pixelscript

@pixelscript@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Read-onlys are cancer. Post stuff you want to see.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah. The real cancer is the quiet plurality of users who just scroll through the post feed and only voting, not even reading comments. The ones who are responsible for the occasional thread that has entirely negative comments but gets upvoted to the stratosphere anyways.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A real puzzler⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Votes on Lemmy are public, fyi.

  You have to host your own Lemmy instance to see them for yourself, but you can check if you were so inclined.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨X's idiocy is doing wonders for Bluesky.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My true hell would be instances only federating explicitly through whitelist. If what the other reply I received about Mastodon is correct, and if Lemmy behaves similary, then they operate on an implicit auto-federation with every other instance. Actual transaction of data needs to be triggered by some user on that instance reaching out to the other instance, but there’s no need for the instances involved to whitelist one another first. They just do it. To stop the transfer, they have to explicitly defed, which effectively makes it an opt-out system.

  The root comment I initially replied to made it sound, to me, like Mastodon instances choose not to federate with one another. Obviously they aren’t preemptively banning one another, so, I interpreted that to mean Mastodon instances must whitelist one another to connect. But apparently what they actually meant was, “users of Mastodon instances rarely explore outward”? The instances would auto-federate, but in practice, the “crawlers” (the users) aren’t leaving their bubbles often enough to create a critical mass of interconnectedness across the Fediverse?

  The fact we have to have this discussion at all is more proof to my original point regardless. Federation is pure faffery to people who just want a platform that has everything in one place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨X's idiocy is doing wonders for Bluesky.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That sounds worse than I thought it was. I just assumed Mastodon was like Lemmy, where every instance federates with every other instance basically by default and there’s only some high-profile defed exceptions.

  A Fediverse where federations are opt-in instead of opt-out sounds like actual hell. Yeah, more control to instances, hooray, but far less seamless usability for people. The only people you will attract with that model are the ones who think having upwards of seven alts for being in seven different communities isn’t remotely strange or cumbersome. That, and/or self-hosting your own individual instances. Neither of these describe the behavior of the vast majority of Internet users who want to sign up on a platform that just works with one account that can see and interact with everything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Season’s the reason!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why did it take so damn long for humanity to "learn" how to draw/paint realistic images?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Art supplies were historically not cheap. If you wanted to do this for a living, you were probably needing to aim for selling your art to the rich upper class. That implicitly meant catering to their fickle tastes and working on commission. You didn’t make art for you and find your audience later, you made art for the customers you had or you starved.

  And to put it bluntly, realism wasn’t the fashionable hotness for most of human history. The more “crude” styles you may think of as objectively inferior to and less technically impressive as realism were in fact the styles in demand at their respective times. Fashion existed in ancient and medeival times just like it does today, and those styles were the fashion.

  The idea of the independent eccentric artist who lives secluded in their ideas cave producing masterpieces for no one in particular leaving the world in awe at their genius every time they come out with something to show is a very modern concept. If any artist wanted to make a realism painting in an era where it was not popular, they’d be doing it purely for themselves at their own expense. So virtually no one did. Or if they did, their works largely didn’t survive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is basically asking why anyone would live in or near a city like Los Angeles or New York City when Minot exists and has everything you could possibly need.

  If you had to look up where Minot even is, you’ve proven my point.

  Say what you will about whether living near the proverbial big city is worth it or not. But it cannot be denied, there is a world of experiences on offer at larger platforms that a smaller platform simply cannot provide. Network effect can be a cruel mistress.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨X's idiocy is doing wonders for Bluesky.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m pretty sure they’re referring to the concept of defederation and how that can splinter the platform.

  Bluesky is ““federated”” in largely the same ways as Mastodon, but there’s basically one and only one instance anyone cares about. The federation capability is just lip service to the minority of dorks like us who care.

  To the vast majority of Twitter refugees, federation as a concept is not a feature, it’s an irritation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I recently had a rather baffling experience trying to preemptively avoid this by downloading the stupid app right away, only to discover I needed the website version anyway.

  I was attempting to add my Known Traveler Number to an already booked trip with Southwest Airlines, booked by someone else. I was able to link the trip to my account right away in the app, no issue. And I could see the KTN field for my ticket sitting there, empty, greyed-out, and not interactible. I opened up the moble version of their website, completely unsurprised to find it was identical to the app, except for the detail that the KTN field there was functional. Put in the information, changes reflected in the app instantly, and I was in the TAS-pre line that afternoon.

