Yea agree, not a fan of “Meta”. But I think limiting who can use federated networks kinda goes against the federated nature of such networks. What’s next, we’ll have a centralized blacklist of lemmy instances.
This is mentioned in pretty much every thread but I haven’t seen anyone apply the theory to the fediverse. The second step is for threads to create features that lure people over from Lemmy (or activitypub). So are the people saying eee by extension saying they’ll move to threads from their current server because threads have a bigger and better development team?
I’ve been saying exactly this since the news dropped. I fully understand people being worried, but I haven’t seen a concrete pathway to damage that doesn’t involve meta-hating users moving over to a meta product.
Past performance is indicative of future behavior. Simple as that. Meta has proven that at every single turn they will do what’s profitable, not what’s best for the user.
they’ll move to threads because threads will be incompatible with the rest of fediverse (thread essentially defederate themself), and if most content is being posted in threads, they’ll move there (since they can’t access it from other instance)
this has happened before, such as
MSN messenger breaking compatibility with AOL IM (MSN wins since it got 95% market share)
MS Office doing obfuscation to their office file data to prevent FOSS editor like LibreOffice from rendering it correctly
Meta’s decision to work towards federation does need to be taken with a lot of salt. Corporations using open platforms or open source to make their money has always resulted in power imbalances that, left unchecked, may become impossible to solve without concessions from said corporation, or else [X] thing just gets hung out to dry.
You have to hope the people running that company understand that these problems exist, and actively work against ruining everything for everyone else that relies on it.
The problem is when bad actors enter the situation. Meta has no interest in being a part of the community, they want to take it over and commercialize it.
Still no. If you feel ostracized because your bigoted viewpoint isn’t welcome, then you should take a hint and stfu instead of crying about it. I don’t feel bad about not welcoming hatred and for treating it the same way it treats others. Your dog whistles aren’t welcome either.
So text-based Instagram with 70 million regular users and some brand accounts is hatred? Serious reality distortion field you have there. Well, Lemmy.World has not blocked Threads at the moment, so I’m alright and actually not crying at all. It is people like you who want to police what other people look at.
Maybe you should lobby to block Trump’s Truth Social which is an Mastodon instance full of actual racists.
The nice part about federated networks is that if you disagree, you can just move instances. Nobody is bound to the will of the admins like with traditional centralized social media
Is there yet a way to fully migrate a lemmy account like a Mastodon one? Otherwise, “just move instances” isn’t great advice, it’s still having to start over. We need that ability imo or we’re losing a major benefit of being federated.
Meta has the right to join the fediverse, but instance admins have the right to defederate from them. If a user doesn’t like that, they can make an account with another instance. How does it go against “fediverse principles?”
Disagree. It should be up to the individual USERS to have the freedom to block whatever user or instance that they want. Honestly the whole point of the fediverse is just freedom and not being at the whim of some god figure overlord
It would be great if that was the way it worked, unfortunately right now it’s granular to the instance level, not user level. Not sure it’s even possible to get it down to user level unless every user runs their own instance which is unlikely to ever happen. The data has to live somewhere, so we need instances or instance -equivalent to host the data. Maybe if they get it down to where hosting your own instance is super easy one-click ordeal. Then each user would be truly in control.
or you know, just don’t use instances that have admins that are powerhungry, authoritarian, censorious dicks. (If you’re looking for a good mastodon instance like that, I’d recommend checking out qoto.org)
I think one can be “open” to a fault. If you cling to principles and morale for the sake of it and without exception or nuance, you set yourself up to be exploited or worse. Many things, entities, interactions in life contradict each other and it is important to set boundaries and make decisions for yourself. Because life and people are multi-faceted and aren’t nice and clean and perfect, which blind, naive idealism fails to take into account. The keyword here is nuance.
