It’s also great excuse to drink while wallowing in dread. I have a bottle of gin set aside for the occasion.

Not me, but an old coworker used a similar trick to see if reviewers were actually reading his documentation. Before sending a large document out for review he would add a sentence to some random paragraph stating, “If you read this, come to my office and I will give you $20.” Surprisingly few people ever came for the money.

The DaneMen

Being banned from a remote instance, and/or having your content removed from a remote instance, is a total non-issue for your local instance’s admins. It requires no effort on their part, and causes no problems.

In my mind you have every right to request that your personal content be removed. It isn’t always practical due to federation bugs and the nature of distributed services, but any decent admin should make a good faith attempt to fulfill your request.

The first time I climbed Mt. Washington some friends took me, and I had no idea there was a road to the summit. It was so disappointing to reach the top and find a parking lot full of “This Car Climbed Mt. Washington” bumper stickers.

Good call. I was going to suggest this or Mt. Washington in New Hampshire.

Schmutz.

It’s Yiddish (?) and is a general term for unspecified dirt or filth. The fun part: once you have identified the filth, it is no longer schmutz.

My spouse and I picked it up from the Says You radio show years ago, and have used it ever since.

I, too, am old.

You cannot run through a campsite. You can only ran through it.

Because it’s past tents.

a physical button on the floor under the gas pedal

I had an E30 BMW with one of those. Push the button and the automatic transmission would immediately downshift, and the engine would spin up in a hurry. Spaz mode was fun.

Power and fuel economy are not the only two variables. Emissions are the biggest thing that comes to mind: your new high-performance remap might put your car outside of the emissions limits for your market.

Some aggressive remaps can also adversely affect how the car drives in normal use. Think rough idle, or jerky acceleration. The vast majority of drivers do not want that.

Assuming I’m still in good health, I want to go on some long bicycle tours. Like weeks or months long. Maybe start with the GAP/C&O Canal as a warm-up. Then La Route Verte. After hitting a few other sections of the US and Canada I would move across the pond to the UK, Ireland, and western Europe.

If I can find a riding partner who is open to dirt then I would really love to do the GDMBR. There are lots of shorter trails that would be fun warm-up trips, too. Unfortunately, I have yet to meet anyone IRL who is crazy enough to do multi-day off-road trips with me.

Mastodon will still be the biggest fediverse service. It will remain a niche player in the microblog world, as Bluesky gradually becomes the big player by stealing users from the platform formerly known as Twitter.

The rest of the federverse will (hopefully) coalesce around fewer projects. Development is massively fragmented right now. I’m very curious to see which projects flourish, and which projects die.

I do not expect the federverse to unseat large corporate social media and become home to the masses. And I’m okay with that.

I wondered if the Turbo button on the computer really did anything.

Fantastic resource!

You need to grease some palms. Lay it on thick.

@[email protected] is a meme god.

@[email protected] keeps history alive and the Confederacy in check.

@[email protected] is our resident owl afficionado.

There are many others, of course, but I seem to notice these three a lot in my Subscribed feed.

Have you… have you never felt the joy of holding a great stick?

“Latitude” can mean freedom of choice, or scope of work, rather than position on the Earth. I think he’s saying that it looks like the work of some low-level employee just doing what they’re told without thinking much about it.