For the elites: conserve their hierarchy and the structures that enable the gradual accumulation of power in the hands of the few.

For the rest: conserve their place in the hierarchy and the comfort of the familiar.

Hourly wages for school teachers? I’m worried I might know the response, but does prep work outside school hours, in breaks etc. count as hours worked?

Linux in general and Arch in particular are kinda laissez-faire in that they’ll allow you to shoot yourself in the foot. Some distros may put barriers in your way, others practically hand you the gun, but at the end of the day, the gun is freely available and it’s your own foot that you’re shooting.

That… that’s what they were saying, no? Companies should worry about their shit.

If you don’t pay for late checkout, you can’t check out late. If you don’t pay for the DLC, you can’t play the DLC. You can still check out at the normal time (which is the basic service) or play the base game, respectively.

Dammit, EAC may be an issue on Linux though. It’s kinda hit or miss whether a given developer will take the extra steps, particularly given the conflicting sources on just how complex it actually is. According to Valve, it’s a checkbox and dropping a file in your depot. Others claim it would require an Epic Online Services version of EAC, with all the baggage that carries, including potentially rewriting a whole chunk of your code.

It’s like booking a hotel: Basic price will get you a room for the night, with all the common amenities, but if you want late checkout, you’ll pay extra. Sure, they could fold that into the basic price and make it the norm, but if you know you’ll leave early anyway, you’ll be paying for something you don’t want.

The metaphor breaks apart if you look too closely - for hotels, early checkout is a convenience since they can get the room ready sooner for the next guest, so they’ll incentivise that, while the devs have already put in the work. On the other hand, the late checkout is a service of convenience while a DLC is an excitement feature, where the content is instead an incentive to pay more.

Either way, I feel like add-ons for games aren’t too different from add-ons in many other industries: “This is the basic <thing>, with the price we feel we can charge for it. This here is an extra you can have for an extra charge.”

Butterfly gang

The latter has been taken over by ElMu and his shenanigans, the former was originally a Twitter-internal project for a decentralised social media interfacing protocol, got forked out from Twitter in 2021 (the year before Musk took over Twitter), has a lot of Ex-Twitter people on it and promises to do a lot of things a lot better than either Twitter (now X) and offer a little more resilience against things like moderator abuse.

Curiously, that last bit is the first time I’ve seen a reasonable use case for Blockchain: Your content can be stored on arbitrary servers and migrated to others. Your identity is tied to keys that can be used to verify your content is actually yours. The info where the public half of the key and all your content are stored is recorded in a public, distributed, append-only ledger, where each entry verifies the integrity of the previous one. Thus, once you’re registered on that, no single moderator can arbitrarily ban you anymore. (Pretty sure there’s a hole in that logic, but I’m not versed enough to confidently assert as much.)

Of course, there’s a caveat: To discover content, you need an index (“relay”) of all the content feeds. That takes some of the content aggregation load off your individual content servers and makes hosting them easier. However, it shifts the content moderation / federation power from the individual instances to the shared index: If a given index blocks your content, people using it won’t see your content.

In theory anyone can host their own relay and everyone can choose which relay they want their content feed to use. In practice, hosting a relay is resource-intensive, bsky have a solid headstart and probably more resources, and their app also obviously uses their own index by default, so if you do want to create a “competitor”/alternative index, you’ll have a lot of catching up to do. They even state that expectation: “In all likelihood, there may be a few large full-network providers” ^src

Which is basically a small-scale version of Google and Bing (and the AT Protocol Overview explicitly uses that comparison): Sure, you can make your own search engine, but if Google is the default everywhere, has a lot of storage and computing power to serve more requests and has way more indexed content, why would people use yours instead? Thus, if you want your content to be seen by many people, you have to play by the big relays’ rules.

Much decentral. Very open.

(I’m being snarky here, but I will give them the benefit of the doubt: They probably do mean to make self-hosting your personal data and content easier, and it’s easier for custom feeds to use single, big relays to draw from rather than doing the indexing and collation themselves. However, it provides them with a lot of leverage and just because they call themselves a “public benefit corporation” doesn’t mean I trust them not to start enshittifying for profit at some point.)

That’s the distinction between “should” and “will”

Then it seems like it’s too out there

All good, I appreciate your intention. Thank you for taking the time!

I wasn’t entirely sure if that’s what they mean, but I considered the possibility. I opted to give a serious response just in case, accepting the possibility I’d be wooooshed.

I did.

A watch. I knew it. Nice one.

Is that frequency something you can control or measure? Do you agree on a shared “let’s meet” frequency you set it to, and if the other happens to have it set to that as well, you end up meeting? Or is it more of a random chance thing, like running into each other in places you both frequent at coincidentally matching times and deciding it must be the bracelets’ doing?

Or am I falling for a joke?

I like how Julius’ lines fit the pentameter, but Brittanus’ “What?” shits right past it.

I have this nasty habit of taking jokes - even ones I recognise as such - and starting a serious line of thought from that. I know you’re joking because that’s an excessive amount of effort for sharing a joke, but in the process of evaluating that, my brain has latched on to the question of “Could that be serious? How would that play out?”, started analysing and I don’t know how to make it stop doing that.

Given that all those rips didn’t add anything to the original work, I’d argue they don’t strictly require credit. They’re not really derivative works, but rather reproductions of the original.

I can see the logic behind crediting “this is where I got it from” as proximate source in addition to naming the ultimate source. In academic contexts, it’s certainly important to specify where you quoted someone from to make your sources transparent in addition to naming the original source. This isn’t an academic context, however, so I wouldn’t consider it warranted.

It’s an interesting consideration, to be sure.

I like that the image already contains the credit twice (props for those crops, whoever did it), but you put it into your comment a third time to be sure. Good bird!

Isn’t that the “how dare you leave this in the tags” phenomenon where OP will hide some gem in the tags for someone else to spot and call out? I was under the impression that it’s often funnier that way, like a comedic duo where one party sets up the joke the other delivers.

So by quoting what was hidden, you became the second member of the impromptu comedic duo. You might not strictly deserve credit for writing it, but you helped deliver it.