I am currently on the third book, halfway through. It has definitely kept my interest, but the plot doesn't really hold up to much questioning lol. Book 2 frustrated me for that reason.
I just finished book two last night. I’m enjoying the ride, but I admit that as the “how we got here” plot has unfolded in book two, I find myself a little perplexed. Maybe I just didn’t understand
spoilerThurman’s original motive. His line of reasoning is just not connecting for me._
Nevertheless, the books are riveting and I find myself looking for any spare minutes to pick it back up and continue reading.
I just finished book 3. Yep. I enjoyed the ride, but the plot seemed a little stretched the more things got expounded on. There was also some unnecessary filler that wore me out to read…
spoilerall the long-form expounding on every crisis, struggling, fighting, chasing puppy etc. scenes.
spoilerThe premise of Thurman’s design seemed a little “out there”. Having a competition that each silo was unaware of and only one being allowed to survive seems ridiculous. Humanity is always going to fragment. As populations grow, expand to different territory, local customs and rites will evolve. Limiting things to only one silo is just unnecessary cruelty. The argument of needing the citizens to forget everything about nano tech, and bombs…also ridiculous.
Just got a handheld emulator console, been trying some Pokemon rom hacks, Rocket Edition in particular. Been loving it! I’ve sort of lost the patience to sit down and play a longer game, so these handheld games are perfect for sitting down and playing for a bit while I watch a YouTube video. This is also the first time I’ve played Pokemon Pinball and it’s fantastic! I’m kinda terrible though!
Also my coworkers started a minecraft server and it’s been fun going back after years away from minecraft.
You could try audiobooks from Libby or audible. It’s not the same as reading the physical text but maybe it can help getting through books faster. For digital manga, there’s tachiyomi. Some are scanlations and some are official translations from old publishers like tokyopop and yen press.
With current synchronisation problem between instances, choosing a big instance is a no brainer. I don't want to use small instance and got 404 when searching community on other instance or when not all comments from other instances showed up.
This is a good point for not choosing too small. I’ve made a couple of accounts, and it looks like when a servers crosses that 1,000 or 2,000 user mark you start getting much better consistency than the micro instances with only a few hundred users.
I usually find that I have to reload a few times if I’m the first person to try to subscribe to a community. That happens uncomfortably too often if the instance is small. Even then, it can take a days or possibly never to properly federate.
I’m sure these issues will be fixed, but for now, I’d like myself a small instance but not too small so as to avoid issues with consistency.
there arn’t any sync problems currently. You’re posting just fine from kbin.social onto lemmy.world and it federated just fine onto my own tiny instance and so many others.
itl only search within communities at least one person on your instance is subbed to yes. and subbing doesn’t pull in hardly any previous posts, mostly just new ones from that point on
use something like this to help find communities, and perhaps retry searching on the home instance of a relevant community to search its entire history
if you do find something you want to do more than simply view, copy the post or comment url, and then search for it on your home instance for it to be pulled over so you can properly interact with it
When you go into the community search on your instance, make sure you select All instead of Local. You’ll get results from all of the instances yours is federated with then.
The community catalogs people post will often take you straight to a different instance—which is different from the one you made your account on and logged into—which is why you see a login prompt.
Searching from your instance with All selected will let you visit communities from any instances yours is connected with while you stay logged in on your home instance. Hope that helps, I tried to simply but it’s late and I’m tired.
I think I know what the issue is. I’m using wefwef/voyager. I think the search there is making it hard for me to find things. I’ll try on the computer. Thank you
I personally opted for kbin.social - I like the UI more, I like the community in the kbin-specific threads, and I like that I have the option to follow Mastodon users and interact with the whole micro-blogging side of the fediverse as well as using the "threadiverse" (Lemmy, etc). I think the occasional issues are bound to happen regardless of your instance, purely because it's such a new and growing platform. kbin's largely been rather stable, though.
