You’d still see them pop up in /r/all or similar spots that showed big posts from other subs.

The issue is really that it’s not really possible to do good moderation (i.e. censorship) at scale.

When the site is centralized, all users have to get the same basic experience. That means someone needs to decide for the entire world what’s allowed and what isn’t. It isn’t just whether you’ll have porn or no porn. It isn’t just whether you’ll have hate subs, or subs dedicated to violence. It’s where you draw the line at politics. Is sexism allowed? What if it’s just a sort-of sexist joke? Can people talk about Nazi ideology? What if it’s a sub for historians?

What makes something like Lemmy better is that each instance can make their own choices of where to draw the line, and other instances can decide whether to federate with them or not. That way an instance running in Germany might have different ideas of where the lines is when it comes to Nazi imagery, and sex, and violence. One in New Zealand might have completely different ideas. If you’re a user from NZ the NZ instance might match your tastes better, but if not, you’re free to sign up for the German one.

The ideal would be someone who was say a Major, or a relatively high rank, then left the military and had a successful career as an executive in the private sector, or one who reached a very high non-appointed post in the government via promotion. Someone who is familiar with the culture of the military and understands how things work, but doesn’t know the high ranking military members, and has no friendships with them, no obligations to them and won’t show any favouritism. OTOH, someone who has the personnel-management skills and small “p” political skills that you need in that kind of job.

But, you’re not promoted. You’re selected for promotion, so you shouldn’t be vacating your position just because your name was put up for promotion. Whatever the reason, it’s stupid.

Really, it should be the people who are not selected for promotion who are at risk.

If you have an excellent Navy Commander who deserves to be promoted to Captain, but you have too many Captains, then maybe it’s time to choose your worst Captain and retire them to make room. It doesn’t make any sense to take the Captain who was up for promotion to Admiral and didn’t get it and retire them instead.

Canta y no llores!
Porque cantando se alegran,
Cielito lindo, los corazones.

It’s not the racism of the country that’s at issue, it’s how the prisons are run. US prisons are a hellscape designed to cost as little as possible, where the prisoners have the freedom to do drugs, form gangs, etc. because there aren’t enough jailers to stop that, and the few jailers they have are easily corrupted. Virtually every rich country in the world has more control over its prisoners than that.

In British prisons?

I wish Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer would quit too, and open the door to new blood for the democrats.

Yeah, that makes much more sense.

Especially because it was random, so in a room with 100 people, you’re very unlikely to have a member of the 0.1%, so it’s easy to decide that tax policy should be to tax the ultra-rich.

PBS did a special a while back where they actually rebuilt the machine used for selecting people. It was a lot like a modern dice tower where you’d pour things in the top and the machine would randomize it. But, instead of using dice, they used black and white balls, and one colour meant people were selected for the position, and the other one meant they didn’t get selected.

Then they were doing it wrong.

The ancient Greeks had a good idea with Ostracism.

No need for a trial, or even an accusation of a crime. Just the population saying “this person is shitty and shouldn’t be in the city/country” and they were kicked out for 10 years.

It was the uncomfortable uniform, he should have worn a skant, then he would have been less rigid.

This also points out how the AI bubble is affecting the economy far beyond the tech sector.

Construction equipment used to be used for other things, not just building datacenters. But, since the start of the AI bubble, almost everything else has slowed down because they’re dedicating so much construction equipment and workers towards building datacenters.

https://futurism.com/future-society/data-center-spending-ai-bubble-construction

In just 1 year, construction work on DCs has gone up by 64.5%. And, that’s from 2025 to 2026. It’s not like it was at a standstill in 2025. Meanwhile, residential construction is down significantly. And, there has been a 25% cut in construction related to manufacturing.

Maybe not even that. The people who bought at the top might not be the ones who sold. The ones who sold might be long-term investors who are still in the black because of the stock’s huge growth in the last 5 years. Someone who bought the stock exactly a year ago is only down about 1.5%. Someone who bought 5 years ago has almost doubled their money.

All that has really happened is that the collective opinion of all Alphabet shareholders is that the company was overvalued by about 15% compared to what they thought it was a couple of days ago.

Ignore, for a second, the use of AI here.

How huge a screw up is it just to send a guy off to work on a project alone for 2 years. Can you imagine the amount of time that should be spent in code reviews looking at something someone has spent a full 2 years on? You’re now going to be asking senior devs to spend months of their lives doing nothing but code reviews. And, if you skip the code reviews that’s suicide.

We all know that in 2 years Cisco is still going to be using their legacy codebase. There’s not a chance in hell this will work. Just announcing this like it is a sane thing to do advertises their dysfunction.

It’s possible that he will find some low-hanging fruit and be able to rewrite some library code. But, really, when rewriting something old and bloated, the main thing you can do to add value is to remove code. And, AI agents are famous for their ability to generate vast amounts of code, not to get rid of it.

The absolute best case here is that this guy wastes 2 years of his life, and Cisco has some kind of deal where these “unlimited AI tokens” come at some fixed price so that this project costs Cisco only $1m or so. Then, the project’s a failure, they only lose a bit of money, and they can maybe learn from the experience. But, do you really make an announcement about a project that’s only going to run you $1m in costs? I doubt it. This is probably Cisco setting fire to $50m or more. And, given that they announced the project like it was a good idea, can they afford to just admit it failed? With that kind of sunk cost, they’re probably going to feel a lot of pressure to achieve something positive with the stunt… so something here is going to be integrated into their codebase.

He seems like a good guy to me, someone who isn’t afraid to take a stand and use his (small) platform to stand up for what he believes in, and he’ll admit to mistakes when he makes them. I also think he’s a great writer.

And, I don’t think he’s be such a good guy if it weren’t for his TNG castmates.

That’s one of the best things about TNG. The characters were decent, moral, caring, people who provided good role model for viewers. It’s great to know that the actors were also good, caring people who formed a tight knit family and took great care of the awkward teenage Wil.

This line in particular from Wil’s blog post hit me:

He always texted me back when I reached out to him directly, no matter what it was about, and he always — always — made me feel special.

Wil Wheaton lost a man who was more of a father to him than his real dad.

Not really, TV age and real-life age are different. Bald men who weren’t old were rare on TV, they still are really. 47 is also young to be that fully bald. So, that made it seem like he was 60+ on TNG. It has also meant that in the decades since then, he hasn’t really seemed to age much.

That’s a pretty room, but it doesn’t seem ideal for a library. If you’re trying to study / concentrate it would be loud: too many people, a big open space with hard surfaces, etc.

If you were waiting to meet up with a friend at the library, that’s a great room for that – as long as when that friend arrives you’re allowed to talk to them at a normal volume. But, you don’t need a room that huge for just meeting up at the library.

If you were allowed to just hang out and chat at normal volume, that would be nice. Especially in places with awful, cold winters, a big, open space like that would be so nice when you’re always stuck inside. But, with all those hard surfaces people would get louder and louder to make themselves overheard over all the other noise.

If the library hosted events of various kinds, that would be an amazing event space. Science fair type things, science demonstrations, a reading by an author followed by a Q&A, a charity ball, etc. It just seems not ideal for quiet reading, studying, etc.