russjr08
@russjr08@bitforged.space
Formerly @russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net
- Comment on This Tiny Robotic Pill Eliminates The Need For Hospital Visits In Stomach Cancer Detection 3 days ago:
I had one of these done for an endoscopy - it ended horribly. It got “stuck” so I ended up having to have surgery for it to be removed.
Getting that surgery coordinated and scheduled took months all the while my health was declining. Eventually it got so bad that I couldn’t hold down food and I had to be pre-admitted to the hospital a month before the procedure and put on IV nutrition…
Granted I do have an autoimmune GI condition which is what prompted that test in the first place, and the chances of this happening is supposedly quite small but… Yeah I’ll take the endoscopy and colonoscopy over even that small chance of going through all of that all over again…
- Comment on Microsoft really wants Local accounts gone after it erases its guide on how to create them 5 days ago:
Let us know how it goes, and if you have any further questions, feel free to give us a shout!
- Comment on Self-hosted website for posting web novel/fiction 1 month ago:
They have their own hosting plans, but you can also self host it.
- Comment on Favourite controllers 1 month ago:
As strange as it may sound, my favorite controller so far has been my Google Stadia controller. It feels very sturdy and has a nice finish - and I can hold it for hours without my hands cramping up.
Also a big fan of the fact that it charges over USB-C, and that it works perfectly for me over both Bluetooth and wired.
However, I haven’t had too many controllers in the past (Nintendo’s controllers - GameCube, Wii, Switch Joycon/Pro, the Xbox 360/One, and the DualShock 3), so that could be part of it. I don’t know, I just haven’t had any complaints with it as of yet.
- Comment on Windows 11 Start menu ads are now rolling out to everyone 2 months ago:
If there’s anything that I’ve learned, it’s that lawsuits are more often than not, just a joke to the large companies.
Hell it’s often easier for them to just classify whatever fine they get slapped on the wrist with as a business expense, than to do the right thing, it seems.
- Comment on What are your complaints about Lemmy? 2 months ago:
This isn’t a problem of Lemmy itself in terms of the software, so I’m not sure it qualifies… But, I find that Lemmy still has the same problem of Reddit where if you say something that the majority of users disagree with, prepare to be torn apart in the comments. And I do not just mean by getting corrected on something you said being factually incorrect, I mean more of a “your opinion is wrong because…”
For example, any discussion revolving around Linux (and let me just prepend this by saying I am a Linux user), if you happen to prefer using Windows be prepared to be told all of the reasons why you have to use Linux instead. And that’s usually tame compared to what I’ve seen on other subjects.
Obviously there are cases where yeah, you absolutely deserve to be torn a new one in the extreme cases when someone is actually being truly vile, such as trying to advocate for the harm of someone/a group of people - but the “extremes” are not what I’m really referring to here.
I’ve blocked a lot of users that while I’ve had no interaction with them, I see how they are clearly engaging in, let’s just say, bad faith with others.
In terms of software-specific issues, I can’t say that I really have had a lot of problems with Lemmy itself as of recently. As an instance owner, I used to have a lot of weird (what seemingly appeared to be, at least) random federation issues, but I haven’t seen any federation problems in a while now. Though just today I swear I submitted a comment somewhere, and its just poof not there - not even locally, but I’m chalking that one up to something I’ve done (whether a misclick, or I’m just hallucinating as badly as an LLM) rather than an actual issue.
- Comment on Steam is a ticking time bomb 2 months ago:
I haven’t had much sleep today so maybe its just me, but I’m a bit confused here:
Valve isn’t obligated to continue supporting all its games and software features on Mac, especially when Apple’s reluctance to natively support Vulkan and other cross-platform technologies makes game development more complex.
Then the next sentence:
There’s no excuse for Steam on Mac to be a far worse experience than on other platforms, though.
As others have mentioned, Apple was the one who chose to abandon x86 and go with ARM - and anyways are there any games that are on Steam that actually are ARM native? You would still end up having to launch a game that is x86 as far as I understand correctly (I haven’t used a Mac since the Apple Silicon transition)?
- Comment on Lemmy.world seems to have banned the largest piracy community on Lemmy. 3 months ago:
I think “here” being the instance their account is on, lemm.ee
- Comment on Helldivers 2 has "performed well ahead of expectations" and topped more than 8m sales 3 months ago:
I wonder, did they change the defaults at some point? Mine was already bound to the arrow keys, I never had to explicitly set that.
- Comment on Halo Infinite Update to Bring Networking Overhaul, Easy Anti-Cheat, and More Next Week 3 months ago:
Does your BIOS have “Enable Resizable Bar” and “Above 4G Decoding” options? Both of those were off on mine, and I had the same problem until I flipped those on.
- Comment on Avast fined $16.5 million for ‘privacy’ software that actually sold users’ browsing data 3 months ago:
I haven’t looked into Proton, but BitWarden is open source both server side and client side.
