Jayjader
@Jayjader@jlai.lu
- Comment on Is there a formalized ban appeal process for the fediverse? Do I just direct message a mod? 5 days ago:
I want to chime in on the subject of community sidebars.
To my understanding, many of the mobile apps people use to interact with the fediverse (and more specifically the threadiverse) haven’t figured out a great way to render community sidebar content in a way that a new user knows that it exists. Sidebar content is accessible, but often hidden in a sub menu or a non-obvious interaction. I use Boost, for example; in it you swipe inwards from the right side of the screen to slide the sidebar into view. This isn’t surprising to me, a somewhat veteran Reddit user that expects communities to have sidebars and for those sidebars to be on the right side of the screen. However a user that doesn’t already know about community sidebars has almost no way of discovering their existence when they use Boost. Mobile apps have limited screen width so they tend to focus on their “principal use” (visiting a community to browse their posts), but if you don’t know that communities have sidebars in which they describe themselves and their posting and commenting rules it’s very easy to end up in OP’s position.
Not to excuse their comments nor question their ban; I agree with the decision by the mods of c/196 to not spend any more effort dealing with such an oblivious user.
I suspect many Lemmy clients are designed for experienced users who already know how to navigate the space(s) and how they function. Yet much of the “how do we introduce new people to the fediverse and onboard them?” discussions I’ve seen seem to settle on “suggest a generalist instance like LW or .zip, suggest a mobile app like Voyager, and make them start browsing! Newbs are put off by having to do work like read up on an instance”. I wonder how much this end up contributing to creating cases like OP’s.
Then again, !womensstuff@piefed.blahaj.zone was plagued for over a year by men claiming they were “just responding to posts in their /all feeds”. When told about the community’s rules and sidebar, the most common response was along the lines of “I can’t be bothered to read the community name before commenting on a post in my feed, now I need to navigate to the community and find their sidebar?? This community should find a way to prevent their posts from appearing in /all instead”. If these users aren’t going to the effort of reading the community name as displayed on posts then there’s no guarantee they would read community sidebars even if they were already on-screen, in front of their eyeballs.
Even in the comments on this post I can see the argument that basically boils down to “spaces that don’t cater to me should also bear the effort of keeping out of my way” being voiced.
- Comment on The wonder of the sea 2 weeks ago:
My experience as a TF2 n00b in public lobbies
- Comment on Where is modern Punk? 2 weeks ago:
In France we’ve had a few white trash rappers take a decidedly punk slant. Ptite Soeur and Gemroz came out with the album Kayfabe Chimera about a year ago ; the track “Kayfabe” is, to me, full of punk messaging. Femtogo has more recently collabed with Ptite Soeur and the album they released, Pretty Dollcorpse, also has a decidedly punk message.
In terms of “old-school” punk music, you might find better recommendations on mastodon /the blogiverse rather than here on lemmy/the threadiverse.
- Comment on Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter 2 weeks ago:
According to this article written in July, it’s a bit more dire than that if you take a step or two back. Basically, openai and their copycats/derivatives are being held up by investments from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta, who in turn are being held up by investments from Nvidia. If/when the whole chain collapses it’ll be more than 0.5% of earnings that disappear.
- Comment on An ex-Intel CEO’s mission to build a Christian AI: ‘hasten the coming of Christ’s return’ 2 weeks ago:
Not that I disagree, just as someone who loves computers and programming it really feels like throwing out the baby along with the bathwater.
We could (should imo) be planning a sort of overthrow of the rich assholes who don’t share; make sure everyone has access to a computer, the electricity need to run it, and the knowledge to use it to their own benefit.
The second, longer quote in my previous comment is from the intro to a computer self-help/“how-to” book, Without Me You Are Nothing (pdf link).
- Comment on An ex-Intel CEO’s mission to build a Christian AI: ‘hasten the coming of Christ’s return’ 2 weeks ago:
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” – Frank Herbert
“Right now there is an explosive growth of the number of computers and things they can do. Not only are their numbers increasing at a dazzling rate, but the storage of information in giant data banks is growing in the same explosive way.
We have no way to control this now and none in sight. In fact, the very nature of this growth says that all controls will lag far behind computer developments. Any attempt to ban them will only drive com- puters underground. Never lose sight of the fact that computers “crunch time.” The speed at which computers can operate tells us that laws cannot keep up with them. The person with a computer can dance rings around you while you react as though you were embedded in molasses.
What can you do?
Get your own computer. Learn how to use it. We are here to help you make that first step: how to find the one that fits your needs and your pocketbook, where to put it, how to program it-all of the essentials. If you don’t do this, the Bill of Rights is dead and your individual liberties will go the way of the dodo.” – also Frank Herbert
I hate how much we seem to be slowly careening towards Frank Herbert’s vision like the worse case of collective target fixation.
- Comment on Piping mouse 2 weeks ago:
The last time I saw this meme, someone commented that these bags are made and used so that the mouse can be euthanized after an experiment. Supposedly this holds the mouse in place so that it can be “cleanly” decapitated.