Many big tech companies run on greed and inhumane, unhealthy, invasive practices for the sake of pure, blind, unsustainable growth and profit. And I would argue that this is one of the driving factors of the fediverse even existing. If you don’t clearly separate yourself from these practices, then we all can simply use Reddit. But people create, maintain and use alternatives for a reason. Not taking a stance or action against what you want to escape from, even openly inviting it for the sake of being open and on a morally high horse makes simply no sense.
Idealists won’t like to hear this, but it’s the same with peace. Look at Ukraine to have a recent example. Most people want to live and prosper in peace. That is natural and desirable. But there are always some, who profit from war and who try to destroy things, disregarding the fate of others. Or political systems that want to expand territory and exploit / convert whole populations. When the desire for peace is only one-sided, and all attempts of talking or peaceful incentives fail, you can either protect yourself forcefully or be stolen from, raped, tortured, deported or murdered, watching your homeland be turned into ashes and those you love suffer for decades from the consequences.
In the same way, when the desire for openness, humane fairness without exploitation of users is one-sided, you have to draw a line and take a clear stance to defend that “safe space” you seeked in the first place from entities and principles that contradict it. And we have decades of clear evidence how big tech, especially Facebook / Meta operates, they are known to invade user privacy, strive for one-sided power, try everything to avoid or circumvent legal regulation. They have more than earned to be excluded from a place created to offer something better, healthier. And it’s not like we hurt feelings here, it’s a corporation, a virtual, soulless entity.
I can only speak for myself and do what I deem is good for me, so I’ll migrate to Lemmy.ml, because at least they have the balls to stay true to a concept, even if it involves difficult or ugly decisions. And even if blocking Meta won’t fully “protect” the fediverse, at least it is a clear message and limits the amount of power they can achieve and the amount of damage they can do here.
My many years of experience on the Internet has taught me that once the unwashed hordes of the public show up and start slinging shit around, that’s when your website dies if you like having intelligent discourse on it.
The article was a nice read. I’m surprised that there is either no awareness or discussion in the privacy conscious tech crowd over here on the lack of privacy from anonymous bad actors. Everyone seems to only care about Meta, who are bad, but the most they will do with our data is advertise to us. The other bad actors enabled by ActivityPub can actually doxx, redistribute, save our posts, messages.
I agree that the fediverse isn’t currently super privacy-friendly, although I think there’s also an inherent limitation to privacy on a social network since it’s all about sharing things. I view privacy as having the control over WHAT I share, with WHOM I share it with, and WHEN, and I get that moreso with the fediverse IMO. I choose what information I share, what I follow, etc. The major difference to me is that Lemmy isn’t tracking me elsewhere around the web like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, etc do. The big sites also save our posts and messages even when they claim not to, because things that are deleted are very rarely ever truly deleted.
I would appreciate the ability to send no-knowledge encrypted DMs here on Lemmy. But using PGP is not difficult, will guarantee only the recipient can read the message, and is a skill that everyone who uses the internet should be able to do anyways.
being open to everything is not better though, and being open to meta specifically will threaten and lower the quality of the place. lemmy.world should defederate with threads
You’re in no position dictate what an instance should or should not do. If you don’t like what an instance is doing, you’re welcome to join another one or start your own, that’s the beauty of decentralization.
As users, we have every right to express an opinion and to ask the admin to consider taking an action. As you say, if you don’t like it, join another instance.
The main thesis here is good, but that’s a mischaracterization of what people consider “failed” writers.
Someone who wrote one novel and had it published is not considered a failed writer, no matter if they then stop writing immediately. “Failed writer” is pretty much reserved for people who tried writing and couldn’t get anyone interested enough in it to publish it.
I’m not sure what labels would be applied to someone who exclusively pursued self-publishing, but that’s not really the common way.
Salinger is a classic example of this. One of the most celebrated authors of all time. He really only wrote one full novel and then essentially disappeared from public view. Despite this I don’t think anyone would consider him a failed writer by any definition
I think a better, but still not perfect, way to define it would be “This person wants to do X, but can’t support him/her/itself doing it.”