- Comment on Windows 11 24H2 goes from “unsupported” to “unbootable” on some older PCs 4 months ago:
The only game that I keep Windows around for is Destiny 2… I know, but it’s the game my closest friends are often playing - but I’ve been playing it less and less so I might actually end up removing Windows completely if the next expansion doesn’t go well.
Now that I have a Steam Deck, I have zero reasons to get into Windows-only games anymore.
- Comment on “Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement - Anil Dash 4 months ago:
I don’t personally use iOS, but some friends of mine have given good reviews about Podcast Republic - note that it has a one-time ads free unlock to it.
- Comment on Midjourney might ban Biden and Trump images this election season 4 months ago:
It has to be a link to a direct image, the image can’t be on a webpage or such. Generally that ends in
.png
(or another photo-related extension) for convention (but not strictly required, depends on how the server is configured). - Comment on How Quora Died 4 months ago:
Kagi now has a lens for focusing results from the Fediverse, I’ve seen it pull Lemmy links before!
- Comment on Inventor of NTP protocol that keeps time on billions of devices dies at age 85 5 months ago:
PIN number
- Comment on bash.org is gone 5 months ago:
Also, IRC doesn’t constantly try to throw “upgrades” (Nitro) in your face every single moment that it gets.
- Comment on Why is installing a different OS/Custom Rom on phones a huge hassle? 5 months ago:
Exactly, its like if I claimed online that I had a million bucks - even if I weren’t lying, it doesn’t matter unless the right people believe my claim. It’s the same premise here really, the truth only counts when you actually have power sadly.
- Comment on Xbox Player Gets Banned for 1 Year After Recording Baldur's Gate 3 Scenes 5 months ago:
A bit of a difference here. From what I recall, a VAC Ban only affects games that actually use Valve’s Anti Cheat, hence the name, which is not so popular anymore as far as I know. And they’re supposed to only affect that game individually (but since they’re public, other game/server owners can decide to ban you too).
Getting an Xbox Live or PSN ban will prevent you from playing any game that relies on the respective service’s network (which they enforce for any game that has online multiplayer in it).
- Comment on Microsoft is adding a new key to PC keyboards for the first time since 1994 5 months ago:
Definitely not, I’d say the thing you need the most is the will to learn - as there are differences of course, but being willing to learn new things will go a long way.
- Comment on Why do we have an internal monologue? 5 months ago:
It’s a bit difficult to say, but perhaps we did in say, maybe through the repetition of flashing images from our memory, or sounds, etc.
Even without language, that internal “making sense” of things / interpreting the world around us still exists - I’d imagine if you were to ask someone who was deaf (starting at a very early age) they’d probably say there is a monologue of some sorts, even if not by “sound”, whether that be the flashing images of various hand signs, or written words, etc.
- Comment on Why do we have an internal monologue? 5 months ago:
I’m by no means a medical expert, so just a stab in the dark here - our brains constantly process all sorts of information. Whether that’s memories, input from your various senses, or a million other things. During that process, your brain is also trying to make sense of it all (“Why?”, “What does it mean”, “How?”, etc).
Our ability to communicate and express language is intertwined in this process, which of course is what gives you the perception of dialog. So in essence, I think its just our brains trying to make sense of… its process of making sense, if that makes sense?
On a side note, I’m practically dosing myself with semantic satiation with how many times I’ve used “sense” here (that last one being more tongue-in-cheek)…
- Comment on What happens to my instance if my domain expires? 5 months ago:
ActivityPub does use cryptographic keys for Actors (“users” in this case) - so even in theory if you were to destroy your instance and then set it up on the same domain and recreate the user, things would be quite broken still… But unfortunately it still does rely on the domain name itself, so I agree.
I think the problem is, without the domain name, there is no way for you to lookup who
@russjr08
would be, or where to send data to them. The domain effectively acts as a mailing address (a well suited analogy considering that ActivityPub also uses inboxes/outboxes) so that Instance A always knows that User B can be found on Instance B.I doubt its an impossible challenge to solve, but probably quite a difficult one I’m sure.
- Comment on Warning: You cannot delete posts or comments on Lemmy. It stays up forever, and is in direct violation of GDPR and other national privacy laws. 5 months ago:
They have access to your password hash, effectively the “infrastructure” admin(s) as I’ll call it (not admins of the site - they need to have access to the actual system that is running the instance) have access to the same things that infrastructure admins of another site would have.
- Comment on Warning: You cannot delete posts or comments on Lemmy. It stays up forever, and is in direct violation of GDPR and other national privacy laws. 5 months ago:
Lemmy should implement proper post deletion, possibly with a delay to allow moderators and admins to inspect deleted posts, but expect anything you share via ActivityPub to follow the once on the internet, always on the internet rule even more than in the past.
