On the positive side Mastodon is working on a fix.

Working quite a bit with lawyers and law students it’s endlessly frustrating that so many of them are there not because they have any interest in understanding what the law is or how it relates to society, but simply because they had good grades and they figured a law degree was the natural thing to do.

Follow your interests. If you’re not interested you won’t end up doing interesting things.

The legal industry is about to get upended by LLMs.

As an LLM myself, this weirds me out every time.

Seems to be some misunderstanding somewhere - Jerry states elsewhere that the costs are covered by donations.

The Mastodon instance I’m on has around 200 people (not all of them active), and received around €800 in donations last year,. Total costs were less than €300.

I think the problem of scaling kicks in when we go after demographics that are less charitable on average.

the flagship instance of Bandwagon.fm will be taking 0% of any money musicians make.

Good stuff.

To support development, Bandwagon’s flagship instance will be offering a $10 per month Premier plan that allows musicians to sell their music and offer their tracks at a higher bit-rate, among other features.

So they will take 0% of money, except a flat fee of €10 every month in order to be allowed to sell music at all? This seems a bit more problematic, as smaller artists would lose money every month by trying to position themselves in the market.

I like the business model of selling subscriptions to the artists but giving them 100% of proceedings quite a lot, but it would be nice if they for example only had to pay a monthly fee once sales surpassed €10, or if they could sell a limited amount of tracks for free in order to test the waters before putting all their music out for sale.

Writing this comment listening to @[email protected] by the way. Recommended to anyone interested in German singer/songwriter music. Who isn’t.

I think this is going to be pretty huge.

I ended up subscribing to @[email protected] (404 Media) after following them on Mastodon. It just feels like a more direct way of following media that fits with how I consume stuff online these days.

What are you on about? It’s open source, you can self host.

OP linked to an entry in their newsletter. If you check out their site, they are being pretty clear that they’re in the business of “Independent technology for modern publishing”, stating in pretty big letters that “Ghost is a powerful app for professional publishers to create, share, and grow a business around their content. It comes with modern tools to build a website, publish content, send newsletters & offer paid subscriptions to members.”.

Reading their newsletters would get boring fast if they started every single one of them with repeating what they are.

Capitalism favours psychopaths.

These people are successful under capitalism not in spite of being terrible people, but because they are terrible people.

I’m usually not the first person to quote Jesus, but when he said that camels had better chances getting through the heads of needles than rich people had of getting into heaven this is sorta what he was getting at. If you’re not a gigantic piece of shit you’re just not going to get that rich.

I don’t think this is accurate for either of the two projects to be honest.

PieFed made sure to make their API as close to Lemmy’s as possible, and they created feeds so that it would be as easy as possible for Lemmy to integrate in the future.

Vibes between the developers of the two platforms seems good enough.

No need to make up drama where there is none.

There is always a chance of open source projects dying off, but if there’s an active user base who enjoy the software it will usually not die easy.

Mbin is a good example of this. It started out as Kbin, which was a project dominated by one very active developer who made the whole thing on his own. Unfortunately he did not prioritize getting other people on board, and he then suffered what seems to have been pretty severe health problems. Last thing we heard from him was a picture from a hospital bed. I hope he’s alright.

Thankfully, as what he had made was open source, Kbin lives on in the form of Mbin. If you check my domain you’ll see I’m still on a site called “kbin.earth” rather than mbin - this is why.

PieFed’s developer is better at taking other developers onboard. If you check out [email protected] you’ll see monthly development updates. The head developer (Rimu) runs the show, but seven other people contributed last month alone.

If Rimu decides to quit, other people can and will take over as long as there’s an interest. PieFed has the added advantage here of being written in Python, which is a language many people know.

So it should be pretty robust, all in all.

As for the future, PieFed just now launched app support. I guess one thing to look out for is the emergence of alternative user interfaces.

Developments are happening fast and the developers are quite creative. It’s fun to follow. :)

Avoiding politics might be wise on some level, but by all means do talk about unionizing.

I think solutions to this is of a very individual nature - it’s hard to imagine a universal solution.

But it seems your addiction might be to beer more than to alcohol itself, for now at least. And (some) alcohol free beer has gotten really good.

So my suggestion is this: Next time beer is on sale, instead of buying a six pack match the value in buying alcohol free beer. When you’re back home you can still pop a cold one, it still feels like a nice reward, and you don’t feel bad after. And you don’t run the risk of developing an addiction to alcohol.

I never had a drinking problem, but I try to always keep alcohol free beer in the fridge these days just because I think it’s a nice treat after a day of work or whenever.

How old are they?

The minimum age for Snapchat is 13. The direct mesaaging part of it allows for fun and harmless messages between friends. I think allowing her to use it if she’s 13+ is reasonable.

What you could do is to ask her not to allow friend requests or messages from anyone who are not her friends, not to use the AI assistant (which can’t be disabled), and to not use it to consume content from influencers (which is in a separate tab to the right). You cannot really police this, but it’s not the end of the world if she sees the feed of some dumb influencer. Maybe while she’s home you can show interest and use it together with her.

Position data must of course also be disabled. Snapchat is a bit creepy.

The fediverse is always (somewhat) public, making it not inherently child friendly. Getting together with other parents to set up a Pixelfed instance to use in the friend group rather than to have them use Instagram is a cool idea, and allows parents to be admins and decide who can federate without taking control of the accounts of the kids. It might be a nice way for them to learn that whatever they do online is run by some person whom they decide to trust. And it could keep them off Instagram a little longer.

I don’t really know the first thing about parenting though, just my thoughts. It’s a tricky question.

The link doesn’t seem to work for those who are not signed in as users.

Try this: https://sopuli.xyz/post/27371098

And then you’re on your phone, and typing two spaces at the end of each line is a mess because your keyboard insists you really want punctuation and a space. Because why would you end a sentence with two spaces. Gah.

I get the pleasure of hanging out in well moderated communities where I feel like I am doing my part. Doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.

Of course politics is about prioritization. But some things are not politicized as we all seemingly agree it should be prioritized, like military in America.

Climate is so highly politicized because one side is refuting basic facts. They are shouting loud about it and running their propaganda, making the issue politicized. This does not seem to have happened that much in this campaign, as they are focused on other things.

For better or for worse, depending on who wins. I’m just arguing that politicization of climate is not inherently a good thing; rather, in an ideal political situation, it shouldn’t be politicized at all at this point.

I’m not passing blame, I’m just saying it might be good for it to be depoliticized a bit. Especially if it involves those more willing to act on climate actually winning.

Whichever policies work well should ideally be more of an academic/technical debate rather than a political one.

It requires political action, but this could happen without politicizing it.

If politicians recognize the need to do something, they might do it even if they do not center their campaign around it.

German support for Ukraine was in a similar situation. Though parties had different ideas and the election would very much be decisive for the future direction, support for Ukraine was not particularly politicized in the election - they focused more on other issues. In the end actors supportive of Ukraine won though, and now they are offering their support without having politicized the issue.