copygirl

@copygirl@lemmy.blahaj.zone
11 Post – 64 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Just a dorky trans woman on the internet.

My other presences on the fediverse:
@copygirl@fedi.anarchy.moe
@copygirl@vt.social

A lot of contributors of FOSS projects make small changes that aren't copyrightable.

There's been a hostile takeover at Gitea and it's now run / owned by a for-profit company. The developers forked the project under the name Forgejo and are continuing the work under a non-profit. See also: Their introduction post and a page comparing the two projects. Feel free to look up more, since I haven't familiarized myself with the incident all that much myself. Either way though, maybe consider using Forgejo instead of Gitea.

3 more...

Zig hasn't been mentioned yet, so I'm just going to drop that here.

I personally have enjoyed the meta-programming, the ease of integrating with C libraries, and like that it's pretty straight-forward to compile.

1 more...

On Mastodon, when you follow another user on another instance, your instance will send a request to the other, to be notified of new posts made by that user, as well as posts they've boosted. When such a new post arrives, a copy will be created on your instance so it can be displayed without nagging the original instance again for the post's content and such.

Lemmy is similar of course, since it uses the same underlying protocol (ActivityPub). Think of communities as "special users". Whenever someone creates a post or reply, the community will boost it, so it ends up on every instance where a user has subscribed to that community.

This part I'm not entirely sure on but I believe it's how things work: The other way to send messages around other than subscription is obviously to send messages directly. In ActivityPub there's a field that specifies the recipients of a message. When such a message is created, it is pushed to the instances of the recipients. On Lemmy, the recipient is the community you're posting to. On Mastodon, the recipients are filled with all the users that you @-mention in the contents of the message. So for a Mastodon user to post to Lemmy, they have to mention the community, which is why you see some posts that contain the community's handle.

Because you can't follow / subscribe to users on Lemmy, the posts of Mastodon users that don't involve Lemmy never end up being "federated", meaning Lemmy instances don't get notified of these posts, so they don't end up being "copied". This is the same on Mastodon by the way. Unless your instance sends out a request to fetch posts from an unknown user, it doesn't know about their posts, since nobody so far has cared about them.

This makes sense because if you were to try and store all the content from the fediverse you would need a LOT of storage for little gain. Similarly it would be bad to never store the content and always fetch it, because that would generate a bunch of additional traffic, which especially small instances would suffer from.

To summarize: Lemmy doesn't display Mastodon posts because it doesn't have a mechanism to subscribe to those users.

Trans girls: Both? Both.
Cis girls: Free money.
Trans boys: Not sure if worth.
Egg (female): Wouldn't it be funny if I pressed this button and turned into a girl instead of getting the money which is totally the reason I pressed the button? That'd be a total bummer. Haha, right? ... unless?

Isn't "queer friendly" and "federates with Threads" an oxymoron?

1 more...

I use uBlock Origin + vaft from TwitchAdSolutions, which is currently working pretty well for me. I've had some issues before, and every now and then the stream can freeze up when an ad is played. But it's so much better than having to endure even a second of those mind-rotting ads.

I did decide to delete all my comments and posts on Reddit. Sure, maybe I've posted some helpful comments, but why support Reddit with their continued existence? Remove content, and people might move to other sites to get their information.

I also decided to keep my account. Turns out some content stayed around, because I could not see and therefore delete it in locked subreddits. So when they came back, the comments came back too, and I was able to delete them, still.

Whether or not it's a good change is likely mostly subjective. I'm guessing Discord made the switch to be more in line with other mainstream social media platforms, and to reduce confusion.

Personally, I kind of like the old way more. It means there could be 10000 different people with basically the same name. Other than paying for a specific number, there is no issue with a person grabbing a handle and then it not being available to anyone else. Otherwise, eventually, a lot of handles will be used up, maybe even dead, so people have to come up with increasingly creative ways to get a unique handle – or just settle on adding some numbers to the end.

I'd even go a step further myself and remove handles completely. Just use a random unique identifier, like a hash or GUID for the user – which a lot of platforms do under the hood anyway, since you can change your handle in many of them – and use invite codes, QR codes or similar to add friends. We don't need this username / handle rotting that just gets worse over time.

This is called A/B testing. They're rolling the feature out only to some users to see if it has the effect they're going for, before rolling it out to more, or all users. (Also to ensure there are no bugs introduced by the changes.)

Prism Launcher has been my go-to ever since it first released, after the PolyMC hostile takeover. They've pushed out a lot of quality-of-life updates like being able to download and update mods from the common mod repositories straight in the launcher. Modpack installation is super easy whether it's CurseForge or Modrinth. The only downside I can think of is that you have to install Java yourself, but honestly that's pretty straight forward.

4 more...

Surely you know more than the lawyers Dolphin got help from.

1 more...

Falling in love? In this economy?

Gitea was taken over by a for-profit company, Forgejo is a fork by the previous maintainers to continue it fully FOSS without any of the shenanigans. See also their FAQ.

There used to be this service called Flattr, and it's still around, but I'm honestly not sure how it works anymore. The way it used to work is you set a monthly amount you're willing to contribute, you get to specify which projects to support, either one time, or recurring, and then your contribution is split up between the projects you chose to support.

I don't know if this is an ideal system, because some creators might end up staying unsupported even though people are using their creations, others end up reminding their audience constantly to use the service and support them, so they end up with more than a similar creator not reminding their audience.

In the end, I think the best thing for all creators would would be universal basic income. Everyone is taken care of such they can survive and pay for necessities, and then they can just create stuff for others to enjoy, for free. (Oh, the humanity!) No trying to convince people to share part of their hard-earned money just for basic survival.

Elon was able to buy Twitter because it's public, and it wasn't making money.

Valve is a privately owned company, and I have a feeling they care a little about what they're doing.

