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This is why email never caught on. Who wants to choose between Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Proton, and Comcast? A successful email service would be one where you can only communicate with users of the same email service. /s
This is why email never caught on. Who wants to choose between Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Proton, and Comcast? A successful email service would be one where you can only communicate with users of the same email service. /s
As this thread demonstrates, there are plenty of ways to say “I’m doing terrible, actually” without breaking the social contract. If I’m having an awful day, my go-to is “hangin’ in there, how are you?”
The last part is important. Some people don’t want to talk about how you’re doing (maybe they don’t have the emotional bandwidth at the moment, maybe they’re in a hurry, maybe they just don’t care) so give them an out, a clear signal of something else they can discuss without seeming rude. The easiest way is to return the question, but you can also just jump into the imminent topic of conversation, like:
“How are you?”
“Keeping on keeping on. Hey, just wanted to reach out about that thing on page 4, do you have a minute?”
Or if they started the conversation and you don’t know what it’s about, there’s always “Takin’ it one day at a time, eh? What can I do for you?”
The biggest “risk” of this approach is that someone may offer sympathy or ask you what happened, which is a whole new set of protocols. But for me it’s worth it to not have to lie.
Holy butts, why has no one ever said this sentence to me before
One of my best friends in high school was a Norwegian exchange student. He was easygoing and smart and we rode the bus together because his host family lived nearby. Some of the funniest conversations of my life happened on those bus rides.
When he went back to Norway we lost touch. I think it must have been difficult for him to be here—the isolation, the culture shock, the language barrier, I can only imagine. Maybe it was a relief to leave our little town in the rearview mirror. But I’m forever glad I met him.
This is a great concept. I hope it catches on.
I participate in a pledge called #50forFOSS. On the first Friday of every month, I choose an open source project and give the maintainer $50, no strings attached. It lets me target small projects that may not have a lot of users, but are valuable to me, as well as bigger ones with more expenses. My mindset these days is that I need to insist on paying for the software I use, because if I don’t, someone else will (i.e. advertisers and venture capitalists, which is bad) or no one else will (i.e. abandonware, which is worse).
Disclaimer: I started #50forFOSS and there’s a very small group of us who are doing it.
This was my experience with MTG. Dude was all excited to “teach” me how to play, made a deck for me and everything, and then whomped me on the second turn.
I never played again and still don’t know how
Only for the floors that are labeled correctly, though.
Only tangentially related, but the cheapest (by weight and per unit) type of hamburger patties at my local Costco this month are Impossible Burgers.
If you’re not familiar with these, they’re completely vegan, made from soy protein, but the texture and flavor is almost identical to beef. They cook like beef, taste like beef, and “bleed” like beef. And (for a few weeks, at least) they’re cheaper than beef.
That’s a new and exciting sandwich IMO.
Wondermark is rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but funny is only one thing comics can be. I like it because it’s smart, zany, and artistically interesting (every comic is made from Victorian woodcuts).
One stated purpose of the campaign is to show the size and influence of the fediverse so that politicians and governments will set up instances and/or accounts and maintain an official presence on it. $500k may or may not be enough to do that, but the organizer is meeting with Democratic Party officials this week to discuss the campaign and there could be meaningful outcomes for the whole fediverse.
At time of publication, the campaign had raised 485k on ActBlue. Yesterday it broke 500k and is still going strong, with smaller daily fundraising goals.
You can see the progress tracker here: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/mastodon-for-harris
Tap-to-pay on credit card chips, too.
I’m with you there. The only explanation that makes sense to me is if they’re really hurting for cash. And if they are, I honestly don’t have a solution that falls between “go bankrupt” and “sell out our users in the least noxious way we can come up with.”
Do we think anyone would actually opt in?
I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that making it opt-in is probably seen in this case as equivalent to throwing the entire feature in the trash.
“I’m not owned! I’m not owned!” I continue to insist as I slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob
Back during the real estate frenzy of the late 2010s I would get calls all the time asking how much I would sell my house for. I’d say “I could probably let it go for 2 million dollars.” (Even at the ridiculous peak, it was never worth more than 750k.) There would be a few seconds of silence on the line while they actually looked up my house. Then they’d say “oh.” And hang up as fast as humanly possible.
“If we run terabytes of text through a statistical model, then spend millions of man-hours labeling outputs, we can approximate the way humans respond to a prompt.” –OpenAI, more or less
Wow, what a surprise. I’ll do you one better: if you take me to a river, I can tell you where the water is going to go next! Maybe we can get some VC money by promising to deliver clean water to every business in the world without all the expense of pipelines and plumbers? I mean, just look at all this water. It may not go where you want right now, but let us dump sewage in it for a couple years and who knows what it’ll do.