There was a guy who was in tech support who talked to a customer about who was hot or not in the company. It was actually the customer who started the conversation, but the rep ran with it and used all kinds of unprofessional and disparaging language when describing his female co-workers.

That call happened to have a supervisor listening in, so he was fired immediately after he got off the call. The thing is found out who called in, and the women on the team had to assist him when he called for support.

Mudvayne, perhaps. I haven't been involved in that scene for a long time, but it's what comes to mind.

I'm not a lawyer so I have no clue about the legal issues, but I'm more than happy to put my name to anything that costs a corporation money. I don't even need the money. They can take it out of Valve's pocket and burn it for all I care.

It's because there's effectively a class-action suit going on right now, but because the user agreement says you have to use arbitration, there were tens of thousands of people who are like "sure let's go to arbitration". Valve is losing tons of money having to fight all the suits.

https://www.classaction.org/steam-antitrust-refund-2023

Note: I am one of the people involved in this suit.

The Supreme Court did pretty much read out that 3rd section.

I got big time Ferengi vibes from that comment.

It's porn if the state wants to harass you for something.

I think this is not quite correct. You're absolutely right that 6 weeks is basically the same thing as a full ban, but it's based on last period rather than from conception. Which is even worse. They assume that women conceived the day after their period.

A woman could become pregnant late in her menstrual cycle, but the 6 weeks counts from the previous period. So she could really be only a few weeks from conception but closer to 5-6 weeks based on the ban math.

Until people are donating enough money to make maintaining an open source browser doable, this will continue to happen.

He's having a great time!

My recollection is that they advertised and got Important People™ to post there as part of their invite-only beta. Don't quote me on this, but I believe they paid some of these people to create accounts and post there. Not sure if that was a rumor or not.

I do not. I can give you a link to the one I'm referencing though. I'm sure that something like this would exist in Seattle.

https://www.ideafoundry.com/

I agree, but there was also the problem of Mastodon has no marketing budget. Before Musk closed the sale on Twitter, they had 2 full time employees, IIRC.

FOMO. More celebrities are on Bluesky than Mastodon and people don't care enough about open protocols and so forth to forego that. If Taylor Swift was only on some Fediverse-enabled platform and nothing else, people would come here in droves. Taylor Swift does not post on Mastodon so people don't want an account here. Replace Taylor Swift for anyone of any sort of popularity and ask the same questions.

I do wonder who the most famous person in the world is that exclusively posts on a Fediverse-platform. It could very well be Eugen Rochko, who probably has about a 0.05% name recognition throughout the world.

The budget for Mastodon gGmbH is measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and Bluesky's is much more than that.

I think it's good of them to do this, but yes, releasing a browser that isn't open source in 2024 is pretty ancient thinking.

As far as what engine it's based on, there are really 3. Blink, Webkit, and Gecko. I agree that if you're worried about Google taking over, Blink is the worst one to choose, but it's not like there are a lot of options.

Yeah I read a blog post about why it isn't and the answer was pretty bog-standard answers for why anything is closed-source: "if we make these cool customizations open, then anyone could take it and make a competing product."

https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser-open-source/

There are maker spaces in some of the larger cities due to this. There is one in Columbus, but it never took off because...most people who live in Columbus have garages.

Most bus systems in American cities are for people to get to work and back home. Trying to take it to, for instance, a friend's house, and you're generally going to spend about 4x the time it'd take to drive there.

I don't know who did it, but there was a list of cities in the US with the amount of space used for car parking. I think Tulsa, OK was something like 2/3rds of their downtown land was devoted to parking.