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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • I mean, keeping them local is easy - if anything much easier. I like the idea of summoning them, maybe a mod summoning and banishing them to have them watch a community

    And bots shouldn’t be acting like humans, they should be doing things only they could or should do. Like haiku bot, n-word bot, things like tallying votes for AITA, or even tracking nominations and building best of communities

    They were misused on Reddit, but we can do more with them here. Probably starting a goodbot that messages admins so they can stay ahead of the inevitable bot explosion



  • Ok, I’ll engage you on this one, your position at least seems internally consistent.

    Let’s play out this example - your 2 year old niece is sick, and so are you. You recently found out that she even exists - you didn’t know you had a sister until CPS told you she’s your responsibility.

    An action that risks your life could possibly save her… Let’s say a liver transplant. It has to be you, you’re her only living family member. And because of that, you’ll also be responsible for her - you can put her up for adoption when this is all over, but you’re still on the hook for the medical bills whether this works or not.

    She’s guaranteed to die if you don’t give her the transplant, and you would almost certainly recover quickly on your own.

    If you go through with the transplant, she has a slim chance to live, and an even slimmer one to have a decent quality of life.

    But in your current state, the transplant is very risky - at best you’ll see a lengthy and expensive recovery, after missing months of work you’ll be tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Complications could see you paralyzed or in lifelong pain, and it’s very possible both of you die on the table - maybe even likely.

    The doctors are telling you it’s a terrible idea to go through with this, that the risk is unacceptable and it would be a mercy to just let her pass, but they’re obligated to go through with it if you insist.

    Now, no one is stopping you from going through with it - if you want to put your life on the line for another, that’s your decision to make. You’re her guardian now, so it’s your decision if she should have to go through the pain for the chance at life, no matter how small.

    That’s all well and good - I’ve seen enough to know that death is often a mercy, but if you believe otherwise there’s not much to say

    Now, here’s my question - should the government be able to force you to attempt the transplant?

    Some of these details might seem weird, but I was trying to stick the metaphor as close as possible to a very real scenario with a dangerous pregnancy. The only difference is - the doctor is performing an action here, but withholding one with the pregnancy.

    You’re not though - pregnancy is not a lack of action. It’s an enormous commitment, especially when it’s atypical. It can even be a practically guaranteed death sentence - if the fetus implants in the fallopian tubes, it’s already not viable - at best you’re waiting for the fetus to grow big enough to rupture them, and hoping the bleed that causes doesn’t do too much damage before you can get help.

    Not to mention if a fetus dies in the womb after it gets to a certain size, it rots and leads to sepsis - unclear laws and harsh punishments have already led to situations where doctors refused care for both of these life threatening cases, and in both these cases the odds aren’t slim, they’re none. In the second the fetus was already gone… Sometimes when they induce labor the fetus isn’t even in one piece… It’s pretty grisly

    I don’t agree with your belief that a potential life is the same as a life, but let’s set that aside - I can respect that as a belief

    So… My root question to you is - Should you be able to force someone to risk their own for someone else?

    If so, how sure do you have to be that the other person will die no matter what you do before you’re released from the compulsion to put your own health on the line?

    There’s always at least some risk of pregnancy turning fatal for the mother. How much danger do you have to be in for the math to check out?

    And also, to what point should politicians with little understanding of medicine be able to deny you care?


  • That ship has sailed… So many sites don’t actually change pages, they just load different data - it’s way faster and looks better

    Problem is, the back button takes you off the site no matter where you are, so now you can change the URL and change the history through code to have the best of both worlds

    Then, there’s the people who do it badly, and there’s the people who think “hey, if you need pro StarCraft level clicking speed to back out of my site, maybe for some reason that will make them decide to stay”



  • As a late millennial and a programmer, I’ve got you.

    So when you request a web page, before anything else, the server gives you a 3 digit status code.

    100s means you asked for metadata

    200s mean it went ok

    300s means you need to go somewhere else (like for login, or because we moved things around)

    400s mean you messed up

    500s mean I messed up

    So this is in the 400s. Each specific code means something - you’ve probably seen 404, which means you asked for a page that isn’t there. And maybe 405, which means you’re not allowed to see this

    418 means you asked for coffee, but I’m a teapot



  • I like karma - gamification is fun, humans like watching number go up

    I think the answer is to localize it. Maybe community/server based, maybe make it bleed off with time, maybe do all of these and use statistics to come up with a way to make the metric useful somehow

    What we don’t need is karma done badly, and there’s a lot of far more important things to worry about first - I think we should put it way on the back burner and wait for an elegant proposal for how to handle it


  • Running a server isn’t that expensive. Someone did a breakdown, and found the cost is around $0.20/user/year. Their math might have been a little off, but it’s in the ballpark based on the back of the envelope math I use to see if something scales

    That’s well within casual donation amounts.

    But, that assumes admins and mods are volunteers- maybe they get a few bucks now and again, but their time is a far bigger factor than server costs



  • It’s weird to think about, but data has a shelf life. Software needs to grow and be pruned regularly, or it dies.

    Social media is both - the data dump is useless without an ecosystem of tools around it, and if the data itself stops interacting with the zeitgeist of the parent society, it basically becomes an old journal. It’s interesting to a very specific group of people, and literally no one else wants to see it (aside from a few gems picked out and cleaned up for public consumption)

    At any point we could go back to Reddits explosion after the digg migration. We could pull up posts that mirror exactly what’s happening now. It’d be interesting for sure, and there’s days of then-now posts that people could be making…but instead we just have people telling us about their memories of that process.

