Yeah people don’t really understand that HOAs are a two way street in most states. Bad HOAs exist because of bad neighbors, neglectful neighbors, or both. All it takes to right a ship is to show up and vote (or fill out the paper absentee ballot…) when the yearly elections happen. And then show up to some meetings so quorum can be met.

My HOA has to reschedule important meetings several times a year because nobody can be bothered to show up for a 30 minute meeting every quarter so quorum is met. Bad HOAs are like bad local unions. They only have power because you let them have power. Lobby your neighbors to do something about it. Unfortunately my experience is such that the typical homeowner who chooses to live in an HOA does so because they want to be rorLly hands off as much as possible. Kind of the opposite of the default pictures people have of obsessive neighbors in HOAs.

Has to be Krampus, and Anna and the Apocalypse.

Krampus really scratches that nostalgic itch every year and I don’t know why. The broken family dynamics, the environment, the sound and set designs are amazing. And it has a lesson like every good Christmas movie should.

And Anna and the Apocalypse is similar. It is funny, musical, and ultimately an allegory about growing up and leaving everyone behind to forge your own path. A good reminder that you never know when it will be your last Christmas with someone. Or maybe I’m looking into it too much and I just like zombie musicals.

Yes generally, but it can be very cheap. Some places sell block accounts which let you pay a one time fee for a set amount of data. Black Friday deals are coming up, and you an usually get amazing deals (1TB for under $5, able to be purchased multiple times, or subscriptions which work out to a couple dollars/euros a month).

The other thing you’d need is an indexer. Some are free, but for the best experience you’d want to pay for acess to a private indexer. Usually a few bucks as well, almost all of the big ones run sales this time of the year.

For subtitles: there are several solutions. Jellyfin (and Plex) support finding subtitles that you either download with a tool like Bazarr, or via Jellyfin/Plex’s own interface. Bazarr auto downloads them based on your parameters you give it though.

This is literally the reason Apple changes the bubble color. iMessage is encrypted by default and uses normal data instead of MMS. That’s the indicator.

This entire spiel about bubble color envy is ridiculous. Features are the separation. The media will whip things up with their sample size of a handful of cherry picked anecdotes. But almost every teen has an iPhone and uses iMessage in the USA. Apple has over 80% of that market.

What Google wants is for Apple to implement Google’s proprietary RCS implementation, not RCS proper. Because RCS proper lacks a lot of features that people take for granted with iMessage. That is presumably one reason Google forked it and requires it to run through their proprietary middleware.

Edit: Don’t get me wrong. I would love for an open standard to overtake the proprietary bits from both Apple and Google. But Google is disingenuous here. They are complaining because, despite their efforts, they can’t crack the market. Teens aren’t bitting for Android. iMessage has network effect going on, so Google is trying to crack that open since they can’t get a compelling overall product and ecosystem for a valuable demographic.

I’d rather there be open standards. But that means Google RCS has to change as well.

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I’m so happy to see someone else is finally talking about this. RCS, as implemented by Google, is distinct from the actual open RCS standard. Google added a proprietary middle layer which is how they get features working which RCS doesn’t support.

And that proprietary middle layer (Jibe being part of it) is why there aren’t a million third party RCS clients out there. Google must give API access. They are gatekeepers. And they only share keys with strategic partners (Samsung being one of them, telcos with their own app like Verizon used to have being another).

But in the end Google did what Google does best: fragmented a product. And now Google holds the leash for RCS proper. I bet Apple isn’t too keen to route all customer data through Google servers even when encrypted. Because it’s another piece that Apple doesn’t control.

Mastodon often feels to me more like Facebook for software developers

I wish. I’ve tried to curate mine as such.

My mastodon feed is awash in spam from authors hucking their LLM generated stories. Constantly. And random low viewer count streamers spamming hashtags every hour 24/7.

It’s crazy how much LinkedIn-like sociopathy is out there right now. Makes sense given the huge spike in new accounts we’ve had in the last month.

I see a lot of people taking issue with how it was handled. An obvious troll controlling sock puppets apparently spurred this, sure.

But the mods of Lemmy World went on a reddit-like spiteful ban spree, apparently forgetting that we can all see their modlogs or simply not caring about it. People got up in arms over the very childish and assholish behavior of the Lemmy World mods, and folks were eventually unbanned in some cases, but still banned from the main communities as punishment. For example, people saying they would just leave and federate their own instance got banned with mod messages telling them “let us help you with that”.