Asides

Whether T. rex and other predatory dinosaurs had lips

Paleontologists investigate whether T. rex and other predatory #dinosaurs had lips like lizards, or protruding teeth like crocodiles (though as the article notes, pop culture has latched onto the latter).

https://wapo.st/3zlDnNK
(gifted article link)

A T. rex skull with three artists' renderings of what its head might have looked like in life: One with its upper teeth protruding over its lower jaw, one with its teeth completely covered, and finally one showing the second version roaring, showing the teeth inside its mouth.

@science

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@science Oh cool, at least one of the paper’s authors is on the fediverse and has posted an infographic on the analysis:

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re: Friendica groups compatibility with Mastodon

I’d guess the mangling has more to do with Mastodon not trying to render the “Article” type yet than it being from a group. Mastodon has the same problem with reviews from Bookwyrm and blog posts from WriteFreely.

I mean, at least it shows the title and link, which is better than the “this type isn’t supported yet” from Takahe, but with the size of its user base, Mastodon *really* needs to get on just treating an Article the same way it treats a long Note!

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re: Congressional TikTok hearings

Rep. Weber just accused tiktok of pushing chinese propaganda and “woke” propaganda in the same sentence — thedextriarchy

I think their mind would be blown if they knew what Chinese state ideology thinks of the things they call “woke.”

Not exactly big on minority rights, racial equality, acceptance of non-traditional gender roles, or awareness of and wanting to dismantle state abuses of power in enforcing conformality.

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Hot take: If we’re serious about encouraging more small and single-user instances to join …

Hot take: If we're serious about encouraging more small and single-user instances to join the Fediverse, we really need to work on improving the setup and upgrade experiences.

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Managed hosting is great for this, but it re-centralizes the infrastructure, and it's going to be hard to find the less well-known platforms, so that re-centralizes the tech stack.

Pre-configured images at hosting companies are also great! But again, you're mostly going to find the bigger projects, and you still have to upgrade it.

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DreamHost migrated my main VPS with no hiccups…

In other news, #DreamHost migrated my main VPS with no hiccups as near as I can tell. I had to manually launch Agate for my #gemini capsule, but I suspect that’s only because they brought up the new system before moving the users over to it.

Here’s hoping it’s more stable than the Nginx one. I think I may just not have allocated enough RAM to the Nginx box, since the new plans don’t let me choose in-between sizes like 1.2 GB, 1.7GB etc. like the old plans did. The VPSes both ran rock solid for years, but DreamHost’s nginx support has always seemed like an afterthought.

I’m probably going to drop the Nginx VPS at some point. I just need to decide what to do with the last remaining site on it: Consolidate on the Apache VPS (possibly with more RAM), or set up a dedicated Nanode and manage it myself (and find out what resources it actually needs on a lighter-weight system)

Formatting

Funny to think:

Newsgroups and early mailing lists were all plaintext, so people came up with conventions like using asterisks and underscores.

Web forums were able to display rich text, and they used markup to implement it.

Early social media like LiveJournal and such supported rich text via raw HTML

Twitter was designed to fit in an SMS message, so it was plain text.

And everyone went back to using asterisks and underscores. Plus abusing Unicode lookalike chars.

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No, brain, it’s Martin Guerre, not Martian Guerre#sleepy

No, brain, it’s Martin Guerre, not Martian Guerre

#sleepy

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OMG it would be a perfect match: Astronaut goes to Mars, comes back…different. Is it really him? Is an alien presence hitchhiking in his mind? Or is it a shape-changer like The Thing? Or did he simply have a life-changing experience on the mission?

It could be played for comedy, horror (body or psychological), or anything in between.

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Spot. On. “I don’t want to log in to your website”

Spot. On.

“I don’t want to log in to your website”
https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23618804/google-facebook-login-ads-web-design-hell

“I am just going to point out something obvious: not reading is easier than reading — and *way easier* than logging in.”

“I don’t want to log in to do a search. If I wanted to log in, I would.”

“if I have clicked into a newsletter on the web, blocking my view of the thing I’m trying to read with a subscription pop-up isn’t going to make me more likely to subscribe.”

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Federated wiki?

Found something that’s allegedly a federated wiki, but the logo being an eagle superimposed on the letter Q sent up a red flag, the example news feed being a mix of tech and right-wing sites sent up another, and the fact that 90% of the search for the hashtag came up with posts by accounts with the same name on different sites including gleasonator sent up a third.

Yeah….NOPE