Well, terrorists became boring, and they still want the loony wing of the GOP's clicks, so best to back off on Nazis and pro-Russians, leaving pedophiles as the safest bet.
DrNeurohax@kbin.social to 
DrNeurohax@kbin.social to 
Fediverse@kbin.social – 0 points – It might be worth noting that the platform is stable, but still growing. Expect little quirks; we're dealing with a big influx of new users.
For example, I joined during the first big wave of signups and the servers were having trouble keeping up with the sudden spike in activity (10 to 1000x+ new posts/users/instances). I would sometimes see federated content, sometimes not. After 12 hours and a massive effort by the devs, everything became MUCH more stable.
There will be bugs, but they are actively being squashed at breakneck speed.
For example, one that I encounter regularly is leaving a thread open in a background tab too long (on Firefox) eventually stops syncing with the server. When I eventually get to that tab, the data is old and attempting to interact (click arrows, reply, subscribe, etc.) send me to an error page. The fix? Refresh the page if was open more that 30 minutes ago. It's a minor bug that will eventually be fixed, so give it time.
I also wanted to throw some advice out there, in case it's useful...
If they're ever confused, there are plenty of support communities/magazines. First, check if others have posted about the same problem. If they haven't, feel free to ask. The NoStupidQuestions community hosts a ton of simple Fediverse-related questions posted by users, and it has some of the highest engagement on the platform. I know the reluctance of posting may have been ground into you by Reddit, but (a) this isn't Reddit, and (b) we're all new here.
There is a slight learning curve, so canoodle around a bit to get a feel for this new Reddit-esque multiverse. Read a few FAQs, skim the support communities, follow a few rabbit holes.
Here's what I suspect is a semi-normal new user experience (because it was mine :) ):
To start, you'll want to register an account, so you do. You'll click a few stories, try to comment, and find you're not logged in and can't log in. You'll notice you're not on the original server. Do you have to register a million accounts? That makes no sense! The answer is no.
Next, you'll want to understand why. That post you clicked took you to another instance (think of them as servers). So, how do you post a comment on another instance? Ah, from your home instance. So, did it matter where I registered? Yes and no, but mostly no.
You'll eventually go back to hit on those forks in the path you didn't take. Follow whichever path suits you best and expand from there.
I almost thought I had written your comment and completely forgot about it. No, I just almost made the exact comment and want that hour of my life back.
If there was some over the top racist rant, I sure didn't see it. And the admin pushing for the defederation sounds so bizarre. Bizarre is the best word I could come up with because "petty" makes me think it was like high school politics. This is closer to a grade school sandbox argument.
The worst I saw was "defedfags" and it was used in a way that was meant to highlight how they never said anything offensive. Like saying, "If you thought what I said before was offensive, let's see how you respond to something intended to be negative."
The crazy thing is that the decision is being made because the admin just liked a post. It's not even because of the post content - which has nothing controversial and appeared maybe 8 times in my Lemmy/kbin feed yesterday.
Editing to add that this is the article: https://kbin.social/search?q=wakeup+call
So, we have the Free Russian liberation group wandering around and taking random towns from Putin. Then we have part of Wagner literally rolling up to military headquarters in tanks, forcing the head to flee. Right now, AFAICT, they're cruising up the highway to Moscow, which is being carved up by trench diggers of the Russian army in anticipation of the convoy. Then there are statements by Kadyrov that seem to support Putin, making it a double coup (though I haven't seen anything between the Wagner subgroups).
I think this is a Civil Double Mu-terr-coup-tionary Attack (mutiny, terrorist attack, military coup, revolution). Fucking Wild.
Whatever, nerd.
Haha just kidding. I agree. I bumped into some market study about Reddit (probably on Reddit) a couple months ago that found ~95% of the most upvoted comments were 2 sentences or less. So much for deep, meaningful conversation.
Makes sense, though. If you weren't getting much out of Reddit's vapid content it was probably easier to escape, along with old-ish folks like me, who have lived through this type of thing many times. Reddit became pretty shitty, and I don't see it getting any better. While purging my accounts, I took a peak at the new interface. What a hellscape without adblock and the old site on life support.
Welcome aboard!
Probably based on the Cap'n Crunch whistle pay phone hack.
Someone correct me if I've missed a few bits, but here's the story...
First, a little history.
Payphones were common. If you're younger, you've probably seen them in movies. To operate them, you picked up the handset, listened for the dial tone (to make sure no one yanked the cord loose), inserted the amount shown by the coin slot, and then dialed. You have a limited amount of time before an automatic message would ask you to add more money. If you dialed a long distance number, a message would play telling you how much more you needed to insert.
