms relating to different agencies and programs.

Plus that doesn’t include the administrative regulations and decisions the administrative agencies passed (things like Net Neutrality), even though those generally only last as long as the next president would want to keep them (see, again, Net Neutrality).

The idea that these models are just stochastic parrots that only probabilisticly repeat their training data isn’t correct

I would argue that it is quite obviously correct, but that the interesting question is whether humans are in the same category (I would argue yes).

Those small USB drives are too slow anyway, often limited to USB 2.0 interfaces or slow flash modules. I’ve switched over to an SSD specifically because of how slow booting and installation is from a standard 10-year-old USB stick.