Notices by Administrator (mdm@mcnamarii.town)

@WiteWulf My friend, I have been here nearly from mastodon's beginnings -- the Pixelfed team has been soliciting money for its future development nearly that entire time, and it's still v0 software.

To me, Pixelfed is like the Aptera Motors (https://aptera.us/) of the software world -- soliciting money for years from people who desperately want the dream of what it represents to be true (in this case, an instagram free of Zuck control).

@cstross (BE-4, right?)

I was looking up some quick stats, and it seems like each BE-4 engine is very close to SpaceX's raptor (around 500k freedom units of force). I don't know how much more power they can get out of a BE-4.

That being said, SpaceX is cramming 33 similar engines into one booster. I have no idea how -- I guess the 2 meters more diameter makes a difference.

I never thought I'd say this, but I am really rooting for Bezos here, to increase some competition.

@cstross ...based on how slowly it lifted off, they've either got to drop that mass (carry less fuel?) or add another engine (probably not possible).

But a very impressive launch, nonetheless!

@cstross @jimmac @archenemy What if it was the same size and pixel density of your current phone, but _also_ had a slide out portrait keyboard?

@cstross In between the mediocre stuff, I have read some _really_ good 40K books.

Now I gotta ask; what faction? Or was it all just Space Marine books in 1990?

@cstross Ah, I see the Tories are having their "Michael Steele" moment (RNC head 2009-2011) after suffering such a big loss.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Steele

@Gargron @reckless1280 @elonjet Trying to get The Verge to even acknowledge that Masto exists sometimes feels like an enormous chore. :p

The Verge has the technological know-how to run their own locked-down server just for their staff (with closed registrations), but they don't!

@ATLeagle @steve @ajsadauskas @mekkaokereke It's stories like these that remind me that I am so privileged that in my nearly 20 year IT career, I have never once been in a room full of only white men.

I work for a major multinational whose US head openly used words like "critical race theory" positively, in a way that showed he actually knew what he was talking about.

@JamesK You too could move, don't worry! (I never thought I'd be able to leave a voting-restricted state either.)

@michael_w_busch Wow -- Michigan also has no such requirement.

Wait -- did it really need to be *notarized*? Even Georgia didn't require that. :\

@jonobie @karabaic @mekkaokereke Every now and then I actually feel bad for a Republican politician, because they'll say something like "we need to stop disenfranchising mail voters, because much of our base lives in rural areas where mail voting could actually help us."

These particular Republican voices are usually older -- getting to a polling place may be hard for them too, at that age (there are no "voter busses" in rural areas, as you might imagine).

@karabaic @mekkaokereke This change was made so that voting by mail would be restricted to only those who either had A) access to a printer, or B) maintained one of their own. Both are things that are getting extremely rare today.

And of course, since this is Georgia, you have to pay for your own stamp.

Meanwhile, in Michigan, I am on the "permanent mail vote" list, where for every election I just receive my vote, complete it, and send it back, with pre-paid postage.

@karabaic @mekkaokereke Right before I left the US South for good, I noticed just how much harder it had become to get a mail vote in Georgia, for instance.

In 2021 Georgia changed the law to require you to use a *printer* to:

A) print out the form
B) sign it
C) scan it
D) send it via email.

Prior to this, you could just sign it on an iPad or your phone.

There was only one reason why this change was made, and it wasn't to make voting "safer".

@owenblacker @cstross

This sentence...

"Another possible route is the cows’ feed, owing to the fairly revolting fact that the U.S. allows farmers to feed leftover poultry bedding material — feathers, excrement, spilled seeds — to dairy and beef cattle as a cheap source of additional protein."

...is one of the main reasons why I don't eat meat in the US

@roadriverrail @djsundog Ah -- I think I see what you mean.

Palm Pre/Microsoft Kin didn't fail _because_ of CDMA, they ended up on CDMA because they were already either failing, or doomed to failure.

Wow, that doesn't speak well of what the industry thought of Verizon at the time, at least as a preferred technology partner, right?

@roadriverrail @djsundog Definitely PalmOS -- and I would love to hear some of your stories about the time spent working on PalmOS. :)

(I used to use the PalmOS "Web Developer" to make phone apps in the seriously beautiful cloud designer circa 2009, or so -- did you work on that?)

My opinion comes from seeing the winners and losers from the 2006-2012 era of phones -- I definitely noticed a trend of "if it launched on CDMA, it was nearly DOA" (PalmOS, the Microsoft Kin, etc.).

@roadriverrail @djsundog

Early Android wasn't great, either (PalmOS was probably better), but Android being on GSM helped more people play around with it.

@djsundog Seriously -- just make web apps.

I use the Mastodon web app on iOS -- it even has notification support now. There is no need for an app store app.

@djsundog I am _always_ surprised at that initial push for "web apps only" with iOS 1.0.

The only thing I can suppose is that the app store simply wasn't ready, and they had to do _something_.

@djsundog PalmOS especially -- had they not been hamstrung by the terrible deal with Sprint in the US, I still believe it could've had wider adoption.

But -- let's just make the web app reality happen, ourselves? I have a single page of apps on my iPhone -- that's it. (Most of them built-in Apple apps.)

Everything else is web apps. It works _fine_.