“If you knew what it was, you’d be using it already.”

This is a great concept. I hope it catches on.

I participate in a pledge called #50forFOSS. On the first Friday of every month, I choose an open source project and give the maintainer $50, no strings attached. It lets me target small projects that may not have a lot of users, but are valuable to me, as well as bigger ones with more expenses. My mindset these days is that I need to insist on paying for the software I use, because if I don’t, someone else will (i.e. advertisers and venture capitalists, which is bad) or no one else will (i.e. abandonware, which is worse).

Disclaimer: I started #50forFOSS and there’s a very small group of us who are doing it.

This was my experience with MTG. Dude was all excited to “teach” me how to play, made a deck for me and everything, and then whomped me on the second turn.

I never played again and still don’t know how

Adrian Tchaikovsky wrote Children of Time, one of my favorite sci-fi novels. Most sci-fi is based on futuristic physics and technology; Children of Time is based on futuristic evolutionary biology. And it’s every bit as cool as it sounds.

That’s probably not what he’s talking about here but hey, free book recommendation

Only for the floors that are labeled correctly, though.

Only tangentially related, but the cheapest (by weight and per unit) type of hamburger patties at my local Costco this month are Impossible Burgers.

If you’re not familiar with these, they’re completely vegan, made from soy protein, but the texture and flavor is almost identical to beef. They cook like beef, taste like beef, and “bleed” like beef. And (for a few weeks, at least) they’re cheaper than beef.

That’s a new and exciting sandwich IMO.

Wondermark is rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but funny is only one thing comics can be. I like it because it’s smart, zany, and artistically interesting (every comic is made from Victorian woodcuts).

One stated purpose of the campaign is to show the size and influence of the fediverse so that politicians and governments will set up instances and/or accounts and maintain an official presence on it. $500k may or may not be enough to do that, but the organizer is meeting with Democratic Party officials this week to discuss the campaign and there could be meaningful outcomes for the whole fediverse.

At time of publication, the campaign had raised 485k on ActBlue. Yesterday it broke 500k and is still going strong, with smaller daily fundraising goals.

You can see the progress tracker here: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/mastodon-for-harris

Tap-to-pay on credit card chips, too.

I’m with you there. The only explanation that makes sense to me is if they’re really hurting for cash. And if they are, I honestly don’t have a solution that falls between “go bankrupt” and “sell out our users in the least noxious way we can come up with.”

Do we think anyone would actually opt in?

I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that making it opt-in is probably seen in this case as equivalent to throwing the entire feature in the trash.

“I’m not owned! I’m not owned!” I continue to insist as I slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob

Back during the real estate frenzy of the late 2010s I would get calls all the time asking how much I would sell my house for. I’d say “I could probably let it go for 2 million dollars.” (Even at the ridiculous peak, it was never worth more than 750k.) There would be a few seconds of silence on the line while they actually looked up my house. Then they’d say “oh.” And hang up as fast as humanly possible.