cecilkorik
@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca
- Comment on How the US is turning into a mass techno-surveillance state 15 hours ago:
That kind of irrational logic will no doubt serve you well. Enjoy your future!
- Comment on Bambu Lab’s Controversial ‘Authorization Control’ Hits Budget 3D Printers 1 day ago:
I’ve never been happier about my Prusa, despite some of what I felt were their suboptimal choices in the last few years, at least they’ve never seemed malicious.
- Comment on Why are you here and not on Reddit? 1 day ago:
Welcome!
But I have to ask, why are you guys here and not on Reddirt?
Hilarious typo if it wasn’t intentional.
Where the population us much larger and its basically the same?
First thing you quickly realize here is that larger is not necessarily better. Small is beautiful, you can have actual thoughtful conversations with individuals here without the incessant dogpiling and low effort meme replies. I have even got smacked down (and rightly so) for accidentally bringing some of that with me at one point. It’s not needed or desirable here.
It appears a few instances dominate this landscape anyway?
When you actually look at the comments I usually find almost everyone is on a different instance, in fact when there are relatively small numbers of comments like the are on most posts, you often won’t even see the same instance in the comments twice unless it’s the same person. Yeah, some instances have “huge numbers” of people and communities (lemmy.world) but I think a lot of them are honestly just rarely used, abandoned, or otherwise non-participatory, and the communities can be used by anybody (which is exactly the point of federation). The people actually spending their time here are on a wide variety of instances, often even using different frontends or software. And that’s great. To me, the ecosystem feels healthy and diverse.
Its not like this is unchecked social media, they still moderate these places right?
The point is you can choose an instance whose moderations suit you. (Almost?) all instances moderate to some degree, complete unmoderation is how you end up infested with child porn and other horrible shit. But the directions they moderate in, and the specific things they moderate, can vary wildly depending on the preferences of the owners and the countries they operate in. They also federate with and defederate different instances, which is a large-scale form of moderation. Most instances defederate (and have been defederated by) hexbear and lemmygrad. But not all of them do. Some also defederate lemmy.ml. But not most. And of course those three still federate with each other, and with some other instances. The point isn’t to completely prevent isolated echo chambers, it’s to allow the instances themselves (and the users who join them) to choose how much echo they want to hear compared to how many challenging views they disagree with. Everyone should be able to find a balance that suits them. Most of the people complaining about the content on Lemmy have probably just chosen the wrong instance, frankly, because most people don’t understand how this works and the biases and moderation attitudes inherent in all these different instances is not always super obvious at first glance.
Reddit sucks now. I still check there regularly but I find both the content and the commenting less and less interesting and find myself spending less and less time there. It hasn’t been a sudden process, but the more time I spend on Lemmy the more I like it and the more communities I find and engage in.
- Comment on What would it take to make Gemini suitable to be president of the world? 2 days ago:
Honesty, empathy and respect.
Good luck ever convincing me an LLM has any of those. I’m not even convinced most of humanity does.
- Comment on What are the benefits of a server having multiple public IP addresses? 2 days ago:
It’s mostly a relic from an older time, it can be useful for more traditional services and situations that struggle with sharing public IPs. In theory, things like multiple IP addresses (and IPv6’s near unlimited addresses) could be used to make things simpler – you don’t need reverse proxies and NAT and port forwarding (all of which were once viewed as excessive complexity if not outright ugly hacks instead of the virtual necessity they are today).
Each service would have its own dedicated public IP, you’d connect them up with IP routing the way the kernel gods intended, and everything would be straightforward, clear, and happy. If such a quantity of IPs were freely available, this would indeed be a simpler life in many ways. And yet it’s such a distant fantasy now that it’s understandable (though a little funny) to hear you describe it as “additional complexity” when, depending on how you look at it, the opposite is true…
From a modern perspective, you’re absolutely right. The tables have really been turned, we have taken the limitation of IP addresses in stride, we have built elaborate systems of tools and layers of abstraction that not only turn these IP-shortage lemons into lemonade, the way we’ve virtualized the connections through featureful and easily-configurable software layers like private IP ranges, IP masquerading, proxies and tunnels can be used to achieve immense flexibility and reliable security. Most software now natively supports handling multiple services on a single IP or even a single port, and in some cases it requires it. This was not always the case.
