Younger folks have been raised on apps and other polished devices with oodles of effort put into UX design.
Older folks grew up learning DOS commands, memorizing the IRQ of their sound card, and other clunky shenanigans.
In their current state Lemmy, Mastodon and other services are too complicated for most young folks to bother with. Not all, but most, especially the filthy casuals.
This is the answer. I’m 26 and most of my peers didn’t really use the internet beyond the occasional usage of the school library computers until Apple released the first iPhone. By that time places like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit were up and running.
That’s all their experience with the internet is. Polished experiences through dedicated apps on extremely popular platforms. Now those people have had kids and all those kids know is the same thing. It’s all apps on phones and tablets.
Lemmy: A) Is too complicated in it’s current form for those types of people to effectively understand and use.
B) Lemmy is currently emulating a type of early internet experience that only nostalgic older millennials nerds crave. General users tend to prefer bigger platforms.
No I feel the same way. I think it’s because it’s part of an ecosystem of concepts built with all its predecessors mistakes in mind. There’s still learning to do but the foundation is simple but is also modern.
This thread is a couple months old at this point but I figured I’d reply anyway.
Maybe you had a different experience but I experienced this transition in middle/high school in west MI. The first Gen iPhone released in 2007. 3G was widespread and while that might be considered slow these days, it was state of the art speed at the time, so it wasn’t considered “slow and unusable”.
In 2007, kids my age didn’t have much tech beyond an iPod or MP3 player. By 2009, almost everyone had a smartphone. That was a huge leap in internet accessibility.
I’m 26, probably among the oldest of gen z. I love lemmy. The quality is higher here because the community is smaller. There are much less reports than there used to be on reddit.
I agree but I can also ok imagine a world where the website remains similar to how it is now with 3rd party apps actually making it user friendly for the masses. Memmy already seems to be getting close to an ease of use similar to Apollo. They’re also attempting to solve the issue of a very confusing onboarding process.
I use Ivory for browsing Mastodon, and I’d bet that the app is more polished than any other first-party social media app.
The problem with Mastodon (and Lemmy to some extent) is that the onboarding process is not as straightforward, thus causing some friction for the less tech-savvy users.
Elbows have always been allowed on the table. The rule for fancy dining was that you couldn’t have elbows on the table during a course, i.e., when people are actively eating, but before/after, it’s fine. That’s a reasonable rule to be considerate of space.
If you have a large number of people eating in comparison to the size of the table, and the table is already covered in food, the only place on the table to put your elbows is in other people’s personal space.
The rule should be “no elbows right next to someone else’s food” but neurotypicals are terrible at communicating due to their underdeveloped social skills and empathy.
People other than you, who are not “neurotypicals” whatever tf that even means, are able to accomplish seating large amounts of people at a table and use basic table manners just fine. It’s just common courtesy.
Yes, neurotypicals are indeed able to have large family dinners. But they have to do it using table manners as a crutch. They can’t just have an honest conversation about what’s really necessary, they need to rely on this social construct to tell people what to do without explaining why. It’s a great weakness. If only the average person weren’t so afraid to introspect and to question why we do things.
Which is kind of the point he is making. Instead of engaging in a honest talk and understanding the reasoning behind social norms, they are just pushed as normative and understandably confusing to people who struggle with “just behave like everyone else, lol”.
Ironically this is exposing us neurotypicals to be socialy underdeveloped instead of non neurotypical people.
As someone who can’t sit straight I only wore shorts and trousers until I learnt this trick in my twenties. While I personally don’t find it lewd, other people clearly do and I get so pissed off every time someone feels the need to inform me that they’ve been looking up my skirt.
Not being able to pull off an assasination in a country where citizens can legally buy an assualt rifle must be an embarrasment in the history of assasins.
it was an incredibly close shot. looks like he coincidentally moved his head the exact moment the shot rang, if he hadn’t he would be gone. factors like windage also play a role. idk which outcome is worse.
Both Trump and the Shooter surviving would have been best. If the kid was able to say exactly why he did it, then all the conspiracy would die. An Trump would have some uncomfortable questions about his involvement with Epstein. That second part might still happen. But likely won’t.
Definitely this one. This just killed my hope that he loses again, and you know the Gravy Seals are going to step up their harassment and violence towards people - and that would have been true either way. At least with the other outcome he doesn’t get in.
He couldn’t have asked for a better gift for his campaign.
him dying would’ve turned him into a martyr and basically solidified him as a saint, if not a god, to the maga crowd. I can imagine the repercussions of that. there’s also the possibility that someone worse replaces him, someone just as fascist and selfish but twice as competent, and that would be disastrous. y’know, the whole “guys I went back in time and killed Hitler” trope/joke.
Which biden would be prepared to deal with. Keep in mind that Trump was in office for Jan 6. One might even consider that a good thing, as this time with a competent president there would be less victims, and more insurrectionists getting their voting rights taken away.
He’s already a god to his followers. People literally paint him as the second coming of Jesus Christ. There is no one worse in this moment than Donald Trump.
Sure, yet none of them are able to do what Trump does. That’s why it’s taken 40+ years for them to get to this point. The Mitch McConnells and such might be politically saavy, but they don’t have the “charisma” of Donald Trump to actually pull off the end game. That’s why they all protect him so much, he’s a cult figure, which can be difficult to fabricate.
As someone indicated below, he’s now a living martyr. I would place money that he uses this to galvanize his following and it actually benefits him in the polls.
He needed to die in an embarrassing way (lethal dose of ex-lax?) for it to hurt his reputation.
I don’t buy the ‘pave the way for someone worse’ argument. Who would that be? I can’t think of anyone right now, except for maybe De Santis in terms of actually being somewhat competent.
Cruz is competent and evil, ramashwarmy will do anything the likes of miller and bannon come up with, de sanstis as you said… There are worse options, frightingly…
Apparently, eating C-4 causes diarrhoea. Bomb tech recruits would be fed small amounts of C-4 and then chased around with a taser, a shock from which they feared would set it off, while trying not to shit themselves
No it wasn’t. He has zero injuries. It could even been a shard of glass on the stage. Stages are dirty fucking things that no one cleans once they are up.
In the video he reacts to something before being tackled, kinda ducking his head a little and grabbing at his ear. He was hit by something, but I’ve heard some conjecture it may have been shrapnel from a shot teleprompter, so seems to either be that or a bullet itself.
Some still survive injury to the head so if you want to kill someone instantly, try to aim for the heart. Security services know this that’s why persons of interest are advised to wear bulletproof vests. I am guessing Trump is wearing one so had the shooter tried to aim for the torso, that would have been more embarrassing than near-missing Trump to the head.
For years there was the “Phantom”, a notorious criminal, haunting all of Europe. DNA testing revealed that it was a female and her crimes ranging from petty theft to murder were seemingly unrelated to each other. That each of them were done in different countries didn’t make solving the case any easier.
But eventually they did solve it. They found the woman working in a cotton swab factory. Turned out many police departments were using the wrong type of swabs. So there seem to be more than one way to incorrectly use cotton swabs.
She was shoving each and every swab up her ass. Her ass swabs she called them. In conversations it gave her the upper hand. Check your bathroom, inside? Her ass swabs. Something in your ear had been up her ass!
Existing. People shed DNA all over. Most of the dust in your house is human skin and hair (or that of your pets). Non-sterile swabs are probably just packed with bare hands, by someone in their regular clothing.
Right, but there would be many people packing swabs in the plant. Unless she has psoriasis, the amount of skin she sheds at one time wouldn’t contaminate all of the swabs she touched with her hands, much less all of the swabs in the factory.
