CoderKat

@CoderKat@kbin.social
9 Post – 168 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

I write ̶b̶u̶g̶s̶ features, show off my adorable standard issue cat, and give a shit about people and stuff. I'm also @CoderKat.

Tiktok is the absolute worst at irrational censorship. It's a shame because the site is immensely popular and that means it is full of very interesting content. Yet, this is far from the first unreasonable thing they've been removing. It's well known how Tiktok users came up with alternative words to circumvent words that were likely to get their content removed (e.g., "unalived" instead of "killed").

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Terrible. And while we don't have enough details at this time to do anything but guess, I wonder if incel and anti-feminist rhetoric had an impact here. Gender studies as a subject is heavily loathed by those types, sometimes to the degree of wishing violence on them.

Well... I'm not surprised. Disappointed, but not surprised. We all knew this Supreme Court was not in favour of its citizens. The Supreme Court should have been stacked long ago. Leaving it be with its insane appointments just because stacking it might start a war with the GOP was a short sighted move, as the GOP is always going to play underhanded (that's how they managed to get so many SCOTUS appointments in the first place). Biden's insistence on trying to play nice with the GOP has always been his weakness.

This really sucks for those with student loans who were depending on this. We're already in an economically rough place for the kinds of folks who would have student loans. Inflation has been sharp in recent years and wages have not kept up. In my field of tech, layoffs have been widespread and new grads would be the most severely impacted (they already struggle to get hired and now they're competing against an increased number of experienced people).

As an aside, it's also a shame that lawmakers have not managed to pass a law for this debt relief. My understanding is that the strike down is specifically because it's not a congress passed loan forgiveness. But congress isn't willing to do the right thing (not in enough numbers to pass a law, anyway).

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Honestly, Reddit is likely to keep on trucking with a decent sized user base no matter what. A massive number of people aren't gonna leave, if for nothing but simply not wanting to have to change. I think the most likely thing that happens is that Reddit loses a small chunk of people, their growth heavily slows due to competition and a slow trickle of people leaving (but likely offset by the network effect still favouring them for new people), and they take a revenue ding because advertisers aren't gonna like all this drama.

The Fediverse will probably have a bit more rapid growth as the blackouts still continue in some subs and more people become aware of alternatives to Reddit, but then just grows slowly, with usability being the big barrier to massive adoption.

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I filled it out, but let's discuss in the comments because filling out a one sided form isn't as fun as being able to have a multi sided discussion.

I personally find biological immortality super appealing. Despite the word "immortality" in it, it actually just means you can live as long as you want, which takes away many of the downsides to immortality that often get discussed. Since I'm not religious, I don't believe in any kind of afterlife, so scientific advancement letting me live longer is the only way I can avoid death (which I'm afraid of). And more than just avoiding death, I want to avoid being a frail senior whose quality of life is severely diminished.

That said, for me, I ranked the positive advancements with the disease prevention, medical advancement, and QoL above simply extending human life. I think these all do of course go hand in hand. But fewer people dying young is better than fewer people dying old. Dying young is really tragic, because there's so much of life you won't have experienced. Similarly, the big issue with growing old is age related diseases, which impact your quality of life. At a certain point, Alzheimer's and dementia seem worse than death. I feel conflicted because I don't want to die but if I had a disease like one of those, it seems like I'd no longer be myself and it's unlikely there's any hope for recovery before the disease eventually kills me. There's also the fear that perhaps I would be myself, but feel trapped inside a body, constantly confused and afraid by what's going on, which sounds horrible.

On the negative impact side, by far my biggest concern is imbalance in access to this immortality. My fear is that regular folks (including myself) won't have access but billionaires will. That's worse than not having immortality, since billionaires are generally terrible people and not who we want living longer. Overpopulation is a bit of a concern, but one that I think we can eventually solve. e.g., with social changes to expectations about having kids, automation improvements to reduce our need for people to work, and eventually moving beyond just living on the surface of earth. Wealthy nations already have a declining birth rate, anyway. As well, I'm a bit skeptical about true biological immortality, as opposed to, say, extending life on earth for a good chunk of time, but eventually moving to a digital afterlife, where overpopulation is less of a concern.