  Why did the two versions obviously built from the same codebase have two different sets of capabilities? Why was the website the more capable of the two this time? I have no clue. All I know is I never want to be a developer at a corporation where I’d have to be responsible for this flavor of trash.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I hate how anything without "world" in its name is just about the US⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The more egalitarian principle would be to not assume. I won’t deny that. People from more minority locales have every right to be upset at being marginalized.

  But at the same time, whenever I read passive aggressive comments on socials from crown countries or from EAASL people around the world bitching about US defaultism as if people are doing it just to be ignorant dicks, I can only think to myself, “Uhh, hello? What do you think the demographics of this space were? What did you expect?”

  Americans are hardly the majority of the world’s English apeakers, but for all the reasons you listed, they tend to remain a massive plurality, if not an outright overwhelming majority, of any mainstream online English language platform. No, that’s not a license to perpetuate US defaultism. But like… read the room, people. Your good fight is far more uphill than you seem to think it is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I have the weirdest aesthetic preferences⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve seen at least one company press kit in rules on how to display their logo refer to it as “respect distance”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta fined $102 million for storing passwords in plain text⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s the thing, though. I computed from the claimed figure above of 13 billion net income. The costs are already accounted for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta fined $102 million for storing passwords in plain text⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been told we have state senators who openly claim to only be there to keep speeding tickets low.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta fined $102 million for storing passwords in plain text⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If you make $50k/yr after taxes, the equivalent fine would be on the order of about $120.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Burning Up⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The correct rebuttal is that 69 degrees is ideal ambient temperature.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all desktop users worldwide | It is Firefox’s strongest privacy protection to date, confining cookies to the site where they were created⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “Anymore”? I’ve never met a single soul who knows this is even possible. I myself don’t even know how to do it if I wanted to.

  I do use NoScript, which does this on a site-by-site basis, but even that is considered extremely niche. I’ve never met another NoScripter in the wild.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why 🤷‍♂️ do users 👨‍💻 dislike 👎 the use ✅ of emojis 😀 on Lemmy 🐭?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Emojis to me are like a strongly flavored seasoning. It’s only appropriate in specific contexts, and even in those contexts, just a pinch goes a long way. Too much and it can detract from the experience.

  Emojipasta is grossly overseasoned food. But that’s the point, obviously. It’s the emoji version of those white women on Tiktok who throw three pounds of ground beef wrapped around an entire block of cheese in a baking sheet full of milk and bake it in the oven for rage clicks.

  Me, personally, I usually don’t need emoji seasoning. I’m fine with it plain. Besides, most emojis to me have all the class of drowning your entire meal in ranch dressing. There are a very small handful of exceptions. But that’s just my lame opinion.

  And of the ones I do find theoretically useful, I’m always hesitant to use them, because emoji rendering is platform specific. They’re not quite like text, where the glyphs are entirely utilitarian and typeface it’s written in conveys little to no information. But with emojis, the subleties pile up. A thinking emoji rendered on a Windows PC isn’t quite the same as a thinking emoji on an iPhone, or various kinds of Android phones. Unless I’m on a platform like Twitter or Discord that forces all clients to use a single emoji set, I can never confidently send a precise emotion with an emoji.

  Platforms like Discord that let you create your own emojis instead of using the comparatively sterile, corporate-approved, general purpose set provided in standard Unicode is another story. I like those and use them extensively. If Lemmy natively supported a Discord-esque system where instances or communities could define custom emojis that didn’t rely on custom clients, plugins, or instance-specific rendering hacks, I’d use them all the time. Though this would, I presume, be to the extreme chagrin of many.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I just wanted to take a moment to enjoy how clean the web can be⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For me, multimedia is a non-negotiable part of the web experience.

  Yes, I get as annoyed as the next guy when I want, say, a simple tutorial written in a couple paragraphs, but the only ones anyone seem to want to make are eight minute long videos filled with fluff. That sucks. But purposefully excluding it from your protocol because it burned you a fee times is a gross overcorrection in my view.

  I appreciate the Gemini project, I respect its goals, and I am happy that it meets the needs of several people such as yourself. But for me, and I think for a great majority of people who would be potentially interested in its broader goal of simplifying the web but are dealbroken by lack of multimedia capabilities, Gemini will never be anything more than a toy. A quirky little curiosity that will never expand beyond a tiny clique of people who accept Gemini for what it is and are content to only ever see content from that same small pool of people.