Not even close. Sweat barely contains any DNA, and while theoretically a person could sweat enough to leave behind enough dna to be identified, it hasn’t ever happened and would require copious amounts of concentrated sweat. Her hands would have to be constantly dripping with sweat, and this happened several times in several countries between 2001 and 2008. Maybe sweaty hands could contaminate one or two cotton swabs, but all of them over the course of several years? No.
MOVIE IDEA!! imagine a movie that takes you all over Europe following a killer and thief . Stumping the best cops. I’m thinking sort of following a cops career looking for this person until it ruins his family and life. Like destroys him slowly until he has nothing left . Kills himself. Through out the movie is close up shots of all the times cotton swabs were used in testing DNA. Randomly scattered. Ending shot of some factory . Camera flies in to assembly line. Two women side by side packing cartons. One look over and says. ‘‘You’ll end up in the office if they catch you without gloves again’’.
Mine is pretty basic but is built on the shoulders of giants. Also that $20 was from pre-pandemic / pre-chip shortage prices. I’m guessing it’s more like $35 now, or maybe high $20s from ali express.
I use Home Assistant for home automation. It has a now official addon called ESPHome for easily configuring esp devices and adding them to Home Assistant.
<span style="color:#323232;">I bought some cheap dev boards off amazon and thankfully they worked
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> an esp8266 microcontroller with IC2 headers and a microusb port already onboard
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> a bmp280 that measures temp, humidity, and barometric pressure
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> a lux sensor with a plastic dome over the top
</span><span style="color:#323232;">I soldered them together on a prototyping board
</span>
All the components were supported by esphome, so I just needed to write the device config and then flash the devboard via esphome (in a web browser) over the built in usb.
I 3d printed a housing for it, but you can also buy boxes. It needs airflow but also needs to stay dry. You can use a spray sealant to help avoid corrosion from ambient humidity. I skipped that step because I want to see how quickly it becomes problematic… and I should probably check on that.
I’m really happy I don’t have enough space for that stuff. Otherwise I would be poor. It’s hard enough to keep myself from buying another old computer.
Can you recommend any good soldering gear for an intermediate level? I’ve done plenty of soldering over the years but have always used crappy low end products. It’s always been a struggle to properly do a clean-true solder (not just heating the solder like I see everywhere) even though I try to meticulously maintain my equipment. I’m hoping that it’s just the equipment I use and a higher end one will make things a breeze like I see the professional’s use.
It’s really a pain in my ass. On top of maintaining the equipment I have whole setups I’ve constructed to hold wires and equipment snugly so I can properly apply heat. I purchased a high temp kit but it’s cheap as well and still sometimes run into the same problem, with the smaller components and projects though I’m afraid to use it and overheat something that can’t handle it.
I’m not really the right guy to ask - I don’t have that much soldering experience, and I’m a broke college student - but I’ve found the Pinecil to be Pretty Good™ for my use case of “occasionally soldering things to microcontrollers.”
It accepts power over USB-C, so no need for a bulky (and expensive) base station like a Hakko or Weller. (You do need an AC adapter capable of pushing 65W PD, but if you’re into electronics you probably already have something like that just lying around.) Proper temperature control is also nice compared to the cheap “plug and go” irons.
YMMV, I upgraded to it from a Home Depot butane iron (yes it was as bad as it sounds) so…
Pinecil works OK for small things, but struggles on larger joints because of it’s low power and small thermal mass. Personally, I’d prefer one of the many Hakko/Weller clones for a cheap solution.
Thermal mass is a valid concern, but the v2 can pull 100w from an appropriatly beefy usb-c adapter, and 200w+ from one on the new usb-pd spec (testing is ongoing for that though)
get one with easily swapped tips… Of an industry standard size. It’s super helpful to have multiple tip sizes
clean your tip with brass sponge!!!^1
cheat mode: use liquid solder flux, Kester 2331 ZX
follow Sparkfun’s soldering tutorial.
1 I taught a bunch of elementary kids how to solder. We only had water sponges and within minutes nobody could solder right. I had one brass sponge and it made instant difference. Now the tip could actually conduct heat properly. It is seriously an unexpected total game changer.
As for the brand… Whatever Sparkfun or Adafruit is selling is legit but more budget friendly. I took a look and Sparkfun has some good options from Weller.
I got a Weller WS81. It’s been good except the first wand didn’t like too much side pressure (user error really). Otherwise it’s been totally solid for years. They cost a lot less when I got it. Yikes. Get the cheaper WE1010 or the other red one.
An Aoyue might be ok. My Aoyue hot air rework station has been solid for the past several years assembling several hundred boards.
I would totally recommend a good precision pencil-style iron. They are somewhat expensive (400$ to 600$), but super nice and easy to use. All the power supply and control electronics is in the base, making the actual iron super light and easy to use, furthermore the hot part is tiny, so it’s much easier to avoid touching it when doing fine work. Despite the small size of the hot end, they do very well on large parts, and are able to heat up instantly.
Same. I’m lucky for software to be my hobby/career. It’s practically free. Contrary to popular misconception, it doesn’t require any kind of special or more powerful hardware (for most dev, at least). Maybe $150 for a second monitor, for sanity, but that’s not actually necessary.
…I mean, I do have good hardware too, but that’s for my gaming hobby, not my software hobby.
To be fair, if C++ or Rust is your thing… let’s just say I’d have a Threadripper if they weren’t five grand.
I once had to (repeatedly) compile a C++ codebase on some Lenovo shitbook. It ended up being so infuriating (thirty seconds, minimum) that I wrote a few load-bearing shell scripts to rsync everything to my desktop, build it, and copy the binary back… which was ultimately about five times faster.
Man, I wish I could have just used MicroPython for that project.
My next step is custom boards and smds, and an oscilloscope seems like a good way to diagnose when reflow goes wrong. I already have had some fights with I2C using dev boards. But really I’m eyeing one because I have allusions about doing fine calibration on analog sensors.
I should add that I’ve been talking myself out of an oscilloscope for 2+ years now. I don’t REALLY need one.
Lol I feel ya. I ended up making and selling electronics kits to fund the hobby somewhat.
I have been using cheap vintage oscilloscopes the whole time.
Not sure what they go for now but $100 for a 20MHz scope and $200 for a 100MHz was what it was several years ago. Cheapest I got off a buddy for $40. I am still using that one.
Sometimes I fix broken ones and sell them. One time I got one that they thought was broken but turned out it was just the basic settings. I like trying different ones so I have gone through a dozen or so by now.
Now* that I think about it, o-scopes are a whole other hobby lol.
Anyway. Yeah by the time you get the test gear and enough sensors and microcontrollers and whatever it adds up.
Right now I’m working on a power supply design for a 50W class D stereo. Found out big toroidal transformers are not cheap. Oof. And enclosures big enough (especially if labeled “amplifier” or “stereo”) are ridiculously spendy.
Being fat is a choice the vast majority of the time, and I have a huge bias against big people.
I used to be fat (250ish lbs (110ish kg) at 5’8"ish (172ish cm)), and as much as I would like to blame my shit on anything else, the person feeding me, the person sitting at the computer for hours, the person actively avoiding all physical activity was me and no one else. After I got diagnosed with some weight related shit, I turned my entire life upside down, am at a much healthier 150 lbs (68ish kg), and feel so much better, both physically and mentally.
I’m aware of my bias, and I make every active effort to counter it in my actual dealings with bigger people. Especially because there are certain circumstances, however rarely, where it may not actually be their fault. But I’d be lying if I said my initial impression was anything except “God, what a lazy, fat fuck.”
So silly. Genetics can make it harder to lose weight, but not impossible.
I’m related to several people diagnosed with hypothyroidism, but none of them are obese because they know the condition makes weight loss hard and actively work harder because of that. The biggest one is what I’d called “chubby”, and that’s more likely because her thyroid numbers are in flux at the moment, and she’s currently working with her doctors on that.