There were no digital controls to this - no modern networking. The primitive "computers" were more like equipment you'd see in a science class. So, to deal with the transaction details, the coin slot mechanism would detect the type of coin inserted, mute the microphone on the handset, and transmit a series of tones. Just voltage spikes. The muting prevented the background noise from interfering with the signal detection. Drop a quarter in the slot and you'd hear the background noise suddenly disappear followed by some tapping sounds (this was just bleed through).
It's also relevant to know that cereals used to include a cheap, little toy inside. At one point, Cap'n Crunch had a whistle which had a pitch of 2600Hz.
The story goes that someone* figured out that the tones sent by the payphones were at 2600Hz - same as the whistle. You could pick up a payphone handset and puff into the whistle a certain number of times, and ti would be detected as control signals (inserting money).
That's right! Free phone calls to anywhere. I'm hazy on the specifics, but I'm pretty sure there were other tricks you could do, like directly calling restricted technician numbers, too. The reason the 2600Hz tone was special had to do with something like it was used as a general signal that didn't trigger billing.
It knocked the idea of phone hacking, or "phreaking", from a little known quirk, to an entire movement. Some of the stuff was wild and if you're interested, look up the different "boxes" that people distributed blueprints for. Eventually, the phone companies caught on and started making it harder to get at wires and more sophisticated coin receptacles.
If you've ever seen the magazine 2600 back in the 90s and early 00s, that's the origin of the name.
All that is to say, if you knew nothing about technology and watched a guy whistle into a phone to get special access, you'd probably be freaked out. Who knows what that maniac could do with a flute!
To be fair, the 80s were known for having commercials earlier in the day for the channel's newscasts that stoked fear. "5 items in your kitchen could kill everyone you've ever loved. Tune in to STFU News at 6 for more information."
Haha, that just made my day. I'm among my own kind here.
I use AliExpress for electrical parts (except anything with memory), 3D printer parts, and small crap I don't mind waiting for, but never anything I would be angry about if it never arrived. Also, nothing I consume or wear or need for safety, and I'm wary of anything that's supposed to be plugged into the wall for long periods of time unattended.
I wouldn't say I've been surprised, but my expectations are low. It's all cheap stuff, but as long as you're not needing the stuff you buy, it's fine. Dollar store quality with the scent of plastic and cigarettes.
That being said, beware of scams. The one that seems acceptable to them is to list one cheap part for the listing, along with variations of the full device. That way it looks like the lowest price in search results, but when you click it, the selected variation is the cheap part. Like, you'll search for "pliers set" and see a listing for $1, compared to others around $15. When you select it, the product page will have a carrying case for $1 and the various pliers for twice as much as the competition. What's better is that the case will be selected automatically, not the thing in the picture you clicked on or the picture you see first in the product pages' gallery.
There are also scam stores that pop up with super low prices compared to others on the site can disappear overnight and the cancellation/refund process is a super pain. Contact customer service once and just submit a claim with your CC company. Their refund process will try to keep telling you to wait for another week, and that includes the reps you get on chat. If you're suspicious and still order, always follow the shipping info. They will estimate a reasonable delivery date, you'll get a shipping notification, but it will sit in limbo. The shipping folks are separate from the scammers, so if you see the package actually move towards a shipping center, you're in the clear. If it says they received shipping information for over a week, you got screwed.
Ignore flash drives/SSDs, batteries, and assume any flashlights are 1/100th the brightness claimed (literally). Oh, and watch shipping costs. Something with free shipping can be 10x the price of the product if you add a second one to your cart.
Oh, man, I'm sure the traffic is up... It took me FOREVER to delete all my comments and posts across 18 accounts. That 5 second lockout on API calls is a total bitch!
Thank you so much for this! It reminded me to revisit my library's general resources and look specifically for which archive collections they had available. I'm 1 state over, so I figured there was a good chance we would have Newspapers.com Library Edition access here.
The main/default collection my library sent me to was no help, but they had a Newspapers.com Library Edition portal listed further down. Final-fucking-ly got it. I really, really appreciate the help.
Generally, if someone's being a total asshole so severely that they have to be yeeted with several thousand other unaware bystanders, I expect to see a bunch of examples within the first... 2, maybe 3, links.
If someone can point me to a concise list of examples (actual data), I find it more disturbing that an admin on another server can yeet my account because they make noise on a discord server.I mean, yes, federating is a feature, but why even offer the ability to enroll users? Maybe for a group of friends, or something, but just rando users is nothing but a liability to everyone involved.
