I was on vacation recently and Apple Maps gave a weirdly circuitous route from our hotel to a restaurant. I checked Google Maps and it showed the direct route I expected, so I went with that.

Google Maps routed me on to a street that was closed due to construction, Apple Maps was smart enough to route around the construction.

I expect general parity between Apple and Google Maps, I had not expected Apple to have better data.

Naming a compression scheme “XL” seems like a bad choice.

A lot of people in Michigan are expecting the state population to boom in the coming decades. No earthquakes or hurricanes, minimal wildfires and tornadoes. Lots of access to fresh water.

We passed a ballot initiative in 2018 that made an independent committee draw up congressional districts and wouldn’t you know it, the state suddenly went blue when no one could gerrymander anymore! Legal recreational weed, legal abortion, free school lunches, the progressives are moving fast with the new majority.

What area all depends on how much winter you can take. Detroit-Ann Arbor area is probably the mildest, followed by Grand Rapids-Kalamazoo (great cities, lake effect snow storms), Up North (even worse snow) and da UP (Marquette is amazing but if you don’t like snow sports you’ll go insane).

$500k will but you a great house in some suburbs or a decent house in a hot market.

Copyright law? One Thousand and One Nights is in the public domain.

To be clear, this creates a separate Pixelfed account, it just uses your Mastodon info for quick profile setup and authentication.

Out of the loop: what’s going on with female disc golfers?

Document document document.

Also, the nice thing about libraries, frameworks, and CMSs is that they already have documentation. If it seems like a pain to learn one of those, imagine how much worse it would be for someone to learn custom code that doesn’t have any resources on Google.

Do people these days still know O’Reilly books? I’ve seen a few posts over the past couple years that are essentially asking “how did you figure out how to program without Stack Overflow?”

To answer your title question, plenty of people do. I follow my friends there and have lots of conversations. Mastodon doesn’t have a lot of famous people, but I didn’t really use Twitter to follow famous people either.

You might want to try FediFinder (when it’s working, they are dealing with Elon’s changes like the API shutdown) to find your Twitter follows on Mastodon.

I follow a couple Lemmy communities from Mastodon. If you create a Mastodon account and search for @technology@lemmy.world you can subscribe to new posts, which get boosted into your feed. You can upvote by favoriting a post and you can reply from Mastodon and it’ll show up on Lemmy.

I can also follow Lemmy users, like by searching for mxwarp@lemmy.world and your posts (but not comments) will show up in my feed.

IIRC the post format is:

Title
@community@server
Body text