- Comment on Dwarf Tyrant vs Tyrant^2: Who would win? 3 weeks ago:
So it weighs as much as a rhino, for small values of “a rhino’s weight”!
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
It’s a very clever follow-up to their previous project, the fediverse schema observatory (also mentioned in the Last Week in Fediverse published October 30th of last year).
- Comment on Fucking math... 3 weeks ago:
Ah, a man of science!
- Comment on Like father... 3 weeks ago:
I have no firm convictions towards or against theism, but learning this in school really made me go “I can’t believe God was this lazy”.
- Comment on Revolt became Stoat 3 weeks ago:
Syntax highlighting for code blocks is the reason I prefer discord over slack for collaborating and just chatting with friends who know how to code. I imagine some irc clients exist that so the same, but at least with discord I know my recipient is guaranteed to see what I see.
- Comment on Which game would you erase from your memory, in order to experience it fresh once again? 3 weeks ago:
Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos (and it’s expansion, The Frozen Throne).
The level of storytelling for a strategy game’s campaign completely blew me away at the time. The “good”-coded guys are haughty and rigid, the “bad”-coded guys are (mostly) just trying to get by in a world that rejects them at every turn, not to mention you play as the lovable young protégé and prodigy that slowly casts aside his humanity until he becomes a “big bad” for everyone else. The campaign has world-altering events take place, and you actually get to see the world altered after the fact.
- Comment on I need someone to help me identify this shark plz. Spotted in the wild. Maybe a new species. 3 weeks ago:
You ever seen a tumbleweed run for it’s life?
- Comment on Lemmy being pinged each midnight 3 weeks ago:
Sounds like either federation working as intended, or some client app trying to cache info about your instance. Might be fedidb.com or fediverse.observer or some other service.
- Comment on I don't think so 4 weeks ago:
I would love to troll them with some videos on people that are literally white as snow, either some kind of stop-motion or other approach. Then report all the Nazi shit as “this is peach/pink people, not white”.
Not that it would do much good, but just maybe they would get frustrated enough to take the insurance down — or at the very least explicit that they use the unambiguously racist meaning of “White”.
- Comment on Intent recognition for HomeAssistant without an LLM? 4 weeks ago:
From my understanding of word embeddings (as used by LLMs), you could skip the LLM and directly compare the similarity of what the STT outputs to each task or phrase in a list you have prepared. You’d need to test it out a few times to see what threshold works, but even testing against dozens of phrases should be much faster than spinning up an LLM - and it should be fully deterministic.
- Comment on Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, 18 years old titan and still the greatest strategy game of it's kind 4 weeks ago:
Beyond all Reason also does this amazing thing where, once all players have joined the map in-game, you get up to a minute to plan out you build order before the game’s clock actually starts.
- Comment on Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, 18 years old titan and still the greatest strategy game of it's kind 4 weeks ago:
Supreme Commander, especially with the Forged Alliance extension is a super-tight, supe-polished game! My biggest complaint is that the devs bet on CPU single core speed continuing to increase over the years instead of trying to make their game more fully multi-threaded; even on my 5950X it can stutter in the late game.
I’ve been getting into Beyond all Reason recently, it’s coming along nicely but (to me) is more focused on emulating the Total Annihilation experience than the SupCom one:
- 2 playable factions, the Armada and the Core (roughly map onto SupCom’s UEF and Cybran, albeit with less flavor and no lore)
- T1 power generation in SupCom is via power generators (spammable) and geothermal plants (only on certain map squares). BaR has windmills, tidal generators, basic and advanced solar panels that are all spammable as well as geothermal on certain map squares
- SupCom has land/air/sea factories, BaR has bots/vehicles/planes/hovercraft/seaplanes/amphibious/naval factories.
- SupCom has 3 unit tiers that each have their own factory, plus a fourth “experimental” whose units are so big they are built as buildings from T3 builders. BaR has like tier 1 and 1.5 units that can be built from T1 factories, tier 2 and 2.5 units that can be built from T2 “advanced” factories, and T3 and experimentals are built from “Experimental” factories — and no T3 builders (!)
- much less diverse experimental units; Armada has a big walker mech and a fat lightning tank equipped with tactical emp missiles, and Core has and even bigger walker mech and a tank so slow you’d think it was immobile (albeit equipped with a commander’s d-gun).
- commanders can’t upgrade at all, and can’t even build every T1 building
The dev team is currently working on a third faction (the Legion) that seems to be somewhat inspired by SupCom’s Aeon and Seraphim.
- Comment on They say word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective form of marketing. What games did you (not) enjoy that came well-recommended by friends to you, and why did they recommend it to you? 4 weeks ago:
Time for some more word of mouth (potentially): have you tried Beyond all Reason? It’s more or less a modern open source remake of Total Annihilation. Runs like a dream even with tens of AI players and tens of thousands of units in-game.