I used to be fat, and when I watch morbidly obese people talk about how much they love food and it makes them happy and makes them feel better that is 100% me. Food is absolutely an addiction for some people, including me. Thankfully I have it under control to be at a healthy weight and lose weight when I need to, but some of these people have absolutely tragic childhoods or life experiences and I don't blame them at all for coping in that way. I could 100% see myself in that position if I had been through what they have been through.
However, those people are self aware that they are unhealthy. The people I can't stand are the "healthy at every size" fat acceptance people. Healthy at every size was SUPPOSED to be that you can make positive health focused changes at any size and there is no point of no return. But it got twisted into I can be morbidly obese and I am still 100% healthy forever. And they even make people feel bad for wanting to lose weight, even if it's for health reasons. Those people are trash and fall on the same level as antivax people IMO.
Everyone deserves to be treated with respect, until you start spewing harmful bullshit and then I will judge you as much as I want.
I’m also a comfort eater. Huge sweet tooth, and almost 0 self-control when the hunger kicks in. My diet fix was making sure I only buy and order what I should eat, because I will clean my plate. I’ve accepted that, and making sure there’s only the appropriate amount of food in front of me has worked wonders. Holidays and special occasions are sometimes tough, with family shoving food in my face, but I just exercise extra hard afterward, lol.
I definitely agree with you about the fat acceptance movement. I have to leave those conversations before I start saying things I regret. Again, I try really hard to manage my bias.
I have a weight problem and I told my wife, who berates me for it, that if there is food I shouldn’t eat in the house, then I will eat it. It’s that simple. I’ll eat a lot of what’s available.
I’ve lost 30 lbs before with intermittent fasting and taking calories. I know what works for me.
Anyways, she insists that I’m being unreasonable and that I should eat in moderation. She buys ice cream and then will eat a spoonful every 30 days.
I’ve been very lucky in that my wife has been very supportive and understanding, but I’m the same way. My rule is that I’m not allowed to shop hungry, because I’ll buy shit I don’t need to eat, and then I’ll eat it because it’s there.
In general avoiding situations when you only rely on your willpower gives much better results than fighting yourself. When I think I should loose weight I only buy boring ingredients that require preparation to be tempting in any way. If I get strong cravings I just eat some random vegetable and try to better plan mealtimes next day. It’s much harder when living with uncooperative partner or parents that like always having snacks in their kitchen. We’re literally built to eat food whenever it’s available.
This happened with my ex - the kids and I, we are all built more lean and spare, but ex hung on to weight. So I cooked or he did, we all ate the same food but somehow he got fat, we stayed skinny.
Well I am like your wife, low tolerance for sweet stuff - usually when I want something sweet I want to taste it, not really eat it, if that makes sense. So yes, a big spoonful of ice cream, one twix candy & save the other one for next week. Emergency chocolate bar at work lasts a month.
Ex was the other extreme, could binge sweet foods. So even with the metabolic advantage of being a couple inches taller and male, his natural intake kept him on the heavy side.
Intermittent fasting is such a good way to maintain weight, but not if you can eat a bag of candy in your eating window!
Holidays and special occasions are sometimes tough, with family shoving food in my face, but I just exercise extra hard afterward, lol.
I think that’s the best way to go about it, eating like a monk literally all the time is much harder than eating well the majority of the time, at least for me lol.
The guilt is an enemy as well, I’m the type to go “well, I’ve broken my diet strike, might as well eat a sundae” in a sort of self hate spiral that makes no sense. If I allow myself to indulge in expected moments I feel much better. Like, literally everyone around the table at christmas goes like, “I ate way too much”, I shouldn’t feel bad for feeling the same haha
I was never huge, though 212 at 5’9" is overweight and approaching the technical definition of obesity. Due to some undesirable side effects of that weight (medical), I’ve been working to lighten up and am already down 24 lbs in 3 months, with a target of 170. It’s tough, and even painful at times, but it really is as simple as making sure calories in is less than calories out. For the doubters, I recommend just starting with meticulous tracking of activity and food consumption without even making any changes. It gets very obvious very quickly what’s happening, which makes it easier to start making changes.
100 pounds lost is amazing. What did you find that worked for you and how long did it take?
My biggest issue with exercise was monotony, so a family member recommended that I try CrossFit. Started going 5 days a week and never looked back. I’m not culty about it, but I love it. Having a different workout every day keeps things from getting boring.
I was also eating like absolute garbage. Red meat, carbs, and sweets galore. No greens. Lots of bad snack food. The only thing I had going for me was that I’d already cut out all sugar drinks besides alcohol. So I just decided to cut alcohol entirely, as well as introduce healthier carbs (like whole grains) and more greens/fiber. Lots of salads. I still do red meat, but it’s more infrequent, and I gravitate more towards poultry and fish.
I didn’t count calories in the beginning because I just wanted to focus on the two big changes, exercise and diet modification. Once I had those down, I was losing so fast I never bother counting, and I still don’t. I’m currently working on strength, especially in Olympic lifts, so I count my macros (protein, carbs, fat) instead.
My advice to anyone that asks is to find whatever consistent exercise you can do. If that’s CrossFit, great! If not, that’s fine, too! Just find literally anything you can power through consistently and do it. And consistency is the key. I can’t tell you how many times I didn’t feel like working out, but I maintain the attitude that “moving is better than not moving”, so I still go, and every single time, I end up glad that I went. People are always like “Ah, man, exercise is hard.” Nah, dog. Exercise isn’t easy, sure, but it’s the consistency that’s hard.
I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot lately and your comment is interesting. Your first sentence is definitely phrased in a more controversial way than the rest of your comment, but I can’t help seeing it as very similar to “Being depressed is a choice the vast majority of the time, and I have a huge bias against depressed people.” Is that an unfair comparison?
I know that treating fatness/obesity as a disease is kinda controversial but I feel like folks give people dealing with mental health a lot more grace than people dealing with health issues related to being fat. I’ve also heard that for some people they can be perfectly healthy at a higher weight (though this is clearly not the case for many fat people who are seeing health impacts). I guess I’m assuming that a lot of fat people would potentially like to be less so, but can’t (for any number of reasons) quite get there. This seems really similar for me to people dealing with depression, anxiety, etc who want to change things but keep falling back into the problem.
I guess my question is do you have bias against people who can’t escape other bad cycles like mental health or even stuff like alcoholism? Or is it more just that you think it’s fair to judge people without the discipline/willpower to get out of a state they didn’t want to be in, like you did.
This is a fair question. I guess maybe my statement could’ve been less broad. If just “being fat” is the primary problem, that’s what I take issue with. If the problem is deeper, and being fat is a secondary issue (like a result of depression, hypothyroidism, or some other mental/physical ailment), then that’s a different situation. My stance in that case is that the person should be actively trying to treat the primary problem. I know depression almost never just goes away. Sometimes it even sticks around with therapy and medicine, and that sucks hard. But at least they’re trying.
Thanks for your reply. I appreciate your personal take on the whole thing. As someone who has never been fat, I’m trying to figure out what’s the whole deal with the various movements around it. I feel it’s gonna become a much bigger cultural discussion in the next decade. And congrats on getting down to a happier weight for you! Setting and reaching goals is definitely something to be celebrated.
This is an old thread, but taking your first comment into account, doesn’t this make them guilty until proven innocent in your eyes? If your first thought is “what a fat lazy fuck” without knowing their story? That seems unnecessarily judgmental, and I can’t help but wonder if it comes from a place of insecurity, maybe left over from your own history with weight
Unpopular opinion follow-up: You should be using proper units of measurement.
Don’t get me wrong. I can perfectly infer from the story what you’re saying. But 150 or 250 lbs just doesn’t mean anything to me. Neither does the height or what people write in the other comments.
