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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • I mean, keeping them local is easy - if anything much easier. I like the idea of summoning them, maybe a mod summoning and banishing them to have them watch a community

    And bots shouldn’t be acting like humans, they should be doing things only they could or should do. Like haiku bot, n-word bot, things like tallying votes for AITA, or even tracking nominations and building best of communities

    They were misused on Reddit, but we can do more with them here. Probably starting a goodbot that messages admins so they can stay ahead of the inevitable bot explosion



  • Ok, I’ll engage you on this one, your position at least seems internally consistent.

    Let’s play out this example - your 2 year old niece is sick, and so are you. You recently found out that she even exists - you didn’t know you had a sister until CPS told you she’s your responsibility.

    An action that risks your life could possibly save her… Let’s say a liver transplant. It has to be you, you’re her only living family member. And because of that, you’ll also be responsible for her - you can put her up for adoption when this is all over, but you’re still on the hook for the medical bills whether this works or not.

    She’s guaranteed to die if you don’t give her the transplant, and you would almost certainly recover quickly on your own.

    If you go through with the transplant, she has a slim chance to live, and an even slimmer one to have a decent quality of life.

    But in your current state, the transplant is very risky - at best you’ll see a lengthy and expensive recovery, after missing months of work you’ll be tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Complications could see you paralyzed or in lifelong pain, and it’s very possible both of you die on the table - maybe even likely.

    The doctors are telling you it’s a terrible idea to go through with this, that the risk is unacceptable and it would be a mercy to just let her pass, but they’re obligated to go through with it if you insist.

    Now, no one is stopping you from going through with it - if you want to put your life on the line for another, that’s your decision to make. You’re her guardian now, so it’s your decision if she should have to go through the pain for the chance at life, no matter how small.

    That’s all well and good - I’ve seen enough to know that death is often a mercy, but if you believe otherwise there’s not much to say

    Now, here’s my question - should the government be able to force you to attempt the transplant?

    Some of these details might seem weird, but I was trying to stick the metaphor as close as possible to a very real scenario with a dangerous pregnancy. The only difference is - the doctor is performing an action here, but withholding one with the pregnancy.

    You’re not though - pregnancy is not a lack of action. It’s an enormous commitment, especially when it’s atypical. It can even be a practically guaranteed death sentence - if the fetus implants in the fallopian tubes, it’s already not viable - at best you’re waiting for the fetus to grow big enough to rupture them, and hoping the bleed that causes doesn’t do too much damage before you can get help.

    Not to mention if a fetus dies in the womb after it gets to a certain size, it rots and leads to sepsis - unclear laws and harsh punishments have already led to situations where doctors refused care for both of these life threatening cases, and in both these cases the odds aren’t slim, they’re none. In the second the fetus was already gone… Sometimes when they induce labor the fetus isn’t even in one piece… It’s pretty grisly

    I don’t agree with your belief that a potential life is the same as a life, but let’s set that aside - I can respect that as a belief

    So… My root question to you is - Should you be able to force someone to risk their own for someone else?

    If so, how sure do you have to be that the other person will die no matter what you do before you’re released from the compulsion to put your own health on the line?

    There’s always at least some risk of pregnancy turning fatal for the mother. How much danger do you have to be in for the math to check out?

    And also, to what point should politicians with little understanding of medicine be able to deny you care?


  • That ship has sailed… So many sites don’t actually change pages, they just load different data - it’s way faster and looks better

    Problem is, the back button takes you off the site no matter where you are, so now you can change the URL and change the history through code to have the best of both worlds

    Then, there’s the people who do it badly, and there’s the people who think “hey, if you need pro StarCraft level clicking speed to back out of my site, maybe for some reason that will make them decide to stay”


  • Convince the population at large it doesn’t work, or even that it’s dangerous.

    Like community run utilities, universal healthcare, or any number of things that so obviously work better without a profit motive

    Make the populace at large see the fediverse as a failed experiment, a hive of criminal activity, or a bunch of tiny toxic echo chambers

    Hell, they could even push legislation that makes running social media out in the open impossible for individuals


  • Frankly, I think this is the only reasonable stance to take with Facebook.

