mozz

It is rare that I don't understand a nerd joke but I am completely lost

I absolutely agree with the central message. I would add a few reasons, notably lack of end-to-end encryption and partial ownership by Tencent, as strong reasons to stay away if you can avoid it.

That said, a lot of the particular details listed here actually aren't right to me.

• By choosing Discord, you also lock out users with accessibility needs, for whom the proprietary Discord client is often a nightmare to use. - From the footnote: "What I can tell you is that, to my surprise, Discord’s accessibility has apparently improved in recent years, and more blind people are using it now. One of my blind friends told me that most Discord functionality is very accessible and several blind communities are using it."
• Users of novel or unusual operating systems or devices (i.e. innovators and early adopters) are also locked out of the client until Discord sees fit to port it to their platform. - What do you mean? The web client doesn't work on web browsers that are running on unusual OSs?
• Discord also declines service to users in countries under US sanctions, such as Iran. Privacy-concious users will think twice before using Discord to participate in your project, or will be denied outright if they rely on Tor or VPNs. - I've used Discord through Tor and as far as I can tell it works fine.

Like I say I actually agree with the central thesis but not with more or less any of the specific reasons he cites.

It is a good idea / a good suggestion.

In general, the existing internet protocols actually work that way -- they were originally designed as a way for networking organizations to connect their networks to one another, for free, because they wanted to talk to one another. You had your internet connection for free through your school / your work / your user group, and TCP/IP connected you via them to everyone else on the internet. The idea only came in much later that one of those "networking organizations" can be a paid ISP that is selling access to the network to anyone who wants to pay them, and it actually wasn't widely seen as a good development when that was introduced, and as years have gone by it's become the dominant model which is a bad thing for many reasons. But the core protocols still don't care and don't require an ISP to be part of the equation. TCP/IP and BGP are good places to start if you want to research more about how it actually works on the peer-to-peer protocol level.

There have been people who've tried to restart the idea of getting internet connections from other motivated / tech savvy individuals, instead of from Comcast. This is a lot more similar to your suggestion idea details. The key word is "mesh networking". A quick search will turn up a bunch of people who are working on it or have set up little networks that work that way. Honestly, to me, it seems a little unlikely that that way can be made to work at any scale for any reasonable amount of effort, at the end-user level. I think probably more what you want is something like community broadband/fiber internet - your local government organizes internet for you at a tiny fraction of the cost that you would have to all collectively pay to Comcast in order to get it done, and we go back to the original model where it's all provided "for free" as a collective, but still centrally organized so it doesn't take technical skill and lots of effort on the part of every single user on the network.

But it's a good idea. Those are just my thoughts to fill in some of the details of how it could happen relative to our current dystopia.

You lost me dude

The story honestly delivers much better than the simple schadenfreude that the headline would imply.

TMTG was set to go public via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) called Digital World Acquisition. However, Litinsky and Moss are now alleging in their lawsuit that Trump sought to "drastically dilute" the shares of the company in an "11th hour, pre-merger corporate maneuvering" scheme.

Initially, Trump's stake was 78 million shares, valued at roughly $3.5 billion. UAV's stake in the company amounted to seven million shares valued at approximately $339 million. However, the lawsuit alleges Trump then engaged in a "dilution scheme" to increase the number of total shares to one billion, which they said had "no legitimate business purpose." UAV accused Trump of possibly scheming to distribute the additional shares among himself and his family, while significantly decreasing their stake in the company to less than 1%.

"[UAV was] promised 8.6 percent of this company and sadly its business partners are baselessly trying to renege," Litinsky and Moss' attorney, Christopher J. Clark — who has previously represented Hunter Biden, Elon Musk and Mark Cuban — told the Post.

"They feel like: We made Truth Social for you. You get 90 percent. But some people just aren’t happy with 90 percent."

It's like a perfect Russian-nesting-doll storm of greed, incompetence, and malice. In ordinary circumstances, I would say it's plausible that the whole thing is a ploy to delay the IPO, because no one would be greedy and illogical enough to fuck up the process of inflating their 90% stake by spending any attention on a craven and self-defeating attempt to claw the last 10% away from the people who are, as far as I know, still actually doing all the work.

But this is Trump. Craven and self-defeating is in him at a molecular level. I would guess that some lawyer of his has already been on the receiving end of a HUGE yelling fit about how unfair it is that someone would try to stop him taking the remaining 10% as is his God given right.

Honestly it was a great opportunity for him to show his human side, now that the stakes are largely removed.

