skullgiver
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
- Comment on A literal depiction of how capitalism invades all aspects of life 6 days ago:
That’s probably because the ad isn’t actually on the facade of the building. It’s on the scaffolding put up against the facade while restorations take place. They put an image of the building itself on the scaffolding canvas, and then put a screen in front of that.
- Comment on A literal depiction of how capitalism invades all aspects of life 6 days ago:
And they’ll stay wealthy for longer by letting some big companies pay for an ad on the scaffolding covering up the cathedral while restoration takes place.
- Comment on A literal depiction of how capitalism invades all aspects of life 6 days ago:
It still sucks, but I guess it’s better than letting monuments crumble.
- Comment on American wanting to move abroad, what's the best bet for an registered nurse? 1 week ago:
That’s unfortunate. Best of luck to you!
- Comment on American wanting to move abroad, what's the best bet for an registered nurse? 1 week ago:
I don’t want to dash your hopes of emigrating to a better country, but don’t underestimate how painful emigration can be. You can’t just pick a country and move there. Moving countries is not like moving states. You’ll need to convince the country you’re going that you’re worth letting in. If I were you, I’d start with a list of countries that might be willing to let you in, and work your way down from there.
I would suggest Europe, the Nordics in particular; the Nordics are some of the best countries to live in in the entire world, with (in my opinion) rather pleasant politics in comparison. Germany and other north-western countries tend to score well too, but you’ll have to look into how much they match your ideals and culture. Europe is generally on pretty good terms with the USA, which helps a lot. However, you’re not alone in wanting to move there. Don’t be surprised if the process of applying for permission to enter the country takes months to years and several thousand dollars in paperwork, time and money you don’t get back if you’re refused. Things can go a bit smoother if you’ve got a claim on citizenship by blood or family history, but that too can take time and paperwork to arrange, and is entirely dependent on the current laws in the countries your ancestors are from.
In many countries, being a highly skilled worker gives you a major advantage. However, your nursing education may not be accredited in other countries, or be considered “highly skilled” enough; with some bad luck, you may need to go back to school in your country of choice to get your education revalidated (if you’re let in for that). The same goes for driver’s licenses and certifications you may have achieved over the years.
One trick you may be able to use if you’re of European descent is getting European citizenship by blood (I believe Italy, Spain, and a bunch of other countries allow for this) and then use the freedom the Schengen accords provide to move elsewhere in Europe, skipping a whole lot of paperwork. This way, you can, for example, work in Denmark without needing to go through the strict Danish immigration system (though validating your education may still need work).
Just as an example: if you want to apply for a license for a general nurse in Norway as a non-EEA citizen, processing time takes at least 11 months if you provide all the required paperwork and costs $152 to file (which you don’t get back if you’re refused). You need a license to be a general nurse; without a license, you can’t do your job. Without a job, you can’t just move there; you can get a temporary holiday visa but you can’t apply for jobs with that. This is on top of the other requirements, like speaking B2 level Norwegian. If you apply, you may be given a deadline to conform with the requirements.
- Comment on Lemmy.world seems to have banned the largest piracy community on Lemmy. 1 month ago:
If you use Sync, there’s this setting you can toggle to disable embedded images. I’m not sure if this protects against network requests, but I think it should? If you disable the, images are represented as links instead.
- Comment on Lemmy.world seems to have banned the largest piracy community on Lemmy. 1 month ago:
Links to pirated content have been deemed illegal in various jurisdictions. That said, the piracy community on Lemmy doesn’t seem to do much more than complain about DRM, so I guess the risk shouldn’t be that high?
Still, the best way to avoid annoying letters from lawyers is to avoid risky communities. Hosting anything related to piracy, gambling, porn, or crime is just a pain, even more so than hosting normal stuff.
- Comment on Lemmy.world seems to have banned the largest piracy community on Lemmy. 1 month ago:
I’m not sure, but anything doing Markdown parsing and allowing images to be embedded is vulnerable to this. I kind of doubt that the devs don’t know about this.
The alternative would be to download every image on the server and cache it until users start requesting the image files, rewriting the Markdown to link to the new image location. I can think of a few reasons why that’s not implemented.
Proxying all comments was implemented in the backend at some point, I’m not sure why this feature was removed again. I can’t find much in the repo history, you could ask the devs why the feature got removed if you’re curious.
- Comment on Lemmy.world seems to have banned the largest piracy community on Lemmy. 1 month ago:
Your client asks my server for the image, my server does a basic IP location lookup based on a free internet database I downloaded last year and turns it into an image on the fly.
- Comment on Does more knowledge/awareness have a tendency to reduce enthusiasm for some subjects/activities? 1 month ago:
I think that’s only a problem if your intent is to become the best player in the world. I just play chess for fun and I don’t really care much if I lose. I don’t care about memorising standard openings.