    They do a lot of good things. They do a lot of bad things. The entity itself has zero understanding of the difference

    Take the good - Facebook has invested in the maturation of a lot of technologies…as the only clear victor in social media, they very literally have more money than they know what to do with, and they threw some of that at FOSS

    Leave the bad… Or more accurately, do everything you can - not only to block their data collection and manipulation of you, but also of your friends and family. Ad blockers, local cdn, and Firefox if they’ll go for it

    And most importantly, keep them far from the operations of anything you hold dear. The fediverse should make this list - this is something important. It’s social media without an agenda - that’s both rare and pretty damn important for all of us

    They can’t stop. There’s a lot of good people at Facebook, but they can’t stop - that’s just what a corporation is. I’ll happily break down why from first principles, but the takeaway is this - every last employee of Facebook could be the most moral, competent group out there and it’d still act like an amoral cancer on society

    It’s not a matter of good or evil, they will take every path that promises ROI on a time frame inversely proportional to their size, and they’re freaking huge…


  • As a late millennial and a programmer, I’ve got you.

    So when you request a web page, before anything else, the server gives you a 3 digit status code.

    100s means you asked for metadata

    200s mean it went ok

    300s means you need to go somewhere else (like for login, or because we moved things around)

    400s mean you messed up

    500s mean I messed up

    So this is in the 400s. Each specific code means something - you’ve probably seen 404, which means you asked for a page that isn’t there. And maybe 405, which means you’re not allowed to see this

    418 means you asked for coffee, but I’m a teapot


  • I share your priorities, but I don’t think you understand the depth and breath of how they can ruin this for us… The only guarantee is that, at some point (maybe tomorrow, maybe in 5 years), they’ll ask “how can we extract value from this investment?”. That’s what a corporation is, it can’t help it anymore than fire can choose how hot to burn

    But even before then, we have misaligned goals. At best, their priority is to generate an endless stream of advertiser friendly content, extract information about users, and grow endlessly. At worst, they want to use us to help kill Twitter while ensuring federation of individuals does not become a viable model for social media








  • I made 2 posts on Reddit, one was a meme about my friend jumping over me to see my username, the other was some random text post. Thousands of comments though

    It’s just not in my nature… So much so that I’m trying to release a Lemmy app tonight, and I just remembered I haven’t started on the ability to post…

    Everything else came easy to me - you should be able to click on anything, everything should stay where you left it… But I have no idea how people want to post. I should probably just do it now before I overthink it


  • I think it’s more just because we’re early adopters and the first wave of refugees.

    We’re building something here - and right now, for some it’s a new home, for some of us this is something big - a place that resists monetization. This isn’t just the fresh new version of social media, built by cool people who have the best intentions and a vision (I think most of them did, at least initially)

    Admins go bad, already some of the instances I’m on have people starting to look at not just paying for servers, but making a profit. And if they can live off the donations - fine, more power to them.

    But when someone comes knocking with a bag of money, what are they going to do? They can sell us out, but they can’t go far before we leave… What do we miss out on? The content will either follow or we’re missing out on content elsewhere.

    And we can mitigate it further - too many talented people care too much to let this idea die. We’re going to face difficult times, but it’s a new ephemeral Internet built on top of the one stolen from us - it doesn’t start or end with a reddit clone.

    And I think that’s why we care - because this time is different. It can’t go bad the way everything else does. It relies on no one, and it’s built from all of us

    This place is ours. No kings, no masters, no capitol, no capital


  • My theory is he’s heard Musk brag about how he’s made Twitter profitable, and only lost bots and scammers - the users and advertisers all came crawling back (without releasing numbers)

    No way that’s true, but every owner of social media seems to have paid attention. They want to believe it - there’s growing pressure to turn a profit now, so when someone tells you “the users might get mad, but they’ll come crawling back if you stand firm” they pay attention

    It’s pretty easy to convince someone of something so convenient


  • Totally agree - when the server was quiet and empty it was one thing, but the server isn’t quiet or empty anymore.

    It’s annoying seeing memes reposted by bots (people can do that just fine all on their own), but I’ve seen stuff like AITA threads - the OP isn’t even here to read it… Is the idea to judge people behind their backs?

    I found it extra upsetting because I’m hoping the Lemmy version will be more like AITA using to be - it turned from “who is the problem here” to “did you have the right to do this”