“Proper units of measurement”? Come on man, don’t be a pretentious ass. We all know metric is better, but don’t shame the man (or woman idk) for using the system of measurement they’re most familiar with!
Hehe. I hope I phrased it nicely enough for them to understand i wasn’t yelling at them. I think it’s mildly ignorant to comment on the internet and not to translate it into proper units. They even edited the comment and it made me ashamed a bit. This is not the job of one individual.
What I was really trying to do is shaming you, the people of Myanmar, Lyberia and the US. And your culture. For living in the 21st century and not even adopting the proper system that would make lots of things easier for you. And for being ignorant towards all the people on the internet who are not offended by progress. (or at least their ancestors hadn’t been…)
Ahem. Didn’t several spaceship explode so far? Planes crashed… People died. And I think many US scientists have already switched to metric and many engineers have not. I bet they currently waste large sums of money for doing double the work when working together. Combined the sum of not switching is already a ludicrous amount of billions and billions. And the world isn’t getting less globalised. So true. It costs money to switch. And it’s probably yet another man’s pocket that money comes from. But the sooner you do it, the more money it’ll save you and everybody in the long run.
Edit: And after a while even your engineers might thank you for the easier calculations. And it’s not that a two-by-four has two by four inches anyways.
Isn’t tragedy of the commons when you share something and it for example gets overused and destroyed in the process? Tragic referring to the part where everyone is trying to get the max out of it for them individually and causing the demise?
This is something else. And also it IS in everybody’s best interest. I’d assume it’s not the most fun activity to learn your feet in a mile, yards… And translating recipes is just madness. I imagine you need all sorts of little helpers, the measuring cups, smear butter everywhere to measure it by volume… and need to whip out a calculator if someone stays for dinner. I think it costs money and people are lazy and fail to see the bigger picture. Because they haven’t tried thinking about this for 5 minutes and are already complaining. It’s not that they wouldn’t also benefit.
Disclaimer: I’m also not perfect and sometimes fail to see some bigger picture.
But ultimately you can’t just blame people. There is literally an entire industry trying to sell you cheap carbs and fat. Down to the sound a bag of chips makes when you open it (this is not a joke).
So on one hand you have evolution, your body still being stuck in the past where food was scarce. On the other hand you have too much food and it’s highly engineered to be addicting on purpose.
It’s no surprise most people are going to lose that challenge.
Hmm I think that for a lot of people, it wasn’t a choice to get fat. I know a lot of kids who are already obese and they aren’t even in their teens.
However, I do think it’s a choice once you’ve realized it and have the ability to actually do something about it.
Kinda related but unrelated: it irks me when someone comments how easy it is for me to be skinny, bc it isn’t. As a previously underweight person, I think gaining and losing weight are just as hard. I had to control my diet, work out, and have a lot of self control to not lose the habits I was building. I folded and stagnated a lot, and yeah it was demotivating but I still had to make a choice to keep going.
Well, anything that can consistently be changed with hard work is ultimately a choice in the same way. Not everyone can deal with the amount of effort needed to lose weight. When you have accumulated awful habits, you need a lot of both time and willpower to change them.
But that doesn’t mean go out and harass fat people. Trust me we fucking know. You can’t lose weight instantly. Some of us may actually be working on it.
Also fat people have the right to be happy. People hating on “happy at any size” is just being assholes for the sake of it.
I agree completely. What makes me irrationally angry is when people say stuff like it’s there’s no correlation between being fat and being unhealthy. Like if I went to work drunk or started smoking cigarettes or doing weed, people find it acceptable to be concerned and try and help me be more healthy but you can’t mention it at all if I’m stuffing myself with unhealthy crap.
I agree with you. I don’t go out of my way to hurt big people and I don’t outwardly do so on ourpose. I just have to catch my initial bias and push it aside first, which I’m working on, I know it’s a me thing, for sure.
I agree “happy at any size” can be an acceptable attitude, for sure, but I disagree with “healthy at any size”. Obesity puts stress on organs and body parts, simply just because of the extra weight, even if everything else is fine.
Oh I’ve actually been told by fat people that there’s no way that I actually enjoy working out and that I’m forcing myself to go to the gym while not enjoying it.
Guess it’s weird I like improving my physique and enjoying seeing how I can reach new goals ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I used to agree with you and still do in a way since I have quite negative attitude towards fat people. However I now realize that while calories in - calories out applies to everyone we’re still different especially in the way we experience hunger.
I’m thin and fit myself but I eat like shit. What differentiates me from fat people however is that I only eat about 3000kcal of shit and then I’m full and it may take quite a while before I eat again but I also go to gym and mountain biking and stuff so I use all the calories too instead of storing them as fat. I also sometimes simply just skip dinner altogether because I don’t feel like eating. I’m just lucky that I can still function just fine even with an empty stomach and I don’t experience aggressive sense of hunger like some other people do. Also I hate cooking and eating. Takes too much time.
My theory for why this is is that my body is just better at switching from carbonhydrates to burning fat (converting it into glucose) and thus I don’t experience the drop in blood sugar levels the way some other people do to whom it takes a while for this process to kick in so they crash hard after all the carbs are used up.
After I got diagnosed with some weight related shit, I turned my entire life upside down, am at a much healthier 150 lbs (68ish kg), and feel so much better, both physically and mentally.
Something disillusioning from the field of psychotherapy research: Our best, most interdisciplinary, low-threshold therapeutic strategies allow people to, on average, lose and hold the loss of up to 7-10% of the weight they’ve started with. Which isn’t even enough to get most people out of the obesity range. What you’ve been through is exceptional. By far most people will never manage to lose that much, not even with professional help.
To put it this way: If we look at obesity like a mental disorder it’s one of the hardest to overcome, harder than depression or anxiety.
I get why so many people share your opinion on this, I just feel like it’s missing context. Because sure, physiologically its possible for a depressed person to “just go out more” or an anxious person to “just stop breathing so fast” or an overweight person to “just eat less and move more”, but this is such an oversimplified way to look at how humans work and why they do what they do that is simply stops being correct. Every now and then you’ll meet someone who managed to do all this just like that, but for the vast majority it’s an unrealistic and unfair thing to ask.
Obesity is a chronic disorder and will continue to be until we get better treatments.
I would’ve thought you would’ve learned kindness out of that ordeal. Didn’t people make fun of you? How’d it feel, even if you knew they were right? It’s just rude and inappropriate. There’s no need. eve
But I’d be lying if I said my initial impression was anything except “God, what a lazy, fat fuck.”
Sounds like envy. Working out is painful and exhausting, you aren’t allowed to eat tasty things except on extremely rare occasions, and that “lazy fat fuck” has neither of those problems.
Unfortunately if this is the only route to losing weight that is out of reach for many, many people who are already getting totally fucked by the system and struggling to get by.
There are a lot of people with eating disorders that result in them being overweight. Some people who have been neglected and abused as children can turn to food as their only source of comfort. If you have not been safe as a child, you will likely not have a basic sense of safety as an adult. If no-one has been kind to you and took care of you, you will likely not know how to be kind to yourself and take care of yourself.
So, you use food to feel safe and to get a sense of comfort. You use it to numb the feelings, to feel something nice. Because you do not have the resources to cope with the world that others that were loved as children do have, you do not know how to deal with it another way. And you survive and fight to make something of your life after all that has happened to you.
And then you get overweight. And society will tell you that it is your own fault. That you should show more restraint. That you just should eat less. That you lack willpower. That you are repulsive. That you are inferior to people who are not overweight. That you are unlovable. Basically, that you are everything that they used to tell you that you were when you were a child.