Of course, if you are already rich it doesn’t matter and then it is a bad metric (one of the reasons it isn’t perfect.) However, I think it is a better way to define it. Someone writing a few books as a hobby and then stops are not a failed writer, but someone that wants to be a writer but just can’t support it is.
Basically I think the intent matters, but that is impossible to measure (and people lie about it). So being able to do it as a profession is an ok metric.
This is sometimes practical, too. For example, hooking and extending functions in compiled code that will never be updated by the original author, while preserving the original executable/library files.
Extension functions are not the same at all. Extension functions are syntactic sugar. For example if you have an extension function like
<span style="color:#323232;">public static class ObjectExtension
</span><span style="color:#323232;">{
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> public static void DoSomething(this object input) { }
</span><span style="color:#323232;">}
</span>
You can call that function on an object by doing object.DoSomething() - Yes. But underneath it’s the same as doing ObjectExtension.DoSomething(object)
That function does not actually become part of the object, and you can’t use it to override existing functions
A closer example of how to do something similar in a memory safe language would be - in C# - using something like Castle DynamicProxy - where through a lot of black magic - you can create a DynamicProxy and fool the CLR into thinking it’s talking to an object, while it’s actually talking to a DynamicProxy instead. And so then you can actually intercept invocations to existing methods and overrule them
Generally overruling existing functions at runtime is not that easy
I thought you were talking about keeping an unmaintained library intact but building onto it.
I thought C was a really dangerous way to use that syntactic sugar pattern. Actual manipulation of the bytecode to maintain and extend a compiled binary is wild
This is sometimes practical, too. For example, hooking and extending functions in compiled code that will never be updated by the original author, while preserving the original executable/library files.
Your original comment made it seem more like extensions - extend and preserve. That’s the misunderstanding.
When I said it’s wild to manipulate bytecode I means “wow that’s a terrifying practice, I would hate to check that PR”
Fair enough. What threw me is that you said “bytecode”, which is generally not used when referring to hardware machine instructions. My original comment is about patching the in-memory image of a running program or library, replacing machine instructions in order to intercept certain calls and extend their behavior.
I thought my phrase “compiled code” would convey this, but I guess nowadays bytecode-compiled languages are so common that some people assume that instead.
Yeah and part of this is that the domain I’ve been working in for years now is very far from machine code, and I’m probably overly lax with my language here.
The result of being in very corporate app dev - I’m usually talking in much higher level abstractions. My bad on conflating bytecode and machine code
Sometimes what I’d like to be able to do is treat part of an app as a core and the rest like user provided scripts, but written and evaluated in the host language and not running an embedded scripting language like lua with all the extra burden.
E.g. you have an image editor and you want the user to be able to write native functions to process the image. Or you have a game engine and you want to inject new game code from the user without the engine being a compiler or the game logic being bundled scripts.
And then you can load plugin classes from all the dlls with dependency injection, and execute them though something like this:
<span style="color:#323232;">public class ImageEditor(IEnumerable<IImageEditorPlugin> plugins)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">{
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> public void EditImage(int[,] imageData)
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> {
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> foreach (var imageEditorPlugin in plugins)
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> {
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> imageEditorPlugin.BeforeImageEdit(imageData);
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> // Do internal image edit function
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> imageEditorPlugin.AfterImageEdit(imageData);
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> }
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> }
</span><span style="color:#323232;">}
</span>
This is a very simple example obviously, normally you’d send more meta-data to the plugins, or have multiple different interfaces depending on the kinda plugin it is, or have some methods to ask plugins when they’re suitable to be used. But this way a user can provide compiled versions of their plugins (in the same language as the core application) - instead of having to provide something like lua scripts
Agreed. It’s a very adult approach. C hands you a running chainsaw and whatever happens after that is your responsibility. It is also your responsibility to decide when it’s not the right time to use C.
