Thanks for confirming.
Always nice to be validated.

It is peak irony that - honestly - the whinge about how miserable the "internet" (as a broad synonym for social media, I guess) is, is followed by one of the most authentic, non-political*, most Old-Slashdot-Flavored engaging discussion I've seen here in at least the last 5, maybe 10 years?
Thanks, this was a nice post & engaging discussion. Even the people I disagree with on balance were making persuasive points.

*so far. It's 2026, I don't hold much hope it'll remain pristine.
Even my simple posting here, I may have tainted it. I have a lovely anon-stalker (I am pretty sure I know who) that follows any post I make with political bile, regardless of the subject.

I expected to wake up to this some day, but I did not expect to wake up to it TODAY. This is very sad news but I can say boldly that Patrick Stewart led a full and meaningful life and had a profound positive impact on the world around him.

Good night, Sir Stewart.

I'm surprised that Reddit, of all places, is emulating twitter?
As far as I can tell "for you" is just a firehose of shitty people that disagree with me politically.
On the other hand "following" is (I guess?) derived from the posts I've actually followed, and that's a firehose of shitty people that I ostensibly agree with, politically, but clearly don't in nearly every other respect.

I think the intent is that one feed will engage me angrily, while the other will engage me affirmatively.

In fact, together they've made it astonishingly easy to never check twitter, ever. Kinda like facebook and reddit.

1) the IAU manipulated what they knew would be an unpopular discussion and the vote they wanted was pushed quietly to the "cleaning up junk" phase of the conference when the majority of attendees had LEFT. Does that sound like a kosher way to handle an IAU issue that the general public might actually, for once, care about? Sounds like a deliberate coverup to me, maybe you have a different view.

2) Nobody yet has explained why the list of planets had to arbitrarily be constrained. Why not expanded? "Eris is more massive, if we included Pluto, we'd have to include Eris" yeah, and? What would be wrong with ADDING Eris? Or if we found larger objects, why not add them? The "must clear their orbit" is vague handwavy bullshit. Depending on your definition, EARTH hasn't 'cleared' its orbit, either. And what happens if planet 9 turns out to be a Neptune-sized gas giant in the Kuiper belt? Would the IAU say that's NOT a planet?
In fact, EVERY SINGLE PLANET has other bodies in its orbit - Jupiter has tens of thousands.
The fact that later in the ruling the IAU simply decreed "(these) are the 8 planets" shows that even they recognize their definition is functionally worthless.

Yes, I continue to object to arbitrary, unjustified rules passed en camera by a small body of elitists. No matter how long ago, ESPECIALLY when they're so stupid that they set themselves up to be almost inevitably self-contradicted and need revision...again.

(I could bring up some other issues that are "done" that we continue to debate, if you'd like examples? But I think as a disingenuous AC you're already aware of them.)

TSIA

If you're upset about "everything":
a) take your ritalin or prozac or whatever cocktail of anxiety meds you're on; you missed a dose.
b) you control you. Nobody MAKES you addicted to the social media feeds; yes, absolutely they are CRAFTED to be the visual-cortex version of heroin. I get that, they are meant to be addictive as fuck. NEVERTHELESS you are (supposedly) a human with agency. Just. Put. The. Fucking. Thing. Down. Go for a walk. Read a book. Turn off your router for a while, if that helps.

Otherwise you're just a herd mammal bleating that you don't like the pasture YOU put yourself in.

You're the one who politicized this, not me.
Or did you forget that you asserted ex nihilo that Trump was going to get it from Putin and then throw Zelensky in the conversation?
You just used those names what, coincidentally? Having a seizure?

Precisely what "stupid shit" re Helium is happening today, that's not just in your hate-Trump fevered imagination? Looks like the US designated helium as a critical resource - that's not "stupid shit", that's sensible.

I don't see any point in your post BUT the political, thus my point that if we're picking sides, it was democrat that put us here.

There's growing evidence for a ninth planet.* https://www.skyatnightmagazine... (real stuff at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.172...)

I've seen some vastly speculative bullshit (including still today "what if it's a micro black hole!?!!??!!?" which is fantastically unlikely, but the evidence does seem to be accumulating about a substantial TNO 500-700 au out.

*assuming the IAU doesn't again set up a bullshit scam-vote after nearly everyone left the conference to deprecate this one too.

Sad to hear about Brave. I like the idea.

The enshittening proceeds.

This puerile crap passes as +5 insightful on slashdot now.
Great.

Instead of just calling you a politically-motivated retard, I'll quote Mr Bill Clinton, who lobbied aggressively for and then signed the Helium Privatization Act in 1995:
"...We propose to cut $130 billion in spending by shrinking departments, extending our freeze on domestic spending, cutting 60 public housing programs down to 3, getting rid of over 100 programs we do not need, like the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Helium Reserve Program...."
(https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-before-joint-session-the-congress-the-state-the-union-11)

This is a reasonably literate and intelligent forum. Or it used to be.

Can we at LEAST recognize the blatant idiocy involved in presenting as equivalent:

"some things that have been declared harmless turned out to be harmful"
and
"things that are harmless will likely actually be harmful"

I don't know what retards will buy that* but it is such a very internet-flavored-argument it makes me recoil.

*that's actually a lie: I know *EXACTLY* what sort of retards will cheerfully gobble such nonsense up and likely chase off to reddit, tiktok, and twitter to spread it among their legions of co-retards.

You're not wrong, there is an aversion to change.

The reality too is that using "the one they're familiar with" is what gets work done.

Nobody wants to climb another fucking learning curve unless it ACTUALLY benefits them (and even then, there's a cost-benefit calculation to the time-to-payoff).
Microsoft - and more and more SAAS bullshit companies - keeps just *changing* shit for no reason (cf the 'start button in the middle of the bar' in Win11). MAYBE they add some teensy feature but imo 95%+ users could be using Word 2.0 and it would perfectly serve their daily needs.

So what users are seeing now is a constant fluffery of 'change for change's sake*". Is it surprising they are resistant?

*we all know it's just so MS can sell some more and CIOs KEEP ACCEPTING IT. Why? Honestly, if Corel just built a bulletproof basic-featured 1990 version of Wordperfect and sold it AS IS in totality today, no 'web awareness' no 'AI collab feature' no constant tweaky updates...hell, it might rise from the dead as a real competitor.

Who needs more than 3 min of porn?
(Excluding the time it took to download the video, in the "good old days" ofc)

Sounds like ff was carefully tuned to it's audience's needs.

Genuine question: what browser is better? I like Firefox but am frustrated by a lot of the 'features' you mention. That said, it's about as marginally functional - read: there are still a shitton of sites out there that "this doesn't work on FF, sorry!" (generally because "this" is a security risk, but that now includes things like tracing containers on Hapag Lloyd - which forever has worked with anything, or Followmyhealth, my medical providers dashboard/website, which "works" but doesn't accept passwords entered in FF so that's not much help).

Are there better browsers out there that are at least as functional as FF but better userwise? I tried Brave, like a lot about it but even LESS compatible. Zen has some nice ideas but even less finished (beta, afaik).

Only for contractors, and that's the choice you make becoming one.

I work for a large multinational and had a lovely package that didn't cost me a dime...until, oh yeah, it was President OBAMA who fucked that up by determining that nice health plans were now taxable in his Socialist Paradise Vision.

So of course, companies stopped offering them. Now that's government working for the people.