And you try to lose the weight, but you feel awful. You feel unsafe. You have nothing else that gives you a nice feeling. People will compliment you and be nicer to you and say that you look better. But you are constantly stressed. You think about food day and night, constantly, until you break. And you eat and you gain the weight back, and more. And you will feel like a failure, and you will feel unlovable and repulsive. And you do not know how to deal with these feelings in any other way than by eating.
And so, the stigma around being overweight actually makes it more difficult to love yourself and to be kind to yourself. The focus on food and the idea that everything will be okay if you just lose the weight will make you put all your effort into weight loss, instead of solving the real problem. Namely, that you need to process trauma and find other ways of coping with feelings and the world.
I think this is what is happening to a lot of people who are overweight. And they might not even be aware of it. They might think it is just about food, because that is what everyone is telling them. That they should just work harder at losing weight. That they just should have more willpower.
But I think that many people who are overweight do not lack willpower at all. They have survived horrible things. They did not get basic life skill lessons that others did. They did not grow up with a sense of safety and feeling good about themselves. But they survived. And they try to make something of their lifes. And that takes a lot of willpower. And for them to get better and to lead a more happy life, they need help with learning new ways to cope, they need their strength to be acknowledged, they need to be accepted, and, above all, they need to be loved.
I try to be nice to everyone as none of us are perfect and fat is just a more easy to see imperfection, right?
But as far as it being mostly lifestyle choice, I agree. I am older. When I was in school there was ONE fat girl, Tanya, and a few “husky” boys. The rest of us were thin.
Do I think Tanya chose to be fat? No way. I think she had some medical issue that made her body hold on to all that fat. But I think the natural incidence of that sort of issue cannot have increased, in one or two generations, from that 1/400 to 1/3. It’s not possible.
Being overweight is an overblown focus on people’s health. Most mildly overweight people lead a normal life. There are more important focuses that also impact weight gain without all the shame.
I’m 265 and 5’9", and I spent my whole life feeling like this was my fault. I’ve changed my diet, I’ve tried exercising, but I was always met with extreme difficulty. I thought exercise was supposed to be difficult and I was just a big baby. People would say, you just have to build up stamina. It gets easier. But it never did. It would get to the point where I’d be crying and pushing myself and still not accomplishing as much exercise as even an average unfit person could. I’d walk a few miles every day and never build stamina, never feel better, never lose weight.
I just found out I have an issue with my pituitary gland, likely a tumor (going for a scan). I just had the tests to confirm the issue is in my pituitary (the tests were miserable). I’m actually not producing certain hormones, so it turns out I’m incapable of building muscle. That’s why I can’t build stamina or convert my fat into muscle. I’ve been told this was “almost certainly” my issue for 2 months, (after my mom, aunts, and cousins were all diagnosed; we likely share a genetic defect causing pituitary tumors) and I’ve had the confirmed test results for over 2 weeks. It’s really hard to shift my perspective away from “this is my fault, I just need to try harder.” I expect to battle with health insurance a couple weeks to months before getting my hormone replacement. My mom only took 2 weeks (averages 2 months), so fingers crossed.
I’ve always thought more people were overweight for medical reasons than assumed by the general population, I just didn’t think I was one of them. I see a lot of moms like me hustling after their toddlers, eating well, trying their best, and still being overweight. I wonder if it has something to do with all the “endocrine disruptors” I’m always hearing about. I definitely think some people are overweight “by choice” (or by a mental disorder rather than a physical one), and I have major problems with “fat positivity” (I believe in body neutrality), but I think it’s more people having a medical problem than you’d expect. Same with my wife and child who both eat like horses but have BMIs of 13. It’s not like they’re not trying to gain weight.
As a disabled person who struggles to maintain a healthy weight, I’ll tell you that yours is not an unpopular opinion. I know that mine is not the typical experience, and there are far more people who are overweight for reasons within their control, but let’s not pretend the people celebrating obesity are the norm.
Regardless of your problems, shame is never productive. Looking down on people you perceive as “fat, lazy fucks,” is just a way to make yourself feel better about yourself. “God, I’m glad I’m not like that piece of shit anymore.” It’s a form of self loathing, hating the way you used to be.
Be kinder to the person you used to be. That person probably could have used to positive support and thoughtful advice. Maybe then you wouldn’t have needed to turn your entire life upside down just to get healthy. Don’t be ashamed of your past choices. Own them, recognize why you made them, and learn how to be a better person tomorrow.
Me as an instance admin sitting here reading about how Lemmy doesn’t have trolls and Russian bots, while I’m in a chat with other instance admins and mods where we need to actively coordinate to fight the trolls and Russian bots 😐
After hexbear got defederated from most of the major instances, the fucking losers just make alts on different instances so they can continue defending that propaganda filled shithole. Now .ml seems like the new worst, no matter what you do these no-life losers will find a way to spread their bullshit.
Takes much more effort to try and stop them than it does for these losers to make alts unfortunately.
Ml is run by the creators of Lemmy, and hexbear is well… Not. Hexbear made their own fork of lemmy a long time ago and only in the past year or so have they been actually able to federate at all. I don’t see the creators of Lemmy going through all that effort to hide their identities if they were actually running hexbear behind the scenes
Hexbear wasn’t federated to begin with for many instances, and Lemmy.ml hasn’t really changed as a result of Hexbear getting defederated by servers like Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ca, because Hexbear has a more secluded user-base. Hexbear intentionally tries to be careful with who they federate with.
Somewhere in Moscow, there’s a big red phone that connects to its counterpart in Beijing, where Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping discuss the latest attempts to influence an indie reddit spin-off with an elaborate network of Markov Chain LLMs producing comments like “I wish y’all wouldn’t be so nakedly racist towards people from other countries.”
That’s honestly pretty amazing that you’ve been here a year and haven’t seen a troll! Though you’re on an instance with a very active and determined admin, there is definitely a difference in how much you see between instances because of how removals work.
You guys are pretty proactive about blocking and defederating bad faith instances, or even ones not doing enough to deal with bad actors. You were one of the first to defederate Hexbear, and I think you even defederated world at one point?
Chasers are dangerous to the trans community and turn people into fetish objects, rather than recognizing them as people. It ignores the desires of trans individuals who wish to be seen as the gender they identify with and explicitly chases trans individuals for their being trans.
Ie, a transwoman is pursued for being a transwoman and not for being a woman.
Hey that was me back when I had a kbin account. I’m the account in the screenshot.
That was a direct response to someone asking if I would have sex with a trans man. I got accused of being a chaser for saying “sure, I guess, pre-transition” (the first part) and being a transphobe for saying “but I’m not sexually attracted to dicks” (the second part). Note those two accusations are more or less mutually exclusive, but it doesn’t matter because they’re both deeply, incredibly stupid accusations. The mods and admins of blahaj pointed out how incredibly stupid the accusations were, and some people didn’t like being called stupid, so they went back to hexbear. And continued to be stupid.
Because chasers undermine the expressed gender identity of trans individuals for the sake of their own sexual pleasure. Calling it “transphilic” is just semantical wordplay that dismisses the inherently predatory nature of chasers.
How is it undermining that and not affirming? I mean to fetishise a group is wrong, I get that and that is also my opinion but if they want to fuck a transwoman they want that because she is a woman which affirms the womanhood?
And the point is how is it transhate if you like the trans aspect specifically. Doesn’t make sense to me.
It is not a wordplay it is what those words mean. Phobic means something like hate or fear and phile means something like love or attraction.
Edit: as phobic means you want to get away from something or don’t want it to exist. Fetishising is the exact opposite.
If someone is arachnophobic that doesn’t mean he wants to fuck a spider or undermine the identity of the spider. That someone wants the spider be gone because it is a spider.
Did you read the original reddit thread? Chasers are dangerous to the trans community. It isn’t about being attracted to trans individuals, it’s about specifically seeking them out for being trans and fetishizing them being trans.