I'm sure it's a fine service, if you want to use it regularly, but I just wanted 1 tiny thing. If they had a $1 for an obit or a page deal, sure. Instead, there's this whole microcosm of bullshit where some are archived, others available, some omitted from public collections, some on different 3rd party sites, etc.
The family paid for an obit. It wasn't in the 1800s. The paper has been digitized. I should be able to go to the paper with the name, exact date, and city and find it. They literally say it doesn't exist. Not that it's on our archive site or our partner site, just nothing.
I would have thrown a couple bucks to any of the sites for access, but no, I need to sign up for a subscription, give them all my details, get spam calls for the next 100 years, just no. Super frustrating.
I don't WANT to agree, but I kinda do.
We're here because Reddit was shit on top shit, led by gaping anus. We all accept that Meta is the same.
We didn't want Reddit profiting from our work. Meta will do the same, only more competently.
Defederation is useless at scale They can continually spin up new instances that act as spies and bridges to Meta's area.
Once enough Meta bridge nodes are woven into the Fedi, they'll be masked by a backchannel to mask the exchange/activity.
Someone plz tell me I'm wrong, but this is how I think things work in the background...
Probably easy to combat when it's one instance here and there. If it's constant and automated, federating would have to be paused until the spies are weeded out and there's a better detection strategy. If they get a big enough network going, they could all dip out at once, change identity, and refederate back in as the Fedi network flips out because of all the sync mismatches. Just more new nodes joining in. They have the source code, so they can act differently from other instances as long as it doesn't cause problems.
Is this a realistic scenario or am I way off base? I feel like it has to be one of the two.
And just like that, my attempt at Linux on the desktop (take #4123), which was going to be Fedora, is back in flux. I don't want to start investing time into a learning project in major transition and an uncertain future.
Ironically, I'm looking again at OpenSUSE, which I had left back during the SuSE-> OpenSUSE period. (You can tell I'm OG because I'm one of the few that uses the correct capitalization! haha)
Oh, I understand the tactics being used. I was implying that person c was obviously stalking person a and pounced the moment they did something less than perfect.
My guess is there isn't anything of substance, so person c's sensitivity got amplified with time and obsessing over whatever is going on, leading them to overreact. But, not c has to double down if they want any chance of being taken seriously if a significant cause to defederate occurs.
Now this is a gif I have not seen in a looong time.
Goddamn that was poetic, ya cunt.
"Black Company" fighting the good fight, it seems.
Don't worry about possibly not being the first person to post this thought. I had the same thought when I saw the headline and then thought the same thing as the last line before reading the body. Against my better judgement, I thought I wouldn't be the first to post a comment on this, but I actually am! Nice to know there is a bottom of this hole.
Yeah, but I can understand their hesitancy. Unexploded bomblets could be a hazard for their own advancing troops and a hazard for citizens that eventually use the land.
I wouldn't be surprised if they had to log every one of these shot - source, target, altitude of actual explosion, number of explosions (is witnessed by drones), etc. I imagine they'll want to do a sweep through there when things settle down.
So you're saying there are people who DO use "normies" and people that DON'T use "normies". These are not two groups of people. Shit, I just joined this thread, so that makes ME one of YOU, and there's OTHERS that aren't here. Are WE the elitists? Or are THEY the "normies"? YOU said there's no there's no US or THEM, so EVERYONE is talking in this thread. ANYONE not in this thread must not exist because I know I exist, so YOU thread posters must exist, but wait, that makes ME an US and YOU a THEM.
(I'm not trying to be snarky, but this argument is exactly as nonsensical.)
Must be a bug. I tried it and now my dog speaks German, but I can only speak to bacteria. You wouldn't believe what assholes they are!
It's like a watermelon on a toothpick. I bet he was going home to cry on his oversized pillow.
I JUST started using SearXNG and have been also googling the same terms to see how they compare.
So far (less than a week), SearXNG has had what i was looking for in the first 5 links every time. Googled result was either below the scroll or I gave up. Maybe only a couple dozen tests, but it wasn't even close.
Since the Snoopocalypse I've been using it MUCH more. I'm as surprised as anyone, but without Reddit, Google is complete hot garbage. I used to use Google 95% of the time and didn't realize how many times I gave up and added "reddit" in the query. It's unusable.
Out of principle, I've made SearXNG my default, but I don't shun Bing at all now. I occasionally use DDG, but anything relatively technical just doesn't come up much there.
Man, the amount of time I wasted writing comments only to think, "Eh, fuck it. They won't appreciate the effort." I hated seeing the dreaded Orange Mailbox. Was it going to be a troll, a nitpicker, or OP asking me to entirely do whatever I was helping them learn.