I didn't know how to answer the regulation question. I think most things need some level of regulation, but the options were "strict regulation" vs "unrestricted", neither which sound right to me. As well, regulation would likely be completely situational. e.g., obviously safety is a vital part of any form of medical treatment. We shouldn't be reducing any existing regulation there. But I certainly don't want research into the area to be unnecessarily held back. For a large part, I see this as no different from researching a cure for any other disease. Aging can be viewed as a disease.

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Strongly agreed. I think a lot of commenters in this thread are getting derailed by their feelings towards Meta. This is truly a dumb, dumb law and it's extremely embarrassing that it even passed.

It's not just Meta. No company wants to comply with this poorly thought out law, written by people who apparently have no idea how the internet works.

I think most of the people in the comments cheering this on haven't read the bill. It requires them to pay news sites to link to the news site. Which is utterly insane. Linking to news sites is a win win. It means Facebook or Google gets to show relevant content and the news site gets users. This bill is going to hurt Canadian news sites because sites like Google and Facebook will avoid linking to them.

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It's not like Reddit was even likely to die. I think we all knew the best case outcome that was still grounded in reality was something like Reddit falling into a slow but certain nose dive.

I mean, even Twitter is still kicking despite all the horrible stuff that's gone on there. Reddit isn't Twitter levels of bad. A slow decline was the best we could have hoped for.

Honestly, we wouldn't have been able to scale to a massive migration, anyway. A slow migration is ideal for scaling and community building.

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Oceanic plankton produces like half of the world's oxygen. Trees get too much credit. I'm not sure what the exact impact of losing so much oxygen would be, but... Not good?

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Though hopefully it can avoid the "orphan crushing machine" effect. That was a problem r/UpliftingNews on Reddit suffered from a lot. So many posts that were meant to be uplifting but were completely dystopian. Most commonly Americans posting stuff like "kid saves money to pay for classmate's cancer treatment" and the rest of the world staring in horror that someone has to pay for a kid's cancer treatment in the first place.

needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation

Gosh, I can't imagine something as minor as passenger safety being important... Seriously, is this guy real or is it three psychopaths in a trenchcoat?

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Reddit does give a fuck, though. If they didn't give fucks, they wouldn't be trying to fuck with the protests (eg, by forcing subs open or removing mods). Whether or not Reddit would actually do any of the things protestors want is a different question, but clearly the protests do at least hurt Reddit and Reddit would dearly like them to stop.

Thank god the NFT avatars are no more. If any Fediverse instance tries to support NFTs, we must collectively agree to nuke them from orbit (or at least block the server from the rest of us).

You gotta stop counting total users. Only active users should be counted. We know there's utterly massive numbers of bots being created. Plus people have multiple accounts from trying out different instances even if they'll only use one.

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I think the main way that could be achieved is if Kbin and Lemmy had a convenient "upload video" option that actually uploaded the video to peertube. Convenience is king. Back before Reddit offered image and video hosting (and you'd usually upload to a site like imgur instead), there'd constantly be people commenting that they didn't know how to upload their content.

That said, I'm personally cautious of PeerTube. Hosting small images is one thing, but video is something else. I don't really understand how PeerTube will keep running if it gets too much usage. Presumably, like most of these sites, it will depend on donations. I don't know if that will cut it for hosting video. My fear is that it'll be fine with low usage but as soon as it gets too high usage, we might see it going down (and taking a ton of content with it).

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I've also mentioned this in numerous threads, but downvotes also are extremely useful against bigotry. When bigoted comments can't or won't be removed (or removed quickly enough), downvotes are reassuring. It sucks to see bigoted comments being expressed and the only thing that can make it better is seeing that the comments are not accepted.

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Yeah. The unethical bots will just use scrapers, as they already do for the many websites that don't offer APIs. They're already violating ToS, so they don't care. Ethical ones won't have that option (at least not past the fairly low quota).

Recordings from the home’s smart doorbell appeared to show the delivery driver, whom Mr Jackson said was the same race as him, misheard an automated response from the device asking: “excuse me, can I help you?”

Seriously, that's what it was? They'll ban him for that?

You never heard of Rust? Today's lucky ten thousand then. I've personally never had a chance to use Rust, but it's my #1 most interested in language based on all the things I've heard about it.

