@david_megginson@mstdn.ca
@david_megginson@mstdn.ca avatar

david_megginson

@[email protected]

#Tea drinker. Urban dweller. #Gardener. Classical guitarist. #Standards wonk. Grounded pilot. Pantheist. Jane Jacobs fanboy. #Language nerd. 25-year #vegetarian. 30-year #Linux user. #Disabled. Open-* and humanitarian #aid person. Former medieval philologist (Ph.D, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, 1993). Living on unceded Anishinabe Algonquin territory.

Header picture: Large reddish-orange letters spelling "Hintonburg", some lying flat on the sidewalk for use as benches.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

david_megginson, to random
@david_megginson@mstdn.ca avatar

Let's not compete with BlueSky.

If people who want to be on BlueSky end up on BlueSky, and people who want to be in the fediverse end up in the fediverse, we'll all be happier.

Tech details aside, I understand that the culture of BlueSky is "Twitter without Elon." I came to the fediverse looking for the same thing, but I've stayed because our culture isn't remotely like Twitter before Elon, either.

levampyre, to gardening German
@levampyre@chaos.social avatar

How did you get into ?
@gardening

david_megginson,
@david_megginson@mstdn.ca avatar

@levampyre @gardening I'd always done a bit, half-heartedly, but when Transport Canada grounded me from flying for medical reasons, I needed something new.

ajsadauskas, to fediverse
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

With BlueSky moving towards finally opening up federation, I'm interested in how people feel about it?

Would you be open to the idea of Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, and other Fediverse platforms adopting the AT protocol in order to federate with it?

If those technical hurdles could be overcome, would you support your instance federating with BlueSky?

Does the same go for other commercially-owned platforms, such as Threads and Tumblr?

@fediverse

david_megginson,
@david_megginson@mstdn.ca avatar

@ajsadauskas @fediverse asked about BlueSky:

Would you be open to the idea of Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, and other Fediverse platforms adopting the AT protocol in order to federate with it?

No, wait for them to adopt #ActivityPub if they want to play.

would you support your instance federating with BlueSky? … other commercially-owned platforms?

Sure, but we defederate them as soon as they fail to meet our moderation and other standards (which would likely happen quickly).

#fediverse

BigAngBlack, to blackmastodon
@BigAngBlack@fosstodon.org avatar

It's a police culture problem, not just a few bad apples. But you knew that already

Black Met officers urged by colleagues to donate to fund for sacked PCs | Metropolitan police | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/30/black-metropolitan-police-colleagues-donate-fund-sacked-officers

> Exclusive: #Black officers complain of collection for men who lied about the stop and search of black athletes

@blackmastodon
@BlackMastodon
#BlackMastodon

david_megginson,
@david_megginson@mstdn.ca avatar

@Snowshadow @BigAngBlack @blackmastodon @BlackMastodon In some ways Canada is worse because we think we're better (we're in deeper denial than the U.S. or U.K.).

mausmalone, to random
@mausmalone@mastodon.social avatar

Every once in a while I'm tempted to try to move my daughter over to and shit like this is why. She's a smart kid. I'm sure she can pick it up. https://www.pcmag.com/news/these-search-terms-could-lead-kids-to-malware

david_megginson,
@david_megginson@mstdn.ca avatar

@mausmalone My kids grew up with Linux -- they struggled to learn Windows and MacOS later on when they had to use them for school or work.

None of the 3 major desktop OS's is inherently more difficult than the others; it's just a matter of which you become familiar with first (though I find Linux a little easier to set up than Windows or MacOS because I don't have to search all over the web for peripheral drivers).

stickfrau, to bookstodon
@stickfrau@mastodon.green avatar

Hey book people, I would like to read up on the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict and am looking for book recommendations. Either English or German would be fine, and preferably written fairly recently (aka not 30 years ago).

@bookstodon

18+ david_megginson,
@david_megginson@mstdn.ca avatar

@stickfrau @bookstodon While you're waiting for book recommendations, start here for key points in the history of Palestinian displacement over the past century (in rough chronological order):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMahon%E2%80%93Hussein_Correspondence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Irgun_attacks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin_massacre

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_refugees

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_settlement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_of_Jerusalem

And more generally,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borders_of_Israel

janbartosik, to bookstodon
@janbartosik@witter.cz avatar

Das Boot by Lothar-Günther Buchheim.

A must-read, no excuses.