The biggest downside for a lot of people is that kbin isn't supported by most of the mobile apps yet. Personally, I don't mind this - there's a PWA (progressive web app - essentially just a fancy bookmark to the mobile site that keeps it in its own unique browser instance with the tabs, menus, etc, hidden so it looks like an app) that works really nicely. The mobile site is really nice to use in general, so I've no issues just using this until a killer app comes along.
Similar thought process for me. The only downside I've experienced thus far is that once or twice a week, I'll get error messages when I try to interact w/ content (upvote/boost/etc).
I think I'll likely create another account when Threads joins the federation but kbin.social chooses to defederate 🤔
I chose an instance ran by the same person who owns the mastodon instance I am on, it’s not that popular compared to the big Lemmy instances.
For my mastodon instance I chose one based off of: being on the official list, region, how many people post on that instance in a day (too many posts = too many users), what kind of stuff they post and the rules I have to follow. You could follow the same idea with Lemmy.
For the most part, I ignore the main instance and just look at my subscription feeds through a 3rd party app. So far, nothing bad has occured from being in a small community.
Also, look for posts on Lemmy or Mastodon about updates for a particular instance. My instance is being updated often and is actively geared against the spam bots and ddoss attacks from the past month.
Whatever works for you, but I switched from Authy because it didn’t have the features I wanted, and I was uncomfortable with them holding my codes in a non-portable format!
I’ve tried many, but I always come back to SwiftKey. It was one of the things I missed the most when I tried iOS for some time (SwiftKey on iOS sucks).
Any instance, large or small, is only as good as the admin team running it. Ultimately, the larger instances have more content on their all feeds, are generally more stable, and are less likely to suddenly disappear. Smaller instances are generally faster, have more direct contact with their admins, and have more user control. Ultimately if you are having a good experience on lemmy.world you don’t have a strong impetus to switch, but I would maintain alt accounts with your subscriptions just in case. You can use a tool called lasim to port them from one account to another. Though I am biased, if you do decide to move to a smaller instance, I have a brand new one called lemmy.thesanewriter.com that I am currently the sole admin of that is accepting new users.
My federation policy is currently fairly open, I’ve only defederated exploding-heads and burgitt. I’m open to making it more restrictive but would like to hear user opinions first.
To summarize it for people that don’t feel like clicking the link, it essentially takes the log of the post score and then divides it by an exponential function of the time since the post was published.
After a day or so, the curve flattens out. This probably explains why we keep seeing posts that are months old in “hot” - if not enough new material is being posted, after the first few pages of “hot”, posts that are 5 days old and 5 months old are essentially the same due to the exponential decay function that was chosen.
That page gives this equation:
<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">Rank = ScaleFactor * log(Max(1, 3 + Score)) / (Time + 2)^Gravity
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Score = Upvotes - Downvotes
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Time = time since submission (in hours)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Gravity = Decay gravity, 1.8 is default
</span>
My guess is that the “gravity” parameter is the issue at the moment. Something is needed to make the decay less steep, so that really old posts aren’t making it up to the top of the feed.
There might be some way of tuning the gravity parameter dynamically based on how much content is being submitted, perhaps aiming for something like “the average age of the first 200 posts should be 10 days” (I made those numbers up, but the basic idea would be that the time decay should be steeper when lots of content is submitted and less steep when content is infrequent?)
thanks for the explanation! I wonder whether it is possible, or rather scalable, if users can pick their own parameters, even define their own functions. Is this calculated and cached at the server side or user side?
So who can change the algorithm? Is it up to the admins of each instance (lemmy.world in my case) to change the numbers? There’s not a centralized formula that each instance refers to is there?
Technically every admin could change it by making the change to the code and recompiling it. Practically it's just code contributors to lemmy development.
Maybe you want a more neutral and stable metrics for a dynamic measure of the gravity? Otherwise you can flood Lemmy with new posts to bury something.
Maybe something related to the average number of active users over the past 30 days over the topics you are looking at, which is harder to alter. But regardless, the steepness is definitely an issue as it should change with the number of posts.
