Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

@westmeadow @alexwild The problem the GOP has (and this is the real quiet part loud) is drawing that line dooms the party to increasing irrelevance as currently constituted.

They see the writing on the wall that younger Americans are increasingly disinterested with their core party platform planks: they want more socialist policies because they aren’t “communism = bad / socialism = communism” Cold-War-era indoctrinated; they are unconvinced in capitalism as the optimum solution because they lived through several crashes; they watched the world not burn down in the aftermath of Loving, Roe, and Obergefell; they are concerned the world will burn down literally due to climate change… A phenomenon the GOP tripled down on being fake.

Faced with these demographic statistics, the GOP is stuck in a situation where embracing democracy means the party weakens and possibly dies. They can’t win if democracy and reason win, and so they’re stuck opposing those principles themselves or committing to political apoptosis.

@cnbc_rss Cool. What about jail time?

@lauren That feels straightforward to add as a feature to the reference implementation.

Ugh... I'd do it, but (a) I'm already swamped on volunteer projects and (b) I've kinda sworn off Ruby on Rails as one of those "Adding more code in this language is harming future generations" infrastructures.

@panna_pudi Wow. That looks great!

@arstechnica First they came for the billionaires, and I said nothing because billionaires don't deserve the right to break exchange law by moving markets with words.

@feditips @Gargron @stux BRB, registering MasTDN.social, Masstodon.social, and mas-todon.social to widen the gyre. ;)

I'm impressed by how PayPal continues to get more complicated but never actually get better.

Me: "PayPal, I'd like to login."

PayPal: "Cool. Oop, you need to two-factor. I've sent your code via text message to this phone number."

Me: "Well that's a landline so it'll never get received."

PayPal: "Oh, our bad dawg. In that case, just give us another phone number."

Me: *gives Google Voice*

PayPal: "Not that one! We can't use that!"

Me: "Sigh..." *gives raw cell number*

PayPal: "Thanks! Okay, we are sending a code to that number."

Me: "Sounds g~ wait: why are we doing this again?"

PayPal: "Two-factor authentication!"

Me: "Right, that security system where..."

PayPal: "You guard against attack by requiring something the user knows and something the user owns. Along two different channels!"

Me: "Right. In other words, me... a potential attacker... supplied the password. And the ID code. Sent to the phone number. That was just supplied by me. The potential attacker."

PayPal: ".... look, do you want your fucking $23 or not?"

@arstechnica So much discussion of other things, when the simple answer is "the atmosphere became breathable when animals evolved lungs." ;)

“Why do people keep making web UIs when it could just be a desktop app?”

Great question. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to re-install Discord again, from scratch. See, they made a minor version bump, and the Ubuntu version can’t self-update, so every time they pop out a minor tweak my ten-second login becomes a two-minute install (and a trip to some website to look up, again, the command in Ubuntu to install a downloaded package…).

Hahaha j/k I used to do that now I use the web interface. ;)

There's plenty of obscurely-named command line apps that are super-powerful but nigh-on inscrutable.

Credit where credit is due: yeah, you have to read all the docs to really take advantage of it, but "ImageMagick" does what it says on the tin.

General #Mastodon question:

What’s the equivalent in Mastodon to “I don’t want to follow this thread?” Like, if there’s a conversation being had that spins off from a topic I started and I don’t care to follow it but (a) I don’t really want to block anyone, I just don’t care to see this rabbit-hole and (b) I keep getting @’ed into the stream, what’s the tool to down-sample that signal in my feed?

I ask because I notice when I reply to a big thread that like four people will get @’ed in; I don’t want to remove them in case they are following the discussion, but it feels awkward if I end up in a back-and-forth with one person and I have no idea if anybody else cares about our little deep-dive. I have no signal on whether to delete the other @’s.