Though I'm personally on kbin and naturally there's the most interest in fixing issues that are on your instance. Kbin sadly is just PHP, but whatever. I was gonna make a bug fix yesterday, but the steps to turnup a dev instance are so long that I got lazy and didn't bother. I'm spoiled by all the servers at my work that I can just start running with a single command that having to spend potentially a few hours turning up a server feels like too much now (and let's be honest, setting up a dev env is the most boring and annoying part of our job).

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The how to subscribe to a magazine guide sadly won't work if you're the first to subscribe to it within kbin. Unfortunately, the guide to doing so might scare people away. You have to search @magazine.domain in the search (not the magazine search!).

Some of these things really highlight changes that need to be made. Like my above example. It's bad that there's two ways to subscribe to a magazine (one being completely unintuitive). It's bad that the whole thread vs post thing is so confusing. It's bad that we call something magazines while most of our content, which comes from Lemmy, calls them communities (and also has syntax for linking to them that doesn't work for us).

If we could find a way to monetize Musk's fragility, we could make a fortune.

Problem is that there's a bunch of major communities on that instance. They have no affiliation with the server admins and mostly just chose the instance because it seemed like the default very early in the migration to the Fediverse.

I don't get what the alternative is supposed to be. You can't make stuff like blockbuster quality movies on ads and/or donations alone. And between ads vs subscriptions, ads are iffy because you end up with sketchy or unethical advertisements. Plus ad blockers make it hard to sustain a business on just ads.

In an ideal world, nobody would need to "make a living" and we'd be able to offer more services for free. But we don't have that ideal world. Musicians, animators, writers, programmers and more all need to get paid somehow.

It's admittedly annoying how fractured subscriptions get, though. I miss when Netflix was the only streaming video subscription I needed. Now there's half a dozen major services and they all want exclusive contracts to show certain movies and TV.

Personally, I'm happy to pay for the stuff I use a lot. Which includes stuff that I don't even have to pay for (eg, I donated $20 to kbin). It does suck for stuff I only want a little of, though. eg, I don't have any news subscriptions because I only check news sites here and there and it's almost never the same site, too (mostly I get linked from sites like this). I want to see subscriptions become a bit more centralized, spanning multiple sites to account for this.

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The importance of jump starting can't be understated. Most people will go to the community that has content. If a community is empty, a lot of people won't even start participating in it. Plenty of people who make posts want them to be discussed, so they're only looking for active communities.

Also historic threads that probably will never be feasible to create anymore. Eg, I loved to read TV show episode discussions right after I watched the episode. That includes for older shows. As long as it didn't predate reddit, basically every notable show had a decent sized thread for every single episode. But a lot of those were only able to take off because they were created when the episode aired. Rewatches don't get the same kinda discussion.

But posts like this you wanna vote on, not just view.

I loved BoRU. It was one of the best subs on Reddit. I definitely want to have some say in this vote. Sadly, it's the kinda sub that doesn't work that well here yet. It depended on the mainstreamness of reddit, as there's very few updates and even fewer that are that interesting.

It's genuinely hard and needs to be improved. Subscribing to a magazine that someone else on kbin has subscribed to already isn't too bad. Go to the magazine (eg, click what looks like the subreddit name in the post) and scroll alllll the way down and there'll be a subscribe button.

But if nobody has subscribed yet in the instance, it's hilariously hard. You have to search in the general search (not the magazine search) for specifically "magazine@domain.com" and you should see a subscribe button then. You will not content in that magazine that existed before you subscribed. If that sounds terrible, it's because it is. Thankfully, most of the time, you won't be the first to subscribe to a magazine and thus can just use the magazine search or browse the front page to see posts.

PS: the subscribe option is also as the bottom of each thread. So you can alternatively just open a thread in the magazine instead of the magazine itself.

PPS: I've mentioned the subscribe button being at the bottom because that's the placement on mobile and I think many of us are on mobile. On desktop, it's in the sidebar.

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Yeah, I'm sure lots of it is people starting a community with genuine intentions, but then they decide "actually, I don't wanna use this site anymore", so they abandon it and will never see your messages.

I think more of it may happen because there's likely plenty of people who came to the Fediverse sites because of the Reddit blackout and then will just go back to Reddit. IMO it's important that server admins have an easy way to reassign communities.

Why even sell a physical box if it has absolutely no benefit over a digital download? I wonder if it's at all driven by desire to trick people who want a physical disk copy (ie, a copy that can be resold or traded)?

