DarthYoshiBoy

So this is neat. Potentially life changing for some type 2 diabetics, but that depends because some t2 diabetics are not failing to make enough insulin, they’re just no longer sensitive to it at a level that makes it functional for them. I suppose it’s possible that this therapy could cause them to grow enough islet β cells to overcome their lack of sensitivity, but (and I’m a type 1, not a type 2, so maybe my info is incorrect here) that lack of sensitivity can grow with further exposure to insulin making this a stop-gap at best for those cases absent other therapies.

…and with all of that said, being able to regrow islet β cells has never really been the problem for type 1 diabetes. You can regrow all the islet β cells you’d like and it’s not going to cure the underlying immune disease that has caused your immune system to kill off all of your islet β cells to begin with. Unless you can figure out why t1 diabetes causes one’s own immune system to go psycho killer on their islet β cells, you’ve done nothing to “cure” diabetes. Without being able to suppress that impulse for your immune system to murder your own cells, any ability to replace the islet β cells is going to be temporary at best, and probably a waste on the whole.

My brother in law is a “cured” type 1 diabetic, by virtue of his having had a kidney replacement and being on immune suppressing drugs for that. Since they were already replacing the kidney and he was going to have to take immune system suppression medications for that, they also just replaced his pancreas at the same time and the suppression of his immune system has allowed the new pancreas to thrive and continue to make insulin. Easy-peasy. The only trade-off is that he is super immunocompromised and can be killed by common colds, so not a great strategy in general.

I accidentally misclicked this article and reported it as spam while I was trying to report some prescription drug spam. Hopefully it’s not adversely affected. I wish there was an Undo on that action.

Bluetooth headphones are not modernity, they should of course be an option, but increasingly they are the only game in town. Wired is still king for loads of things, not the least of which is reliability.

You wanna know how many times my wired Sennheiser’s have been unable to put music in my ear holes? Never. They always work. Care to guess how many wireless headphones have been able to provide sound every time I’ve wanted it without delay or failure? None. I’ve owned more than 2 dozen wireless this, that, and the other, headphones & earbuds, and none of them have been even a shadow of the reliability offered by my old wired headphones. Which is to say nothing of the fact that the wired experience usually sounds better (Still don’t think you can get any comfortable phat 600ohm monster cans that don’t have a wire) and has no issues with making sound when you’re in a space that is saturating the 2.4Ghz band (my Costco is usually so full of idiots on Bluetooth that you can’t get a reliable experience for anything from any wireless audio device.)

You seem to think it’s “backwards rhetoric” to want a feature that will never be offered in a wireless setup, and that’s just fucked man. There are a wealth of reasons why wireless does not fully replace wired. It’s why anything that doesn’t have to move generally gets a fixed connection, it’s just more reliable and often more efficient. That’s not backwards, it’s just a priority that you don’t value above others. If landlines or floppy disks offered any advantages over anything else they’d still be around today (and arguably they are in some limited niches,) but the replacements for those technologies have had no downsides against their replacements while wireless tech still has some significant downsides (again, maybe you don’t weight the pros and cons the same, so this may not apply to you) against the technology they are meant to replace, and will likely never see 100% capture of their role as a result.

TL;DR: Stop trying to frame this as some sort of crusade against the future, there are legit cases where wired is just better than wireless.

At this point they’re only wagging their fingers to make it appear as though they’re considering regulation.

Again, it’s disingenuous to claim that their pragmatism in the face of unreasonable actors is the same as being the unreasonable actors. What are the left supposed to do? Pull a Trump and pretend that the laws and systems that make our country don’t exist and just say that what they want is law and ignore that half the country is electing morons who will fight them at every turn? That’s not how it works and frankly I wouldn’t want it to work that way because it’s just incredibly dangerous. They’re trying to work within a system where the right has learned they can con half the country into believing they’re doing their job while they sit back and do their damnedest to ensure that the government doesn’t function at all because that’s the only way that conservatives can stop progress at this point with their platforms being as unpopular as they are.

