captain_aggravated

@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works

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Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast Took a temporary honorary demotion of one grade to honor Captain Kori.

⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Next week, Amazon is stripping away your ability to download your ebooks.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
I pulled down the eight Kindle books I actually bought, about half of the books in my Kindle library are public domain, stuff like old Sherlock Holmes novels, some FAA handbooks, etc.

Next I guess is Audible. Over the years Audible has offered a lot of free trials with a complimentary audiobook several times, and I’ve amassed a bit of a collection. Including the edition of The Martian narrated by R.C. Bray you can’t get anymore. Those I’d like in mp3 format if I can get it.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨.world c/conservative is unmodded now too! Post all the things they hate!⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
I joined sh.itjust.works about two years ago during the Reddexodus. I remember two things happening around that time, a the_donald community popped up and was quickly banned, and The_Dude opened The Agora and there was some wackadoo in there campaigning against allowing members to vote on anything.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is the pipeline true, fellas?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
Divorcing a billionaire is how you GET billions of dollars though.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Far to many people think that Jesus from the Bible was light skinned, even though he grew up in what we call the Middle East.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Entirely too many people give a shit about a shitass collection of bronze age bullshit in the first place.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
The very best we can do is have vigilant grown adults in charge. We can likely agree that child bestiality or other word combinations that feel illegal to even type should be isolated, but on the spectrum of “Hitler was right” “Mao was right” “Che was right” “Washington was right” do you say “Nope we don’t accept that kind of shit around here?” There are people who will draw the line in the same place from either side of it. Like I say, that line is somewhere in the middle of that slap fight over there and that’s not a unique problem to the Fediverse; it’s a problem with humans, and I don’t think you can solve it, only sidestep it through totalitarianism.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Working below minimum wage to save the planet⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I 3D print stuff for the wood shop a lot. Clamping doodads, tool holders, jigs, etc.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
If I understand the way the Fediverse works correctly, global content viewed by members of an instance gets cached on that instance. So even though this thread is “on” lemmy.world, because I’m participating here there’s also a copy on sh.itjust.works and that copy gets passed to me.

Among the instances sh.itjust.works is defederated from, there’s one called “rape.pet”. I’m okay with The_Dude saying “No, you can’t get there from here” to shit like that.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
To the guy in here going “UX != UI!!!” Sure, but you can’t design UX, especially for the unwashed masses. “Tried cutting toenails with lawnmower; severed foot. 0/10 bad user experience.”

Lemmy has a “have our cake and eat it too” problem. It offers two mutually exclusive promises:
- Each instance is its own independent self-contained little Reddit with their own communities, culture, code of conduct etc. so that individuals can find a place that suits them or make one if none is available, and
- All the servers are part of one great big federated system where all users have access to content on all instances so it doesn’t matter which instance you sign up for, you can access it all.
In practice, the former is more or less true, the latter really isn’t.

First there’s the obvious topic of defederation, which makes the “join one server, access all of them” an outright lie. On the one hand, I think everyone here will agree this platform requires defederation to function so that we can kick out instances like lolli.rape or whatever, which thank you admins and mods for dealing with. But what about Hexbear, or Truth Social (which as I understand it is running on Mastodon software). The only honest answer to “where do we draw that line?” is “somewhere in the middle of that slap fight over there.”

It is intellectually dishonest to say that Lemmy has this problem and Reddit doesn’t. Post in r/mensrights and an automod bans you from r/twoxchromosomes. Do basically anything anywhere on the platform and get banned from r/conservative. They managed to implement “It’s a different platform depending on who you are” on a monolithic service.

All that crap aside, the average user has a more limited perspective on the rest of the fediverse than his home instance. Often, the UI defaults to viewing only local posts, you have to tell it to give you a global feed. You can browse a list of your local communities, you can browse a list of global communities, you can’t browse a list of communities on a given foreign instance. ‘Show me everything on lemmy.sports’ or indeed ‘show me a list of communities on lemmy.nsfw.’ You cannot create (or moderate?) communities on instances you aren’t a member of. It is, if only slightly, easier to participate on your home instance than elsewhere.

Either your choice of server does matter, or it doesn’t.

If it does matter, we shouldn’t have so many general purpose instances, it should be lemmy.music and lemmy.art and lemmy.uk. Then newcomers are presented a meaningful choice. Are you mostly interested in discussions pertaining to your country? Your hobby? Your career? Sign up here to mostly participate in that, and no matter which you pick you can visit the rest of the Lemmyverse, too."

If it doesn’t matter, then design it such that instances are entirely transparent to users; eliminate the possibility of !linux@lemmy.world and !linux@lemmy.ml coexisting, and make all instances lemmy1.world lemmy2.world, issue credentials centrally and then just spread the load in the background.

