• 1 Post
  • 172 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
cake
Cake day: December 31st, 2023

help-circle
  • “very better”? Anyway…

    It won’t last. Right now it’s new, but ultimately it will become an actual initiation ritual to knock it down, or perhaps a harder version to steal something out from under its nose. It doesn’t know who you are if you wear a mask (or stay out of its line or sight) and don’t carry something broadcasting your IP.

    This looks like just security theater.

    Meanwhile, aren’t cameras cheap? If let’s say hundreds of those were sprinkled around, maybe behind an opaque substance so you could also put up 10-100x more of them but 9/10ths being fake, and you swap them around occasionally, that might not be perfect either but could work better than a robot offering a nice, easy, fun target to play with, just like in video games. (Nobody ever enjoys video games these days though, do they?)



  • I meant like a daily usage situation - e.g. working from a terminal, running MacVim, and things like Firefox and Slack etc. all work fine from a Mac - but I don’t self-host, and I run actual Mac OSX itself, so my answers may be of limited utility to you.

    If someone else is reading this I would look into running a Jellfin server from a machine running Linux, which can be connected to from a device running iOS or Android or whatever they want - but your kodi+mpd already sounds like it should do the trick.

    Hopefully you can avoid running Mac OSX itself, but if that’s not possible then perhaps at worst you could get a machine that does that and then partially isolate it on the network? (though that is beyond my skillset:-)

    For TV I just an ancient ChromeCast (iirc it’s a first-generation even!) and that works from everything (ironically one of the harder solutions was from Samsung mobile, though even ancient iPads have apps that will make it happen). I worry about when my TV and especially the ChromeCast dies what will I do - it will take so much time to investigate a replacement, it seems all/most of the newer solutions are trying to inject ads or whatever into the stream, or even just not working as simply as the old. Mine is security through obscurity, which only works for so long until the hardware flat wears out:-).

    And I barely have a backup solution - just a single SSD that I put stuff onto when I think about it, and is aging so when it too wears out… I have so much catching up that I need to do, I’m setting myself up for pain most likely:-(. But also I tend to “stream” most things rather than “download”, so my need for thus is extremely much smaller.





  • Tbf, cruelty isn’t the point. For the recipients of the most benefits of conservatives being in charge, things like lower taxes and free handouts to corporations etc. is the point. And to Russia and China, the point of the disinformation warfare is to distract while invading others countries. And to the voters themselves, they get to live in a fantasy dreamland where “God is in charge” (ignoring all those pesky parts of the Bible that say e.g. take care of widows & orphans, the worker deserves their wages, you reap what you sow, etc.).

    All the school shootings, all the lunch shamings, all of it, and it’s all a by-product of those real goals. Children’s actual lives, health , and mental health do not seem to matter in the slightest according to those precepts. 😭










  • The developers of Lemmy do not seem interested in anything less than banning people instance-wide, even from communities that they have never posted in before, so ironically shadowbanning is too subtle for them.

    But I thought the only way someone could be shadowbanned now is at the individual user level? It would be nice to increase transparency even further - e.g. a message pops up if you try to reply to someone saying like “this user has blocked you” (possibly everyone from that instance) so that people do not waste time trying to get a message across that the recipient will never read.


  • The version code hasn’t even hit 0.2 yet. Lemmy was founded by people who got banned from Reddit for being too toxic & extremist leftists, so went off to make their own replacement. They do what they like, and bc Rust is a difficult language to work with, not that many are willing to help.

    Then after Huffman’s debacle, we started to see Kbin, Mbin, Piefed, Sublinks, and perhaps more - but none even as advanced as Lemmy yet.

    But more to the point, that’s just the nature of an open network. Wouldn’t Wikipedia suffer from the same issues? Though less of an issue than a social media framework I would wager.


  • I want to have the ability to turn on my echo chamber, when I want it, and also to be able to turn it off, when I want to step outside of it for awhile. This doesn’t have to be a toggle - it could be having an alt on a different instance.

    I don’t want this choice made for me by people who think they know better how to run my own life than me. They can write an appeal that I will consider, but ultimately I want to make my own choice.

    Having votes be publicly viewable allows us all the freedom to do as we choose with that information - including to ignore them entirely. What I would probably do with it is make large block lists of people on lemmy.ml, since it turns out that user blocks of an instance don’t block all that much. Fwiw, for everyone I’ve blocked in the past, I look through the post history to see if they merely are being disagreeable on a particular matter but overall are capable of contributing something substantive to a conversation, or are nothing more than a troll, setting out to vomit their emotions upon everyone worldwide across the Fediverse.

    I’ve been a mod before, on Reddit, and am under no illusions anymore that everyone is worth listening to - a downvote from someone rational I will give serious thought about, but an idiot is an idiot, even if a community mod hasn’t banned them (yet?).

    It’s like autocorrect: feel free to make suggestions, but it would be nice if I could have control when I want it, including/especially not wasting my time.


  • Unlike commenting and posting, which offers the who, what, where, and when parts of the message passing process, voting on Lemmy (now, for non-admins) is inherently an unequal process. Imagine if someone could send you an email whenever they wanted, but you were prevented from knowing who or even from what instance it is from, or when it was sent, do you think that could open up a potential for some variety of abuse? Or texting, phone calls, showing up at your door, etc.

    Knowing the identity of the voter is an important part of properly receiving the “message”. It also increases freedom of choice, b/c otherwise the only way to prevent such messages (if, let’s take it as a given that some people find them annoying) would be to turn off voting entirely, either by going to one of the instances that does that, or just ignoring all (down-)votes yourself.

    If we want the Fediverse to grow, and in particular to include less emotionally stunted humans that actually care when someone says something about them, good or bad, this will be a necessity. (Also, I was speaking tongue-in-cheek there, but genuinely social standards do vary across this wide world, and it really would increase content if there were not only more but different types of people, especially those most likely to generate quality content.)

    And as other non-Lemmy methods of access to the Fediverse provide that feature - k/mbin, piefed, sublinks - Lemmy will fall increasingly behind if it were to ignore this very basic feature.

    Making the votes public also increases honesty, since they are already public now. And if you don’t want to know who down-(up?-)votes you then… don’t look? But for those who want to know, it will be a great feature to have.