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Plus the kinds of people that migrated to Voat were... Not good people. IIRC, it was particularly the banning of FatPeopleHate that got many to move to Voat. The kind of people who'd quit a website because they said to stop harassing people for being fat are not good people. By comparison, this time, we're migrating because Reddit is being disrespectful towards frankly all their users, but also particularly mods and the visibility impaired.

I have nothing against the straights. Some of my best friends are straight. But do they have to keep shoving it down my throat? And what am I supposed to tell my children when they see straight people in public?? /s

Honestly, we really do need more content that isn't just focused on what reddit admins are doing. Mind you, I do get it. I want to know how reddit is doing, myself. But the number of posts about reddit is just too high. There's a ton of duplicate posts across numerous communities, which makes the reddit drama take up a disproportionate amount of space on the feed.

I've largely stopped upvoting anything that isn't novel and especially only upvoting whichever post already has the most votes (ie, no dupes).

It's sadly very annoying. What I usually do is I long press the magazine name if I'm in the front page. That will show the URL. I otherwise usually just use the URL of the page I'm on (it should have /m/foo@bar -- unless it's a local magazine, in which case it won't display the domain). But I know that isn't user friendly nor likely available on apps.

It needs to be improved. And the UI should stop hiding it (eg, the front page will show "gaming" instead of "gaming@lemmy.ml"), because the domain is a critical part of the magazine name.

I think it's important to not have a single person having to deal with those. But admittedly it's hard to get to that point. I've only significantly done established, commercial software dev, where you can just trust your coworkers. Random people on the internet are harder to trust. Anyone can play nice for a couple of days for a chance to slip in something malicious.

The project is not only rather new (so any contributors are gonna be new), but it's also hosted on an unfamiliar site (which is to say, it's not GitHub), so most people don't have an account with history either.

Yeah, DeSantis is evil, not stupid. He has degrees from both Yale and Harvard. He knows full well what he's doing and how things work. It's all calculated evil.

Honestly, I kinda question how good of a time investment it is to try and allow deletion from the public facing parts of the internet, given the numerous places where your content will be cached or otherwise stored.

There is certainly some value in simply making it as hard as possible to find things you want to delete. Why let perfect be the enemy of good, after all. There's plenty of types of content we certainly want to do our best at deleting even if we can't be perfect. Eg, do you wanna be the one to tell a revenge porn victim, "sorry, we can't make it harder to find the content that harms you because we can't delete all of it anyway"?

But at the same time, development time is limited. Everything is a trade off. We do have to decide what is most important, because we can't do it all immediately. The fact we can't actually delete everything does have to be a factor in this prioritization, too.

There is something to be said about ensuring people know and understand that nothing can truly be 100% deleted once it's posted on the internet. Not that Lemmy is doing good about that, either (especially since deleted comments apparently lie about being deleted).

All this said, I do think federated, reliable deletion is critical for illegal content. Such content needs to be removed quickly and easily from as many places as possible. Without this, instance owners are put at considerable legal risk. This risk poses a threat to the scalability of the Fediverse.

I know some phones had already did this, but I always liked the idea of support for using your phone as a TV remote. The phone has replaced so many pieces of hardware that it feels silly that TV remotes haven't been replaced yet.

I also specifically wish Chrome supported extensions on mobile. Firefox does it. Why can't the biggest browser do it?

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... is this Terminator? Probably, since the year matches up.

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What I'm most happy about is that the Fediverse so far seems to be mostly actually pretty good people (though I've been largely chilling in kbin since the blackout started -- it only just turned on federation). Most past attempts to abandon reddit only saw the most toxic, horrible people leave. Sites like Voat were never an option because the users were awful. It's nice that so far, I haven't really seen any of that. In fact, it feels the opposite, with the people who left reddit being disproportionately great people, with the toxic people being more likely to stay on reddit.

I wonder if it'll last? I hope so. I wanted to leave reddit in the past but never felt like there was anywhere comparable to go that wasn't shit.

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You often don't get paid or don't get paid nearly enough. Too many people like paycheque to paycheque to be able to do that.

And in extreme cases, you can get sequestered, where you're expected to basically put your life on hold for the duration of the trial, which complete bullshit and feels as if you're being punished.

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... UPHILL! BOTH WAYS!