But no

10/10 not showing the face of the guy actually wearing it

I was invited to give a speech to all new hires to get them fired up, and said sure. I think I was picked because I was a known weirdo; not that they were expecting great things out of the speech but more along the lines of "well it definitely won't be boring." It was a rowdy company and someone threw a roll of paper towels at me basically right when I walked out. I caught the roll in the air with both hands, held it for a moment, and put it on the table next to me and started in with my speech. I honestly couldn't tell you most of what I said. I didn't have any particular plan or preparation beyond the first few sentences. I mostly talked about teamwork and dumb stuff I had done and what I'd learned, and everyone fucking loved it and little turns of phrase from the speech entered into the company vernacular for a little while. I have no idea where it all came from; I had no particular public speaking experience, but I had a blast with it. Someone told me it was like a sermon.

Another one: I got an interview with a FAANG company back in their heyday, and studied my absolute ass off for the interview. I wrote out solutions to programming problems on paper, then once I was satisfied, I typed them into the computer and saw how they ran and identified problems with them, then once I was pretty practiced and comfortable with that, I bought a whiteboard and started doing the same on the whiteboard, on my own or in real time and explaining the problems to my girlfriend. (I was on a plane doing the on-paper version and typing solutions into the computer, and the guy sitting next to me asked about what I was doing and I explained, and he offered me a job.) I smoked the interview and they offered me a job and a bunch of money, which I actually turned down for complex reasons, which confused everybody.

What the fuck why are they both work related... I have others, some of which I wouldn't want to share on Lemmy, but it bothers me a little bit that the ones that came right immediately to mind were of that nature. Counterbalancing ones:

Sat on an airplane next to a massage lady who brought her own alcohol on the plane and she talked with me while drinking quite a lot from her bottle and then once she was drunk she gave me a long massage. She invited me to lunch with her, but she was married so I decided against it.

My friend got himself confused driving at night and was in a wrong lane head-on with another car and I calmly told him he should shift to the right, and he did, and he told me after that me being very relaxed about it helped him to react smoothly and calmly and not freak out or do anything that would delay us not dying.

Gave someone else's ID to a cop and then when he looked at it and looked back at me and said "That ain't you!" I convinced him that it actually was.

He said he prefers hand-counting ballots because “one person can affect a handful of votes. One person with a machine can affect thousands.”

Honestly... the idea of installing shouty far-right extremists who only want to see the world one way into positions where they can influence the day-to-day business of counting votes scares the hell out of me.

But at the same time, this made me kind of made me like his overall direction of thinking. Like yeah, you're right. We should have a transparent process where people from both parties can always observe all the machinery of all elections, and if it's less convenient and you don't get to do your automation the way you want, oh well. He's wrong that the 2020 election was stolen, but he's 100% right about people needing to know what's going on and it not being locked behind proprietary software. Let's outlaw machinery with no paper backup ballot. Let's invite every Republican who has concerns to get involved in the process in a productive way. Security specialists have been squawking about how bad an idea paperless voting is since at least 2000 and pointing out discrepancies in key elections that never seem to really get looked into. If we can find some common ground with the GOP crazy people on the ground then fuckin fantastic.

just a reminder this meme is about the primary

Or do you lot just not want people to express disapproval with him ever?

Sounds like you've already decided what "you lot" think and say, and you've saved yourself the time it would have taken to read my message by just creating a message in your mind that's what "you lot" say, in your imagination. You're responding to what you heard in your head, not what I wrote. Here's part of what I actually said:

"Is [Biden] good enough? Fuck no. I am about to vote in the primary in my state and I would love if someone would give me a realistic way to support someone younger than Biden"

You should read the whole thing, I'd love to talk if you have something with which to respond to what I actually said.

I said:

Is [Biden] good enough? Fuck no.

I would love if someone would give me a realistic way to support someone younger than Biden

I actually really hope that that does succeed in breaking the US's unconditional and war-criminal support for Israel

And you characterized that as:

Please just trust the system

we promise it will all work out

... so that you would have a way to disagree with me.

We are screwed. That's a key feature of the nature of the current US economy.

That doesn't mean that I think it's a good idea to take someone who did work to fix some aspect of it, from absolutely pitiful to slightly-less-awful-and-pitiful, and scream "GENOCIDE JOE GENOCIDE JOE" in their face and enable instead someone ten times worse, who will actively take us backwards to the best of his ability for the entire time he's in office. That seems, in fact, to be counterproductive.