I don’t think it’s so clear what some of the money is going to. From the article:

the package includes $3.5 billion for “essential wartime procurement” […] and a $5.2 billion grant for air defenses. The ministry said the $5.2 billion for air defenses “will significantly strengthen critical systems such as Iron Dome…"

With Hezbollah launching rockets towards civilians, I am in favor of strengthening the Iron Dome. But it sounds like that $3.5 billion could be to resupply Israel for their attacks on Gaza, thereby enabling new ones.

The Juicero was seriously a major point in my personal ideological journey. Around 2013, I was still very convinced that Silicon Valley (and VC-backed startups in general) were a source of innovation that could do a lot of good in the world. I was starting to question that a little bit because I had noticed that every new startup was described as “like Uber for <other thing>,” but I still largely believed that most SV startups were innovative and improving people’s lives, or at least had the potential to do so.

And then the freaking Juicero came along, and I was like, “What the fuck? Do these people actually have no idea what they’re doing? Oh my god, they don’t.”

Look, I’m not saying that if the Juicero didn’t exist, that I would be some Elon Musk fanboy right now. Something else probably would have woken me up instead.

But in this timeline, in this current universe we are in, the Juicero made me see things differently. No one wants to believe that they were changed by the Juicero… but I was. And I… I… I don’t know how I feel about that…

The way that they pulled off this attack is interesting from a cybersecurity standpoint, but we can’t ignore the fact that Israel had no way of knowing who was near the devices when they exploded. They very nature of this attack made it impossible for Israel to know how closely they were targeting the bad guys or how many civilians were nearby.

That was a great explanation.

I remember hearing an interview with John Boehner on NPR (former Republican Speaker of the House) a few years ago. He was talking about the government shutdown that happened shortly after far right wing was elected in 2010. Apparently, a few of them barged into his office after the shutdown and demanded to know why the government had actually shut down.

And Boehner was like, “Um…you said you wanted it to?”

And the right wingers said, “Well we didn’t think it would work!”

These are irresponsible people who think they should just get to play games in life.

This headline is easy to read wrong – my brain grouped the subject of this headline the other way at first. I read, “Marjorie rages at (Mike and calls to fund government)” rather than “Marjorie (rages at Mike) and (calls to fund government).”

I’ve been loving RFF the last few months, it might be my favorite new thing I’ve found since I switched from Twitter to Mastodon. It also always shows you the artists’ fediverse usernames so you can follow them, and they usually have a Bandcamp link if you want to buy an album.

They recently said that they could use some volunteer help. I haven’t been able to check out what they need yet, but their matrix channel is #radioFreeFedi:matrix.org, I think that’s where they organize things.

I’ve found that, currently, this kind of works and kind of doesn’t. I’ve boosted a few lemmy and mbin comments from my Mastodon account, and it shows up in feeds just like you would expect it to. Unfortunately, the parent post of the thread only shows as a link to the lemmy/mbin thread, rather than showing the full text of the original post. So it’s hard for people to see the context of the comment.

Mastodon appears to see lemmyverse comments the same way it sees Mastodon comments, but the top-level post that started the thread is somehow different.

Man, I had forgotten how much the “purity” of stars like Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson was talked about. It didn’t even seem weird at the time. (Although I was a little kid, so I probably just couldn’t notice the hypocrisy.)

A quote FTA:

“Wokeness is dead,” gloated right-wing commentator Richard Hanania on X back in March, over a video clip of Sweeney in a black dress with a plunging neckline, her breasts at the center of the frame. Hanania’s logic was obscure, but it seemed to go something like this: Sweeney’s prominently displayed chest was somehow inextricably opposed to the progressive ethos currently fashionable in popular culture.

This whole issue that this article is describing is a perfect example of why it’s impossible to argue against the right on their own terms. Their process is like this:

1. Have a very loosely defined set of ideals. You can believe anything at any time. Have more of a vibe than a set of principles.
2. Invent an enemy. This enemy should be vaguely defined; it is everything and nothing at the same time. For example, wokeism.
3. Because your enemy is whatever you want it to be, and because your values are whatever you want them to be, you alone get to decide when you’ve won. You can declare victory at any time, for any reason. This conveniently fits your insecurity-based need to feel like a winner.

I’m hoping that this will “just work” when Mastodon gets quite-posting. You could take a Mastodon post, and then quote-post it into a community by mentioning that community’s name.