I’m not very good, but if I wanted to memorise a billion different things, I’d study a language or something. Playing online allows me to play with people who are just about as bad as I am when I have a few minutes to spare.
- Comment on Lemmy.world seems to have banned the largest piracy community on Lemmy. 1 month ago:
Lemmy makes local copies of everything when federation occurs. It’s 100% on their server. The only exceptions are images posted as part of the comments, those are loaded directly. Then again, that adds the ability to add tracking pixels, so that’s not exactly great for a piracy community either.
Image loading example
Image I turned off all the logging for this proof of concept but this could’ve been a transparent PNG pixel that tracks every bit of information your browser will give it.
- Comment on Lemmy.world seems to have banned the largest piracy community on Lemmy. 1 month ago:
I’m surprised the major Lemmy servers even permit piracy related content in the first place. Half the Fediverse seems to be hosted in Germany, probably one of the worst countries to host piracy related content.
The .world team should definitely make a statement before banning stuff just to avoid this kind of drama, but piracy communities are not worth the moderation hassle and legal risk for a silly side project like Lemmy.
If I were you, I wouldn’t expect the same privacy protections Reddit provides for their users when copyright owners start sending legal threats. These instances barely collect enough donations to cover server costs, nobody is going to pay an expensive lawyer to protect your IP address if your server gets sued.
- Comment on Two amateurish questions 2 months ago:
Hosting
Strato offers a bunch of services. If you’re renting a VPS, you can definitely join the Fediverse. Just set up a subdomain (masto.yourdomain.nl) and follow the setup guide for any Fediverse service.
If you’re renting shared hosting (i.e. a space to dump PHP and HTML files), you may be limited in what you can do. You’ll need to pick a Fediverse server that can deal with running in such an environment. Strato does offer a bunch of programming languages (Ruby, Python) but services like Mastodon probably won’t be compatible. I think Kbin might actually work, but that depends on the PHP addons and resource limits that Strato enforces. Many of these shared hosts have limits on things like IOPS and inodes, and you may run into that. Performance may also be suboptimal, as many shared hosts limit RAM and CPU time to a level where you can barely run WordPress. Make sure you have plenty of storage, I expect the basic plan with only 20GB of content to fill up quite quickly if you don’t disable any caching.
If you don’t know what a VPS is or don’t know how to handle yourself in a Linux command line, you may be better off renting a specific Fediverse server from a company specialising in that.
Following
Most ActivityPub accounts can follow most other ActivityPub accounts. You can follow a GoToSocial account from your Pixelfed account and boost its posts so your followers on Akkoma and Mastodon can read it, or reply again mentioning your family on Friendica.
Lemmy, Kbin, and a few other Threadiverse services are oriented around subreddit-like communities with votes indicating order, and they’re the biggest exception to the rule. Most Fediverse software is built around Twitter/Facebook style timelines rather than topics+replies. You can follow Lemmy communities on Mastodon, but the other way around doesn’t work.
As for the apps: you’ll need to use the app that fits your server. Many servers offer a Mastodon API, as Mastodon is the most popular ActivityPub server type, but you’ll probably have a better experience with the native apps. Lemmy clients don’t typically include Mastodon APIs and neither does the opposite work.
The app sporting the best cross-application support I’ve seen so far is Fedilab (Android app, free on F-Droid), sporting support for Mastodon, Peertube, and Pleroma, and any services exposing those APIs like (I believe) Pixelfed.
In theory, apps could use the ActivityPub C2S standard to interact with ActivityPub servers of any type, but in practice that API isn’t implemented, as it’s not very well-defined and ignores the reality that most ActivityPub servers are made with a certain bias (like “optimised for timeline”, “optimised for sorting based on votes”). I do hope C2S becomes more popular in the future but for now it’s kind of theoretical more than anything.
- Comment on Someone recreated the 1996 FMV game "Star Trek: Borg" that works in a browser and with upscaled visuals 2 months ago:
They did come back and work out a good deal (and props to the Roddenberry estate for doing that!) but the first reaction was issuing a takedown.
In this case, the fact that it’s using property under actual copyright from a third party (the game studio) rather than just being a fan recreation isn’t in the project’s favour. And to be fair, the author(s) state as much on the website.
I didn’t know they got to do the Orville. Unfortunately, I don’t have any VR access these days, but I’m glad they’re doing well!
- Comment on Someone recreated the 1996 FMV game "Star Trek: Borg" that works in a browser and with upscaled visuals 2 months ago:
Can’t reach the site. There’s no way Paramount will let this slide, though…
- Comment on Star Trek on LaserDisc, if you've got the right equipment, it looks amazing! (samples in the description) 3 months ago:
I wouldn’t be surprised if Paramount doesn’t have a complete Laserdisc collection to rip.