Compared to SupCom I would say there is more unit diversity but less wacky experimentals, and the commander unit cannot be upgraded. There are currently only 2 factions, that basically map to UEF and Cybran from SupCom (or rather SupCom derived those two from the 2 in Total Annihilation). The dev team is currently working on a third faction that, from the previews, seems to me to be a mashup of the Aeon and Seraphim from SupCom: Forged Alliance.
- Comment on Are we living in a golden age of stupidity? 4 weeks ago:
Empathy and intelligence are not the same. As evidenced by some highly intelligent people displaying a shocking lack of empathy, and some highly empathetic people not displaying the greatest intelligence.
Personally, I’d rather talk about knowledge and behavior. Intelligence and empathy are hard to quantize.
Leaning into natural selection, proposing we need to let it “run it’s course”, in a way, to “weed out the weak traits” is eugenics. So is thinking that some traits are “good” and others “bad” without qualifying “for the current social/environmental context”. Stupidity might be a good defense against existential depression.
Why do you yourself call the thought “scary” if you don’t think it’s eugenics? What exactly is scary about letting “weak traits perish” if not that it’s inviting a certain form of eugenics to decide who gets to reproduce and/or be born?
You’ll note I didn’t claim you advocate for it directly, just that your arguments are eugenics-flavored.
- Comment on Are we living in a golden age of stupidity? 4 weeks ago:
Wealth inequality is returning to pre-WW1 levels and climate change’s effects are becoming visible to the average person, making people desperate for a way out. Education budgets in the US have been steadily slashed, far-right agit-prop by people like Steve Bannon has flooded the internet while the political class that could oppose it are pacified by corporate donors.
No need for social darwinism or sketchy eugenics-flavored arguments to explain this.
- Comment on How should Lemmy sort posts so small communities can compete? 4 weeks ago:
“Top over the last 6 hours” can be a decent middle ground between “new”, “scaled”, and “active”.
- Comment on Am I getting this right? The vibe of different lemmy instances 4 weeks ago:
The only drama I’m aware of (beyond the small spat with hexbear I mentioned) is how feddit.org’s admins were extra cautious regarding discourse on Israel/Palestine in the wake of October 7th. Given the the servers are physically located in Germany (and as such apparently the admins can go to jail over their content) it was disappointing but understandable to me, and pissed off a lot of the more audibly anti-genocide and anti-imperialism users.
I think, sadly, this kind of tribalism is part of the growing pains for federated online communities, especially the more “Western” ones. Instances behave like villages or city-states towards each other, while in physical space we’ve all grown up and been socialized inside (comparatively) huge nation-states.
- Comment on Am I getting this right? The vibe of different lemmy instances 4 weeks ago:
anything else: either nazis or tankies depending on who you ask.
I’m curious what you’ve heard of jlai.lu, feddit.org, and/or sopuli.xyz. I suspect that, being more geographically-focused than the topic-focused or mindset-focused like most of the instances you’ve listed, they don’t as easily fit into one box (other than the obvious france/germany/finland boxes).
Here on jlai.lu, we had a bit of a spat with hexbear a while back because we’re too reactionary for their tastes, but even that feels mostly irrelevant nowadays.
- Comment on Looking for bot-friendly Lemmy instances/communities for RSS reposting 4 weeks ago:
I see, thanks for the explanation!
I’ve been working on a frontend/browser client for “exploring” activitypub instances in my spare time, and CORS basically requires me to have some sort of separate server process that can fetch and auth using my account(s). I’m unsure of how much sense it would make to try to bolt my client on top of your software, but at least now I know I can try without needing to involve a Microsoft account.
- Comment on Looking for bot-friendly Lemmy instances/communities for RSS reposting 4 weeks ago:
ASP.NET Core Identity is backed by an in-memory database (since 11.1.0); the only allowed login method is via Microsoft account, but DeviantArt and Reddit accounts can be added in user management (which will connect these accounts to Pandacap’s main database).
Does this literally mean I need a Microsoft account to run this on my own machine, or is that only for deploying on Azure?
- Comment on Are there any games you don't play as it was intended to be played? If so, what game and how? 4 weeks ago:
According to my father, who is an absolute Epic Wizard level computer programmer consultant, Factorio teaches you the basics of computer programming.
Someone wrote a whole article riffing off of that idea (checks date) 4 (!) years ago: erikmcclure.com/…/factorio-is-best-interview-we-h…
(Apologies for replying to a 6-month old thread)
- Comment on Are there any games you don't play as it was intended to be played? If so, what game and how? 5 weeks ago:
Sorry for necroposting, but OP linked your reply in a recent post and I wanted to directly respond to it.
You might enjoy The Ellimist Chronicles, a companion book to the Animorphs series. The novel’s protagonist has a similar interest in getting things done with the minimum of direct intervention.
- Comment on Are there any games you don't play as it was intended to be played? If so, what game and how? 5 weeks ago:
I also like to try to determine before hand what I want them to do, like becoming emperor of brittania or whatever, and see how close I can get from just 1 or 2 interactions with them.
Reminds me of the beginning of the book The Ellimist Chronicles.