Just some Internet guy

He/him/them 🏳️‍🌈

  • 11 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • A lot of them got sucked into the whole “the government is forcing it on you to control the population”, and they simply can’t comprehend that anyone would voluntarily wear what they now consider being the symbol of submission to the government. In their mind it doesn’t work and never worked and you’re just virtue signalling your support of the government. It’s wild and a lost cause.

    I’d expect it to get much worse now.


  • That should be mostly the default. My secondary Vega 64 is reporting using only 3W which, on a laptop would be worth it but I doubt 3W affects your electricity. It’s nothing compared to the overall power usage of the rest of the desktop, the monitors. Pretty sure even my fans use more.

    The best way to address this would be to first take proper measurements. Maybe get a kill-a-watt and measure usage with and without the card installed to get the true usage at the wall. Also maybe get a baseline with as little hardware as possible. With that data you can calculate roughly how much it costs to run the PC and how much each component costs, and from there it’s easier to decide if it’s worth.

    Just the electric bill being higher isn’t a lot to go with. Could just be that it’s getting cold, or hot. Little details can really throw expectations off. For example, mining crypto during the winter is technically cheaper than not for me because I have electric heat, so between 500W in a heating strip or 500W mining crypto, they both produce the same amount of heat in the room but one of them also made me a few cents as a byproduct. You have to consider that when optimizing for cost and not maximizing battery life on a laptop.


  • One thing to be careful with allowing some bending of the rules, is some are going to start testing how far they can bend the rules. Everytime you bend a rule you create a precedent for it as well, and you get into nasty fights of why was I banned but not them and have your clemency hit you right back in the face.

    If it’s okay to bend some rules, then that should explicitly be the rule instead. Offtopic discussions for example, you can have a rule be “all top level comments should be on topic” as a balance, so offtopic discussions can happen, just not take over the whole comment section. If you allow something, make a mod comment explaining why for transparency and set the right expectations: “This post is off-topic but is generating on-topic discussion so we’re keeping it.”

    Similarly, well designed punishments goes a long way. For example, automatic ban after N warnings can be unfair. What you’re really after is, you don’t want to be warning that user every day to stay on topic. So the punishment can be more like “more than 3 warnings within 10 days results in a 7 day ban”. But sometimes the situation is such, you can rack in 10 warnings in the same threads. So you can make the punishment account for that: “If you get warned more than 3 times during a 14 day period, you will be banned for 7 days”. Or per thread, whatever makes sense. Understand common mistakes community members do and how you can steer them in the right direction without being unnecessarily harsh.

    With those two combined, it shouldn’t matter if you moderate like a robot or not. The expectations are clear, forgiving and fair while enforcing some order for repeat offenders. The rules have the flexibility you need baked in so you don’t have to bend the rules.


  • Guarantee there will be questions of cost of setup, maintenance, and risks.

    And time moderating it, especially if they run their own. At least with Twitter/Facebook/YouTube, you get a lot of moderation for free whether you agree with it or not.

    And if they use another instance, there’s other liability questions about the particular instance to choose. If they’re gonna represent an official city account, you’d expect some cybersecurity certifications to be a requirement and all kinds of stuff, even if it’s a free service. The instance admins interfering, possibly steering opinions during city elections, etc.

    Nobody cares about decentralized social networks, the technology, or how terrible the other outlets are. For a municipality, you may want to focus on maintaining multiple channels of communications and ways to reach and engage the most users. You could then fold the fediverse into it as one more channel. Something they should keep an eye on. They’ll need a way to post the same content to all those channels with the least effort. Something easy that a trained intern or clerk can do.

    In this case IMO it might even be better to use something like Wordpress with the ActivityPub plugin, or alternatives to that. I imagine a city mostly posts announcements and stuff, so a blog that serves as both an official website and you can follow and interact with it from the comfort of your preferred social service sounds a lot more appealing than just another social media without that many users. Can even use more plugins to post to Facebook and Twitter as well, all from one place. Given the age of the board, they’re also more likely to know and care about Threads and Bluesky compatibility just because they have more users, and bureaucratic decisions are based on numbers. A nice graph showing if they join the fediverse they capture all the users fleeing Twitter by supporting AP and AT.


  • I went for a federated option specifically so that it’s resistant to one company going rogue like Reddit did with the API fiasco and the banning of every third party app that made Reddit great. That’s really the killer feature, if you’re tired of your admins you go to another instance. No need to protest and switch your subs to private, just move the whole community elsewhere.