Can you not see how this may look if you are the trans person in this relationship?
I’m not stupid, I know it means “fear of.” Do you think Homophobes are “afraid” of gay people? What abiut transphobes? In the context of bigotry, phobia is used to refer to invalidating or undermining ones sexuality, gender identity, etc.
Literally talk to a trans person, or just read through that thread, it isn’t difficult.
Talk to trans people about how they feel about lumping anti-trans views into the “transphile” category because rather than being hated outright, chasers simply prey on trans individuals and undermine their gender identity in a sickeningly fetishizing way.
This is the most bizarre stand I’ve seen someone take online, and that’s really saying something. Phobic means an irrational fear or disgust off something, these people are clearly neither afraid or disgusted of trans people.
I wrote a lot more than 1 sentence in the beginning and linked a good thread with a bunch of trans individuals discussing said topic. They aren’t adding anything, just playing semantics with philic vs phobic.
To use an analogy, imagine you’re fat and trying to lose weight. Someone admits they are attracted to you, “sure, as long as you’re still fat”. Can you see how this would not be a good basis for a healthy relationship? You could even say it is a sign of a “chubby chaser”. Likewise for transness.
Also, people are overly sensitive because being denied full/legitimate relationships is a frequent pain point for trans people (esp trans women). The classic trope is the boyfriend who will take you on dates but refuse to introduce you to his friends/relatives.
So yeah, I can see why a queer friendly instance would defederate an instance whose admins promote/defend that sort of rhetoric. Hexbear might have jumped the gun (as I told them at the time- the turnaround time was less than 24 hours and the head admin had no chance to respond) but the blahaj admins weren’t great either
You could even say it is a sign of a “chubby chaser”. Likewise for transness.
Yeah, if you’re deeply stupid. Or, as you suggested, so traumatized by life that you have no understanding of normal human interrepationships. Just because you are open to the idea of having sex with a fat person, that does not make you a chubby chaser. That’s not at all what that means.
In your analogy, the proper response for the fat person would be “that makes me feel bad” and NOT “you are a bad person”. Take some ownership for your feelings. People are allowed to have sexual preferences. That is 100% normal. If it’s triggering for you, then it’s on you to manage your response, not lash out.
Also, people are overly sensitive
Understatement of the year. I think we need to acknowledge that some trans communities can get extremely toxic. Woe unto you if you get caught in their crosshairs for whatever reason. Sure, this may stem from trauma or transphobia/discrimination, but we shouldn’t pretend it’s not a thing.
My pet theory is that trans people are excluded from so many groups that groups of trans people by necessity get very insular. And insular groups tend towards shittiness, almost universally.
It’s not just being attracted, it’s being attracted conditional on the person having x characteristic (that they might not even want to have). That’s the very definition of fetishizing/objectifying and it’s not toxic to criticize it.
I will grant that this is more of an issue for relationships than for hookups etc. As a wise woman once told me- chasers are gross, but they also help pay her rent, so really it’s impossible to say if they’re bad or not.
Potentially yes, they can exhibit similar patterns. In fact lots of cishet women have also complained about being objectified because their (potential) dating partner is attracted not to the whole package but to a specific part of them- it’s a classic feminist talking point. The “chaser” label gets added when the person being objectified is marked as deviant in some way. But it’s def not just cishet men who are capable of it.
Some people like being fat. Some people like being women.
A person who likes bobs and vagene entering a committed relationship with a trans man would be toxic. Ditto for a person who likes fat people entering a committed relationship with someone who is trying to lose weight. That said, firstly, I don’t see anything wrong with a one-night stand in either of those scenarios, which is what the original question was, and secondly, more importantly, you’d have to stretch really hard to say that a person who’s into a little chub and a person who’s perfectly happy having a little chub entering a committed relationship is in any way problematic. OP is into women. If anyone unironically tries to call someone a pussy-chaser I’m going to recommend them for commitment.
OP saying he’d have sex with a trans man who hadn’t transitioned yet is no different than a lover of booty saying they’d have sex with someone who hadn’t lost weight yet. Sure, it might be a little confusing and/or disheartening for his potential sexual partner to be told that he likes them for the one aspect of themselves that they’re working to change, but if it’s only for one night, and that person otherwise has a good support network, and, most importantly, it’s two consenting adults, I don’t see the harm.
Ok I went and looked it up, the original question in the screenshot was about specifically dating and specifically trans men. Not a one night stand, and not someone who likes being a woman
Welcome to IT. If everything is on fire, they ask why you’re even here, and if everything is ready for the fire and there’s nothing left to do, they also ask why you’re even here
I don’t mind costing them the effort or $10 for a new domain
Incidentally I have several domains with DNS provided by freedns.afraid.net, which allows sharing domains. Everyone who asks for a domain under any of mine just seems so very sketchy. Now I have to worry if they’re a nazi looking for a new domain to get banned
the 0.19 implementation is so half-assed I genuinely think the Lemmy devs just don’t want that functionality but expected quite a lot of backlash if they outright said as much, so they decided to implement something that ticks the box in the “wanted features” list without having any effect
afaik it only blocks communities and explicitly lets users from blocked instances through
Feel free to make open an issue to improve instance blocking. Or better yet a pull request. We are only a few devs with limited time, and hundreds of issues to work on.
The thing that actually worried me a little bit more was people upvoting the aggressive comments to be top comments.
I was reading some thread over at !politics today, and a lot of stuff advocating for political violence were the top comments. Mods yanked it, but nevertheless, people were vibing with some comments about dragging people through the street. I felt like I was on X/Twitter.
Yeah, I think it’s a legitimate and growing problem. I think a lot of folks don’t realize, but since growth has slowed from Reddit more broadly, the people who feel they have been “unfairly silenced” are the fastest growing subpopulation around here. If I’m honest, I think the only real antidote is to reestablish growth from communities with kinder dispositions.
We don’t need to take from nicer communities, we need to build nicer communities. Right now there aren’t any left wing instances, which is a big problem. It was nicer back when lib.lgbt existed.
Well remember that any instance you federate with also gets to vote. If you feel like votes aren’t matching your values, perhaps you should try an instance with more of the “aggressive” stuff defederated.
Possibly, although those instances also have less content. I remember starting out with a BeeHaw account like many of us here. Trade off was often less content, no ability to create your own communities, but less people lashing out at each other.
Beehaw is very selective though (and that’s fine). There is a middle ground between lemmy.world and Beehaw though.
But you said elsewhere that you go on American political communities. I’m not American but from what I’ve seen, it is hardly surprising that those places would be toxic. I think at this point, arguing US politics online seems like a lost cause. You’re probably better off discussing politics IRL.
There you go, that’s your problem. Political topics always gets heated and brings out the worst in people, no matter the platform. The first thing I did is block all politics (and general news + sports) communities, and it’s been a fairly pleasant experience so far for me, except for the odd troll or fanboy that shows up every now and then.
You read my mind. It’s the same feeling I got when a reddit sub would degrade into a toxic circle jerk, and I’d have to unsub. Except it feels like it’s a lot of lemmy communities lately. I feel like I can’t respectfully disagree with anyone without being met with ad hominem attacks. I don’t think something like changemyview could survive.
Also reminds me of those anti-moderate subs, which is a sentiment literally synonymous with radicalization. I’m all for free speech, I would just rather they state whatever take they have with a calm, measured demeanor.
Hexbear called me a troll for being further left than them. They thought I was an extreme caricature of a leftist for saying things like “xenogenders are real” and “slurs against disabilities are bad”. My presence was actually critically destructive because I had effective points against all their reactionary opinions that made it impossible for themselves to honestly call themselves leftists. Now it’s against the rules to like me on there. That’s how bad I was for them.
