Notices by Ross Andrews (randrews@somewhy.net)

@sun Makes sense I guess because casting one very large piece of acrylic is probably hard / expensive to do.

Could you get a polishing compound and just re-smooth it out?

@mrsaturday @p @rvcx If he didn't ask permission to run them there first, that does make a difference, sure. And I suggested to him that he should just self-host them, which he wouldn't do. So yeah, kind of an unserious person. Depends on your definition of "spam" I guess; I wouldn't consider them spam.

@p @rvcx They aren't spambots; they were providing a useful service (useful to me anyway). I know I have alternate ways to get it (it's one of the functions of my watch) but I liked getting it from the bot, which is why I followed the bot. If you didn't want to see it, all you had to do was not follow the bot.

@rvcx
> (exemplified by the first reply to this announcement)

Dunno what to tell you man, I was trying to help. I follow the Houston bot and will be sorry to see it go.

@rvcx I can't see that link, it's a 404 for me

@rvcx Yeah, it doesn't take much to trigger people to instance-block you. It sucks, federation doesn't work if people intentionally break it.

And yeah that commenter is an asshole. Well, if the bots go to bluesky, I'm guessing somewhy.net is blocked there so I won't see them any more. Bummer!

@rvcx Have you thought about hosting your own instance to operate the bots in? I host an instance, it's not hard.

@sickburnbro The media does this with damn near everything. They'll get the idea of a narrative and selectively-report to push their agenda. It happens most obviously with guns; every so often they'll decide to push for gun bans and suddenly every day there's something horrible about guns in the news.

@kaia Normally you only see the top square portion. :)

Watching Louis Rossmann in 2024 is weird for me because I remember the 90s when everyone thought this way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtTdOBCLsyo

Before following:

I am a conservative. If you are not, then we can still be friends! But if you post or boost things attacking conservatives or republicans then I will block you. I don't post hate speech about others, and I expect the same courtesy.

@Hyolobrika To be fair, neither does actual in-person laughter.

@sj_zero At the very least I trust him to weather the storm better than Kamala.

So I'm watching 2010. The scene where he's reactivating HAL 9000. And I think, "that's stupid, there's no way a computer like that would have a keyboard that looked like that."

Then I look down at my own keyboard.

Okay, fair enough.

@sun @Hyolobrika Every time I've tried to talk to some crypto-bro about whether crypto is a good idea, all they fall back on is that the USD is inflationary and a bad store of value.

Sure. It is. But that isn't in itself an argument why cryptocurrencies are a good idea.

So I've given up. Let people dump their money into the scams, doesn't matter to me.

@Hyolobrika I don't think they've thought it through. Their idea is that as early adopters, they'll be trillionaires when all of society moves to the libertarian-fun-bux standard, and everyone who didn't buy btc will be peasants. But why would anyone move to a different currency where they'll be a peasant? What's gonna motivate everyone to ascend these basement-dwellers to godhood?

@Diceynes That is not true. I used to work for a DNA testing company and a lot of our customers were from Israel.

@Diceynes I didn't believe you so I did look it up and the first result is that they're not illegal. Even if they require the equivalent of a prescription, that's not the same as illegal, and it's also not keeping people from getting them since, as I said, enough Israeli customers to keep my former company afloat...

@Diceynes That law apparently dates to when all DNA tests were done with court approval, before the cost lowered enough that things like 23andMe / FamilyTreeDNA existed. And people apparently ignore it.

@Diceynes The bottom paragraph, right there, all the exceptions. Medical purposes, they do DNA testing for citizenship, they do it for research projects. The law you're talking about was apparently written to ensure people's privacy by requiring that they be done by accredited labs, which as a side effect make OTC ones illegal, but the same places that sell them in the US will ship the sample kits there as well (I know because we did!)