The left is definitely more open to considering regulation. It’s not even close. The right thinks that regulation is a four letter word and they’re generally not a fan of those either. It’s disingenuous to both sides everything. Much of the time where the left allows a carveout for vampirism, it’s because it’s the best compromise they can mange to a given end given that the right is out there swabbing their throats and getting all hot and bothered waiting for daddy Drac to come and give it to them, not because it’s their preference that we allow unfettered late-stage capitalism to destroy lives. Again, it’s disingenuous to claim that their pragmatism in the face of unreasonable actors is the same as being the unreasonable actors (and I am well aware that there are exceptions that prove the rule on both sides of the isle, so 🤷‍♂️)

…and lest anyone think that this problem isn’t solved with government regulation, I invite you to look at the medication situation in nearly any other country in the world where by and large they are not afraid of regulation for the same drug companies that are fucking us sideways in the US and see how much cheaper and better their access to medications is solely because they’re willing to support that maybe there is a greater public good than shareholder profits.

This is of course their MO. They were making Insulin for pennies per vial for years and selling it for hundreds of dollars per. It’s funny how they’re allowed to keep doing this to us and they probably always will because the US right thinks the immoral thing is not letting vampires have a suck whenever they want it. Obesity and Diabetes are a couple of the largest killers around, to say nothing of the losses in Quality of Life they cause. It’s just insane that we refuse to regulate prices for drugs that would relieve immeasurable suffering and death because CEOs gotta have a nicer Yacht or how is life any fair?

It’s a pretty great game. Really good music and one of those gameplay loops that is easy to pick up and difficult to master. If you like Tetris and the like, Lumines is worth your attention.

Lumines

I’m on the other side, why use either?

Microblogging is a great format for following creators. I don’t need your life story to know that you’ve got a new album, a new software release, a new security vulnerability, a new video, a new tour, or a new comic. The shortform communication forced by Mastodon or Bluesky is perfect for that. It gives enough room to share those quick updates, and that’s about it. Replies are also kept succinct which makes parsing those for relevant context or side info similarly simple.

I originally got into Twitter because it was the update channel for when new Cyanogenmod releases dropped and I stuck around because following the right security professionals made it so that I could learn about a new CVE within seconds of its filing rather than having to wait for a news site I visit to catch wind of it and write something up. Which in turn made my job easier because I knew what systems we’d need to be patching well before that info bubbled up to my bosses so I could already have a head start on the work before the ask reached me officially.

These days, microblogging (at least with a straight chronological follow feed) more or less achieves what RSS used to back before everyone suddenly decided about a decade back that it wasn’t worth maintaining an RSS feed without Google running Reader or some crap. By way of example, ~20 years ago I had 13 comics that I followed via my RSS reader, today only 5 of those creators still have RSS feeds and a couple of those seem like they’re on life support for how they seem to infrequently pause updates for a few days at a time. All of the RSS feeds that are gone have moved to microblogging of some sort for updates, and I’d rather they use something open than the likes of Twitter (which I left at the first whiff that Musk was buying the place) or Instagram (which I have never used because it’s Facebook and I don’t do Facebook.)

Let’s not even get started on how stupid people sound when they talk about skeets and toots.

Yeah, I’ll agree there. I call them posts wherever they reside. It’s what they’ve always been, it’s what they’ll always be.

For everyone wondering why anyone would use Bluesky when Mastodon and/or the Fediverse is around.

I have to ask why not use both? All the tech people I followed on Twitter went to Mastodon almost immediately when Musk bought the site, while most of my personal friends on Twitter were not willing to leave because they thought Mastodon was too techy and Bluesky couldn’t replicate the network of people they valued from Twitter. That said, slowly over time as the invites came rolling in for Bluesky, my personal friend circle has been willing to move to Bluesky while they still wont touch Mastodon and honestly it hasn’t harmed me in the least to use both. It’s actually sorta nice to have the tech stuff in a separate bucket from my personal connections.

I’m not super hopeful that the AT protocol ever expands beyond the single site it is now, but I will be fully happy to launch my own instance and keep my personal contacts if that day ever comes, and if it doesn’t, I’ve still got Mastodon to fall back to where I’m pretty happily established but for the lack of the people I know IRL.

