Because, if not, then it means there are no Tucker Carlsons and no Jon Stewarts, and no John Olivers in that universe. Probably because nothing needs internal investigations in that society as a whole!
In Deep Space 9, Jake Sisko (the station commander’s son) is a journalist for the Federation News Service. There’s a good episode where he ends up in a war zone and the story covers cowardice and PTSD.
Hurrah... good sense breaks out in the #NorthWest as the 'Waitrose of the North', Booths begins to get rid of self-service check-outs.
Given the price premium at Booths, we (the customers) want the social interaction with staff at the checkouts, not be told to 'scan & bag'!
More importantly, not only do checkouts provide regular local employment, they are also for many semi-isolated shoppers a key bit of rare social interaction... so a welcome reverse!
@RolloTreadway@cvwillegen@dweebish@ChrisMayLA6@Greenseer@actuallyautistic
I have found a really great solution: I'm in a Co-op. That's a little community store that orders bulk for you and has basic items and produce right there. I pay a little monthly fee and get to shop in this friendly DIY environment. I can chat, I can hang out, or I can just collect my stuff and leave. I feel totally relaxed there. No annoying ads, lights, sounds or music. Just the things everyone needs in a tiny store, and my boxes on a shelf with my name on it, if I ordered bulk. And the atmo is so incredibly nice, that I often start a convo just for the fun of it.
In brief: I'm still not sure how much #AltText is optimal. And I tend to run into situations in which alt-text that describes everything in a picture will grow longer than any of you could possibly imagine in their wildest dreams.
Here's my situation:
I don't have a problem with writing a lot. Unlike most of you, I'm not on a phone. I'm on a desktop computer, and if I'm not, I'm on a laptop. I've always got a full-blown hardware keyboard, and I can touch-type with ten fingers. And I like to rant.
I'm on #Hubzilla. This means virtually no limit in post length and especially virtually no limit in alt-text length. The only limiting factor would be how much alt-text the instances where my posts are viewed can display. #Mastodon has a hard cap at 1,500 characters, for example.
I'm not the one to skimp on #accessibility rules unless they're technologically impossible for me to follow. I'd rather do too much than too little. This includes full transcriptions of all texts in a picture unless privacy issues speak against it, or unless I've got no way to source the original of a text anymore, and said text in the picture is ineligible even for me. Yes, I transcribe text that's one pixel high if I can get the original.
When I post pictures, I don't always post them Instagram/Pixelfed-style, i.e. posts that are about this particular picture. Instead, I often use pictures to illustrate the post. Hubzilla gives me all necessary means to write full-blown blog posts with all bells and whistles as regular posts. Describing a picture in the visible part of a post when the post isn't about the picture is horribly bad style. Doing so when there are multiple pictures in one post, regardless of whether Mastodon puts them in the right places (which it doesn't), is even worse.
I usually post pictures taken in #VirtualWorlds. In comparison with pictures taken in real-life, they have a much higher tendency to contain things that need to be described, often to both sighted and blind or visually-impaired users, because they simply don't know them, be it objects, be it locations. It's one thing if a picture was taken on Times Square, and it's something else if a picture was taken in a place of which maybe not even five people in the whole Fediverse even know that it exists. Thus, more text is needed.
Now there are two schools of thoughts when it comes to alt-text.
One: clear and concise alt-text. Only describe what's necessary in the context in which the picture is posted. Screen readers can't handle long alt-texts well. You can't navigate alt-text with most screen readers, i.e. you can't stop it somewhere, rewind it to a certain point and listen to parts of it once more. All you can do is let the screen reader rattle down the whole alt-text in one chunk. If you need to hear it again, you have to hear all of it again.
The obvious downside of this is that most of the content of the image is lost to everyone who isn't sighted, and some is lost to those who can't identify it even by looking at it in that particular picture.
Two: full description of absolutely everything in the picture plus explanation if necessary. Denying non-sighted people the chance to experience everything that's in a picture, and be it through words, can be considered ableist. Also, tiny details that are barely visible in the picture could be described so that sighted people can identify them.
And besides, there's the idea that alt-text can help everyone understand what that is that they see (or don't see) in that picture if they're unfamiliar with them.
