I share your hope. I’m just offering the caveat that it might not go as quickly and smoothly as you expect (unless I’m reading your comments wrong - do correct me!)

It’s my perpetual gripe with many of those open tools that I love ideologically, but practically find lacking in some respects, typically UI/UX (including the pre-experience of the decision whether to use them). I don’t have all the skills or knowledge to fix the issues that bother me, as it’s often far eaiser to know what’s wrong than how to fix it.

I understand and endorse the philosophy that it’s unfair to demand things of volunteers already donating their time and skills to the public, but it creates some interdisciplinary problems. Even if capable UX designers were to tackle the issue and propose solutions or improvements, they might not all have the skills to actually implement them, so they’d have to rely on developers to indulge their requests.
And from my own experience, devs tend to prioritise function over form, because techy people are often adept enough at navigating less-polished interfaces. Creating a pretty frontend takes away time from creating stuff I’d find useful.

I don’t know if there’s an easy solution. The intersection between “People that can approach software from the perspective of a non-tech user”, “People that are willing to approach techy Software” and “People that are tech-savy enough to be able to fix the usability issues” is probably very small.

It’s so big that it can take a lot of bleeding before it dies. It doesn’t help that there is no significant enough consensus yet on an alternative.

It seems like some people are flocking to bsky, probably because it has better visibility and seems more accessible than Mastodon (“What’s an instance? How do I pick?”). Others are heading to Threads just because it’s there already.

If enough people move to some other platform to generate a critical mass, they’ll pull others too. Until then, inertia will keep X rolling a good while to come.

I prefer Mastodon to what is ultimately still a for-profit corporation (“public benefit” notwithstanding), but both are better than Twatter.

The value of distributed redundancy

Most furries are harmless. A few are creeps with no concept of boundaries. Some are particularly deluded Nazis. Like every group of some size, they have a certain percentage of scum. Depending on your standards, they might be weird, but I’ll take harmless weirdness over harmful normalcy any day, let alone harmful weirdness.

I do think he is unique, but also the prime specimen to show that not everything unique is valuable.

Given the heavy use of subject-specific jargon, I’d guess as much. I wouldn’t go to the length of looking up neuroscience terms just to roast neuroscientists, because that just seems like a poor happy chemical return on the mental energy investment, whatever the proper terms for that might be.

Now, if you’d ask me to build a data model to analyse my unhappiness for key influencers, we’re in business.

Or maybe he felt it was a funny implication to make. I know we sometimes have a reputation for being serious, but some of us are just good at deadpan deliveries.

Seems like a case where a particular claim of a select group was generalised over a supergroup by way of being the subject of memes that ran away with the stereotype.

It’s like that one fraud falsifying studies about a specific type of vaccines in an attempt to sell his own, only for people to latch on to the “vaccine bad” part of the story without limit, nuance or critical examination.

Does anyone still know where the original “just friends” claim stems from, in which context, supported by which arguments, what refutations have been offered since and just how widespread among archaeologists it is today?

For the elites: conserve their hierarchy and the structures that enable the gradual accumulation of power in the hands of the few.

For the rest: conserve their place in the hierarchy and the comfort of the familiar.

I appreciate that you took the time to supply the nuances I omitted. While there is value in a positive framing, it’s important to acknowledge potential struggles as well. We can’t effectively tackle issues if we’re not aware of them.

In any case, while I’m not qualified to help you with your difficulties, I hope you find - or have found - a way to work on overcoming them. Dealing with insecurities, from my own experience, can be a tough process, further amplified by setbacks and a lack of perceived progress. But if you persevere, even if you might not feel that you have improved much, you may find yourself looking back at a time when it was worse and, by contrast, see the progress you’ve made. May that hope, that your future self will look back and be proud of your hard work, give you the strength to keep going.

Hourly wages for school teachers? I’m worried I might know the response, but does prep work outside school hours, in breaks etc. count as hours worked?

I considered that option too, but opted to go with the more positive guess. I’m not qualified either way, I just wanted to say something nice.

Well, you sound like a team player. You place the common good (fun together) higher than individual ambitions (or maybe place your own worth very low, I can’t tell from one sentence, but the outcome is the same).

Saying deliberately sounds like it’s not just a thing that you find yourself doing again and again, but a conscious choice. That suggests there was a choice to make; that the option of playing a self-centered character was something you were actively aware of, but were sufficiently repulsed by it to make a point of being better than those people.

I think you’re a nice person, empathetic, while not so entirely innocent as to not even consider the possibility, still principled and caring enough to actively defy it.

I think you’re a net good for this world.

In theory, Judges hold individual people accountable, the representatives of the people hold the judges accountable, the people collectively hold their representatives accountable.

However, if a significant part of the representatives refuses to do their job, and the nature of the two-party FPTP system combined with highly effective identity politics makes it hard to hold them accountable for it, the system breaks down.

Linux in general and Arch in particular are kinda laissez-faire in that they’ll allow you to shoot yourself in the foot. Some distros may put barriers in your way, others practically hand you the gun, but at the end of the day, the gun is freely available and it’s your own foot that you’re shooting.

That… that’s what they were saying, no? Companies should worry about their shit.

If you don’t pay for late checkout, you can’t check out late. If you don’t pay for the DLC, you can’t play the DLC. You can still check out at the normal time (which is the basic service) or play the base game, respectively.

Dammit, EAC may be an issue on Linux though. It’s kinda hit or miss whether a given developer will take the extra steps, particularly given the conflicting sources on just how complex it actually is. According to Valve, it’s a checkbox and dropping a file in your depot. Others claim it would require an Epic Online Services version of EAC, with all the baggage that carries, including potentially rewriting a whole chunk of your code.