matsdis

That’s a good book, not terribly deep but very much fun to read. I’m sure bots thinking they are human has been done several times. First show that comes to mind is Westworld, which is kind of centered around that idea.

As a pretty new user to PieFed (and Lemmy), I still find those combined feeds (“Communities”) confusing. It helped with discovery, but feels like I have been mass-subscribed and now need to unsubscribe each community individually. (I’m sure this is not the case and I just haven’t figured out how it works yet.)

In contrast, the cross-post feature (mentioned by sibling comments) was easy to understand, and looks like a great way to discover (and loosely connect) small related communities.

If you’re interested in human intelligence, don’t miss Joseph Henrich’s book, “The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter”.

It has a few fun examples where historical people follow seemingly absurd complex instructions/traditions that are actually beneficial, while nobody ever designed them or knows what they do. It puts logical thinking into perspective.

Telemetry is in Server -> General -> Allow Anonymous Usage Collection. When you opt-out, it also send a final message to the server that you’ve opted out. The the telemetry itself looks reasonable, I don’t mind sending it. It’s really just the dark pattern of opt-out vs of opt-in that bothers me.

The donate button is the heart in the bottom left menu (not visible in the settings). It’s unobtrusive. I wouldn’t bother to remove it, except the tooltip says that I have to pay to remove it - now it has to go. Asking for donations is fine, but asking for money to remove a button is disgusting.

I’ve set up Kavita for my e-books. Nice UI, looks promising, and I’ve added some books. I haven’t really used it yet, because half of this was just an excuse to try podman (instead of docker). I wanted to set it up to run as unprivileged user, without the docker daemon running as root. That wasn’t too hard, but it was definitely a few extra steps.

But something about Kavita didn’t sit well with me. Maybe I don’t self-host enough stuff to know what’s normal, but there is a donate button, which I don’t mind, but its tooltip says: “You can remove this button by subscribing to Kavita+.”

I’m donating to a few software projects already, and I have developed a substantial amount of free software myself. There is nothing wrong with asking for money. But what I cannot stand is when software running on my own device is intentionally acting against my interests. And this tooltip was very clear about not letting me do something that I might want to do.

So I checked the source code for more. I found another anti-pattern: telemetry is opt-out instead of opt-in. But that seems to be it, I didn’t find anything worse than that. So… fair I guess, if the author wants it that way. It’s still free software. It looks like I could delete all the Kavita+ stuff myself and re-build. Which I’m going to do if I keep using it. But this is now an extra step that prevents me from just using it, because I need to feel in control of what I run. Kind of self-inflicted, I guess…

That’s a good article. Here is a related deep dive: Pineapples! (PDF)

Because the pineapple leaves close their stomata during the day they don’t have the benefits of evaporative cooling! Plants heat up and unless there is a breeze to move the heat out of the field they are prone to plant damage, fruit sunburn and “cooking” or “boiling”. Growth slows when temperatures exceed 36°C and stops at about 40°C.