Yeah so the feature actually sounds completely useless against a determined adversarytiser. At the very least, apps should have no way of knowing whether notifications are turned on, including no means of knowing whether a notification was displayed or not.

App stores should also make a policy of banning apps that don’t explicitly keep all their ads in an advertising channel.

Are apps able to lie though? Say, by putting ads into the same channel as essential notifications?

They get more viewers when they do. Streamers do exist who don’t use a webcam, don’t talk to viewers at all, and only show gameplay. They get some viewers but not nearly as many as they would otherwise.

People like interacting with streamers. They especially like seeing the streamer get excited when they donate a bunch of subscriptions or send a bunch of money. Popular streamers will even have animations and sound to make a big deal out of this.

The truth is that full time streamers are supported by a small minority of viewers who donate large amounts of money. This makes streaming somewhat akin to prostitution in my view. But there you have it!

The worst is when an otherwise great app does that! And they also send really important notifications too, so you can’t just disable notifications!

I wonder if they’re afraid of Eternal September’ing the service. A lot of people on Lemmy were upset when a bunch of people on Reddit joined. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have millions join in one day. I doubt it would be good for the culture of the community!

Despite all that I am really enjoying the rewatch. What makes the show great are the other characters: Al, Jill, and Wilson! Wilson is by far my favourite. Such a weird guy!

The show totally played it straight with some very cringeworthy episodes in the early seasons. They started subverting it more and more as time went along.

Some of the stuff they stayed with for a very long time though. Al Borland was the butt of many jokes for not presenting as traditionally masculine, for his relationship with his mother, for being single, etc. At times it could be hard to watch, with Tim essentially bullying Al relentlessly. Of course everything is all great at the end of the episode but it rarely involved an apology from Tim!

Tim Allen has always been conservative. I’ve been rewatching Home Improvement and it kind of blows me away how much the show leans on gender stereotypes for its jokes! It was only the 1990s but it feels like ancient history now.

There is no solution that involves billions of people.

Whoever said anything about that? You can make positive changes, just don’t expect them to be permanent. Nothing is permanent. That’s life! Eventually we all die.

It’s a Red Queen’s Race.

Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

They’re actually going after all of them at the same time. They’re just at different stages in each case.

In the long term, no. It’s a temporary measure. It’s like fighting against entropy.

Oh definitely. That’s the argument from pragmatism which I wholeheartedly support. At the end of the day, we need to feed and shelter ourselves and keep ourselves safe from aggression and violence.

The moral argument is a much more difficult one to tackle. Much has been written on this topic: consent of the governed, responsibility of the individual towards society and vice versa.

The whole libertarian argument is that the government is just the most powerful gang who goes around extorting everyone to pay taxes. If we’re not morally obligated to pay up when it’s a small gang, why does morality change when it’s a large gang?

The tax the wealth that they can’t take out of the country. Bring in land value taxes and start raking in the revenue from all those posh London flats (more properly the land they sit on).

Tropical regions? Look at the guy! This is clearly somewhere in Eastern Europe!

The harder thing to convey is the full dimensionality of it. With the rubber sheet (or trampoline) you can show a small ball orbiting around a larger one but only in a single plane (around the “equator” of the large ball). However in reality you can orbit in any direction you like and many satellites actually orbit over the poles. Trying to show that with a small model seems extremely difficult!

Furthermore, most children are raised on the idea that gravity is pulling them down. They intuitively understand the idea that when they climb a ladder and drop a ball from the top, the earth pulls the ball down. General relativity tells us that this is not happening at all! That there us nothing pulling us down whatsoever. I have yet to see anyone provide a lay person GR explanation for the ladder problem.

Oh because that incorrect analogy is the most common “lay person” analogy for describing gravitational curvature of spacetime. The most common reply from children is that it’s the earth’s gravity pulling down on the bowling ball so that the trampoline demonstration wouldn’t work in space.

Also the trampoline analogy doesn’t show us how gravitational lensing works, nor does it even touch how different gravitational reference frames affect the passage of time (GR generalizes special relativity, after all).

That’s special relativity. General relativity is the theory of the curvature of spacetime as the mechanism for gravity. Large masses curve spacetime more than small masses. Under GR, gravity is not a force.