• 0 Posts
  • 152 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle

  • All your old stuff will stay visible even after lemm.ee goes down, but it won’t be linked with whatever new user you create on another instance.

    If export and import of posts and comments was possible it would result in “duplicating” your posts and comments to your new account, which as you might imagine would be an absolute mess (not to mention technically infeasible - how would comment chains with other users work?) so you can presumably understand why it isn’t.

    It’s quite annoying for sure (and I’m a lemm.ee user too, so I’m also annoyed with everything I’m losing) but this is the trade-off we accept with federation that allows Lemmy as a whole to be robust and keep going even without lemm.ee


  • Captain Picard very much became a Captain to all of us, I think.

    Of course he’s got some flaws for sure (his stubbornness, for one!) but he really set the bar for what a civilised person and a good leader should be.

    He’s principled, fact-based, fair in his judgement, respects the differences of others (both individually and culturally), solves problems with understanding and empathy rather than force, and he’s forgiving of mistakes.

    And he does all that while still being a “strong” man. In fact, it’s these very traits which earn him the respect of his crew.

    I’m glad I had Captain Picard as an influence in my childhood, rather than whatever youtube channel trying to make me angry for all the wrong reasons.



  • VSCode is by far and away the best thing Microsoft has ever done. (I’m sure therefore they will ruin it eventually, but that’s a separate issue)

    Its good for two main reasons IMO:

    1. It is plugin-based

    2. It is (therefore) language-agnostic

    Plugins mean the DE starts as a very lightweight thing that is basically nothing more than a text editor. You can then add as much or as little as you want to get the level of features you are comfortable with but without being too bloated.

    And then, because it’s all plugins, you can work with any language and still stay within the same editor. Divine.

    I personally love how lightweight it is compared to a full IDE because I don’t like it when IDEs hide the magic behind UI. Press the button and it compiles huh? But how? What’s going on there? What toolchain and commands are being executed?

    I much prefer a good MAKEFILE where you know what your entry points are and what is going on, because it makes everything so much more portable and also improves your own knowledge and understanding.






  • I recently swapped my Dad’s Windows computer with my old machine, which I installed Linux on ahead of time.

    I told him it was a faster machine - which it was just slightly in the hardware sense, a very minor upgrade. A half-truth to encourage the transition.

    But of course, it’s running Linux, not Windows.

    Next day he phones me up really happy that it’s “so much faster than the old machine!”

    And it really is a lot faster, but it’s not the hardware. It’s just not getting bogged down with all the crap Windows constantly does in the background.

    Either way, mission accomplished.


  • I chose lemm.ee mostly by chance, but I think that it’s worked out okay for me.

    My impression is that it’s a mostly neutral instance which doesn’t really have a strong agenda, and federates with most other instances. This is definitely what I want, because it gives me access to the most content.

    If there are communities or users I find I have issues with, I can block them myself.


  • Every major shift in how media is consumed has always come because of evolutions in the technology used to deliver it - going from just a few broadcast channels, to cable, to “on demand” cable and satellite, and finally to Internet delivery.

    And it’s just really hard to imagine what delivery technology could provide any new capability beyond the always-on, bidirectional, high capacity data stream in your pocket that is the Internet we now have.

    With streaming we’ve already achieved what should in theory be the best way to watch - and with the studios all having their own streaming platform now, there’s not even any middleman to undercut anymore, like there was when the cable companies were cut out by Netflix at the dawn of streaming. This is endgame.

    The only thing left now is enshittification.

    The one thing that could save us from this fate is if new programs and content are produced that are competitive in quality with what the current giants are putting out, giving people other places to go and forcing competition.

    This is what we’ve already seen with indie studios and single developers disrupting the games industry, and perhaps with ever more achievable 3D animation, AI and other accessible production techniques we’ll start seeing this disrupt the film and TV industry too.


  • Just because something always used to be some way doesn’t mean it’s automatically acceptable.

    TV might have been designed for the ad break but what if it wasn’t? You give Star Trek as an example, and here in the UK growing up I watched TNG episodes on BBC2, which is a tax-funded station without adverts. Did the lack of adverts make my childhood TNG experience worse? Personally I’d say it made it better.

    Even in the cable TV age, to have adverts in something you are paying for is still horrible, and to me it’s unacceptable.

    I will do everything in my power to not expose my brain to a barrage of advertising, and that includes not using any service where I have to subject myself to it.


  • I did buy a (secondhand) nvidia card specifically for AI worlkloads because yes, I realised that this is what the AI dev community has settled on, and if I try to avoid nvidia I will be making life very hard for myself.

    But that doesn’t change the fact that it still absolutely sucks that nvidia have this dominance in the space, and that it is largely due to what tooling the community has decided to use, rather than any unique hardware capability which nvidia have.


  • I’d argue no, because they are not a resident. They are only a visitor.

    Resident (noun) 1. a person who lives somewhere permanently or on a long-term basis

    Occupant in a housing sense is pretty synonymous with Resident legally, but in a wider sense can also mean “anyone there at the time” - especially in non-housing contexts (e.g. the occupants of a vehicle). So for the sake of eliminating all ambiguity I’d strike out Occupant, and stick with Resident as the most appropriate term.





  • The idea there should be some definitive, canonical domain for the Fediverse is somewhat at odds with the core tenents of the Fediverse itself - decentralisation, and no single point of ownership or control. And on that basis, we absolutely should not care about a particular domain, or assign any level of ‘specialness’ to it.

    I understand your worry - that some ‘bad actor’ could buy the domain and do something anti-Fediverse with it and mislead the public, but my response would be to simply not worry. The strength of the Fediverse is that we are diverse and unbothered by whatever nonsense some centralised platform is trying to pull. We don’t have a profit motive. We don’t care.

    People who want to find the real Fediverse will absolutely still find us, all on their own, regardless of who owns some random domain :)