I’ll be honest, I could sometimes find a helpful answer there, but for about the last 2 years it has taken 3 reloads of a page at least before it actually loads any content, otherwise it just sits there at a plain white page showing their logo and I usually give up rather than try to get lucky with a page actually loading.

My favorite Libertarian society experiment. I mean, it’s the only one that I’m aware of, but that it ended about as well as you’d expect is just fantastic.

I’m not the original owner of my Mazda either, I had the upgrade done well after the original sale of that vehicle. I had also looked into the software modding scene but decided that an official upgrade costing only $400 wasn’t worth the potential headaches of hacky homebrew updates I had to service myself.

My Mazda is a 2016 CX-5. It was a limited option in 2016, but it was an option, and it only cost me $400 to purchase the upgraded head unit and have it installed by my Mazda dealership. I don’t know what model yours is, but 2016 is the year that you can actually look into the option depending. It was going to run me more than $400 to do my own AA solution with the risks of losing the steering wheel or knob controls, so $400 for the upgrade that retains all of that without any hacky workarounds was a godsend.

Your Mastodon data is already an open book to Meta if they care to have it. The protocol is open, they could already be black-ops scooping up everything that’s fit to federate without turning on Threads federation, so them doing that really changes nothing. And what I mean by that is that they could already have set up unknown instances to leech whatever data they want out of the Fediverse, which instances masquerade as normal mom and pop installs just federating and sucking up everything without bringing anything back to the table. There’s literally nothing stopping them from leeching everything out of the Fediverse at any time other than people being better at detecting their activity (and actively thwarting that activity) than Meta is at keeping it off the radar.

In this case they’re making it so that I might have a chance to follow and interact with people already in the Meta/Instagram/Threads atmosphere without having to convince those people to leave the confines of what they’re comfortable with and find a Mastodon instance to sign up for. Maybe they’ll be more comfortable with leaving Meta after dipping their toes in the open spec?

How is that not a win? If Meta/Threads decide that they want to fracture the protocol and go do their own thing later, so what? We’ll go right back to where we were before they brought their users into the Fediverse. If people decide that they value the Threads extras/connections more than they value the purity of the ActivityPub protocol then maybe Meta is actually providing something that matters and we’ve lost by not supplying that need before the corporate interest figured out that it existed. In that case we’ll deserve the death that causes in use of the open spec, but the open spec will still be there and people who want to do their own thing with it can’t be stopped now. The code to run an open ActivityPub Mastodon instance is already out there and it’s impossible to take it back now.

Everyone is out here decrying this as a subtle takeover of the Fediverse by Meta, but did Facebook “takeover” the HTTP spec when they started operating facebook (dot) com on the world wide web over the HTTP protocol? It’s an insane assertion. I’ve been running my own opensource web servers since well before Facebook was a thing and I’ve continued to do so despite most people opting to depend on a mega-corp to be steward of their online presence. That Meta has a very successful and popular website that I’ve never been a fan of has never impacted my ability to use the open protocol they operate on to continue doing my own thing. The same thing will be true here.

It really seems like people are just upset that Threads might bring ActivityPub to the mainstream and force them to contend with the realization that a diaspora of open spec implementations already lost the war to Meta/Facebook. We had that once before. It was called the World Wide Web and you could go and find forums, fan pages, company websites, and everything else back then that has since moved to Facebook (or other content aggregator sites) because people value the network effects and homogenization more than they care about one big company being in charge of it all. (…and not to belabor the point, but most of that stuff is still out there, it’s just waned in popularity because the network effects are not there.) Here we are with a chance to try and break things out again and people are seemingly worried that we can’t if we let the Meta users in? Maybe they’re right, maybe it’s impossible to achieve victory here, but gatekeeping the standard and enacting some purity test for which providers are allowed on the protocol isn’t going to tip the scales in favor of the open standards implementation.

If the protocol is truly open, then how can a corporation embracing it be a danger? We’re all free to adopt any changes or not at any point in the journey so it’s impossible to lose, you’re free to keep doing your own thing any way you look at it. Tell me how any of this is untrue.