I don’t think you can have both at the same time.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I could see a “choose for me” button, kind of like installing an OS where you can go with the automatic stuff or set it up yourself. I think you’d need several instances to get with join-lemmy.org to volunteer to be one of the ones that would sign people up for.

Folks who want to sign up for a specific instance in order to create or maybe moderate a community there almost certainly won’t go to join-lemmy.org for that, they’ll just go to that instance.

There may need to be a "Hey could we cool it with the fukpolitik’ agreement to be on that random sign-up list; I’m not sure I’d drop random folks into ex-Hexbear or whatever.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
So is a large part of lemmy.world cached on sh.itjust.works’ server? Does Pixelfed, Loops or Peertube work the same way? I could see images or video being more of a burden to serve like that. Or does AP sync the metadata like thumbnail, video title, description, comments etc. and the video itself is torrented straight from the host server?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I’ve gone on this diatribe about PIxelfed’s onboarding process, where they have a website that says “This page will help find the perfect server for you” and then is designed to present as little meaningful information about each server as possible. Looking at join-lemmy.org, it’s marginally better. “You can access all content from the Lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn’t matter which you choose” 1. not strictly true and 2. if it doesn’t matter why make the choice?

Here’s a question I have, because I’m honestly not sure: Let’s say most of the communities I’m personally interested in are on example.lol. But my account is on sh.itjust.works. How much am I burdening sh.itjust.works by mostly reading and posting to example.lol? Would I be decreasing people’s operating costs if I just opened an account on example.lol so most of my interaction was on my home instance?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In light of recent events, here's OpenStreetMap editors discussing naming of the Gulf of Mexico⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Personally I’d prefer it if they spent all four years renaming things to Mount Hitler or whatever instead of doing anything actual.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
It is my admittedly limited understanding that we really can’t do better at digitally recording an audio signal than how red book audio does it, such that the microphones, amplifiers, ADCs etc on the recording end and the DAC, amp and speakers on the playback end are going to be much more significant factors in audio quality.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
CDs can, by a very narrow margin, reproduce sounds beyond which the human ear can detect. There’s a theorem that states you can perfectly reproduce a waveform by sampling if the bitrate is double the maximum frequency or something like that, and CDs use a bitrate such that it can produce just above the human hearing range. You can’t record an ultrasonic dog whistle on a CD, it won’t work.

It’s functionally impossible to improve on “red book” CD Digital Audio quality because it can perfectly replicate any waveform that has been band-passed filtered to 20,000 Hz or thereabouts. Maybe you can talk about dynamic range or multi-channel (CDs are exactly stereo. No mono, no 5.1 surround…Stereo.) It’s why there really hasn’t been a new disc format; no one needs one. It was as good as the human ear can do in the early 80’s and still is.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pixelfed's first plateau in progress⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
<Tantacrul>

Okay, are you ready for the pain?

First, we go to pixelfed.org, and click on “Servers.” We are treated to a page that says “Find the perfect community server. Signing up on an existing server is the easiest way to get started, let us help you find the ideal server to join!” This alludes to creating your own pixelfed server, which the vast majority of users are not going to want to do. We’re talking about a public who has been accustomed to downloading an app, opening an account on the app, and having access to all the content in that app. The idea of hosting their own server at this point shouldn’t really be an idea we’re bringing up here.

We tehn get filters for “sign-up process”, because you have to apply for and be approved to some servers, filter by country, and filter by language. I mean, okay. Then we get Server Catagories: All (87) Art (1) General (8) Regional (13) Adult (4) and Uncategorized, (61). I suppose this is more honest than defaulting everyone to “General” but it’s also lazier than a dead house cat. When the vast majority of them are categorized as “Uncategorized” it gives me the feeling that the people running this shitmound don’t care about it, so I absolutely shouldn’t.

Then we get a section called Network Health, which has data that is not pertinent to choosing a server, including total photos shared, total users, active servers, and average users per server. Neat stats I guess, not relevant to choosing a server to sign up on.

The choices of server are a grid of choices that look like this:

Image

The name/URL of the instance is at the top, with an $8 checkmark next to it which is a different glyph from the check marks in the left column talking about all the evil stuff they don’t do, so I think we’re just used to seeing check marks after names on social media, so we put them there. I can’t find one that doesn’t have that check mark so it’s completely meaningless.

Then we get a cover photo, which 9 times out of 10 is a variant on the Pixelfed logo so here’s yet another opportunity to distinguish severs squandered.

Just below that is the name/URL of the server again in a different color, just in case you didn’t read it the first time. This is just 100% wasted space.

