We are obsessed with "Wikiflix," a streaming site full of freely-licensed films from Wikimedia Commons! It was created by legendary Wikimedian @magnusmanske
"Moderna is quadrupling the cost of covid vaccines, from $26/dose to $110-130. Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel calls the price hike "consistent with the value" of the mRNA vaccines. Moderna's manufacturing costs are $2.85/dose, for a 4,460% markup on every dose...
What will Moderna do with the billions it reaps through price-gouging? It won't be research. To date, the company has spent >20% of its covid windfall profits on stock buybacks and dividends, manipulating its stock price, with more to come...
It's not an outlier. Big Pharma is a machine for commercializing publicly funded research and then laundering the profits with financial engineering. The largest pharma companies each spend more on stock buybacks than research."
Recommended follow list for Ukraine war on Mastodon
Here are my recommendations for coverage of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Only accounts active recently and you can easily import them from a file. They are split into two different lists by type.
Ukraine: OSINT & war updates
This list mostly has accounts posting quickly about daily events of the war and doing open source intelligence.
The import file relies on the List import feature recently added to Mastodon. I have noticed the list import results in a few accounts sometimes ending up in their separate list by the same name so you may have to fix that manually afterwards if this happens on your instance. If many people are on an older Mastodon version and want it I can also post a follows file that will work for those.
Import instructions:
Sign into your instance on the web
go to settings (Gear icon)
Choose Import and Export -> Import
For import type choose "Lists" (could also be "Translation missing: en.imports.types.lists" if there is an issue with the localization).
Select "merge" to only add to your current follows/lists so nothing you have gets deleted
The discourse in the last few days regarding #Meta and #Threads gives the impression that the entire Fediverse is already blocking Threads. I wanted to take a look at the numbers and they speak a different language. The data source for my calculation is https://fedipact.veganism.social/?v=2.
Measured by user count, 76 % of all users are federated with Threads. Remaining instances with 24 % of users either block Threads or are limited (e.g. infosec.exchange).
Great investigation by BBC Russian Liza Fokht & co. The Kremlin has refined its prisoner recruitment in ways that demonstrate great sensitivity to Putin’s reputation and regular troop morale. No more presidential pardons and no more short-term service.
The new policy, which forces inmates to sign up as contract soldiers (not volunteers), means they’re locked into service for the war’s duration (one of the legal quirks of Putin’s mobilization order, and why he doesn’t rescind it). Also, the prisons and military handle this now w/o courts and, most importantly, without all those tedious, very embarrassing presidential pardons. Now, fewer inmates will ever return home, and the issue itself will fade from many Russians’ daily concerns. A devious, intelligent play by the Kremlin and Defense Ministry.
#Throwbackthursday to 2003. When my fascination with VR really fired up. I was so excited to have a 1MP camera to get a photo of using this.
A WHOLE MILLION PIXELS!!! WHOA 🤯
@SomeGadgetGuy interesting, would love to learn more about that phase, I believe Virtuality was more of a early 90s thing as they went bankrupt by 1997 but I can believe a lot of the history is not really easy to find out about at this point.
Going with #HoloISO doesn't seem like it would make much sense to me. As far as I understand it is something like an unauthorized derivative of #SteamOS so you'd be putting yourself at Valve's whims without Valve okaying it and no voice at all in the development process.
I like getting the dev team of an open distro involved, I guess #ChimeraOS might have been better if they fit that description as well though.
Interesting, scammers are getting sophisticated... Ran into a Youtube #cryptoscam stream that is piggybacking off the latest SpaceX rocket launch and uses a Elon Musk #deepfake (voice and lipsynced video) to try to scam people into scanning a QR code and going to a link where they send their crypto to the scammer in hopes of doubling the amount.
@darth I think development cost is driving the move towards timed exclusives more than anything. Probably unlikely a megacorp like Microsoft does anything just to be the "good guy".
@mackuba this is great since it is the only one that has long-term data and more options is also useful, any chance of also adding a graph for user registrations?
The downward trend in #Bluesky daily active users has been visible since October but for the last 10 days new registrations have also been consistently low compared to the past at only around 4.5k per day.
@LaureM@noelreports#Bluesky is absolutely not in growth mode, it has recently been falling below 400k daily active and the trend of decline has been visible for months. It did briefly grab attention as the most hyped alternative but it is starting to look a lot like that is already fading.
there are some reasons to be optimistic for #Mastodon's future since it isn't just a single isolated platform and the #fediverse has welcomed the first small steps of #threads integration recently, #wordpress introduced their ActivityPub integration, #Flipboard launched their integration etc. but it is definitely experiencing a period of slower growth currently.
Overall it seems like there is no single place the #twittermigration consistently goes towards and that results in a more fragmented social media landscape but ActivityPub does promise to unify some of them.
it's pretty weird that communists are pro-Russian these days since ideologically current Russia has not got much to do with communism but in many cases I guess it is mostly about being anti-USA/west with some elements of being stuck in the past days of the Soviet Union still being a thing.
Elon Musk's recent acquisition of Twitter came with promises of free speech. Yet, allegations of like count manipulations on critical posts have raised eyebrows. @hoblon tool tracks likes on a specific tweet by Pekka Kallioniemi @P_Kallioniemi (VatnikSoup) critiquing Musk, to observe any unusual changes in real-time.
Interesting to see how "likes" are disappearing in packs of 12k or so in 5 mn, and repeatedly so...The worst being over 24k vanishing in 5 mn on October 3.
@EighthLayer they're the best input device for games and user interfaces that need a mouse for something. On PC there's of course lots of games that are built around the assumption that there is a pointing device and, if you're using Windows, even the operating system's UI heavily relies on it.
How much you'd miss a trackpad does of course depend somewhat on what kind of games you are likely to play but for me it is a must-have. Trackpads are also quite flexible so you can make good use of them even when a pointer is not needed as Steam allows you to define buttons that activate when pressing on different parts of the pad for example.
@EighthLayer the trackpads are absolutely essential for me on Deck and it even has the advantage of SteamOS so I really don't get why many of these other options ship without them.
Instead, they’re chasing engagement on #Twitter, #Threads, and now #Bluesky. Many have abandoned accounts here with thousands of followers, while others just broadcast links now and then. I get it, but…
Of course there are a ton of exceptions, and other voices worthy of following, but discovering becomes a part-time job.
@toddalstrom in terms of news orgs @Flipboard has been bringing quite a few to the fediverse, they are gradually enabling ActivityPub for more and more of the accounts available on their platform
When I last paid attention five years ago, I had the impression that #BlueSky was reinventing ActivityPub without acknowledging it (giving me the impression that the chief objection was "my problem with ActivityPub is it isn't owned by me").
Today though, the AT protocol FAQ has some clear statements about moving accounts. Was BlueSky always trying to build a protocol that made account moving easier than ActivityPub? Or is that revisionist?
@matt You might be on to something, @jonny recently pointed out you don't actually need to reinvent AP to do account portability in one of their excellent threads analyzing ATProto.
Trailer makes this look great, plenty of Alyx comparisons... Even though this trailer is titled as Quest I think it is the same as the one they showed at the Playstation event and looks too good to be captured on Quest which is good since it suggests everyone is not getting a Quest-downgraded version...
Orange Pi Neo is new handheld powered by AMD and comes preinstalled with Manjaro (neo.manjaro.org)
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/11418105...
Metro Awakening | Coming to Quest, PSVR2 & Steam (www.youtube.com)