Longer real answer: The current Chinese calendar is not 4721 years old. It was developed right at the end of the Ming Dynasty, in the 17th century AD. The current calendar is based on direct observations of the exact positions of the sun and the moon, and so it is inherently precise and future-proof.
Since I am a massive calendar nerd, I will now delve into the gory details.
The civil day runs from midnight to midnight, Chinese Standard Time.
Each month begins on the day of the new moon. It doesn't matter if the new moon happens one second after midnight or one second before the day ends, if it falls on that day, then that day is the start of the month.
A year usually has 12 months, but sometimes has 13 to keep things aligned with the sun. The ecliptic is divided into 24 equal parts called solar terms (jieqi), of which the even-numbered ones are called major solar terms (zhongqi). The zhongqi include the instants of the solstices and equinoxes. A month normally contains a zhongqi within it; if a year has a leap month, the leap month is the first month without a zhongqi. The leap month has the same name and number as the preceding regular month. (If the Gregorian calendar did leap month, it would be like going January, February, March, Extra March, April...)
The 11th month of the year, by definition, is the one that contains the southern solstice (which in China is the winter solstice). If there are 12 months between that month and the 11th month of the next year, then the year to come is a normal year with 12 months; if there are 13, then one of those 13 months is a leap month. Most commonly, the leap month is part of the year to come, but occasionally it falls after the 11th or 12th month of the year coming to an end.
The calendar year has nothing to do with the age of the calendar; it is the number of years since some important event. The Gregorian calendar, for example is on year 2023 as of this writing, but it is not 2,023 years old; it was introduced in 1568, but counts years from the birth of Jesus (or rather the nominal birth; historians and Bible scholars generally agree that Jesus was actually born closer to 4BC). The earliest known Chinese calendars date to the Shang dynasty, and assumed a tropical year of 365¼ days. Under the influence of Indian astronomical treatises, calendars were designed that closely matched the length of the sidereal year, but Chinese astronomers noticed in the early Han dynasty that the tropical year is slightly shorter than the sidereal year, and adjusted their values to match.
Calendar reform was seen as a duty of the emperor, as it was right and proper to make timekeeping accord ever closer with the seasons. To this end, every emperor was expected to commission at least one calendar refinement, though not all of them did so. Such was the importance of accurate timekeeping that foreigners were invited to bring astronomical knowledge and methods to China. Muslims astronomers in particular were sought-after due to the impressive astronomical knowledge of the Muslim world.
Jesuit missionaries arrived in China during the reign of Emperor Deyue, and impressed court officials with European mathematical and engineering insights. The emperor heard about this and decided to put them to a test. He tasked the Christians with predicting the exact time of the next eclipse, and also tasked the Buddhist and Muslim astronomers in his court with the same task. The Christians were naturally eager to impress the emperor, and quite reasonably figured that converting him would do a great deal to Christianise the rest of China. The Christians knew about the mighty logarithm, and their calculation of the time of the eclipse was most accurate. The emperor was impressed, and tasked them with designing the latest iteration of the calendar, which is still in use today. He was also initially receptive to Christianity until they got to the part where he would only be allowed to have one wife at a time, and no concubines. Upon hearing this, he decided that Christianity wasn't for him, and Buddhism was really more his speed.
So if I got this right, instead of defining the number of days in a year like Julian calendar, the Chinese calendar goes off lunar cycles with extra months as necessary (according to lunar and solstice cycle). Thus it naturally didn’t run into the problem the Julian calendar had with defined number of days. Right?
Same way you get to be any other kind of nerd - by getting really interesting in something.
In my case, I'd had some interest in calendars for a while, ever since I came across this converter. I'd also always wanted to learn programming, but my previous efforts just kind of fizzled out.
In 2020, I had some COVID-related downtime, and decided to use it to learn programming again. I worked my way through a book on Python, and when I finished, decided that the best way to practice was to write a real programme. I figured an extensive calendar converter would be a good way to learn, since it's all just maths. Writing a converter involved doing research to learn how various calendars work, writing code, and comparing it to existing converters and historical data. This in turn led to finding out about more and more obscure calendars, and I just became obsessed with tracking down vague hints and references.
The Chinese calendar in particular took me about a year of admittedly sporadic work, plus a lot of frustration, to figure out, because while there are plenty of descriptions, most of them are poorly-worded and not very descriptive. I also ended up having to write a whole library in Fortran to calculate the position of the sun and the moon. Yes, Fortran.
Right now I'm trying to figure out how traditional Indian calendars work, which is a whole challenge because they're even less-well documented than the Chinese calendars, and what documentation I can find tends to result in dates that don't match official dates.
I've put my notes on the calendars I've so far implemented here, with sources. Some sources are sketchy, but were all I could find.
We have been dealing with some DDOS attacks and are still taking extra measures to get everything more stable but we are working with people in different timezones so it’s not always as easy to react.
Sorry for being a bit harsh, but I have little sympathy for the admins of lemmy.world. Instead of looking for ways to disperse the people around other instances, it seems that the people behind .world are rushing to grab mindshare and concentrate as many people as they can in their own servers.
The threadiverse is not healthy when almost 50% of the active user base is in the same instance. The lemmy.ml admins basically shut down their instance for registration and said “please look elsewhere”. Why can’t you do the same?
They’re not advertising or telling people to come to lemmy.world… people are coming here and they’re just accommodating them instead of blowing them off
To be honest, what upsets me is the amount of communities that already existed elsewhere but they decided to recreate under their own service. Why does everything need to be under their umbrella? Why not point the users to the already existing communities? It would even help avoid the issues they are having now.
It’s not that we can not handle the load caused by users or by the amount of communities. It’s because of DDOS attacks and even with cloudflare some of these attacks are challenging due to the way lemmy works. No instance is safe from these attacks but the bigger instances get targeted. We weren’t the only instance that went down today.
I don’t think we do anything wrong here? None of us are being paid, we all put in a lot of time and effort to keep things running. You don’t know how many passionate people are involved “behind the scenes” seeing you call out the admins of lemmy.world.
You can’t please everyone, and some people will always find a stick. But I still think a lot of people believe in our team, our policies and what we are trying to do here. If that’s not your thing, fine, you can look elsewhere.
I’d love to, except lemmy.world went on to a huge land grab, cloned every possible popular community on reddit and is not giving any signs that will stop. Almost 50% of the user base is unreasonable and it goes against the ethos of federation and decentralization. An instance going down should not be newsworthy, but because it’s so big (relative to the others) it introduces systemic risk and approaches “too big to fail” status.
The instance itself did not do a “big land grab,” users on the instances made the communities. And, as you should know, the fact that there’s a community on one instance doesn’t mean that the same topic can’t be on another, there are several of those kinds of duplicates.
I signed up for .world because I liked the policies, it didn’t seem to be heavily communist or hosted in an authoritarian country, and it seemed to be robust. Nobody told me I should make my account there; I saw zero advertising. I’m not sure what you think the admins did to make other people settle there.
And the fact that some people are donating to it in no way means they’re making anything like profit. The admins didn’t make a plea for me to donate anywhere that I saw, other than having the link in the sidebar, like many/most instances.
You seem to be taking frustrations out on people who don’t deserve it. If the stability problems become an issue, people will just make accounts elsewhere.
I’m not sure what you think the admins did to make other people settle there.
They opened the gates and let people come in without knowing if they were able to handle the influx of people. By presenting themselves as a place that could welcome everyone, they end up robbing the opportunity for other instances to share the load and to absorb part of the user base. This is what I mean about “land grab”.
A more sensible approach would be to have a feedback loop where they open up a limited number of spots, fill them, see how their instance and the overall fediverse behaves and adjust based on that new information.
You leave out the fact that @ruud was already running mastodon.world before all this. So he does have experience running a big instance. He had a team of moderators from mastodon.world that helped from the start.