As I've said, extensive image descriptions in the visible part of a post may be okay when the post is about the picture, but not when the picture illustrates the post and even less when there's more than one picture illustrating the post.
Yes, this is a thing. Just read what @Stormgren wrote earlier this month.
Alt-text doesn't just mean accessibility in terms of low -vision or no-vision end users.
Done right also means accessibility for people who might not know much about your image's subject matter either.
This is especially true for technical topic photos. By accurately describing what's in the picture, you give context to non-technical viewers, or newbies, as to exactly what they're looking at, and even describe how it works or why it matters.
#AltText is not just an alternate description to a visual medium, it's an enhancement for everyone if you do it right.
(So I can't find any prior post of mine on this, so if I've actually made this point before, well, you got to hear a version of it again.)
And I'm actually waiting for Mastodon users to refuse to boost posts that contain pictures with insufficient alt-text. Many refuse to boost posts that contain pictures without alt-text already now.
The obvious downside of it is: "DESCRIBE ALL THE THINGS" + lots and lots and lots of stuff in the picture + just about everything needs to be explained because nobody is familiar with any of it = alt-text the size of a rather long blog post.
I've tried that with this picture (no embedding although I could because reasons). I've written a detailed alt-text. I've spent more than three hours in-world in a preserved, static copy of this place, researching and transcribing text where probably none of you would even know that there's text otherwise. The picture alone wasn't enough of a source for an alt-text that I would have deemed sufficient.
Only description plus some transcriptions: 7,636 characters. Description plus everything transcribed, save for the big black panel in the middle background behind the tree which I couldn't transcribe because it no longer exists in-world, plus translations of everything that isn't English plus everything unfamiliar explained: 10,985 characters. If that panel had still existed in-world, and I could have transcribed it, I might have passed the 12,000-character mark. With an image description.
As I've said, Hubzilla doesn't have a hard cap for alt-text length. In theory, it could handle and probably display alt-texts much longer than this. I don't know how it'd display an alt-text of that size in practice, whether it'd be scrollable, whether it'd have a time-out before anyone could read it fully etc. Mastodon, in the meantime, has the hard cap I've mentioned above which probably also cuts alt-texts coming in from outside. That's where most of my audience is. And screen reader users might have no other choice than to sit through their screen readers rambling down alt-text for more than five minutes in one go, especially if they could get a hold of the original alt-text instead of one cropped at the 1,500-character mark.
Now, even though I'll probably kick off two separate threads, I'd like to read your thoughts about how detailed alt-text should be.
Alt-text doesn't just mean accessibility in terms of low -vision or no-vision end users.
Done right also means accessibility for people who might not know much about your image's subject matter either.
This is especially true for technical topic photos. By accurately describing what's in the picture, you give context to non-technical viewers, or newbies, as to exactly what they're looking at, and even describe how it works or why it matters.
#AltText is not just an alternate description to a visual medium, it's an enhancement for everyone if you do it right.
(So I can't find any prior post of mine on this, so if I've actually made this point before, well, you got to hear a version of it again.)
This means she asks for a) a full description and b) a full set of explanations where necessary, especially of technical content.
Besides, there might still be legally blind people who nonetheless want to know everything about everything that's in a picture, too.
I admit I skimmed it at first, because even for sighted people text might be too long. As I mentioned, trimming is a useful thing (and I don’t mean it snarky, even if it may seem that way).
However, I had given it a 2nd look and added an edit. Maybe the edit didn’t federate to Mastodon tho, so here it is:
Also, for uses other than vision impairment, I think text should be elsewhere than alt-text. Like just description text or image metadata. Alt-text is for when you can’t see the picture.
(Like on ye olde internet which you might have browsed with images disabled to speed up loading.)
@tobogganablaze My point is: How can you be so sure it has been dismissed? I just found about [1] from 2013.
It appears, the SM doesn't disagree with shrinkage at all.
But why does it seem your mind being blown by this idea? Maybe be because you didn't consider us being sucked in anywhere? If that's the case, here's why didn't you consider this yet: I didn't yet post my post despite the probability of not having a new thought.
That's how blocking path dependencies in science can be so strong.