- Comment on *ducks and runs* 3 months ago:
I doubt you’d be able to order the wrong ones. There are basically two companies that produce almost every bread clip in the world (source), so there’s no way you’ll be able to mess up your order. These unlikely duopolies aren’t exactly known for their willingness to do custom runs, or wide product variety…
- Comment on Thank the EU there’s a prominent “Reject” button nowadays 3 months ago:
The best thing about that tool is that it doesn’t necessarily reject all unnecessary cookies. You can tell it your preferences, i.e. “I’m okay with basic analytics but not with ad cookies”. That’s probably the biggest feature of this addon, although I imagine most people who install the addon will want to disable everything.
- Comment on queer.af, a Mastodon instance, has been killed by the Taliban 4 months ago:
Many people don’t know it’s not a generic TLD.
There was some drama about the TLD a while back by people who disagree with the British occupation of the territories, and with the state of the world right now, I don’t think it’s entirely unimaginable that the TLD will be redelegated. We’ve seen the death and redelegation of .tk and other Freenom domains already, which was partially because of a lawsuit, but also because the locals wanted control of their TLD back (because none of the TLD money was flowing into the local economy).
I think the TLD isn’t at great risk at the moment, but if you’re going to build your business, you may want to pick a generic TLD just in case.
- Comment on queer.af, a Mastodon instance, has been killed by the Taliban 4 months ago:
I don’t think so, you can’t just claim a brand name of your own. You have to own a trademark on the name.
- Comment on Does ActivityPub need URL schema(s)? 4 months ago:
ActivityPub uses the
acct
URI to kickstart itself and then uses LD-JSON to span the network. The JSON contains fields and lists that can be dynamically expanded into whatever representation you need, with default schemas ready for use through ActivityStreams.I think it’s difficult to set up a URI standard for ActivityStreams objects because there is no standard identifier, nor is there a guarantee that these identifiers will be URI-safe. Objects do contain references to (unique) URLs that identify them, but the data is linked either by value (written out completely) or as URLs.
Setting up a URI scheme can be difficult to do comprehensively. How do you represent a link to a repost of an edit of a Location object? You can’t exactly expect the URL to indicate the type, so you’ll probably end up with “ap:server.com/1234”, but at that point you’re leaving out the important part (“where do I go to fetch this object”). You can’t just assume that there are standard endpoints because ActivityPub doesn’t standardise any. Soms apps break on showing Lemmy content for this reason; they were written for Mastodon and Mastodon alone, so their URL generation breaks.
I think an URI scheme would just become one of those unimplemented or useless specifications. It would only distract from what I consider to be the much better solution: fixing up and implementing ActivityPub’s client-server protocol.
The CS protocol lacks important things (like “how do I log in”), but it exposes ActivityPub directly. Your server will expose a bunch of lists (timelines? communities? Up to the server!) and all the app needs to do is render those. Dig down a level and you get a bunch of objects; posts, notes, comments, whatever you can think of, and they too can be rendered by the client in any way you may want.
The protocol is rather freeform but importantly, the server takes care of any references and dereferencing. Clients shouldn’t need to deal with that mess of they’re connected to a server that handles everything for them already.
You can write a super generic ActivityPub CS client that operates somewhat like a file browser, and then it should work with any type of ActivityPub content. A smarter app could detect the type of server responsible for managing certain things (i.e. when you’re following a Lemmy community, treat posts in it as such, and not as a flat timeline), and the protocol extensions that every server adds should help with that.
The only limitation, in my opinion, is the fact that so few servers actually implement the ActivityPub CS protocol, and that in turn there are only a few applications that make use of it. I think this comes down to the vagueness of things like “how do I tell whay user this is in a standardised way” and if we can improve that part of the protocol, we may be able to get the “one single super app” for ActivityPub.
- Comment on Firefish has been abandoned. 4 months ago:
No, we prefer the proprietary ones so that a rival can buy out their competition, end their products, and force everyone to migrate to their worse version of the software you were happy with!
- Comment on Modders are gonna have a field day 4 months ago:
I don’t think anyone needed the source code for that, though.
- Comment on Not noice 4 months ago:
It’s not hard and it’s actually quite efficient to do so. All you need is a fake uTorrent signature and a list of trackers. Just pretend you have all the parts described in the torrent file and start “offering” blocks. Every request that comes in is an attempt to illegally download a file.
You can go one step beyond and use the torrent file to search the DHT tree for people that don’t even use trackers.
Of course, as rights holders, these companies have the legal right to distribute parts of their content as they please. They can legally send you half a frame of video and determine you’re downloading the entire torrent quite concisely. That’d be a waste of expensive networking bandwidth, though.
- Comment on Why does lemmy have it, so any link takes you off the page instead of opening in a new window? 8 months ago:
What browser preference is this, exactly? I’m not aware of any browser having a setting to open every single link in a new tab.