malicka

The downside to transparency – someone will bad-faith you into oblivion for telling the truth.

Personally, even if the fall-out of losing the servers hasn’t been perfectly-and-neatly handled (civil suit, money back, etc.), I am impressed at the resilience they’ve had; this is something that very easily could’ve wiped out other projects, but they’re still here and they’ve managed to raise capacity. The transparency is also greatly appreciated.

I find this heartening. Godspeed to them!

There is a key difference: When an AI is wrong, it’s “buyer beware; you knew AI isn’t infallible.” You have no recourse.

When a human is incompetent, you can blame them or their employer. You have recourse.

Just to emphasize: When opan says ton, they mean a TON. Around 13 thousand, if I remember correctly.

It’s not mental illness, it’s the logical extension of principle. If you think non-free software is unjustifiable and should be avoided, you’re probably going to try to avoid using it (or, at least, promoting it).

There are three exceptions people sometimes make in their avoidance: Using non-free drivers, using non-free software for work/school, and using non-free software in the browser. It’s rational that someone would want to limit these exceptions as best they can, and LibreJS is useful for that.

I use LibreJS not to help me completely avoid non-free JS, but to make me more concious of my software use. If a site has non-free code and LibreJS pings me about it, I’ll consider if there’s a better site I should be supporting instead.

These sorts of critiques are a red-flag because that is rarely ever the case.

> Alas, I fear that this Starbucks fiasco is emblematic of a deeper malaise. There’s a shortage of seriousness everywhere in society now. […] So much is image-driven in our influencer culture nowadays, and so little is substance. Sometimes it feels like the whole country is slurping Frappucinos® in Barbieland.

There’s nothing that bothers me more than this sort of cultural critique about X vague value that doesn’t have much meaning in and of itself. They give me an immediate knee-jerk reaction, since they’re usually pretty meaningless. Things need to be more “serious?” What?

And since the birth of pop-culture, it’s always been a bit shallow, image-driven, and insusbtantial – that’s not new to this generation, or even the one before that.

Several people, including you, are proposing using env rather than sourcing; is that somehow preferable to something like this?

    (. .env; my-cmd)

It’s the same as forgetting you put something in your .profile or .bashrc, no? In any case, both forgetting the env config and using the same shell for days in a row seem like two things that probably don’t coincide too often.

By “still,” they meant that the article’s observation about younger men being more suicidal than older men doesn’t apply likewise to younger women & older women. So older women still are more suicidal than younger women.

You blame the people that architected it: Racist & oportunistic politicians, bankers, and real estate agents.

Who were predominately white, yes. Not sure why that makes you feel so defensive.

This seems like a weirdly wishy-washy reason to go with, when we could pick out a more tangible one instead: For some types of software, being a bit painful to use is (counter-intuitively) the more profitable route. These user-hostile patterns are copied by other teams and apps because they are seen as “what’s professional” or “modern.” And then those get copied by others, so on and so forth… until you get the modern landscape of proprietary software.

> Then millions fled America's inner cities in the 1960s due to skyrocketing crime and racial violence.

Let’s make sure we keep the cause-and-effect straight here. White flight was what created the crime, not the other way around. Inner cities in the US became poor, losing their business and tax bases, because of the racially-motivated flight of white people to avoid coloured people. Policies that facilitated white flight were done with the explicit purpose of creating white suburbs and preventing coloured people from following suit. It was not people making rational decisions about crime statistics.

I disagree — enacting a policy people like and find useful is inherently good publicity.

If your city mayors’ initiatives improve your local library, this will make people who visit the library like the mayor more. This doesn’t make improving the library immoral or unethical.

Of course root causes should be addressed (chiefly, I believe that tuition should be gratis for public universities), but in the meantime I think this is a perfectly fine policy. It achieves three goals:

• Gets people talking about higher education payments.

• Eases the financial burden of higher education for some. It should be all, but this is still objectively better than none, provisionally.

• Provides good publicity for the political party more inclined to do anything about the root causes (Democrats).

This is a desktop environment, not a window-manager, so here it’s pretty expected. I’ve gotta say, though, virtually every window manager that does have a panel makes it toggleable. FVWM, Fluxbox, xmonad, i3, etc.

SpaceFN seems nice idea, but wow does this article feel like SEO bait. There are three introductory paragraphs about the idea of the idea of SpaceFN, rather than just describing it. The style feels a bit condescending, too…

Nice idea, though.

Interesting project! I’ve never gotten past brief tinkering with Forth, so this might be a good excuse to get a little farther.

It’s named in Esperanto, too — “ilo” being “tool,” “koni” being “to know,” and so “Kon/il/o” meaning a “tool for knowing.”

I’d wager he has thought of it, based on his interesting AI-girlfriend short story: https://stallman.org/articles/made-for-you.html

On paper, in that every person exhibits some symptoms of some disorders to some degree? Yea, anyone will tick some of those boxes.

But are those symptoms long-lasting? Are they severe? Do they impede day-to-day life? Professional diagnosis isn’t like WebMD.

> The fact they own the software means they can make it easier or harder to surprise or spread certain messages, and do so in very subtle ways.

I just can’t imagine how, honestly! It’s not exactly trivial to programmatically hinder certain messages in a way that others won’t notice and complain about — as they did when Lemmy had hard-coded blacklists for slurs.

If anything, they'd abuse their control of the Lemmy.ml server, like you said.

I just don't see how they could manipulate, outside of their own servers?

I honestly don't think the Lemmy developers have any control other than that over lemmy.ml. And with Lemmy’s user-base spreading out to use other servers, their influence is decreasing more and more each day.

It depends on whether or not the author's politics bleed into the software or somehow influences the user-base; which could be disasterous. I think with Lemmy, though, there isn't much risk for that.

It really doesn’t matter, I don’t think. You can avoid the official-ish servers run by developers and join another, or host your own.

At the end of the day, Lemmy’s just server-software. Whatever the developer’s politics are, it doesn’t magically poison the software.

I think it matters significantly less with Lemmy than it does with Mastodon/Pleroma/etc.

For one, it's pretty low-stakes: With Mastodon, you lose your followers, your posts, and your platform. It's hard to start from scratch, unless you have a chance to move house with the “migration” tool. Lemmy accounts are, comparatively, much more disposable. You can move house at the drop of a hat and it doesn't matter too much; your new profile has fewer comments in its history, who cares? People don't follow _you_, after all, they follow the _community_.

If you pick a bad server, just make a new account, no problem.

People switching from Android to iOS for privacy reasons seems myopic to me. Apple is, ultimately, a company. There is no such thing as them “making enough money.” If they can double-dip by both selling data and selling hardware, they will. It's not a matter of if, but when. De-Googled Android is objectively a more privacy-friendly option than iOS.

You didn't save a click, that one case is a small part of the article. The focus is the history and current state of such laws.

> Let’s try the opposite: “not left” is definitely something different from “right” - urrrgggh. “Do not go left” doesn’t mean to go right.

“maldekstra” doesn't actually mean “not right” — mal in Esperanto more precisely means “opposite.” Left is opposite of right, and so malmaldekstra (opposite of the opposite of right) is still right (dekstra).

“Not right” in Esperanto doesn't exactly mean left, either, just like in in English. That'd be ne + dekstra = nedesktra.

I know GNU Jami (a P2P chat program) uses Git as its data-store extensively— from what I could tell, checking out ~/.local/share/Jami/, all messages are stored in git commit messages, for instance.