How would this be done? Like you mentioned, anyone can run a modified instance of Lemmy that does not honor delete requests. I suppose you could put something that retrieves content from other servers as a pull operation instead of a push, but that’s going to break Lemmy’s ability to work with other ActivityPub applications (at the very least).
- Comment on What happens to my instance if my domain expires? 5 months ago:
Yeah, AFAIK ActivityPub itself heavily relies on the domain being part of your identity - so its not really possible to change the domain on any of them, along with other federation implementations such as Matrix.
This is why while Mastodon allows for profile transfers, it doesn’t transfer your post content - it simply just sends a signal to your followers to unfollow your old account and follow your new one. The actual content itself is intrinsically tied to your identity on the old domain.
- Comment on Substack says it will not remove or demonetize Nazi content 6 months ago:
Censorship isn’t the right word here, I would say. Censorship would make sense if this were a government that was being spoken about but it’s not.
I’ll take it from the perspective of myself, I run a Lemmy instance that is open for people to register for (after a brief application question and confirming your email address). If someone registered, and wanted to post Nazi-adjacent content I would remove it and ban them right away.
I would not be “censoring” your ability to see it. I would be saying “I do not want to host this content on the hardware that I am paying for and maintain”. Sure, you could argue that the side effect is that you’re not able to see it, but my intent isn’t “censorship”. If you want to see red and pink diamonds (just a completely abstract example), but I did not want to host it, then as the person who’s paying for the hardware then my want will always come first. That isn’t to say that others aren’t free (including yourself) to host said red and pink diamonds.
Censorship as a term makes sense for the government, because they have the power to enforce that everyone under their ruling must not host red and pink diamonds. I alone do not. Now, maybe almost every single Lemmy instance also doesn’t want to host red and pink diamonds - that would still not be censorship, that would just be most instance admins happen to align the same and are executing the same rules for their own sites.
Of course, replace myself with a private business owner, and Lemmy instances with something like a News subscription website, the meaning should still be the same. Hopefully my stance makes sense, I’m not writing this with the intent of “You’re wrong and I’m right” in the direct sense, but as a “I disagree, and here’s why”.
I did see your conversation with the other person here, and I agree that government censorship is bad (such as the weird concept of having to upload your ID to view porn), but I just don’t view this in the same way I suppose.
Obviously, Substack is within their rights to allow red and pink diamonds if they want, but if they didn’t then that would not be censorship (in my eyes, at least).
- Comment on Does anyone else feel like 90% of the population is stupid? 6 months ago:
I mean, a lot of people have a tendency to do “stupid” things, and maybe even say stupid things - but I wouldn’t classify 90% of the population as stupid. First problem is that “stupid” isn’t a very quantifiable quality - and “smarter” really depends on the perspective of the way you’re looking at it. I’ll use what someone else mentioned here as an example: I would like to say that I’m at least a decent software developer (or so I hope), but I know absolutely nothing about cars (I don’t even have one). While I’m pretty well rounded on the software side of computers, I’m terrible at the hardware side. I am also terrible at math aside from the very basics (and even then… eh) - hence, I’d never have a good shot at even getting into game development if that were something I wanted to pursue.
So not only can I not comment on whether other people are “stupid”, I can’t even account for myself, because there’s no metric for it. Are we going off of IQ (I have zero clue what my IQ is, nor do I really have an interest in finding out what it might be)? Are we going off of being able to answer Jeopardy questions?
- Comment on 41% of fediverse instances have blocked threads so far!!! 6 months ago:
I’m pretty sure this has already happened in the past, I swear there was a “Bad instances” list that someone was passing around, which someone else then disputed that the list was bad due to there not being valid reasons for why an instance was marked “bad” - but people had taken the list as 100% fact and blocked said instances.
That is the double-edged sword of the Fediverse, the freedom to choose who you allow and don’t allow in regards to federation. There’s always going to be the “cliques” so to speak where if you upset (for lack of a better word) the wrong people, the size of that instance can claim that you’re bad, and if other instances take their word at face value without verifying this then all of a sudden you can’t communicate with other instances/people (ie, if you get defederated by lemmy.world or mastodon.social - then good luck). Obviously, the good part about how the Fediverse works is the power for each instance admin to make their own determinations of who they want to federate with, but this is the “bad” side of it which is further amplified by the fact that there are always going to be instances that hold a very larger position of power. In a way, fracturing of the Fediverse is a bit inevitable because of this. I suspect what you say will happen (as I’ve already seen this mentioned).
It is what it is, I’m not saying whether that double-edged nature is good or bad, because at the end of the day that determination comes down to every person who chooses to participate, and is a decision they have to make on their own volition.
- Comment on A new Type of Mastodon Signup that gives people a sense of Agency 6 months ago:
To be honest, as an instance owner I would not want to even have that data touch my instance - that would be a nightmare waiting to happen whether some instance operator does so with or without malice intent (such as a server compromise).