The influx of people was never a problem, if you choose the right hosting provider you are prepared for these things. And the hosting company we use provides all those tools to help us grow. We started with a small server at Hetzner.de and gradually upgraded when it was required. They have no limits on bandwidth so that is also something Ruud looked at.
Anyway, you have a lot of say about how you would do things but you had a 3 years head start…
It’s not a technical problem, but a systemic one. Getting way too big relative to the rest of the fediverse paints a target on your back. There is a reason your instance is being DDOS’d while so many others aren’t and one instance being DDOS’d shouldn’t be have such an impact on the overall system.
My point is that the sensible thing to do would’ve been to limit growth of .world and let others catch up. This is what the lemmy devs did with their instance, this is what Hugo from masto.host did to his service (stopped accepting new customers when he got close to 50% of the users) and this is even what Eugen did with mastodon.social and mastodon.online in the beginning.
I agree with your point of view but there is nothing that can be done about it.
It does feel sad to see one giant instance have almost all users and all traffic for me too. I was hoping it would become a proper decentralized platform with hundreds of islands of different servers filled with people and communities.
But fine, we don’t always get what we want. I’m disappointed but will keep using Lemmy anyway. It’s not a big tech service at least which is wonderful, and most people are nice.
Yes, from my comments it seems that I am criticizing the people working on lemmy or trying to paint them in a bad light. I am not saying that what they are doing is wrong, just misguided.
And I totally agree, at least this is not (and will not be) owned by Big Tech.
I am sure that it has nothing to do with you having any financial gains hosting instances. And that you do it all for the good of federation: lemmy.world/comment/1510374
Yes you would do things differently if you were in our position.
He has the trust of every one involved. We are very thankful for the community supporting us as they do and it’s not because income is more than expenses now that it will stay like that. We expect donations to drop off at one point. But whatever happens we will always be open about this. Even you linked to information that is freely available.
I am sure that it has nothing to do with you having any financial gains hosting instances. And that you do it all for the good of federation.
Yes for both, without sarcasm. I don’t think that the donation-based model is healthy or sustainable and I would rather see more service providers like mine.
Actually, I like to see more providers that can make real money and prove that this is feasible. I’ve been running communick for more than 3 years already, and it has been nothing but a small money pit. The managed hosting side of things is just barely breaking even.
You just sound salty now that you quit your job to start a fediverse hosting company and it’s not working out the way you want. Donation-based models have been used for ages and it worked for mastodon.world so why shouldn’t it for lemmy.world? If donations and interest decreases we can always downscale.
Sorry you’re not breaking even, seems like running a managed hosting service for lemmy is not feasible
Donation-based models have been used for ages and it worked for mastodon.world
Maybe I wasn’t clear on the blog post. There are two objections to donation-based funding:
unless everyone working on an instance is properly compensated, it’s hard to say “it is working” or "it is sustainable"
it may work for particular instances, but it stunts the growth of the overall fediverse.
You might not see it that way, but my argument is that relying on donations hides the true costs of running the server from the users and (like in ad-funded business) distorts the “market” in a way that makes the overall system less efficient.
Is there a post or blog somewhere that goes into detail about why DDOS is such an issue with lemmy or activitypub? Or are you saying that about DDOS in general?
I don’t think people invented socially controlling practices because they found religion, I think they found religion to frame the invention of socially controlling practices.
Masturbation is a gratifying act that relives pressure to settle into a rigid domestic arrangement that serves to make more workers and soldiers, and create dependents that need fed, and whose well-being would be threatened if a parent became defiant and provoked the ire of elites.
Masturbation is good for the individual at the expense of the nation and its rulers. So it’s inevitable that priests would decry it as an affront against god, as that’s historically been their purpose.
Their statement started off with “I don’t think” which generally means it’s an opinion that may or may not have evidence. As long as they don’t present it as truth and fact, it doesn’t really need a citation.
That an opinion lacks evidence does not alleviate the requirement that its factual allegations be supported by evidence. “I don’t think the surface of the earth is curved” may be an opinion, but it’s a provably wrong assertion, and adding a disclamitory phrase to it doesn’t excuse the statement from evaluation.
Then you should simply call that person a dumb ass and move on in that scenario. And their statement was loaded with qualifiers that indicates to the audience to not take their claim seriously. This isn’t debate club or a Congressional hearing. It’s a niche internet forum.
Pretty sad when religion claims to abhor evil, happens to be the source of a lot of it. Right? I can’t name a single thing religion ever did for me other than make me miserable.
IMO, and without actual data to back it up, I reckon religion (and religious difference) is responsible for the most suffering throughout the history of humankind.
Yeah, no dispute here, mate. We’re pretty shocking like that. But I think religion stands out as an example of the worst, most inventive way we’ve come up with to subjugate and hurt people.
As a species, we’ve convinced ourselves that religion should be protected rather than inspected. We let lots of bad things happen in the name of religion. It’s bullshit.
I don’t think it’s the source. I think it’s a tool of social control that enables the powerful to create a bare minimum willingness to be ruled. For a long time the doctrine of Christianity was the Divine Right of Kings. Now it’s the Prosperity Gospel. The books did not change but the people with all the money and power ensured the church leaders who served their interest had most of the money and thus followers.
If we didn’t have religion, some other social construct would arise, and I’d argue, has arisen to fulfill it’s role. Modern economic theory justifies the current power order in an unfalsifiable way that reminds me of religion.
Religion could be a liberatory force in society. In fact it has been. The liberation theology movement in South America and numerous heretical movements in the late medieval period are both examples of progressive Christian social movements.
A person’s music taste seems to crystalize at some point in their teenage years. The bands you loved at 15-17 are probably the bands that you’ll love forever.
Likewise, I’m finding that my relationship with information services as a whole probably crystalized a while ago, and the new era of “apps for every individual thing” is just wholly unappealing. Give me a web browser to interface with your information. If I can’t get it done with that, I’m more likely to move on to some even older tech and skip your product altogether.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m late to bingo. And get off my lawn.
Me: “seems to” “at some point” “probably” while making a minor, secondary point. Others: Severely Triggered
For me it depends on the mood. New stuff is fun, but stuff I know can be instantly trabsportative to moods or mental spaces and it feels good. New stuff can be too mentally engaging if I’m trying to do focus work or zone out. I think I listen to less new stuff now because I’m usually wanting to zone out with music more than actively engage with it.
I don’t think that’s true. I like what I liked what I was a teen but more in a nostalgic kind of way. I definitely didn’t like harder metalcore in my teens the way I do now lol.
I don’t know if anyone growing up these days would actually like mobile app requirements if they took the time to think about why they’re required. Source: I’m one of them.
I’m finding that my relationship with information services as a whole probably crystalized a while ago
You are correct but it goes further:
Any tech that existed before you start school is completely natural and quite boring.
Any tech that is invented while you still care about new tech (this can be anywhere between 15 and 45 as it depends on the person) is exciting and cool.
Anything after that is squarely in get off my lawn territory and a bit scary and confronting.
Not necessarily… I grew up already in the era of apps, but have the same attitude. And I actually did actively use a smartphone during my tween and early teen years.
I had a buddy, and we talked in great detail about this. I chase challenges, and am always looking for the next big puzzle to muddle my way through. He chased freedom. He just wanted to be who he was and spend his time how he wanted.
My point is people are motivated by different things. Find your thing and pursue it. Don’t worry what anyone else is doing. You don’t answer to them, and they’re not any happier than you.
The caveat is don’t conflate freedom/motivation with being a dick. Live the life that you want to live, but if that involves disparaging certain demographics for ethically and/or morally wrong reasons, then maybe live a better life than the one you really want to live. This doesn’t apply to most people, but there are some out there that should read it and take it to heart.
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