It’s sort of like the divide between hardware RAID and software RAID. Once upon a time, software RAID was slow, messy, confusing, unreliable, and distinctly inferior to “true” hardware RAID, which was plug-and-play with powerful configuration options. Nobody would willingly use software RAID if they had any other choice, the best RAID cards were sold for thousands of dollars and motherboards advertised how much hardware RAID they had built-in. But over time, as CPUs and software became faster and more powerful, the tide changed, and people started to realize that actually, hardware RAID was the one that left you tied to an expensive proprietary controller that could fail or become obsolete and leave your array a difficult to migrate or recover mess, whereas software RAID was reliable, predictable, upgradable, supporting a wide variety of disk types and layouts while still performing solidly and was generally far nicer to work with. It became the more common configuration, and found its way into almost every OS. You can now set up software RAID simply by clicking an option in a menu, even in Windows, and it basically works flawlessly without any additional thought.
Times change, we adapt to the technologies that are most common and that work the best in the situations we’re using them in, and we make them better until they’re not just a last resort anymore, but become a first choice, while the old way becomes a confusing anachronism. That’s what multiple public IPs have become nowadays, for most purposes.
- Comment on What did Musk and Trump fall out over? 2 days ago:
That’s exactly my point. If they do in a few days “come back from” that and are all buddy buddy again, then I think that indicates it was just a staged performance for show and distraction and none of it was real fighting. Suggests it was all just an act. (IF they do come back from it. Which remains to be seen)
Muskrat has already backed down from a few things he said in the “heat” of the argument, like that he was going to disassemble the Dragon capsules. So I wouldn’t jump to your conclusion that they can’t possibly “come back from” this, my point is just that if they do, it was probably all just an act to begin with because I agree if it’s real, stuff was said that either one of these vindictive sociopaths is likely to forget.
- Comment on What did Musk and Trump fall out over? 2 days ago:
I’m putting 50/50 odds that it’s an intentional, theatrical distraction from other more important things that are going on, or it’s just the inevitable outcome of two malignant narcissist sociopaths being in the same room together too often. If they quickly kiss and make up I’ll lean more towards the former than the latter.
- Comment on Is this genocide denial? 2 days ago:
It also sounds like sealioning. So yeah genocide denial by either shutting you up or making you appear to be the bigot would be the goal.
- Comment on Bonfire's new software lets users build their own social communities, free from platform control 3 days ago:
We are reinventing our way back to Web 1.0, pretty soon we will be teaching people that they can design their own sites using simple tools or even just by typing in plain text and that they can use “links” to connect to other people’s content anywhere else on the web.
And because this probably sounds like a facetious criticism, I need to clarify: it’s really not a criticism at all. This is how the web is supposed to work. Companies broke it in order to entrap you and make profit from you.
- Comment on Safest CalDAV/CardDAV server 3 days ago:
I’ve been using Nextcloud for almost a decade (started with Owncloud), publicly exposed to the internet with no VPN, and I’ve had no issues with security or with DAV. I do nothing special besides keeping it up to date.
- Comment on How can I delete my Lemmy comment history? 3 days ago:
If Barbra Streisand cannot delete her name from her house on the Internet, you cannot delete your comments. The Internet only forgets when you don’t want it to. If you want it to forget, it never will.
Posting a comment on the Internet is something that can never be undone. Once it’s out there, it’s out there forever. You can try and delete it, and you might make some progress, you might even be successful, but there are no guarantees, and the more you want it to be deleted the less likely you’ll be able to pull it off.
In a practical sense, just use to built-in features to delete your account and posts. It’s not perfect or guaranteed, but it’s the best you’re going to get.
- Comment on Why don't people like Melon Tusk get tired of the shit they gave you pull through literally every day ? I mean doesn't the guilt of bad decisions pull them down enough like the rest of us ? 4 days ago:
A lot of the current crop of billionaires literally became billionaires by disrupting the establishment, overhauling whole industries and toppling the old systems of power and control. They were by definition anti-establishment. The problem is… now they’re the establishment and they’ve implemented their own, even worse systems of power and control.
Much of the pre-Trump establishment is gone now, and no one should regret that, except for the unfortunate detail that the post-Trump establishment is far, far worse than anything that came before it.
