Notices by pieist@qoto.org

Yesterday I discovered that not only do #crows distinguish between people, but also between #cats.

There's a neighborhood cat whose presence is always announced by the outraged crows yelling and swooping at him. But they pay no attention to our cat, even if he's walking right by them. i can only assume that the other cat has menaced them or their nests in some way, and Stanley never does that.

Anyway, yesterday three crows were standing quietly on our driveway apron looking at Stanley, as he sat looking back at them and meowing chattily from no more than 10 feet away.

To Stanley, a #bird is a person if he's ever seen us talking to it. I've spoken to scrub #jays, #hummingbirds and crows in his presence, and since then I've seen him talk to them as well.

@w7voa
And yet I still have no confidence that the military rank and file won't stand behind him. They really are astonishingly willing to be lied to, and equally passionate about lying to themselves.

@QOTO @freemo Hi. Any idea of the time frame on resolving the web UI issues? The availability of translate or edit, the profile link? Thanks.

@Nimbius666 @gimulnautti @noellemitchell @Npars01 @dragonsidedd

"Too cheap to meter" nuclear is just a few years away... and has been for 60 years now.

@freemo If 24 Horus doesn't work, give it five or six Amun-Ra

@freemo @realcaseyrollins Yeah, not exactly exculpatory, is it: "Not a piece of that precise flavor of shit, but still actively and unequivocally demonstrating with every fibre of his being that he's a massive piece of some kind of shit."

@simon Is it also OK not to?

@freemo Pretty impatient birdwatchers.

@freemo Nonsense, I'm just an average jobless white 20something Portlander with totally-not-culturally-appropriating dreadlocks.

Are you looking to give up being a fascist? Well, nothing could be simpler: just stop disagreeing with me!

@sundogplanets I thought Neil DeGrasse Tyson had an interesting point when he suggested that an extraterrestrial race appreciably smarter than we are might simply not be very interested in talking to us. Sort of in the way that very few humans are really interested in talking to chimpanzees, or would go out of their way to try.

@feditips They're all going to sod off again when Musk relents and makes Twitter even a little bit usable again, so I wouldn't get excited.

@Popehat I'm still sorry that with the passing of Rik, there's no longer such a thing as Mayall privilege.

@JohnShirley2023 @kissane

Your instance can block them. Looks like it doesn't block very many, though:

https://mastodon.cloud/about/more

But Mastodon as a whole is just a software project that's freely redistributable. It's effectively impossible to stop an instance from being created which allows anything. Other instances and individuals can refuse to federate with them, and that's basically how that's handled.

@JohnShirley2023 @kissane

Other instances can shut them out. The bigger, better known ones tend to cooperate on this, particularly the ones operated by Mastodon project.

But unfortunately as Erin points out, there are no controls on who downloads open source software -- there almost by definition can't be.

I feel personally harmed by whatever you are or aren't doing right now, and I'm working on my medium.com post about just what it is that you and everybody else in the world owes me because of it.