look, those boots aren’t gonna lick themselves

No? 1) I’m perfectly happy to say I don’t like tipping in general, too. I do it because that’s how we’ve apparently agreed service workers make any money at all. 2) I didn’t explicitly say I’m in the US, altho I did imagine our tipping culture to be a bit unique, so to be clear - I also don’t have much faith in labor laws getting consistently enforced here.

You can also take the smug armchair psych somewhere else, guy.

Yeah I have no idea who the tip even goes to sometimes.

And really in those cases, I assume straight to the business/owner. And then it’s like why am I volunteering to buy this at an additional markup?

Agreed!

People keep talking about the appeal of the megacommunities on Reddit, and I’m like… were they really that great? There was so much noise to sift through to get to anything real. Having decent discussions or building communities? Maybe if you’re in a small niche subreddit, but otherwise no.

Absolutely. I don’t think it’s really sunk in generally that the Fediverse is intended to operate fundamentally differently from a centralized system. An instance selectively (de)federating is how it’s supposed to work.

If the platform running as intended kills it, then there are big problems. I don’t think it will, but the user culture does have to change and incorporate knowledge of how the system works. We need to not have threads saying the Fediverse, a platform built on decentralization, needs to centralize as much as possible to survive.

Get paid up front or not at all, with this guy. I dunno how anyone doesn’t know this by now.

There seems to be quite a few folks here that basically want the Lemmyverse to be Reddit with new management

That was wild, yeah. Social media sites shouldn’t lock down APIs because it’s all user generated and LLMs should be given free reign to harvest user content for their own proprietary ends?

I guess I can agree that these two ideas aren’t fully contradictory, but there’s a lot of friction between these two conceptions of user’s rights to their content/data.

Right there with you (not 100% sure what gen my oasis is). Not crazy about Amazon, but it’s a very nice device, and I get most of my books from the library these days anyway.

My man! I love Le Guin and Lathe of Heaven is a great book. Super interesting, entertaining, and I loved the clear influence of her ongoing studies of Taoism (related, her translation of the Tao Te Ching is what I point folks towards for a first look at Taoism).

Oh! She’s on my to-read list with Babel, I’ll have to check this one out as well.

I just finished up Empire of Gold by S.A. Chakraborty. It’s the last in her Daevabad Trilogy, an immensely entertaining work drawing from legends and myths from the Middle East. It’s filled with political intrigue, memorable characters with well developed internality, and detailed world building.

It’s good stuff! I had a lot of fun reading it, it’s a little different than typical fare with the Middle Eastern background, and Chakraborty has an eye for plotting and characters that kept me going through a lengthy tale. I’m looking forward to reading her collection of short stories in the universe, River of Silver, and the Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, a novel set a thousand years before this trilogy.