Yeah - agreed. I don’t know the best solution. The other issue is whether the algorithm is being applied to all feeds and communities in the same way. The experience will be quite different if browsing all on a highly federated, high activity instance, compared to just looking at your subscriptions or browsing a lower-activity single community. Maybe the answer is just in general to decrease the steepness of the curve.
After all of this, I will amend my response to say that I think that there must be something going wrong with the algorithm. Consider these two consecutive posts on my “hot” feed:
The anti-vax nonsense from two years ago was appropriately downvoted to hell. The post right underneath it is one year old and has a post score of +13. Based on the equation above, the lower post must have a higher rank than the anti-vax post, as it should have both a higher numerator and a lower denominator.
Time for a review of the source code? Or am I missing something? Do other people see this phenomenon? No older, lower-scored post should be above a newer and higher-scored post in your feed, I think.
Yeah - though I had thought that still the one should be higher than the other, even if the numbers are small. In the actual equation, this would be multiplied by a scaling factor of 10000, though. (See the code discussion in the other comments). Though, in this case, the rank would still be very close to zero.
What I had missed is that, in the actual code, the equation is wrapped in floor() and returns an integer. So both are treated as rank = 0 and maybe randomly sorted.
The question is why are rank 0 posts showing up at all? In my other comment, if you do the math, I think that it should take quite a bit of time for any post with an appreciable score to decay to a rank of zero. Yet we see that these sorts of old posts are appearing relatively high in the hot feed.
One possible answer was suggested in another comment – it may have to do with how often the scores are recalculated for older posts, and if some have not decayed to zero by the time that the score recalculation stops, they might persist with a non zero score until the instance is restarted. I’m still not sure that that is the right answer, however, because I am guessing that instances like lemmy.world (which I am using) have been restarted recently with the various hacking attempts?
Didn’t knew the value of the scaling factor, but supposed it didn’t mattered a lot when the denominator of the division is in the 10^(-8) range.
Another problem in my opinion is in the log(max(1,3+score)), anything with a score of -2 or less send the max function to 1, the log(1) to 0 and the whole score to 0, so the distributions of post with score 0 should be gigantic without discrimination of a controversial - something score post against something with a score of - thousands. Also, some malicious agent can just use 3 bots to totally fuck all the post on new.
And this is a great thing about open source software
Want to know how something works? Want to know the implications of something, or whether it is artificially manipulated? You can go directly to the code.
How does the algorithm work for other software, and is it authentic and not manipulated for other gains? Nobody knows except them, and bad stuff can be hidden away.
It seems to me that the issue might be that the function returns an integer. If the scaling factor is inadequately large, then floor() would return zero for tons of posts (any post where the equation inside floor() evaluates to less than one). All of those posts would have equivalent ranks. This could explain why we start seeing randomly sorted old posts after a certain score threshold. Maybe better not to round here or dramatically increase the scaling factor?
I’m not sure what the units of the post age would be in here, though. Probably hours based on the division by 3600? And is log() the natural log or base 10 by default?
In any case, something still must be going wrong. If I’m doing the math correctly, a post with a score of +25 should take approximately 203 hours (assuming log base 10) before it reaches a raw rank score of < 1 and gets floored to zero, joining all of the really old posts. So we should be seeing all posts from the last 8.5 days that had +25 scores before we see any of these really old posts… But that isn’t what’s happening.
Just curious, is this something that admins of individual instances could adjust for themselves? I could see some specialized instances being able to make use of a customized sorting algorithm for this.
If this is something that admins can adjust, does that impact anything with that content shared to or accessed from any federated instances?
I don’t think any of the algorithm is expose to other instances so that wouldn’t impact the communication between instances. At the end of the day this is open source so admins can freely build a forked version of Lemmy with a slightly different algorithm.
Played through Road 96 quite recently and it was definitely different. I did really enjoy it and as an anticapitalist lefty I could get into the overarching narrative quite easily.
I did not know about the Mile 0 prequel though so thanks for pointing that out. Wishlisted for now until a proper sale.
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