PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]

Anarchist, autistic, engineer, and Certified Professional Life-Regretter. If you got a brick of text, don’t be alarmed; that’s normal.

No, I’m not interested in voting for your candidate.

  • 1 Post
  • 97 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • But merely being able to communicate with people has never been sufficient to make peace with them, at least from my experience. Otherwise I’d be much more popular with people, because I never had trouble reading, listening to, and writing to people, but I’m not good at talking to people. I typically need a lot more prior information (i.e. cultural norms, dictionary of body language, recent local history, a catalog of an individual’s interests and their definitions, etc.) to talk to people effectively, which I often don’t have or acquire by fucking up enough times to figure it out by hand 🙃.




  • I know it’s just the meme, but topology actually pops up in robotics. The topology of the configuration space, i.e. what values the variables you can control, like arm angles, linear positions, etc., can actually be used to determine if a certain type of movement is feasible. For example, if your robot’s configuration space has the shape of a torus, you can’t send the robot “into” the torus’s “donut hole”. Physically, this means that to get from one configuration to another, you might have to take some indirect path because the straight path (in configuration space) isn’t physically feasible.




  • I like this, but I think that upvotes correspond to things people enjoy, which may or may not be of high quality. I.e., shitposting subs would probably be rated “high quality” when, like… it’s literally the point to post shitty content.

    Also, as stated, that means we have to sum over the entire time history of the community. We would probably want to limit the time history of what is summed over, subject to a maximum for subs with high post counts (like the shitposting subs.

    IMO it’s a great suggestion, but I think it needs to be part of a weighted combination of factors.






  • Short answer: No.

    Long answer: Threads, like Mastodon and the social media website formerly known as Twitter, are microblogging sites. While Mastodon users do show up here once in a while, I don’t get their posts unless they actively post in a Lemmy community.

    So if your instance decides not to defederate from Threads, and you choose not to block Threads using Lemmy’s upcoming individual instance blocks, you might see their users occasionally comment on stuff. If I recall correctly, it’s pretty difficult for Mastodon users to post on Lemmy for technical reasons that will also apply to Threads.

    I do think that quality of life in the wider Fediverse could dip once Threads users are allowed to participate and Threads content is allowed to spread. However, I think that the impact on Lemmy will be small. If it isn’t, we have defederation and soon individual instance blocking to help us filter out the crap.

    Because the code for Fediverse sites is free and open source, I think that the Fediverse will exist for the foreseeable future. However, Meta could make it worse. If their past behavior is any indication, i.e. basically all of it, then that’s probably what they’re going to do eventually. At the end of the day, if Threads is too irritating, someone will start an instance of something that is defederated from them.

    Personally, I’m not exactly thrilled by the prospect of Meta (or any corporation) joining the Fediverse (or any other aspect of public life), but I think we’ll be okay. I am concerned for people in marginalized groups who will have to deal with the toxic community that Threads has allowed to fester. However, there was a big stink about this a couple months ago where some big instances pre-emptively defederated from Threads. Now might be a good time to make an account on one of those instances.

    Regardless of what happens, you will not be literally forced to go to Facebook or Threads. In the absolute worst case scenario, i.e. Meta takes over the Fediverse, you join or host an instance that doesn’t federate with anyone.

    I’m an anxious person myself so I know this is hard to internalize: you’ll be okay. We’ll get through this.


  • I’ve never met a person in my life that was convinced by an ad to buy something.

    I believe that you’re being truthful, but I respectfully challenge the idea that you don’t know some person who was convinced by an ad to buy something. Even if all your friends truthfully insist that their decisions are not swayed by ads, there is probably some product they chose at least partially because an advertisement reached them and left a positive impression about the product.

    Ads do clearly work on people who are suggestible enough to be susceptible to them. Some of your contacts are probably these people whether they admit to it or not. If ads didn’t work, they wouldn’t be made. Ads aren’t made inherently to be annoying or make our lives worse; they’re driven by profit. Kill the profit and the motive dies. IMO that’s all the more reason to get rid of them.

    Anecdotally, my parents and grandmother watch TV with commercials, and they give me a bug-eyed look when I explain to them that I don’t get advertisements and that I don’t want to see them. Most people I know just want to get content crammed down their content-holes and will deal with ads to avoid the momentary inconvenience of change. So I feel like we’re fighting an uphill battle.




  • Actually I tried out KDE Plasma on my grandmother’s budget laptop from about the same time. It was a little too slow with default settings, but once I killed the animations (can be done in Settings app) it ran pretty well. It ran a whole hell of a lot better than the Windows it came with.

    I also tested KDE vs XFCE in my old gaming computer, and I actually managed to get slightly less RAM usage in KDE than XFCE, so long as no plugins were used.

    Both systems were tested with Debian 12. On the gaming PC, I actually used the XFCE iso, so it was installed first.

    So depending on how your distro ships the default KDE Plasma settings or how you set it up, it actually can be a lightweight option compared with XFCE.