The problem with popular revolutions is that they don’t always end up being very popular once the revolution has succeeded.
- Comment on Lemmy,Mbin, piefed, what even are those? 4 days ago:
The whole point of federation and open protocols is that you aren’t tied to any specific piece of software, or any single provider, or any single set of features. People can experiment and innovate and collaborate and expand to build new things on top without losing access or interfering with people who prefer the old methods. People or software that abuses the system on the other hand, can be blocked or defederated.
A healthy software ecosystem should have many different pieces of software all written by different people with different goals, but all implementing most of the same things. Some will be more popular than others, and the popular ones might not agree with your own personal tastes, but that’s just life. The point is that we (and software developers) all have the freedom to choose how we interact with this system without any formal rules or maintainer group deciding what is allowed and what isn’t (except within their own software and/or instance).
and they will be cross compatible enough that it won’t be much of a deal what project is running underneath?
They are already cross-compatible enough, they are as cross-compatible as they need to be. It’s not clear what more you could ask for. If you want them to all look and work exactly the same then what’s the point of having different software at all? You’re acting like the different features and choices are a downside when it is in fact a benefit. Pick the one you like the most and use it. If you like Piefed’s hashtags, then use Piefed, it’s great! There’s nothing “locked away” in Piefed, everything in it is available to everybody, as it should be!
- Comment on lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month 5 days ago:
Really nice that they’re doing a sunset period with advance warning instead of just randomly going dark. As Lemmy’s first major “shutdown” we need to accept that this sort of thing seems inevitable from time to time, maybe this can set an example and open a conversation on how to handle this sort of situation in the future. I’d hope this creates some pressure to Fediverse developers to improve portability for users (and communities!) moving between instances, maybe even some kind of immigration/emigration mode for people or communities who want to apply to transfer their account and history rather than simply sign up a new account while posting a link from their old account. Federation should be able to do better than that.
- Comment on How does HTML actually run on a computer? 5 days ago:
You are conflating a bunch of different things here and it’s hard to tell exactly what you’re even asking. HTML is completely separate from Javascript and CSS. Together, they are web technologies and typically all three are used to display a webpage, but only HTML is actually required. The others provide additional functions, each in their own way.
More to your point. HTML is not a programming language. It is not turing-complete. It is a markup language. It does not get “compiled”, it gets “rendered”. This may seem like a semantic difference, but these are actually different things and they are handled differently by code and in fact by completely different engines within the code. HTML rendering engines are still very complex beasts, and while you can draw some similarities with a compiler, they are not the same thing.
Most web standards are defined by the W3C, that includes HTML and CSS. But there are many different standards, even ones defined by the W3C, and many versions of those standards as well. All of these are handled by the browser’s rendering engine. However, there’s also a lot of bad code in the world that still needs to be rendered correctly, and you might be surprised how recently some of these standards actually developed. The browser wars have flared up many times and each time “standards” were usually the casualty. Mozilla has this brief explainer of the three different “quirks” modes currently used for compatibility on the modern web.
Javascript engines are their own whole different ballgame, as Javascript/ECMAscript is indeed a turing complete programming lanaguage, and all the big players (V8, Spidermonkey/Warpmonkey) are highly sophisticated JIT compilers with multiple layers of on-the-fly optimization. The deeper technical details are frankly beyond me.
Modern web browsers are as complex, feature-rich environments as any traditional operating system, and they have as many different aspects to them as any complete operating system does. They are not “one engine” or “one compiler” or “one standard” as much as they are an ecosystem of engines, compilers, standards, protocols and libraries all working together while remaining compatible with each other and all the other software that is out there, to ultimately present the user with a coherent, consistent and accessible representation that hides most of the immense complexity of what is going on behind the scenes.
- Comment on Whatever happened to cheap eReaders? – Terence Eden’s Blog 6 days ago:
It’s my “opinion” that a device running a slightly modified Linux 2.6 kernel is literally running Linux, yes. Maybe you’re making the point that it’s not a full GNU/Linux distribution that people imagine when they hear Linux, and that’s a valid and valuable clarification which I thank you for providing, but don’t imply I’m wrong because of it.