C is dangerous like your uncle who drinks and smokes. Y’wanna make a weedwhacker-powered skateboard? Bitchin’! Nail that fucker on there good, she’ll be right. Get a bunch of C folks together and they’ll avoid all the stupid easy ways to kill somebody, in service to building something properly dangerous. They’ll raise the stakes from “accident” to “disaster.” Whether or not it works, it’s gonna blow people away.
C++ is dangerous like a quiet librarian who knows exactly which forbidden tomes you’re looking for. He and his… associates… will gladly share all the dark magic you know how to ask about. They’ll assure you, oh no no no, the power cosmic would never pull someone inside-out, without sufficient warning. They don’t question why a loving god would allow the powers you crave. They will show you which runes to carve, and then, they will hand you the knife.
Rust is like a paranoid overprotective guardian. A “mom friend”, of sorts. Always the designated driver of the group, keeps you from staying up too late, stops you from eating things that might be choking hazards without proper precaution, and so on and so forth. You’ll never meet a person more concerned with your health and safety – until, that is, you say the magic word “unsafe”. Suddenly the alter ego that their hypnotist implanted gets activated, and their entire demeanor changes on a dime. BMX biking? Bungee jumping? Inline assembly? Sounds like a great idea! Let’s go, man! Rules are for NERDS! Then the minute the unsafe block ends, they’re back to normal, fully cognizant of the adventure they just went on and thinking absolutely nothing of it. “Whitewater rafting with you guys was really fun, especially the part where Jason jumped into the water and I went after him! I’d best go get the first aid kit, though – that scrape he got when he did that looks like it might get infected. I know he said it didn’t hurt, but better safe than sorry!”
They kinda scare you when they’re like that, if you’re honest.
Oh man, the fucking sass in the comments of this post. You’re all so passionate about these things.
… And almost all of the arguments are whataboutisms. It’s a fucking race to the bottom with everyone.
All I’m going to say is that not voting is not a valid way to protest. That’s excluding yourself from the process, and letting others decide for you. Just go vote. I’m not going to tell you who to vote for, just go do it. Have your voice heard.
I realize this years vote for Americans will very likely turn into a competition of who is less bad of an option, but you need to still go out and cast a ballot. Please just do it. Please!
He was equally alert to the problem of voter fetishism: voters mistakenly thinking the vote is an exercise of power, when in fact power in a capitalist society is collective, social and located largely outside the parliamentary realm. Elections had a place, but they were no substitute for mass working-class action in the workplaces, streets and squares. Ultimately power must be wrested from the capitalist class in revolution.
For like 99% of people arguing that ‘voting is useless’ they are also not working towards any other method of improving society. Either by working towards unions, or effective means of protest or even violent revolution. They’re just opting out and doing nothing of value while feeling smug about being ‘above’ such petty squabbles.
If you are the 1% actually doing something of value that isn’t voting. Congrats, I guess? But I think I’m far more likely to convince someone to vote, which is at least somewhat helpful than I am to convince them to join a revolution.
Let’s hope you have the privilege to vote after Nov 5.
I can assure you they do not feel smug, or above the squabbles. They are probably more freaked out than the multitudes that think Trump can’t possibly win, or a Biden victory saves Democracy. It fundamentally sucks to see where America is headed, and be individually powerless to stop it.
noooooo lol that’s adults handwriting. Kids handwriting looks like drunken chicken scratch until they’re past 4-5th grade if they’re regularly encouraged to practice. The “neat” student handwriting I have seen is still marginally worse than this. The start/stop of the penmarks and overall uniformity is pretty telling imo.
Kids would be hanged if they wrote like that in 5th grade, atleast mentally, funny thing is everyone stops caring as you get older, so all that practice was just a waste of time
When I was growing up my teachers told me I had to learn good cursive because all of my collage papers would be hand written in it for context. So I know the feeling maybe lol. It’s really shocking how absolutely garbage kids are at writing now, at least where I am anyways.