This would create a separate thread of replies, which is good. A person shouldn’t be able to suddenly thrust a bunch of community replies onto someone else’s post. So basically it’s what quote-posting is for, but sharing it with a community instead of just your own followers.

I think it’s worth as a long-term goal for the Fediverse to entirely separate the “view” aspect from the “content” aspect of platforms where reasonably possible

This perfectly describes my ideal fediverse, too. Pretty much everything we’re doing here is posting text; it can be a comment on someone else’s text, or a comment on a video, or a top-level post in a community, or a top-level post on your microblog (which is basically your own community where you’re the only top-level poster). IMO the type of fediverse server you choose should be based on which one has the best UI for the viewing and posting you’ll be doing most often, but they should all be able to show everyone else’s content as much as possible.

If I need to, I’ll create separate accounts for separate interests, like one for games and one for professional things. But I’d like to use the same account for following indie game developers (on Mastodon) and gaming communities (on Lemmy) and commenting on game review videos (on Peertube).

I also want interoperability between microblogging and threaded services, but unfortunately I’m a little skeptical about the account mirroring concept. Or, at least, I’d like more details about it.

Do users need to opt-in to have their accounts mirrored, like how they do with brid.gy right now? If there are a bunch of users with Bluesky accounts that don’t have Frontpage accounts, that would mess with the ability to have all comments showing up between the two services, and it would prevent some people from posting a comment on someone else’s comment if one of the commenters has not opted-in to have their account mirrored. Or, can a plain Bluesky account comment on Frontpage threads, but not start a thread?

I like the idea of being able to quote-post link aggregator threads to your Bluesky account, but I think ideally this would only require one account. Which would mean you could also use your Bluesky account to start a thread on Frontpage.

It’s good that no one is actually criticizing Mongolia for this – they are not really in a position to handcuff Putin, much as we would all love to see it.

Yep, that’s basically all of it. ActivityPub allows a reader to send messages back to the original poster. Those messages can be a comment, or a like, an upvote, a downvote, or a many others. That’s what ActivityPub unlocks compared to RSS.

RSS only goes one way: the reader can read messages from the poster, but not send any messages to the poster.

edit: if anyone is curious about what the “many other” messages can be, the list is here, under Verbs: https://github.com/activitystreams/activity-schema/blob/master/activity-schema.md#verbs

Technically, that is part of ActivityStreams, not ActivityPub. But there is a lot of overlap there, and ActivityStreams is a necessary addition. For example, downvotes on Lemmy are not part of AP, but you’ll find them in AS, called “dislike.”

Man, AnandTech came from the earlier type of Internet, where independent media outlets were fully in control of their own presence on the web. (E.g. they were not a YouTube channel.) Even though they weren’t still independent for a while now (purchased by a publishing company in 2014), I’m sad to see one of the originals go.

They also fund the Epoch Times, a right-wing news outlet that is partially responsible for half of your relatives being absolutely insane these days. (That’s mentioned in OP’s link, and also in your wiki link, but I figured I should mention it for those who didn’t click through.)

Israel’s actions are appalling; that does not mean anyone should want a hard right theocracy like Iran to have nuclear weapons. I don’t even think it would serve as a deterrent; if anything, it could unite all of Israel behind Netanyahu. Scared people go further to the right. And remember: Iran’s government hates more countries than just Israel.

I love when anti-progressive people “take a stand” against California by moving to Texas, and then they move to the most famously progressive city in Texas.

Austin: For those who are stupid enough to relocate based on culture war bullshit, but not stupid enough to think that you’re hiring software developers and creatives out in the boonies.

This is very cool. I’m hoping 404media.co and aftermath.site do it – those are two independent sites that I’ve subscribed to after hearing about them on the fediverse. Seems like most of 404media’s writers are on Mastodon, at least.

I also like that this feature creates the ability to have a known link for an author across multiple websites. With that, you could show posts that link to any other article by the same author, regardless of which site the article was published on. So then you can see all the threads of discussion about all of the articles that particular author has written.

This might not be exactly what you’re looking for, but Neon White is one of my favorite games of the last few years, and it’s on the Switch. I played on PC, but I haven’t seen any complaints about the Switch version.

I don’t really know if I’d call if a first person shooter. It’s more like a first person platformer and you have to shoot some targets before completing the level. Levels are very, very short, and you’ll replay them many times to shave a fraction of a second off of your time.

Thank you! Was just about to ask if there were any suggestions for someone who had never played the original.