Below this is the first 80 characters of a description that was almost certainly written to go somewhere else and has been echoed here. Several of them read “Pixelfed is an image sharing platform, an ethical alternative to centr…” Which must be some kind of default text. Many also use an identical cover image to Pixelfed.social, the instance run by the creators, so I’m assuming this is also a placeholder default. The dead cat is at it again. Those that don’t use the default boilerplate often have a description that starts with their instance name, for example “Pixelfed.art is a community driven platfrorm designed to showcase and c…” So including the cover image, pixelfed.art’s entry contains the string “pixelfed.art” a total of four times, and nearly no other information is conveyed.

Below this is a button that either says “Create Account” in white on bright lilac, or “Apply to Join” in subdued purple on dark purple, which makes the option look greyed out. People will already be unlikely to click there, and the change in shade further discourages people from trying to sign up. I suppose telling you this here in the main directory will prevent “Oh dammit you have to apply to join” but there’s just something wrong with making it look greyed out or unselectable.

There’s another button that says “More Details,” which leads to another very sparse page which shows a large version of the useless and uninformative cover image, information you probably don’t care about like the server location and establishment date, and a link that frustratingly says “More Details.” We just clicked on that, why do you want me to click it again? When you click it, you don’t get more details about the server, it scrolls down to a list of general features of the Pixelfed platform. Marketing cockshit that people’s eyes just glance off of because this is where marketing departments put all the lies.

Oh, did I mention when you click on the uppermost of the many copies of the server name, the top one in white, it takes you to the same place that the More Details button does?

This page promises to help you find the perfect server, and then offers virtually no information that would help a newcomer choose gram.social over pixey.org.

</Tantacrul>

I would suggest removing a lot of the redundant details such as the More Details button and the second copy of the instance’s name below the cover image. That would free up room for a couple more lines of description for each here on the index page.

Eliminate the Uncategorized category, maybe add a few more like “Arts, Crafts and Photography” “Lifestyles and Activities” “Fashion and beauty” “Casual, Food and Pets”. “I want to upload pictures of my cat, which category do I choose?” “I want to promote my paintings. Which category?” “I want to show off my travel pictures.”

Add a text search bar so that people could search by keyword.

As this is a list that instance admins have to apply to be on, I would suggest some requirements and/or heavy suggestions for that process:
- Do not allow default boilerplate cover images or descriptions. Make them post something. You’re an image hosting platform, you should be able to find an image the defines your community. !woodworking@lemmy.ca runs contests with their members to pick theirs, I won it once. Do that.
- Strongly suggest against using a variant of the Pixelfed logo unless that variant describes what your instance is about. Like if you have a sports-oriented instance, the Pixelfed speech bubble P logo appearing inside a sports ball is more acceptable than a P with “pixelfed.sports” next to it. Better yet, an action shot of a sportsball player making an exciting sportsball play with maybe a logo in the corner.
- Require admins to choose a category, to eliminate “Uncategorized.”
- For descriptions, provide a style guide that warns against things like mentioning the name of the instance again in the description, and steer away from all the bleeding heart hyphenated marketing wank.
BAD: Example.lol is a community-driven, open-source, cage-free, low-gluten, carbon-offset, high-estrogen, no-pressure, fuel-injected, tax-free, non-mandatory place to share photos.

GOOD: Share photos of your arts and crafts projects with our avid community of painters, woodworkers, blacksmiths, seamstresses and more!

The aim here is to present INFORMATION that can help someone new understand why they should - or should not - sign up for your instance. We’re almost perfectly failing to achieve that.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New bird flu variant found in Nevada dairy cows has experts sounding alarms: ‘We have never been closer to a pandemic from this virus’⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
BOHICA
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I miss when you could get a flagship phone that could fit in your hand⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Wider, longer, flatter, thinner, and harder to hold without touching shit at the edge of the screen. I miss being able to grip a phone by its buttons.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is everyone using as a HTPC?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
My old desktop, a Ryzen 3600/GTX-1080 mini-ITX build. After using a Pi 4 with Kodi for awhile it’s nice to have a media machine that can run Crysis.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is PeerTube dead or is discoverability bad?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
So why run an instance in the first place then?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is PeerTube dead or is discoverability bad?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I don’t think .rape is a valid TLD, but as you say we’re in the worst timeline.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is PeerTube dead or is discoverability bad?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
But federating with other instances IS links to content, not hosting content.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is PeerTube dead or is discoverability bad?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Would that mean you need an account name to be Die4Ever and your channel identifier might be Die4Ever_Games?