Took me 2 hours to find out why the final output of a neural network was a bunch of NaN. This is always very annoying but I can’t really complain, it make sense. Just sucks.
That could be a nice way. Sadly it was in a C++ code base (using tensorflow). Therefore no such nice things (would be slow too). I skill-issued myself thinking a struct would be 0 -initialized but MyStruct input; would not while MyStruct input {}; will (that was the fix). Long story.
If you use the GNU libc the feenableexcept function, which you can use to enable certain floating point exceptions, could be useful to catch unexpected/unwanted NaNs
I’m telling you, there will be a streaming service that will deepfake ads into finished movies. Darth Vader will turn at the at the camera and say “No, I am your father… and you should buy the Elon Musk biography on audible dot com for free”
The catch is that you’re signing up for a recurring subscription, and Audible plays the hard sell when you try to cancel your subscription.
(If you’re determined though, this can be great for you. I think I’ve gotten a total of 5 or 6 audiobooks for free from Audible thanks to their free first month and “please don’t leave” unsubscribe flow and “please come back” emails.)
I was at a Cracker Barrel last night and among the random shit on their walls was an old checker board. The border of the board, taking the majority of the space available, was covered in ads. I guess it never changes.
That’s been going on since Blockbuster was a growth company. Like 20 years ago, for the TV (or maybe DVD, I forget which) release of Get Shorty, they 'shopped in an Oldsmobile Sillouette minivan as a product placement, replacing the original vehicle.
“Its the Cadillac of minivans.”
edit: Actually, the Olds was the one in the theatrical release, which got replaced with another make/model for TV. All the releases I can find so far include the Sillouette.
Slow down there, Satan. I kid you not, I had someone approach me to help develop technology like this a long time ago. The idea was to break into video streams at the ISP and insert advertising on the fly w/o prior approval.
My reaction, after realizing this person wanted to turn the internet into an ad-encrusted wasteland*, was: “What happens when that video stream is something live with a LOT of money behind it, like the Superbowl?” The legal and professional ramifications didn’t even clock with this guy. It was squarely in the “not my problem” category.
(* More-so than it is now. I’m not saying we’re getting off light, but this guy was a-okay with making everything look like the hallway bulletin board in a college dorm.)
Exactly. I tell this story to remind people that cynics aren’t just old cranks on internet forums. They’re also salespeople that decided to make some cash on our way to (consumer) hell, and they’re entitled to a turn at holding the pitchfork.
In places where you need to have emissions checked they should simultaneously check headlight alignment and brightness and enforce standards for these.
For the most part, I agree. LEDs are not the problem. The problem is either moronic drivers, or poor implementation of LED lights. As a driver of a very low car, the vast majority of my complaints about bright lights boils down to lifted trucks with ridiculous light bars, LEDs bulbs in halogen housings, or dufoids driving with their highbeams on. It doesn’t matter if the highbeams are halogen or LED, they’re both blinding.
That being said, there are cars with LED headlights that are blinding from the factory:
2023+ Subaru Outback.
Jeep Wrangler/Gladiator (compounded by having a factory or aftermarket lift)
Hyundai Palisade
Then there are the cars that are designed by morons that have all instruments in the center console. That makes it harder for drivers to see when their LED highbeams are on:
Toyota Prius
Tesla Model 3/Y
But there are plenty of cars with LED headlights that I don’t have any issues with. In my experience, Mercedes and Audi seem to do a particularly good job of having bright lights for the driver without blinding anyone else.
And there are plenty of other cars with halogen headlights that are blinding from the factory too:
Ford F-Series trucks with quad halogen headlamps
Dodge trucks
Chevy Cruze (or some other small to midsize American sedan, I can’t tell)
The luddites who want to strap jam jars with glowworms in them to the front of new cars are being ridiculous. Properly aimed LEDs are so much safer.
