Dedicated to the Captain https://rynothebearded.com/2026/11/dedicated-to-the-captain/ He is still not through this keep him in your thoughts #karma

So, work asked for my opinions about AI again.

"I have lost all confidence in senior management since they started evangelising for this obvious scam."

"If any other supplier offered us stolen goods at a price lower than their cost we would not be allowed to buy from them. AI tools should be no different."

"Senior management have clearly missed their calling in timeshare sales and cult recruitment. The pressure to (a) use the tools and (b) provide some evidence, any evidence, that they improve productivity is relentless. It's not my job to destroy my profession, the economy, the climate and poor communities that have AI data centres inflicted on them in order to provide evidence that they may be of marginal utility in my work. If they were worth all the damage they inflict, the
results would be obvious."

@mastodonmigration

having fought establishment Dems who played this game in primaries to defeat more progressive candidates, I can't be happy about this.

"The outage lasted for about two days, and around the world, government agencies and businesses large and small ground to a halt. Without Office 365, Outlook and Teams, many organizations could not even convene a meeting or formulate a plan to deal with the outage.

All of this raises an important question: is Microsoft guilty of negligence, and, if so, what should be done about this? Here's my answer: yes, Microsoft is presumptively guilty of negligence, and any response to this must include antitrust breakups of the company.

Here's why I think that. Microsoft has demonstrably underinvested in its IT stability. Any IT plan that results in a global, multi-day outage is, by definition, inadequate. Whether the problem could have been solved by buying more servers, or hiring more people, or changing the management of key divisions is immaterial. Every one of these measures – every single measure that could have prevented this – costs money. By not spending that money, Microsoft definitively underinvested in its products.

But Microsoft doesn't lack for funds! Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, and it has the margins to prove it. In 2025-2026, the company pissed away more than $30b in stock buybacks, a once-illegal (and still sleazy) form of stock manipulation. Over that same period, Microsoft lost nearly $200b on AI ventures that it now admits will not pay off:"

https://pluralistic.net/2026/11/13/outlookpocalypse/#bright-line-test

#Microsoft #Monopolies #Copyright #IP #CyberSecurity #Competition #Antitrust #AI

Random question about scholarly journals; do the number of academic libraries wanting to subscribe to a journal play a role in determining its impact factor? I don't mean getting it as part of a bundle, I mean specifically *wanting* it in their collection?

Second random question; do requests for journals from the academics at an institution play a determining role in what its library subscribes to? I mean a formal and transparent one.

(1/?)

#AcademicJournals #AcademicLibraries #academia

So your probelm with the platforms is not the platforms themselves, but people? Because the mods running communities here aren’t too different from the refit communities.

As for your second point, you want karma farmers to run the communities?

@Nonilex
Good question.

Eric Trump will have the solution 😂😂

The word of the day is
$[x2 $[font.serif Genau!]]
Sou Dayo.

ICYMI: Introducing FediDB Globe, a real time and interactive overview of the fediverse, mapped onto a globe with search and filters.

https://fedidb.com/globe

Enjoy, and spread the word!

#FediDB #FediDBGlobe #Earth

A NetBSD flag is kind of funny when you notice the NetBSD logo is also a flag.

meow

NetBSDブース #KOF2026

The word of the day is
$[x2 $[font.serif Genau!]]
Sou Dayo.

@quincy CCC++++++?

I’m splitting this into two parts. First identifying the issue. And second my personal idea for a solution. I’m hoping for a lot of discussion so please be clear which part you are responding to.

Part 1: The problem

Reddit as a platform has many flaws. Obviously being a corporation means they’re terrible no matter what. But their platform is also flawed. Even if Reddit was 100% community owned the platform would still be flawed. The number one thing that is ruining Reddit are the tyrannical mods.

Each community on Reddit is a dictatorship. Whoever is arbitrarily in charge of a community has full unrestricted power to do whatever they want. The people who are actually creating the content and sharing it are totally at their whim. I understand that modding is a difficult and thankless job, but toxic mods ruined Reddit and Lemmy will do the same if it’s not addressed.

Lemmy’s answer is to allow people to create their own instances. Don’t like the mods at World? Go make your own Lemmy, with blackjack and hookers. But that’s not sufficient. It takes years to build up a community to have enough people for meaningful discussion to happen, and nearly all communities or instances fail. We absolutely need a way for mods to answer to the users.

Part 2: My solution

My solution is simple. Lemmy is built on the community. Everyone helps run it. Therefore mods are elected by the users who generate the highest upvoted content in a community.

Elections should happen on a schedule and, if a community is particularly upset with a mod, a vote of no confidence can be taken.

I understand that this will be a huge undertaking. But I truly believe that we need to fix this issue for Lemmy to thrive long term. Or else we’ll just end up with another Reddit.

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from cyberterrorism

whiskey

@mastodonmigration

Mushroom clouds, always a sure sign of success...

If you were wondering what the collapse of an empire looks like from the inside, just look at the past few days. Empires don't collapse overnight, they collapse gradually, with systems steadily degrading and failing over decades. It's not a spectacular, singular event, it's watching shit that worked fine in the past just stop working and never getting fixed.