  • It’s just not that good of a metric overall. Not just because it would be easy to fake it, but also because it would inevitably divide into tribes that unconditionally upvote eachother. See: politics in western countries.

    You can pile up a ton of reputation and still be an asshole and still get a ton of support from like-minded people.

    The best measure of someone’s reputation is a quick glance and their post history.


  • I think it is a circular problem.

    Another example that comes to mind: the sanctions on Huawei and whether Google would be considered to be supplying software because Android is open-source. At the very least any contributions from Huawei is unlikely to be accepted into AOSP. The EU is also becoming problematic with their whole software origin and quality certifications they’re trying to impose.

    This leads to exactly what you said: national forks. In Huawei’s case that’s HarmonyOS.

    I think we need to get back to being anonymous online, as if you’re anonymous nobody knows where you’re from and your contributions should be based solely on its merit. The legal framework just isn’t set up for an environment like the Internet that severely blurs the lines between borders and no clear “this company is supplying this company in the enemy country”.

    Governments can’t control it, and they really hate it.


  • The problem isn’t even where the software is officially based, it can become a problem for individual contributors too.

    PGP for example used to be problematic because US exports control on encryption used to forbid exporting systems capable of strong encryption because the US wanted to be able to break it when it’s used by others. Sending the tarball of the PGP software by an american to the soviets at the time would have been considered treason against the US, let alone letting them contribute to it. Heck, sharing 3D printable gun models with a foreign country can probably be considered supplying weapons like they’re real guns. So even if Linux was based in a more neutral country not subject to US sanctions, the sanctions would make it illegal to use or contribute to it anyway.

    As much as we’d love to believe in the FOSS utopia that transcends nationality, the reality is we all live in real countries with laws that restrict what we can do. Ultimately the Linux maintainers had to do what’s best for the majority of the community, which mostly lives in NATO countries honoring the sanctions against Russia and China.


  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.metoPiracy@lemmy.mlAI for torrenting?
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    9 days ago

    No. It could repair some files to make them playable, maybe, by extrapolating sections before and after, like a couple seconds missing there and there in a movie, but all bets are off as to whether it’ll guess right. I’m not aware of such tool existing.

    But if it’s a zip file, there’s no chance it can fix it. It’s much different than AI upscaling, because you don’t just need to find an answer that’s close enough, you need the exact bits because even one value off could mean the gravity of the whole game is off, as an example. If some files are encrypted then all bets are off, as that would imply breaking encryption.

    Also I’d look at what’s the missing data. Sometimes you can be stuck at 99% because the only seeder left didn’t download a readme file or something but the whole content is there.



  • Those kinds of problems aren’t particularly new (PGP comes to mind as an example back when you couldn’t export it out of the US), but it’s a reminder that a lot of open-source comes from the US and Europe and is subject to western nation’s will. The US is also apparently thinks China is “stealing” RISC-V.

    To me that goes against the spirit of open-source, where where you come from and who you are shouldn’t matter, because the code is by the people for the people and no money is exchanged. It’s already out there in the open, it’s not like it will stop the enemy from using the code. What’s also silly about this is if the those people were contributing anonymously under a fake or generic name, nothing would have happened.

    The Internet got ruined when Facebook normalized/enforced using your real identity online.



  • The logins aren’t federated, the content is. Each instance receives a copy of everything, and normally you browse other instance’s content from your home instance. In your case you’d access lemmy.one’s content from your home instance, lemmy.world. If the logins were federated we wouldn’t need those domains after our usernames!

    The email analogy still works for this: if you’re on Gmail, you don’t go log in to Outlook to send an email to your friend: from gmail directly, you send an email to your friend and Gmail’s server takes care of sending it out to Outlook.

    There’s browser extensions to help go back to your home instance, as the linking on Lemmy is sometimes a bit weird and you do end up on other instances every now and then.



  • Everyone’s approaching this from the privacy aspect, but the real reason isn’t that the cashier thought you were weird, they’re just underpaid and under a lot of pressure from management to try multiple times and in some cases they even get written up for not doing it because it’s deemed part of their job. They hate it just as much as you. Same when you try to cancel your cable subscription or whatever: the calls are recorded and their performance is monitored and they make damn sure they try at least 3 times to upsell you, even when it’s painfully obvious you’re done with them.

    Just politely decline until they asked however many times they’re required to ask and move on.