    Why? Because that data is old and stale. You’d have to hunt it down with tools not intended for it, filter out the best of it, fix broken links, and probably put it through a slur filter



  • Nah, that’s not quite right.

    Tiny federates with huge - nothing happens, they just exchange metadata. Dancer@tiny subs to something on huge - now you have one community, with a lot of updates, coming at tiny. Maybe it drops some. Still not an issue

    Hugo@huge subs to something on tiny - now something@tiny is cached on huge, still not a problem.

    Now something@tiny is in the feed on huge. A million people comment. This is a problem… For huge mostly. Over at little, people are commenting on something@tiny. They might see doubled up comments or orphaned comments, but mostly they just don’t see most of the stuff from huge

    So generally, it’s not an issue. In certain situations, there will be hiccups, but it will keep chugging along




  • That’s funny, I did the opposite - I got used to developing on osx, then Linux, but that was always on my work computer - my desktop has always been Windows (I’m still using the same license and chassis from the computer I bought in high school a decade and a half ago).

    Then I burnt out hard, and started picking up contracts here and there, but didn’t have the money to pick up a second computer powerful enough for gaming or work. So I ran virtualbox and avoided cmd like the plague for a while… It was driving me nuts, so I made plans to run Linux with Windows in a hypervisor - I was looking at pci passthrough so I could give it direct access to the graphics card.

    But then wsl came out and it just didn’t seem as important. Even as Linux gaming has grown, I just haven’t felt the need to switch… It’s sometimes finicky and setting everything up on a new computer is a pain, but the only time I considered switching one of my machines over is setting up LLMs - that was a real pain to coax into working, and it’d run better on Linux


  • I made 2 posts on Reddit, one was a meme about my friend jumping over me to see my username, the other was some random text post. Thousands of comments though

    It’s just not in my nature… So much so that I’m trying to release a Lemmy app tonight, and I just remembered I haven’t started on the ability to post…

    Everything else came easy to me - you should be able to click on anything, everything should stay where you left it… But I have no idea how people want to post. I should probably just do it now before I overthink it


  • I think it’s more just because we’re early adopters and the first wave of refugees.

    We’re building something here - and right now, for some it’s a new home, for some of us this is something big - a place that resists monetization. This isn’t just the fresh new version of social media, built by cool people who have the best intentions and a vision (I think most of them did, at least initially)

    Admins go bad, already some of the instances I’m on have people starting to look at not just paying for servers, but making a profit. And if they can live off the donations - fine, more power to them.

    But when someone comes knocking with a bag of money, what are they going to do? They can sell us out, but they can’t go far before we leave… What do we miss out on? The content will either follow or we’re missing out on content elsewhere.

    And we can mitigate it further - too many talented people care too much to let this idea die. We’re going to face difficult times, but it’s a new ephemeral Internet built on top of the one stolen from us - it doesn’t start or end with a reddit clone.

    And I think that’s why we care - because this time is different. It can’t go bad the way everything else does. It relies on no one, and it’s built from all of us

    This place is ours. No kings, no masters, no capitol, no capital


  • Hahahaha…he didn’t start Tesla or spaceX

    He did sue the founders of Tesla, the settlement demanded they refer to themselves as “co-founders” and not publicly refute him calling himself the founder.

    There’s speculation that the spaceX founders signed a similar NDA, but the company existed before him, and their goal was always scaling up spaceflight

    Musk is good at two things, fundraising from Uncle Sam, and hype. And he did those well, and if he stuck to that I’d still be singing his praises… Except he hasn’t.

    He’s not a smart man technically - a decade ago I first read a post-mortem about how he was booted from the company that bought PayPal (and put him on the map when they sold it, as he still had shares). They kicked him out for utterly failing to build a payment platform as he promised, then pushing they switch everything from Linux to Windows, refusing to understand that was impractically difficult (and just a bad idea, even Microsoft runs Linux on their servers now). He kept pushing this and being distributive, and so they threw him out

    Every time he’s tried to start something, it failed - he can’t build a team to save his life.

    He’s good at hype and having money, I used to say “he’s a billionaire who read a lot of sci-fi growing up… That’s not the worst thing to be”.

    Now? He’s convincing people his abusive management strategies brought this success, but those teams were long formed by people who deeply care about the future of humanity. They’re driven, intelligent, and passionate people - did they succeed because of him, or in spite of him?

    I can’t say for sure, but I can say for sure that they could’ve done this with someone else at the helm, but he couldn’t have done it from scratch


  • Yeah, people will do something just for fun, to profit personally, or to spite someone

    The moment they realize someone is making money off it, they start getting FOMO - humans are very loss adverse. No one wants to miss out on free money

    But what if they had turned around and said, “fine, we’ll start hiring you guys. You’ll get paid hourly, but you’ll have to do the proper paperwork, be given guidelines from corporate, reviewed on your performance regularly, and you might be relocated to undermoderated subs”?

    Most of them wouldn’t be into it - they don’t actually want to work for Reddit, they just don’t like feeling like someone else is sitting back and living off their work while they get nothing. The reality is, they’re not doing a job, and they generally don’t want to be (there’s a difference between a job and work, especially work that benefits others vs a job protecting the cash cow)

    When someone does a service for you, you act grateful and offer them lemonade and gift cards, you don’t try to turn it into a job, and you sure as hell don’t break their tools and ask when they’ll get back to work