I 100% agree that word is cringe and I'm totally into the fediverse for the long haul, but we have to address the pachyderm in the room: The word "Fediverse" is just as cringe.
I, ... I'm sorry. I can read it in a document, but the second a human being types it, I can't take it seriously. I don't care if folks want to shorten it to something like the FI (Federated Instances). Yes, there are other uses of the word "federate", but it immediately sounds like a federal intraweb domain or a group of Star Trek policy makers.
"Fediverse" is "netizen 2.0."
"Fediverse" is "cruising on the information superhighway Pro."
Please tell me I'm not alone in thinking this.
I was considering it, but I've done little auditions of Ubuntu over the last 10 years and something doesn't feel right. It was awesome in the late '00s, but it hasn't clicked with me since. Maybe it was the 1-2 pow of trying to make a phone OS and then the phone-looking launcher.
Thanks for the tip, though. I'll give it a go if my next candidate gets too messy. (Yes, it's definitely the distros' fault, not mine. Okay, maybe 20% mine. Or 95%. Something like that.)
One thing I've missed in the discussion of sending F-16s is the role they'll play.
From what I've seen, Russia still has significant air defense capabilities, and they launch air fired weapons from deep in their own territory. So, if the F-16s can't get too far upfield, due to defenses, and there isn't much they can do in air-to-air combat, what advantage do they have over longer range artillery?
Kinda on topic, there are 2 really good deals running right now. 1 for the Surface, 1 for the Lenovo Yoga.
https://slickdeals.net/f/16728539-thinkpad-x1-yoga-gen-6-14-3840x2400-oled-i7-1185g7-16gb-ram-512gb-ssd-1099-free-s-h?src=category\_page
and
https://slickdeals.net/f/16727681-microsoft-surface-pro-8-13-2880x1920-i5-1135g7-8gb-ram-128gb-ssd-610-free-s-h-w-amazon-prime?src=category\_page
The Surface might be too bare bones for some, but $610 is decent. (Also, there are several "generations" in the store now. This is the middle, non-ARM flavor with 11th Gen Intel. The Surface 9 has the current generation.)
The Lenovo is a much bigger discount and better specs, but I've heard worse stuff about the Lenovo support. Apparently Lenovo's consumer support and build quality is very different from the business offerings.
Very true. I would argue that for some people, it might be better to ween themselves off Reddit than stop cold turkey.
If they posted every day, stop posting, maybe reduce commenting, and take an extra 10 seconds to search out other sources of info.
If they commented every day, stop commenting, browse Reddit if you feel like it, but try to find an equivalent article here to comment on.
If they lurked, try finding new sources, try new search engines, etc. Did they lurk because they didn't care about interacting, or because they were turned off by toxic responses in the past? Try commenting here.
I'd rather see people leave slowly and stay away, than go back to their old patterns because they think, "I just really NEED to check that one sub, so I guess protesting is not for me."
Also, I don't think there are many here that would fault those that actually need Reddit in some way (e.g.-Ukraine war, self help, support groups, etc.). They have bigger shit to worry about. Revisit the migration topic when you're comfortable, and if you want.
(It's worth mentioning that some of that material is starting to pop up around here. See if they fill your needs when it's okay for you - no point in joining a group with 2 people if you really need a larger support system.)
How much of that Kickstarter money is set aside from the avalanche of lawsuits Adobe will launch when they see the name and icon?
There is zero chance it launches without rebranding, so I wonder what they're actually naming it.
Even better, this must be fantastic when you're training AI models with millions of images. The compression level AND performance should be a game changer.
Agreed. I'm in my 40s, and I've never seen anywhere near the level of subsurface signaling and intentional complacency we're experiencing now.
And your second!
You dare question the majesty of AltaVista?
I'm generally a Windows user, but on the verge of doing a trial run of Fedora Silverblue (just need to find the time). It sounds like a great solution to my.. complicated... history with Linux.
I've installed Linux dozens of times going back to the 90s (LinuxPPC anyone? Yellow Dog?), and I keep going back to Windows because I tweak everything until it breaks. Then I have no idea how I got to that point, but no time to troubleshoot. Easily being able to get back to a stable system that isn't a fresh install sounds great.
I got around 5 links deep for each of the links in the admin's post, and fuck if I know. There was an argumentative user, but they were articulate and thoughtful. Not dropping slurs or wasting space nonsense, but still bordering on "edgy". The person pushing the defederation appeared to be bullying them and on a power trip.
It was embarrassing. That's all I took away. (My opinion can change if someone digs through the shitpiles of nothingness to pull up some actual naughty posts, but that's not going to be me.)