Quark's

“Media conglomerate putting together majority cash offer for WBD backed by ultra-rich Ellison family, reports say”

The Wall Street Journal, this Guardian article and other business news media are reporting that the rumoured Warner Brothers - Paramount merger is back under consideration — this time with the deep pockets of the Ellisons.

One can see it as a worthwhile investment for the Ellisons regardless whether the motivation is acquiring IP or media control.

Disquieting for Star Trek franchise fans nonetheless.

I've been seeing a lot of startrek.website shares I do showing the wrong desc and image in the unfurl on the posts lately. It was a few of them a week at first, but it's become multiple a day now.

As the most recent example, the "Look at the time, its 7 of 9" post unfurls like this in signal:

Is this a known issue? Is there a better place to report instance issues? It kind of looks to me like UUID reuse leading to new posts displaying old images.

One of the shorter presentations at FediCon, but definitely interesting, especially since lemmy instances are very much driven by the user base (whereas Linux doesn't really change based on how many users there are). Also interesting since the speaker, Janet Vertesi, is one of the people working on the "Europa Clipper" project (the one where we're flying a satellite through Europa's geysers to get water samples, since landing and drilling under the ice is impractical. This has nothing to do with the presentation, I'm just excited about it).

Video Highlights:

2:00 - The current dominance of a few social media companies was predicted. Although there are lots of neat tools for opting out of Microsoft/Google/etc., but it's the community of these tools that matters

7:30 - Difficulties with how entangled folks are with mainstream tools (maps, calendars, clubs, etc.) - and how to overcome these obstacles. Interesting bit about how all the privacy toggles on Facebook, etc. give a false sense of security and discourage users from making bigger, more effective change. Additionally, behavior change happens at the group level, not the individual level.

12:00 - Building a network of "Tech Reclaimers" to help others make the change. Teaching social and technical skills (e.g., moderation - people are used to the technology doing everything for them on "traditional" social media), taking small steps, etc.

17:30 - Ongoing events

FTA:

The last full version of the webpage, archived by the Internet Archive on July 17, still included the now-deleted sections. Parts of Section 8 of Article I, as well as all of Sections 9 and 10 of Article I are now gone from the live site. The deletions, as of August 6, are also archived here. The change was spotted by users on Lemmy, an open-source aggregation platform and forum.

Variety reports that “Brian Robbins Calls Paramount-Skydance Merger ‘Bittersweet’ in Memo to Staff Amid His Exit as Co-CEO”

David Ellison, the founder of Skydance, will become chairman and CEO of Paramount. Andy Gordon, who leads the West Coast office of RedBird Capital Partners, is set to take the role of chief operating officer and chief strategic officer. RedBird teamed with Skydance to acquire Paramount Global for $8.5 billion.

Looking at how Paramount, since 2021, has failed to deliver on a new Star Trek movie, arguably wound down three successful shows prematurely, it’s difficult to see that this leadership team has done well by the franchise.

Looking at the apparent expeditious compromises Paramount leadership and Shari Redstone were willing to make to clear the way for the sale, I’m willing to look forward to see what comes next.

I’ve been on a bit of a button-making kick, and here’s my latest one.

Bonus: The earlier one I did for TMBW. It needs some work in the margins - I just haven’t gotten to it yet.

Ordered an MP back in June for the July batch and finally received it today. Loving it so far even though it's got a few quirks.

(The Minimal is the e-ink phone with the QWERTY keyboard).

I've been using a dumb phone for a while now and didn't want to go back to a full smartphone, so this seemed like a decent compromise.

Probably the biggest annoyance I've noticed is the Alt and Shift buttons being in illogical places and wishing those were reversed.

And yes I made this post on it and am aware of the irony 😆

Has anyone else had the issue lately where when making a post, it gets posted twice?

I can't tell what's been happening, but it has occurred multiple times recently. I use Firefox, so maybe that's a factor, but I'd also guess Firefox usage per capita is higher than average in the Lemmy crowd.

In at least one case, I pressed the create button, and it appeared to not work, so I pressed it again.

I feel like I should file a bug report, but I first need to do more troubleshooting, but since I can't just go fill a random community with posts trying to reproduce this bug, I should probably set up a test instance. Before I do that, though, I was wondering if anyone else had experienced this problem.

cross-posted from: https://toast.ooo/post/8396304

OK WE'RE ACTUALLY LIVE NOW

a little hiccup at the start but we're here

The Enterprise-D is all set up in the top right corner of the canvas.

Obviously, the ship is the highlight, here - I'm thinking we should probably outline it in black, and then fill it in (ideally with better colours than the ones in the template - I just used those for shading).

The starfield is less important, and should provide a nice space for people to blend our template with the others.

Have fun!

Direct link to our template

Canvas 2025 will be upon us on July 12, and we've got something ready to go for our community's contribution:

I'll update this post with the template URL once I've got everything set up.

Edit: Template URL

Pretty freaky article, and it doesn't surprise me that chatbots could have this effect on some people more vulnerable to this sort of delusional thinking.

I also thought this was very interesting that even a subreddit full of die-hard AI evangelists (many of whom have an already religious-esque view of AI) would notice and identify a problem with this behavior.