@bookstodon

david_megginson,
@david_megginson@mstdn.ca avatar

@timdalton @janbartosik @bookstodon The book came first. The author, Lothar-Günther Buchheim, had travelled briefly on U-boots as a young naval propaganda journalist during the war, and drew on that experience. He publicly criticised the later film version as an unrealistic, overacted American-style action flick, unlike his anti-war book (they wouldn't let him write the script 🙂).

venitamathias, to blackmastodon
@venitamathias@masto.ai avatar

How ya'll doing? Are you thriving? (You can access the poll results within the politico article)
'The mission of the Payne Center is to inform public policy that improves the lives of Black Americans and all marginalized communities.'
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/the-recast/2023/09/19/black-americans-gallup-poll-00116804
@blackmastodon

david_megginson,
@david_megginson@mstdn.ca avatar

@venitamathias @blackmastodon I'm sorry that you had to deal with a racist troll jumping into your thread. I've blocked and reported them (they also had some extreme homophobic content in other posts).

camilla_hoel, to bookstodon
@camilla_hoel@hcommons.social avatar

O have fallen into a hole of Patrick O’Brian’s making (currently at The Surgeon’s Mate) and greatly enjoying it. I had believed the branding and thought these were Manly Men’s books, no girls or feelings allowed. Now considering making these mandatory reading for all boys when I take over the world. @bookstodon

david_megginson,
@david_megginson@mstdn.ca avatar

@camilla_hoel @bookstodon I love how the sailors are good at housekeeping when they're ashore. 🙂

TimPurdum, to random
@TimPurdum@fosstodon.org avatar

I switched from #tusky (still like it) to #megalodon bc of an issue when opening/closing my #foldable #android phone where the text would go offscreen. Megalodon also has some other nice features. But it has an even worse issue with the foldable. Now whenever I open/close, my feed resets to the top and loses my place 😩

david_megginson,
@david_megginson@mstdn.ca avatar

@TimPurdum I tried using the apps (so that I could set a daily-use timer), but gave up and went back to the mobile website on my phone. It's just better for me -- it has everything I want, and very little that I don't want.

In general, I'm a big advocate of mobile websites over apps. The tech is very good now, and for anything except high-resource things (like GPU-bound games), they're comparable.

david_megginson,
@david_megginson@mstdn.ca avatar

@TimPurdum Not much of a sidebar in a phone browser, fortunately (just a narrow strip of icons).

david_megginson,
@david_megginson@mstdn.ca avatar

@TimPurdum I scroll by swiping the middle of the screen in Firefox+Android. Is it different on other platforms?

david_megginson,
@david_megginson@mstdn.ca avatar

@TimPurdum I agree about the design, but it takes a lot more than that to push me from the browser to a phone app. De gustibus, etc.

itnewsbot, to random
@itnewsbot@schleuss.online avatar

Android's Now Better Than iOS, Instagram Boss Says - Which is better: iPhone or Android? Instagram head Adam Mosseri weighed in on the ... - https://slashdot.org/story/23/07/24/133216/androids-now-better-than-ios-instagram-boss-says?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed #android

david_megginson,
@david_megginson@mstdn.ca avatar

@itnewsbot "Better" depends on your perspective. If you have other Apple stuff, #iOS is still better for you for interoperability; if you're not stuck in their ecosystem, then most of the benefits vanish.

For me, #Android was "better" when I was in hospital after my spinal injury, unable even to sit up for the first 2+ months: I installed a full Linux dev environment in #Termux and was able to work on ourairports.com on my phone, lying flat on my back.

As I wrote, there are many perspectives.

ajsadauskas, to technology
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.

We're not a newspaper, we're a content portal.
We're not a taxi service, we're a ride sharing app.
We're not a pay TV service, we're a streaming platform.
We're not a department store, we're an e-commerce marketplace.
We're not a financial services firm, we're crypto.
We're not a space agency, we're a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We're not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we're a large language model generative AI platform.

Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.

But we're totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.

And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don't apply to us.

Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections... They totally don't apply to us.

Even copyright laws — as long as we're talking about everyone else's intellectual property.

We're going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.

We've also raised several billion in VC funding, and we'll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.

Once we have a near monopoly, we'll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.

You won't believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.

We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.

By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.

By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!

@technology

david_megginson,
@david_megginson@mstdn.ca avatar

@ajsadauskas @technology The one thing I don't sympathise with in that list is the taxi services — at least here in #Ottawa, they were even more exploitative than Uber or Lyft, with a small number of plate holders acting as feudal lords for the drivers, and extracting rent from their vassals even on a bad shift with few fares.

The city could have fixed that by issuing more plates, but the plate-owner lobby was too powerful.

david_megginson,
@david_megginson@mstdn.ca avatar

@markr Very true. Ideally, the city would have managed taxi plates (medallions), increasing the supply every year so that it approximately matched the number of drivers the market would support, instead of freezing it at an artificially-low level so that plates were selling for $500K+ on the secondary market (before Uber and Lyft wiped out their value).

#Ottawa #taxis

david_megginson,
@david_megginson@mstdn.ca avatar

@cheese_greater @Banzai51 LOTR isn't very Christian; Tolkein was Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, at a time when Old English studies were focussing more on the pagan elements that they thought were more "pure" and corrupted by the arrival of Christianity.

C.S. Lewis's books were allegorical Christian (very high church), but fundamentalists don't go for that kind of thing; for them, Jesus has to be Jesus, not an anthropomorphic lion inspired by the story of the crucifixion.

david_megginson,
@david_megginson@mstdn.ca avatar

@FaeDrifter @Smatt I read Tolkein's books more in the light of his experience serving on the front in WW1. There's this terrible thing that you have to leave your cozy, safe home to do, and it damages you so much that even after "victory", you can never really go back.

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