- Comment on Whatever happened to cheap eReaders? – Terence Eden’s Blog 6 days ago:
Kobos are pretty nice. They’re not cheap, as you pointed out, but you can get an older or used one for quite a bit cheaper and it’s just as good. They run Linux. It’s almost completely open, and anything that isn’t might as well be. That said you really don’t need to open it up much, just enough to install something like koreader which basically completely replaces the OS on the thing. It does everything I would ever want to use my ereader for … granted that’s pretty much just “read ebooks”.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
The US is not really a functioning democracy right now so it’s kind of a crapshoot to be discussing what they do now, however if you’re interested more in the idea of what they’re supposed to do, they propose and vote on new legislation, same as the members of the house of representatives. Generally, bills can be proposed by either group, and both bodies must pass the bill for it to reach the president to be signed into law.
What makes the two different is that the senate is intentionally much smaller, and all states are equally represented (2 senators each), unlike the house which is proportionally represented with more populous states having far greater numbers of representatives and thus votes. The senate also changes members less frequently with senators being elected for 6 year terms compared to the president’s 4 years and the representatives at 2 years. The idea for the senate is for it to be responsible for considering longer term effects of proposed legislation, as well as to consider and propose legislation on issues that affect the whole nation equally including the smaller states that have less of a voice in the house of representatives. In theory, it’s a very thoughtful and well-balanced system. The reality is… well, we can all see what’s happened to it.
- Comment on Can a person use AI or whatever and get rid of their name and history off the net? And can it create a new ident with a bunch of history pictures and so forth? 1 week ago:
The internet remembers forever. Literally. The more you want something gone, the more tenaciously the internet will preserve it and treasure it and amplify it.
You can absolutely create a new fake profile. You can create lots, an endless amount of them. That’s trivial. AIs are doing that all the time, some people legitimately believe most of the internet nowadays is just bots with fake profiles arguing with other bots with equally fake profiles. And it’s plausible they could be at least a little more right than most people would imagine. See the dead internet theory
But trying to have something removed from the internet is like asking your family to stop telling that embarrassing story at every gathering. All it does is let everyone know there’s an embarrassing story, and intrigues everybody to find out what it is. And they won’t stop until they do. See also the Streisand Effect.
- Comment on Federated 3d printing design hub like Thingiverse? 1 week ago:
So far, this seems to be exactly what I’m looking for. Thanks so much!
- Comment on Federated 3d printing design hub like Thingiverse? 1 week ago:
I don’t want to have to dig through 100 communities all spread out to find things.
So don’t. Hang out on Lemmy.world. You’ll be fine here. It’s as centralized as you can get. All you’re really asking for is to deny others the ability to choose or run their own instance and still be able to talk to you, like I’m doing right now.
- Comment on Federated 3d printing design hub like Thingiverse? 1 week ago:
Federation alone would give a lot of utility. The whole point is not to be a walled garden of discrete silos. If I can post on Lemmy from Mastodon, why shouldn’t I be able to post a comment on a model?
- Submitted 1 week ago to fediverse@lemmy.world | 15 comments
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
If a government raises taxes for something so that working class people cannot buy it, that government becomes richer by exploiting the working class.
Governments don’t become “rich”, and if they do, that either signals unchecked corruption, or a government that is investing wisely in the nation’s present and future, depending on where the money is going. This may seem contradictory, but the reality is, you need a much deeper and broader understanding of your government’s finances and economic plan before the accusations you’re making will hold any weight. This is not something that can be reasoned about in the abstract and addressed with news-bite talking points. It a hugely complex situation and people spend lifetimes studying this.
A government that is genuinely exploiting the working class should be replaced by the working class with a government that supports and protects the working class. If you do not have the power to choose your government, then you need to figure that out how to organize the working class and acquire that power first, otherwise you’re wasting your time trying to change a government you have no control over, and that’s not going to work and it’s never going to support and protect you.
CO2 makes up a miniscule amount of our atmosphere.
This is accurate.
In the past there have been ice ages while the atmospheric CO2 level was 10 times higher than it is now.
This is misleading disinformation
The notion that eating insects will save the world seems a little dubious.
This is accurate.
- Comment on A fake Facebook event disguised as a math problem has been one of its top posts for 6 months 1 week ago:
Parenthesis, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction.
should actually be
Parenthesis, exponents, (multiplication and division), (addition and subtraction).