"What instead of the universe expanding we’re just shrinking" is not what I posted because my brain didn't come up with it. If you want things simple and in your words, I suggest a solitary life.
Finally, you don't know my age or experience. Your unfriendliness could just have hurt a kid's interest into space. Remember that.
My point is: How can you be so sure it has been dismissed?
Models that don’t work should be dismissed. If you have a model for shrinkage that does work it should not be dismissed.
It appears, the SM doesn’t disagree with shrinkage at all.
Yup, pretty much.
But why does it seem your mind being blown by this idea? Maybe be because you didn’t consider us being sucked in anywhere? If that’s the case, here’s why didn’t you consider this yet: I didn’t yet post my post despite the probability of not having a new thought.
Sorry, I’m not following. My mind is definitly NOT blown and black holes don’t “suck in” things. That’s a common misconception. And I really don’t know what you’re trying to say with the sentences after that.
Your unfriendliness could just have hurt a kid’s interest into space. Remember that.
I’m sorry that you think I was unfriendly.
But this a community for people that smoked too much weed to saything dumb things that sound clever when you don’t think about them too much.
If there is actual kids around that are interested in space theneven more important that unscientific non-sense gets called out.
But the TL;DR here is that so far all “shrinking gravity” models had major flaws and didn’t work. And the last idea of perfeclty scaling atoms is unobservable, so really more of a thought expriment than an actual model.
Tonight I started a discovery course of Hebrew. Just for me
I checked the alphabet
Similar system of consonants and strong vowels on which you append unwritten short vowels
Then I went on with the words that are close to Arabic, which I started to learn 20 years ago (not seriously enough): I still remember though how to pronounce most of arabic letters, and remember some vocabulary
I post my "course", because I recognize many of the words: THREAD will be LONG
Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.
Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.
But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.
The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.
And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.
The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person) and groups (!group), but I know that that is quite much to ask.
P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.
Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.
The term Threadiverse has nothing to do with Meta’s Threads platform, I think the term is actually older than Meta’s announcement. The Threadiverse refers to the platforms that organize things into threads similar to Reddit or forums, right now this mainly means Lemmy and Kbin
I find mastodon boring and I just think people who wanna use defederated twitter are different and more common than people who wanna use defederated reddit. Peertube though, now that is a compelling argument.
Single player games rarely need or demand “continued support” and player numbers aren’t indicative of that
Sure maybe if the gaming industry didn’t constantly release buggy broken messes. But alas that’s not the world we live in and is very much a metric I care about to know whether or not a game is going to become abandonware or at least have community support if the developer won’t. These metrics allow that community or developer to understand if there is a player base which would benefit or a market to keep selling to. So yes they add value for players.
Single player player numbers aren’t indicative about things getting a sequel, low player count games get sequels, high player count games don’t get sequels. It has no direct bearing.
They very much are if the game is single player based. Acting as if demand is not a reason for games to get sequels or the budgets which come from player sales is not relevant is completely naive. Yes companies can run into financial hardships, get acquired and all manner of other circumstances that can lead to development being stopped whether there was an active player base or not. That’s not what these metrics represent and can give you an idea of what ip might get cut if a studio is acquired. They are useful and helpful, and I like to see those counts for my own understanding.
If you want to check if there are guides you can just Google it, it’s a lot more useful to just Google it. Then you’ll actually know instead of guessing.
Sure that used to work before SEO has killed search results, it’s quicker to check a player count on steam then to wade through garbage ai generated articles to find out if there is an active community following the game. It’s not a guess either if there are many people playing then there will be demand for content on YouTube or other platforms which means I can find guides.
Knowing single player, player counts is really just for vague curiosity. There’s no real use to it.
The only reason to hide it is to trick users to get abandon ware games or obscure how bad a game is doing. Keeping those stats up gives you valuable information, as I have pointed out. You are arguing in bad faith here and I honestly don’t know why unless you have some gatcha game on steam that you want to hide player stats on to hopefully drive some sales which is disingenuous.
@tip@tofugolem Rules prohibiting vandalism is not oppression. Hotheads that foment violence are oppressive. Public housing typically have a community garden space. People looking to legalize vandalism should move to Russia.