That would actually solve a problem I had on Youtube, where, I’ll use Linus Media Group as an example, Tech Linked and Mac Address were different unrelated Youtube channels. Youtube has no concept of “Shows”
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is PeerTube dead or is discoverability bad?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I see two possible ways for it to succeed:
- Federate by default, defederate if you have to. This is how Lemmy mostly seems to work; I proposed a policy for defederation for sh.itjust.works that has been used, we will federate with you unless you start spamming or hosting illegal porn or spewing hate speech or that kind of shit, then we’ll defederate. That has to happen at the instance level; if example.lol is generally fine but there’s one account there that’s a nuisance that’s what the block button is for, but lolita.rape gets defederated (and reported to the FBI).
- Apply and join model. Have a coalition of instances that agree to mutually uphold certain moderation practices (no hate speech, no kid fucking, goat or human, no human trafficking, etc) and then they federate with each other, eventually forming a large and wholesome community.
Nobody federates and it’s a bunch of independent nothings won’t work. Youtubers will use it as a backup service, a couple of the real paranoid Linux types will host their videos there that someone might even watch, and half the instances will be places you go when you’ve been kicked off of Youtube.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is PeerTube dead or is discoverability bad?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Do we need to start over? Like fork PeerTube and fix all the “We choose to do this wrong because our parents didn’t hug us as children” problems?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit Refugees⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
The button they built got pushed before it was supposed to and everyone’s like “Why’d you build the button?”
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what are “female jocks” called?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Gonna channel TierZoo for a minute here:

If you’re going to play High School, there are two ways to create the Jock build:
- You can go with the Prep class and then subclass in Meathead. You’re going to letter in baseball, soccer, golf and track and field, your girlfriend is a cheerleader, you’re probably going to be prom king and you’re going to the college your dad did and probably join the same frat your dad was in.
- Start out as trailer trash nobody and go for the “peak in high school” subquest, you’re gonna be on the football team and the wrestling team, you’ll date one of the three straight girls in the marching band’s color guard. You’re probably someone’s school bully. You’re not even going to apply to college. Ten years from now you’ll be other than honorably discharged from the marine corps and you’ll work as a bouncer at a dive bar in Jacksonville.
It’s kinda rare to see a direct distaff counterpart to either one of these. In the former’s case, you get a cheerleader. She might run track or something in the spring but these girls usually throw themselves into shit like student government, yearbook club, whatever student committee organizes the dances, she’s gonna major in poli-sci and marry a lawyer for his money or she’s gonna get an MBA so she can be a self-proclaimed “boss bitch.”

In the latter’s case, she probably doesn’t go for athletics or even extracurriculars at all, she’s a fixture at house parties with alcohol, she has basically no plan for life, through her 20’s she’ll waitress at various chain sit-down restaurants and/or cashier at Food Lion until she gets knocked up.

There is a somewhat rarer class of severe tryhard, she’s convinced she’s going to be an astronaut so she takes herself 100% seriously, isn’t accepted to the Air Force Academy so she enrolls in ROTC at ERAU, is in every sport the college offers to girls, does basically no socializing, ends up an officer in the Air Force but does not become a pilot, resigns as a Captain and opens a shelter for abandoned parrots. Athletics are just a byproduct of overachieving with nothing to show for it.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
I mean, they eventually do. Fetuses kick in the womb.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Framework ships RISC-V board for its 13" laptops along with "boardless" laptop chassis.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
I didn’t say it’s a problem inherent to RISC-V; it’s more that anyone who can make the jump to RISC-V (or ARM) will do so in a locked down sealed shut proprietary format like Apple, or doesn’t have the capability of making a platform shift at all like Microsoft. You could make an ATX form factor ARM or RISC-V machine with a lot of processing power and run Linux on it, but who would buy it and for what? That question is why no one makes such a thing.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Framework ships RISC-V board for its 13" laptops along with "boardless" laptop chassis.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Sure, it’s technologically possible. Is there even an inkling of a plan to go from “dev kit” to “widely available consumer product?” Because basically the only “widely available consumer products” are locked down playpens like iPhones and such. Even a lot of x86 devices are going to the soldered everything approach.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Framework ships RISC-V board for its 13" laptops along with "boardless" laptop chassis.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Well, the RISC-V instruction set is open source, but that doesn’t imply a system architecture standard. So there’s not going to be one. The x86 PC became an industry standard basically by accident, an accident that is unlikely to happen again. Hell, even CP/M, the DOS before DOS had to come in different flavors for different manufacturers because the several manufacturers that supported it didn’t build compatible computers.

Microsoft has so much inertia on x86 that it’s probably not going anywhere, and RISC-V will become the new ARM, same cores slapped into whatever the hell the company wanted to build that day. With no standard platforms, there will be no modular accessories. What you’ll get are sealed shut devices with no user serviceability, the RAM and storage soldered to the board and the bootloader stored in on-chip ROM.