Addition and subtraction are given the same priority, and are done in the same step, from left to right.
It’s not a great system of notation, it could be made far clearer (and parenthesis allow you to make it as clear as you like), but it’s essentially the universal standard now and it’s what we’re stuck with.
- Comment on You Can’t Make an Omelette without Exploding Several Billion Dollars’ Worth of Eggs 1 week ago:
I doubt there is video of that… why would they be filming his back?
- Comment on You Can’t Make an Omelette without Exploding Several Billion Dollars’ Worth of Eggs 1 week ago:
What bubble have they got you trapped in? Literally every video I can find shows both Nazi salutes Elon Musk did. Here’s a link to PBS’s video.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
If you had FTL travel, you wouldn’t use radio, but you could set up an FTL pony express. Or even something like a “conveyor belt” of microsats FTLing to a destination, dropping off their messages, and FTLing back with the replies. Whether that’s practical or not and how fast it is depends on how exactly your FTL works, but it’s hard to build a situation where you can FTL travel without having almost equivalently fast communication times.
Without FTL though, you’re right, the communication situation gets real dicey real fast. Whether you’re using generation ships or cryosleep or life extension to span the lightyears is irrelevant, by the time a colony ship reaches another system, both it and the humanity back on Earth will have diverged significantly due to lack of communication, and will continue to diverge as different events and pressures and developments affect each group differently. Imagine we started getting pen pals from the 1800s, but then to leave them a message, we have to wait for them to get to the 2020s to read it, and then by the time we get a reply maybe we’ll be in the 2300s. What can we even try to meaningfully talk about? It’s more like opening time capsules and studying history than anything resembling communication. It’s interesting, but neither of our lives are at all relevant to each other. We are separated by too much time and without breaking light speed we can’t break that.
Psychologically it is very difficult to imagine any two hypothetical civilizations not eventually separating and developing independently, because in all practical senses they will be completely independent of each other. And that’s a manifestation of physical reality, there is really nothing we can do to avoid it. Not even an attempt at tyrannical oppression to make it otherwise can survive hundreds of years of delayed communication. Any “oppressors” sent will quickly end up having more in common with and more dependence on the colonists they are oppressing than they will with their “command” back in Earth-space. Even if they are successful, it’s almost impossible to imagine they will not just end up as rulers of a separate independent colony. And then when Earth finds out hundreds of years later that their guys aren’t quite following the orders they would’ve sent if they had been able to, what could they even do about it? Spend more hundreds of years sending more oppressors? Which will just end up doing the same thing? And why would they bother? If they want to loot their resources, is it still even going to be useful by the time they can get it back?
It’s wild to think that after a few thousand years of independent development, we may not even recognize each other anymore, and we definitely won’t think of each other as the “same” people. This will probably even be the case within the solar system, in some respects it already happens even here on Earth, nevermind once you start trying to stretch humanity across light years. Whoever those creatures that colonize other stars might be, it won’t be long before we probably won’t consider them “us”, and they probably won’t consider themselves “us” either.
- Comment on If you can't buy it, make it: EN25 corner that fits HDMI cables. 1 week ago:
Almost any type of plastic that can be manufactured (and even some that otherwise sort of cannot) can also be 3d printed and almost all are available as filaments. Some of these filaments are very difficult to print, or very expensive, or very hard to find, or all of the above, but if you need 3d printer filament that meets any particular certification or material needs, there’s probably a filament for that, and it likely has official certification too. 3d printing is being used everywhere now, commercially and industrially. It’s not just for home-gamers anymore.
And even if you don’t find something you can print that will quite meet the same technical level of certification, there are still plenty of easy to print filaments that have quite good properties for things like flammability. It’s good to keep things like that in mind though, especially if you’re the sort of person who just defaults to PLA or PETG for everything. (I’m guilty of this)
- Comment on It’s Time To Go Back to Web 1.0 1 week ago:
Honestly escaping AI slop may be the hardest part of any situations (nevermind just the small web) soon if this anti-human distributed-denial-of-service attack on our awareness continues the way it’s going. There will always be spammers with little to lose and more to gain, even if it’s not financial gain they’re after there can be benefits to simply increasing the level of noise in an environment, whether it’s to hide something else they’re doing or to weaken opposition to some goal.