Notices by 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social), page 76

@quad @lanodan It doesn't actually say anywhere on the box of rice what rice strain they use. I find that a bit strange.

@quad @lanodan *I* thought there was a type of rice called grøtris, since several manufacturers have something called that, and people casually refer to it as that in recipes, etc.

Usually, I'm not a fan of flavoured Coke varieties, but Coke Zero Raspberry has won me over.

@quad @lanodan Anyway, if you Google "chicken breton" you find a bunch of dishes that look kind of similar to what's on that sauce packet.

@quad @lanodan It can be quite difficult to figure out what the proper names of various food items are when you've been raised in a world of corporate foods. You only really notice how dependent you are on various corporations if you try to live abroad for a while.

When I grew up, that sauce wasn't even around, and everyone used Peppersaus (gravy with peppercorn) with their chicken.

@quad @lanodan Sometimes, food manufacturers will simply invent names for their products, even when there is already a name for it. For example, Jarlsberg cheese is basically a blend of Emmental and Gouda. Also, there is no rice called "porridge rice" (grøtris). If you're abroad, you'd need to look for short-grain rice if you want to cook some risengrynsgrøt (rice porridge).

@Alrescha This is the same barrier that protects you, the primary customer, from having a sea of shitty apps in the App Store. I guess my issue is that this protective barrier is a crappy experience for the content producers, no matter how well-intentioned and competent they are.

@Alrescha Hmm, if you think about it, Google's primary customers are companies, not consumers. Thus, there's little need to be protective of the consumers. They're just eyeballs for ads anyway. For Apple, consumers are their primary customers and entire livelihood. In a weird way, it's almost reassuring that Apple puts up a bit of a barrier between you and their customers...

@Alrescha In this case, the ability to reach their customers. Google is nowhere near as paranoid about it. Maybe they would be if their main income source was phones.

The world is on a really unfortunate trajectory at the moment. Populists, climate deniers and anti-vaccers are on the rise. Meanwhile, the ecosystem is coming off its hinges. Popular opinion and physical reality are not in agreement at all, and this gap is only getting wider and wider. I hope my worries are unfounded.

@deejoe For the new developer to even install a free macOS (Xcode) app from the app store, he had to give up his address, phone number and email address, and the latter two had to be verified. The user experience was, to be frank with you, very bumpy and unlike what I've come to expect from Apple. I was also struck by how many defaults you have to change on macOS to get a sane setup.

@deejoe Yes. Usually, I'm fine with Apple's fenced garden, but it feels rather imposing to stand outside the gates and face a cross-examination and background check to even enter.

The closer you get to things that Apple considers valuable or sensitive, the more they want to control what you're doing. It's not a great feeling.

Using Xcode on a team apparently requires you to set up an Apple Developer Program account. This, in turn, requires you to get a DUNS number (an American business ID) because Apple is too lazy to localise their system for each country they operate in. After you have a DUNS number, you then pay $99 for the privilege of assigning a bundle identifier (org.domain.foo) to your team (so apps can be run in more than one copy of Xcode simultaneously) and for the privilege of submitting apps for review.

There's a small but loud contingent of Norwegians who refuse to have their electricity meters upgraded to smart meters because they're worried about radiation.

We are constantly bathing in radio waves. People only notice them when they can see the transmitter. If these people could see radio waves, they'd probably shut up fairly quickly, because they'd realise that there's no way of avoiding them except perhaps from living your entire life in a concrete basement.

You know, the more I think about it, the more I get how this works...

1. Engineers invent chatbots.

2. This is seized upon by corporate, who proceeds to use it as a replacement for human chat operators in customer service.

3. It's now even harder to get through to customer service than it was before.

Chatbots were never a good idea. Even if they did become intelligent, they'd still have less power to help you than humans would, because they'd be completely loyal.

@natecull Also note the important distinction between a *technology* and a *product*.

TCP/IP and HTTP are excellent technologies that would have got nowhere as products.

What Mastodon does is to package the ActivityPub technology as a product, made available for free. That's exactly what you need to do to get a technology to succeed.

@natecull (Note that the packaging, design and user experience of your product is also part of the marketing. Mastodon gets these right in a way that most free software does not.)

@natecull Idealists throw the baby out with the bathwater. The ideals never had a chance, because only the corporations bothered to actually market their ideas.

Everything is sales. You won't get anywhere without a sales pitch. You won't even get a date. Whenever you're trying to impress anybody, that's sales, and that's what corporations are good at. It's not capitalism that sells an idea, it's marketing.

Mastodon is better at marketing than GNU Social was, which is why we're here.

The artist in the background says that the picture in the foreground isn't art, but kitsch, because it doesn't have a soul.

That sort of attitude didn't exist prior to the invention of photography, when artists were forced to redefine the word "art" in order to survive.

I find it quite funny that he thinks that his splotches of colour are somehow more sophisticated. He probably gets an art grant from the government too.