The term nerf in respect to video games was actually derived from Nerf guns. Because Nerf guns are basically just normal guns that have been heavily nerfed 😅

I’ve heard they tend to harbor a lot of alt-right types. Possibly because users can’t really get banned. Is that true?

Why are people focusing on the numerical comparison between writers and billionaires? Whatever, it doesn’t really matter.

The point of the article is that writers and authors are seemingly less valued than they ever have been. One reason for this is probably the change in media consumption habits which renders writers mere employees and underlings in the film and television industries (along with everywhere else). People no longer read books, which are the main format by which writers can become self-employed and self sufficient.

As always, it comes back to the homogenizing aspect of capitalism which tends to absorb everything into an interconnected web of economic dependencies. Instead of small businesses, we have overarching retail behemoths like Walmart and Amazon. Similarly, instead of a multitude of independent writers and authors expressing their own thoughts in books, they are compelled to work in teams to construct artificial, corporatized narratives due to economic necessity, yielding film franchises and television series along with all of their advertising and merchandising income.

Good old Tenzing Norgay 😅. Certainly ranks among the coolest of guides.

Indeed, that’s an excellent point. Additionally, the fediverse is already an innovation in and of itself.

Yeah most fediverse projects mimic Twitter, reddit, etc. But they all add the key innovation of federation. Just by conforming to ActivityPub, each fediverse project features a key innovation in its respective niche.

I think part of the reason this doesn’t seem as impactful as it could is because federation is still very rudimentary. We are only scratching the surface of the potential that federation theoretically provides. It’s a feature/innovation that becomes more useful the larger the network grows, and the fediverse isn’t large enough yet for that to become apparent.

Ok thanks for the info. Fingers crossed 🤞

I remember hearing that Lemmy’s NLnet funding was going to run out soon.

Does this mean the Lemmy devs could potentially reapply for additional funding, or is this only for “new projects”?

Late 80s New York crime rates were pretty brutal. The city and music scene were definitely more vibrant and less sanitized compared with today though, so I feel you

Well said. What people fail to understand is that simply telling people how they should act is futile. You need to alter the conditions that cause people to develop dysfunctional social behaviors in the first place.

Cool, I’ll check out her channel

Well, I now know more about Svalbard than I thought possible, just from reading this whole thread. Thank you for your service 😅

That’s actually a really good point that I hadn’t previously realized. Collecting genetic information from any living human is incredibly trivial to do without them ever consenting or even knowing that it happened.

Hot tub and jacuzzi are used interchangeably in the US. Is the one that you posted used for bathing?

Yeah man it’s uh… it’s the future that’s getting weird 😅

Although I had no part in this, on behalf of all Lemmings, I accept your thanks and wish you a very happy holiday.

Btw, a festivus pole still doesn’t sound like a bad idea. A festivus for the rest of us; it’s a noble pursuit

Plugging !radiolemmy@lemm.ee. Not exactly what you asked for, but a cool community project that covers a wide spectrum of musical genres.

A lot of sticks have tiny branches, but they’re still sticks

Just to clarify, you want to show your family stuff you’ve written online, without them being able to identify your account?

If I were you, I’d just write new stuff for them.

The sheer audacity

That’s a very interesting question and I’m not sure of the answer.

Obviously on some level, the cost of the infrastructure scales with the number of people using it. But so does the ability to crowdfund, if there are 100x more instances then theoretically there would be 100x more potential donors to meet the cost.

One clear way to influence the scaling in our favor would be to utilize instances with clear themes and purposes. If everybody on a particular instance is interested in the same content, that reduces the wasted computational resources compared to an instance where all of the users are interested in different topics, and thus subscribed to a much wider variety of communities.

My intuition is that as long as the platform only hosts text and images, the costs should be manageable, especially with inevitable improvements to computational efficiency that are likely to come as Lemmy matures. For instance, I believe there is some kind of patch that reduces storage utilization that should be shipping with the next version (0.19).