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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • I align with that article 's conclusion; in fact such a “fediverse browser” is exactly what I think the fediverse needs to fully replace closed/proprietary/traditional social media.

    However, some of their arguments seem off. For example, for the client to be able to choose/implement it’s own sorting algorithm, it seems to me that it would need to have access to all posts. At that point, your client is just another server, with all the problems that we’re originally trying to avoid.

    I have the same problem with your proposal / nostr’s approach: you may obtain a portable identity but all the “content” tied to that identity still has to live somewhere - someone else’s server or your own.


  • Interesting to note that this was originally posted a little over a year ago. I don’t know if anything has changed since, as I don’t self host masto and have been spending more and more of my “fedi-time” here in lemmy.

    Not surprised that someone who “led AI and subscription products at Amazon for the past 8 years” ended up back on mastodon.social, but that’s probably neither here nor there…


  • The description given for Pinker’s The Blank Slate made me sceptical at best, so I went hunting for critiques and found this https://www.jstor.org/stable/27759451

    Sadly it’s pay-walled beyond a preview of the first page.

    For a suggestion of my own, The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson. It’s a fun romp through the history of the English language with numerous tangents focusing on this or that quirk, written for those who have never formally studied English or linguistics.

    As someone who was always more of a “STEM” person, this book completely upended my relationship to language. I used to think there was “one way” of expressing any given idea, and our job as humans, as it were, is to simply learn all the words and their meanings so as to be as precise as possible when expressing ideas. Nowadays I very much trend to see it the other way around: our use of language shapes the language itself, and our changing needs in terms of which ideas we want to express is what makes language evolve over time.

    To put it succinctly, this book helped me view language as a tool that we should alter to suit our needs, not some pre-ordained scripture that we need to memorize and adjust ourselves to.



  • It’s such a destructive mindset, and it seems to me like indie games are hopefully on the cusp of re-demonstrating to the rest of the industry why it is so.

    Art/luxury products depend on catering to subjective tastes to turn a profit. You need to speak to someone’s perspective or interests, and are competing for their disposable income against all other forms of entertainment. Thus the wider the targeted audience, the harder it is to outcompete the rest of the market on “consumer interest” (no idea if that’s the proper use of the term but it sounds correct for the context), the harder it is to even turn a profit.

    Simultaneously, these corporations want an ever-greater magnitude of profit (aka growth). So they decide to target the widest audience possible, while investing as much capital as they can.

    That’s already an unstable balance of priorities. As soon as you start conceiving yourself as competing with almost every single other market on the basis of shareholder speculation, in terms of ROI, it’s doomed.

    You’re not just shooting yourself in the foot, you’re trying to do a Paul Muad’hib Atreides except because this is reality, not sci-fi, instead of drinking the Water of Life you mixed 10 grams of ketamine, 5 tabs of acid, and a fistful of meth into a blue Gatorade and chugged it in one go. All you end up doing is vibrating in place so hard you begin to slough off flesh and erratically disintegrate, like some sort of sad eldritch horror.

    God do I hate corpos sick with capitalism.

    To continue the Dune analogy, they really could use some ecology-derived thinking: specialize and find your niche (or help it emerge), and give back to the rest of the ecosystem so that it continues to flourish with you. Monoculture has a negative correlation between scale and sustainability, let alone ROI.


  • The sci-fi/space opera Pandora’s Star (and it’s follow-up, Judas Unchained) by Peter F Hamilton has humanity developing fast growing coral that they then use to essentially grow houses, over around 5 years, to the specific shape and layout that the inhabitants desire.

    The books aren’t solarpunk in the truest sense, yet they have a surprising amount of solarpunk compatible ideas involved (including a hefty critique of both capitalism and unchecked industrialization).


  • For clarity’s sake: I have been daily driving Linux, specifically ArchLinux, for the past 9 years, across a rotation of laptop and desktop computers. I do almost everything in the command line and prefer it that way.

    I still think if you want people to try Linux you need to chill the fuck out on getting them to use the command line. At the very least, until they’re actually interested in using Linux on their own.


  • Kinda disappointing.

    The article is really trying to sell us, the reader, that using Linux without knowing how to use the command line is not only possible but totally feasible. Unfortunately, after each paragraph that expresses that sentiment we are treated to up to several paragraphs on how it’s totally easier, faster, and more powerful to do things via thé command line, and hey did you know that more people like coding on Linux than windows? Did you know you can do more powerful things with bash, awk, and sed than you ever could in a file manager?!

    FFS vim and nano are brought up and vim’s “shortcuts” are praised… in an article on how you can totally use Linux through a gui and never need to open up the command line.

    Who is this written for? outside of people who not only already use Linux but are convinced that using any other OS is both a moral failing and a form of self-harm?






  • Disclaimer: not a physicist, and I never went beyond the equivalent to a BA in physics in my formal education (after that I “fell” into comp sci, which funnily enough I find was a great pepper for wrapping my head around quantum mechanics).

    So space and time per se might be continuous, but the energy levels of the various fields that inhabit spacetime are not.

    And since, to the best of our current understanding, everything “inside” the universe is made up of those different fields, including our eyes and any instrument we might use to measure, there is a limit below which we just can’t “see” more detail - be it in terms of size, mass, energy, spin, electrical potential, etc.

    This limit varies depending on the physical quantity you are considering, and are collectively called Planck units.

    Note that this is a hand wavy explanation I’m giving that attempts to give you a feeling for what the implications of quantum mechanics are like. The wikipédia article I linked in the previous paragraph gives a more precise definition, notably that the Planck “scale” for a physical quantity (mass, length, charge, etc) is the scale at which you cannot reasonably ignore the effects of quantum gravity. Sadly (for the purpose of providing you with a good explanation) we still don’t know exactly how to take quantum gravity into account. So the Planck scale is effectively the “minimum size limit” beyond which you kinda have to throw your existing understanding of physics out of the window.

    This is why I began this comment with “space and time might be continuous per se”; we just don’t conclusively know yet what “really” goes on as you keep on considering smaller and smaller subdivisions.


  • Yes, sway presents itself as a drop-in replacement for i3 (just built on top of wayland instead of xorg).

    I’ve used it on a Thinkpad laptop for close to 4 years, and on my desktop for the past 3.

    The only problems I’ve encountered are some apps not being Wayland-compatible; xwayland makes the rendering work for those but then things like sharing a window or the entire screen don’t always work. Notably, Discord’s sharing doesn’t work, but I can use OBS to record any entire screen since [the OBS devs] put in the work to properly support Wayland.