Dan Killam

I am a Californian. My passport says USA but it's hard to feel anything for that concept anymore.

With five years of "work" and so many millions sunk into the company, has Truth Social actually contributed anything technically impressive to the Mastodon codebase? I am legitimately curious

Apple's anticompetitive behavior is really insidious. Their leverage to gain users is by holding my connections to friends and family hostage. I can't facetime my mom and they don't provide other video call apps the same first-party access. I can't share location as easily with my friends, especially my mom because Google Maps loses location permission from time to time on her phone. And messaging is still by far the biggest barrier: Apple's RCS integration is messed up. It frequently doesn't deliver RCS messages to iPhones over WiFi. I sometimes advise friends to just have an iMessage group thread to themselves and keep me posted separately, because I don't want to cause them to lose any messages. All these sources of friction push people to move away from Android.

#bluesky is down
Decentralized media is a must

The new ability in Firefox to view tabs in split view is great. Nice to see long-requested features finally coming into the browser. I hope more of these actual usability improvements come in, rather than the LLM stuff that most of their users likely have no interest in.

#bluesky seems down. It's like their inability to deliver on federation is a big problem!

It's interesting going through the list of crimes of King George III in the Declaration of Independence. Trump is guilty of most of them

How is #immich these days? I'm so fed up with Google Photos and its enshittified search. It used to be scary good at pulling up photos when I searched by subject. Actually useful AI. Now it's dumb as molasses. I hear immich has a similar search tool and thinking of trying it out

I believe that virtually all major challenges facing the US come back to inequality and the overconcentration of wealth. Climate change, pollution, affordability of food and housing, declining nutrition and health standards, accelerating polarization, accelerating rates and severity of mass disasters, loss of third places for communities, declining levels of education and basic research, constant cycles of war and economic bubbles. It is all a developing polycrisis originating from a smaller and smaller group of people taking an unprecedentedly large share of the economy over the last few decades.

In which an Associated Press team of American/British journalists try an Italian reinterpretation of 'Hawaiian' pizza, whose true origins are murky but is rumored to have arisen in Canada (the Talk page of Hawaiian pizza on Wikipedia is locked in heated debate about it!). And Canada of course had pizza because of Italian immigrants, and Italy has pizza in its modern form because of tomatoes, which came from the Americas. Pizza is truly a food that unites this planet, even if pineapple on said pizza is deeply divisive.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/pineapple-pizza-ap-journalists-test-174823261.html

Aside from all the ethical aspects, AI generated memes are deeply lame to me. At their core, memes are satisfying because they scratch the itch of identifying associations I have in my mind in new ways. They are like found art in that way. When the meme is just generated on demand, wholesale it destroys that aspect of creative discovery for me.