TL;DR: Threads coming to the Fediverse is a good thing. It’ll make it possible to expand the network effects of an open protocol far faster and more than any amount of Fedinerds proselyting the gospel of ActivityPub ever will. The only thing that is at risk of being lost is that we’ll refuse to adapt to what end users want fast enough to keep a large corporation from bending the spec to their ends. Which loss again only means that you’d be cutting yourself off from those who WANT to embrace the revised spec by not adopting those changes yourself. That option (to just not adopt changes to the spec) can’t be taken away from you in the future, so worrying is only warranted if you feel like your ideal ActivityPub implementation can’t win out in the marketplace of ideas and that you’re owed that victory even if others are able to expand it in ways that people actually want to use enough to dismiss whatever downsides it contains.

I’ve a Mazda with Android Auto that doesn’t use a touch screen. It’s all controlled with a joystick/knob/button setup that is actually really nice. I wish my Nissan had a similar setup all the time.

In the Mazda I know how many physical interactions will get me the result I want, it takes barely more than a glance at the screen to know what’s up. With the touch interface I have to put my eyes on the screen to confirm that the car didn’t bounce when I went to tap a “button” and/or confirm that the tap was actually registered. I know that GM has to know that Android Auto supports non touchscreen interactions. If they’re concerned about how unsafe touchscreens are, just add a knob to the center console that doubles as a 4-way joystick like Mazda has and all those concerns go away. It’s really that simple and it IS miles better than using touch for everything.

Why aren’t people pushing at Apple users to make that switch themselves

If you’ve ever tried to get someone to use the non-default… anything, you would probably note that most people will not go out of their way to use something that isn’t the default. The fact that Apple doesn’t allow you to set another messenger app means that your appeal to most Apple users will quickly run into the neat wall that Apple keeps around their garden. It doesn’t hurt Apple’s defense of that default that they convey a special status to users of the default, why would someone who is special in the default app (blue bubble) go out of their way to be a normie elsewhere?

Funny story time, intentionally vague to shield identities:

I have a friend who was hired to teach a course at a local University for their new CS degree that had a focus on video games some while ago. He was a bit of an expert in a particular portion of the material that they needed, and when they started putting out feelers to find someone to teach the subject matter, everyone locally in the industry gave him the highest praise and said he was the man for the job. The University met with him and eventually selected him to teach, which he did for 3 semesters. After 3 semesters, they dropped him because he didn’t himself have a college degree in what he was teaching (which was something he made very clear in the hiring process.)

He went into making games straight out of high school, he was basically there at the ground floor, self taught, acknowledged by everyone in the industry locally as a foremost expert in the field where they had him teaching, and they couldn’t keep him because they couldn’t have him teach when he didn’t have a degree in the field. Without his having a degree their program couldn’t be accredited. So… They wanted him to have a degree in a subject he was an originator of and without that degree they had to drop him.

He makes financial software now because the games industry was/is brutal and he wanted to see his family now and then. I’ve always found it hilarious that a University had to let him go because otherwise the snake wasn’t eating its own tail and the ouroboros apparently can’t have that.

As always, there is an XKCD for this.

https://xkcd.com/538/

Aside the whole issue that a single component in a system exfiltrating data without cooperation from many of the other components in the system is just patently absurd, the honest truth is that anyone who wants to break your security isn’t going to go to the extreme length of making certain your screen is replaced with a covert unit that can somehow inform them of anything you’re doing when for most cases a pair of binoculars will get the same job done for much cheaper and is at least half as convoluted, a hit to the head with a $5 wrench gets your fingerprint much more easily than a replacement fingerprint scanner does, and most compromises of a user would be far more effectively done in software rather than hardware. Software which constantly has new bugs to exploit while getting a crooked piece of hardware navigated into place is just an absurdly unlikely occurrence that would require a massive coverup the size of which is out of the reach of most entities in existence.

I look back at the PS2’s library (to be fair, it was enormous even for its own time) and everything on the Switch feels tiny in comparison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PlayStation_2_games_(A%E2%80%93K) vs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_Switch_games

If there aren’t legit more Nintendo Switch games than there were PS2 games right now, I imagine that the Switch will just trample the PS2 before its end.