When I got my new car with LED headlights, I couldn’t believe how much more I could see. I could see fae down the road. Retroreflectors on lane markings far beyond the reach of my beams are visible. Pedestrians running across the street against the light wearing all black (true story) are visible! Despite clear lenses, new bulbs, and being correctly aimed, the halogen lights in my old Civic barely reached 100 feet down the road. My other halogen bulbed vehicle is better, but it’s still a far cry from what I’m used to now.
Notice how all the cars in the first batch are SUVs. It’s almost like having vehicles with headlights that are on eye level with most normal cars is a bad thing.
SUVs are genuinely one of the worst things to happen to the automotive industry.
I hate to tell you this, but SUVs are “most normal cars” these days. There’s a reason Ford got out of making cars, except for the Mustang. (And I say this as someone that dislikes SUVs and would rather buy cars.)
Part of it is how large trucks and SUVs are. The standard is that they have to point down a certain angle, but when you are that tall that is not enough.
We do in Germany, every two years. It’s not helping and I don’t know why. Maybe people are aligning their headlights correctly just for the test. Or the test is garbage. Next time my car is due, I’ll ask the guy.
There is a huge difference though when it comes to the intensity of headlights in the US vs Germany. Some cars in the US will light up the inside of your own car simply by driving behind you.
A big enough hit if 42% of Chrome users switch to a different browser.
However, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that people with adblock are more likely to use something other than Chrome. And some people will stay with Chrome and deal with the lack of adblock.
Google used to be like “we have found 10 quadrillion websites with your term” and you could click page 173 and it would give you the list for as many times as you wanted to click
Then they went to giving you several pages but if you clicked past page two they would be like hahaha psych there are actually only two pages of results for “starcraft two newbie tips”
Now I’ll search for specific phrases I know I read somewhere and I’ll get like, three god damn results.
Which makes this even more annoying. Like you have good chunk of the world using your browser with ads, but you still want even more and are still taking these types of scummy actions.
This is where I live. It’s called Oyak Sitesi in Turkey/Antalya and it’s a beautiful place with an actual community. Very affordable too. We just did a stability test and they were also very durable to earthquakes.
Just because you’re making blocks doesnt also mean that they have to be 20 stories tall either. Here is my old house.
Give a commie block a fresh coat of paint every decade or so and they can look good (though I just don’t like flat roofs. But that’s personal taste.)
But while a somewhat run down european style house can still have some charme for longer (guess I’m biased here) a run down commie block in gray and with cracks in the facade will quickly start to look depressing.
And as they are often chosen for cost reasons inside capitalistic environments, they are often neglected.
So, the problem is not commie blocks, but how they are maintained. And as often we tend to search for the extreme examples if we (dis)like something.
I happen to live in a city that’s primarily blocks (or as we call them: Plattenbauten) and honestly, they’re pretty good houses. The structure is sound, after some renovations in the 90s and 00s, insulation and comfort are perfectly fine, and the surroundings are usually very green and pleasant.
The only real problem is, that these buildings are somewhat away from the city center due to superior socialist planning, so they are not super attractive for younger people.
It wasn’t communists who came up with the idea of that type of building and it’s a common sight in many European countries, for example, which are not communist.
Yes, Ubuntu 20 isn’t EOL yet. A lot of those downloads are probably IT staff or developers that are running Ubuntu servers or developing on those versions.
ETA: We still have some RHEL 7 and clones at my day job
The facts became so undeniable that they’re forced to accept that things are changing, but now they insist that the changes are absolutely not related to our environmental fuckery but are a natural thing.
“Humans couldn’t possibly change the environment that much!” [gets in manufactured vehicle and drives an hour to work on a concrete roadway without seeing a single natural tree or animal]
I was so confused by “Insulate Britain” - I thought it’s some weird satire and the showsection is called “Insult Britain”. But growing-concrete guy was serious and that was a real news show - crazy.
The most obnoxious thing is that even if we were seeing natural warming, the greenhouse effect would still be a real thing we have directly observed on Venus and the dumbest bastard in the world should consider not making things worse.
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