With a radio control drone you, your face and your smart phone can be a quarter mile away. Plus, have you been in aerial combat? I haven’t. Yet.

Thanks for the warning.

especially when spelled with quotes.

Wasn’t there a guy who built an AK-47 out of a shovel?

Is there a common quadcopter on the market capable of carrying a paintball gun or something else that can splatter lenses?

By “blue collar work” do you mean that done by mechanics, carpenters, masons, plumbers, electricians, machinists, tool operators and repairmen? because yes I do.

Unfortunately I think that bed has been shat, because everyone wants to be a general purpose instance. Nobody wants to be sportslemmy or musiclemmy or movielemmy where they only host communities that match their theme, which is why we have [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]…

So “Join an instance for a community you’re interested in”…not sure if that’s tenable on Mastodon but it sure ain’t on Lemmy.

I do occasionally receive a temporary field promotion to Major Aggravated.

I think this was and still is in part true for me.

The distinction is one large company that has a monopoly on this specific kind of thing, versus a bunch of individual companies that all use the same industry standards to interoperate with each other.

The USPS (and probably other countries’ mail services, too) is one gigantic corporation with a legal monopoly on letter carrying. The USPS uses the common highway, railway and airway systems that are also used for other passengers and freight to carry letters to their various offices to do businesses with customers across the nation. We have one The Mail Company. We used to have one The Phone Company too, but they broke up Bell Telephone.

There has never been a The Email Company. Email from the very beginning was meant to be an industry standard so that different organizations could host the service and interchange traffic between them. There are hundreds of them, a few big ones, a bunch of little ones, all sending standardized messages across the common internet.

Reddit or Twitter or Tiktok or Instagram or however many others are individual businesses. You sign up with an account with, say, Twitter, and that gets you access to Twitter, their backend software, their front-end user apps, their community, their content…one monolithic stack.

Mastodon is software you can use to make your own little Twitter. The folks that make that software operate a server running that software. So do other people; there’s a whole bunch of them. You can use it to make your own little Twitter all by yourself, which is how Truth Social works. But those of us who aren’t in a white supremacy retardation cult prefer to voltron all our little Twitters together into one big if nebulous network.

Lemmy does the same thing but with a Reddit-like form factor. So does Mbin and Piefed. Different software that speak the same protocol. I’m a member of sh.itjust.works, posting a comment to a community hosted on lemmy.world, replying to a member of feddit.org, each of these are Lemmy instances. Users on instances of Mbin and Piefed can also read and reply to this thread. So can Mastodon users, in fact. And Peertube, Loops and Pixelfed, which are Youtube, Tiktok and Instagram-alikes. They all use the ActivityPub protocol and can interoperate…within their own UI limits at least. Imagine being able to Tweet from Youtube. Not embed a Youtube video in a Tweet…Tweet from Youtube. Well you can Toot from Peertube. You just…Can; abstract as it is it’s a thing this collection of software can do.

I’m not sure you can define “the biggest bubble” in objective terms; defederation is a thing, it exists to be able to cut off spammers, scammers, anyone acting in bad faith. More often it’s used to separate servers that disagree politically, which in some ways isn’t ideal but I’m pretty sure that’s an unsolvable problem. A mainstream instance will get you the sumtotal; it’s a bit like living in the milky way galaxy; there’s some of it we can’t see because the middle is in the way, and there’s nowhere in it where that isn’t true.

As for a feed algorithm on Mastodon…I don’t know, I don’t actually use Mastodon. It is my understanding that the lack of a feed algorithm is considered a feature, not a bug; how exactly to discover content I’ll leave to someone else to answer.

In men it’s the third layer down under hair and grease.

It’s absolutely real; there’s a joke about it in The Naked Gun.

It’s not that there used to be a red variety of pistashio, they were sold coated in this oily red gunk that would stain your fingers pink. That stopped at some point in the late 90’s early 2000s.

No, pistachio flavored ice cream and puddings and such have always been green.

I mean, we all know that women are just…completely covered in skin, right? They’ve got it all over them.

I want to see someone 3D print me some gunpowder.

Is there a motorized roller skate?

The abject retardation spirals off infinitely in all directions like the blades of the time knife. I mean, just out of my own twisted head:

• they’re talking about making it illegal to traffic 3D printers that don’t have a “certified gun detection algorithm.” Okay, what part of the 3D printer are you going to control? Hot ends? Control boards? 3D printers don’t have lower receivers. If I were to disassemble my Prusa MK4S back into the ~1000 weird shaped hunks of plastic, metal plates and sticks, wires, circuit boards, nuts and bolts it came in as a kit, and then drive through California, which exact piece am I going to be arrested for carrying?

• I can’t wait until someone Man With The Golden Gun’s one of thes “certified algorithms”, prints stuff that looks like cabinet hooks, musical instruments, a walkie-talkie case, a toy dinosaur, which clip together in a certain way to make a functioning weapon. I’ve never 3D printed a gun before, this might just get me into it.

Those are also unobtainium.

Damn Small Linux:

Looks like Google livery so I’m going with ChromeOS.

Yes.