The best Mastodon instance is the one that aligns with your interests and values the most.

  • Are you interested in tech? There's a couple of tech-focused instances.
  • Are you some flavor of LGBTQ+? Some instances do a better job at keeping out bad actors, and you can be around like-minded people.
  • Are you interested in gaming? Movies? Art? Writing? Game development? Home improvement? Gardening? Activism? Memes? News?
  • Maybe you're interested in stuff happening in your country or local area?

Why? When you're looking for new content, and new people to follow, the local and federated timelines of your instance are a good way to do so. Your home timeline includes all the people and hashtags you followed yourself, and their boosts. The local timeline includes all the posts and boosts of everyone on your instance. The federated timeline has all the content that everyone on your instance is following. (Of course you can always follow anyone you like, but I'm making a point about ease of discovering content relevant to you here.)

For this reason, just joining a big, general-purpose is less useful, since you're just going to get a hodge-podge of random things in these timelines. Perhaps you don't mind, but I feel like it's good to point out this feature of the fediverse, as some people might not know, or realize this is a thing.

How? Okay, of course this is silly to recommend without giving you some way to look for these instances. There's a couple of directories that allow you to search for them. Looking for some briefly came up with https://instances.social/, https://mastodon.help/instances and https://mastodonservers.net/. Also note you can migrate your account from one instance to another, taking your followed content and even followers with you.

It could just have something to do with the fact that many people think ads are not only annoying but also highly manipulative, creating artificial needs in people, a tool to make already successful and rich companies even richer, ... and the surrounding technology to power them is unethical, hoarding tons of information, building profiles of people, tracking which websites they visit, what search terms they use, ...

When people talk about blocking ads, being frustrated about them showing up, it's just kind of disrespectful to be like "well you could just pay for the service, you know?". Besides, who knows how much actually ends up in the creators' pockets.

4 more...
  1. There is the --download-sections option. Looking at it, you might want to use --download-sections "*0:00-1:00".
  2. I briefly checked with --list-thumbnails and it doesn't look like YouTube offers any square ones, so I would look into using ImageMagick to edit the image with a command. I doubt yt-dlp allows you to do any sort of image manipulation out of the box.

A personal instance generally doesn't have a big reach, unless people actively follow the person who's posting the doxxing information.* The fediverse may not be a good way to spread personal information of others, throwing up an instance like that is not much different than throwing up a website or forum.

There's two things I can think of you can do: Contact the company that hosts the website to take it down – I'm unsure about how you go about this, but I'm sure you can find out more about that. And to report the instance to other instance admins to get it blacklisted, perhaps get it on a block list, limiting its reach and thus effectiveness. Get in contact with big instance admins, they likely have chatrooms you could join, and they might be able to help with the other step as well.

*edit: In the case of Lemmy, I suppose it would be people following a community, rather than a user directly. If moderators or admins act on the posted informated and delete it, the deletion will federate as well and any legitimate instance will automatically delete the content on their servers as well. This would also be true for Mastodon and such. If not, the above applies.

Something else to consider in place of or in addition to a build number could also be using the git commit hash of what you're building. Though I would only use that for non-stable releases.

For example, stable versions of Zig look like 0.12.1 and then there's in-development releases like 0.13.0-dev.351+64ef45eb0. It uses semantic versioning where the "pre-release" is dev.351, which includes an incrementing build number, and the "build metadata" is 64ef45eb0, the commit hash it was built from. The latter allows a user to quickly look up the exact commit easily and thus know exactly what they're using.

It's a lot more legally dubious for them if you defederate. If your instance willingly connects and shares data out of their own volition, it's like that instance giving permission. If an instance blocks communication via the ActivityPub protocol outright, what are the legal grounds for Meta/Facebook to be able to freely access that information? Even if it's posted publicly to view.

As an example. I can have my own website and post some info there, write articles, have contact information. People can view it. Companies can index this information and make it available to search. But I'm guessing it's not legal (or at least less so) to be collecting that information to process and sell. Companies can do that so easily because you agree to it in their terms of service.

(But hey, IANAL.)

1 more...

except for visual studio code

But also:

  • Telemetry everywhere
  • Not permitted to use the official marketplace with OSS builds
  • Not able to use certain extensions (like C# debugger) with OSS builds

Though I've been very happy about the direction .NET and C# have been going, especially the licensing.

1 more...

What I'm saying is that Microsoft is, in fact, being hostile by limiting OSS builds such as Codium in the ways I've mentioned above. I guess that's how they try to get people to keep using their proprietary build instead.

Just yesterday I replied to a post where a similar question was asked, so I hope it's okay if I just copy-paste my answer:

The best Mastodon instance is the one that aligns with your interests and values the most.

  • Are you interested in tech? There's a couple of tech-focused instances.
  • Are you some flavor of LGBTQ+? Some instances do a better job at keeping out bad actors, and you can be around like-minded people.
  • Are you interested in gaming? Movies? Art? Writing? Game development? Home improvement? Gardening? Activism? Memes? News?
  • Maybe you're interested in stuff happening in your country or local area?

Why? When you're looking for new content, and new people to follow, the local and federated timelines of your instance are a good way to do so. Your home timeline includes all the people and hashtags you followed yourself, and their boosts. The local timeline includes all the posts and boosts of everyone on your instance. The federated timeline has all the content that everyone on your instance is following. (Of course you can always follow anyone you like, but I'm making a point about ease of discovering content relevant to you here.)

For this reason, just joining a big, general-purpose is less useful, since you're just going to get a hodge-podge of random things in these timelines. Perhaps you don't mind, but I feel like it's good to point out this feature of the fediverse, as some people might not know, or realize this is a thing.

How? Okay, of course this is silly to recommend without giving you some way to look for these instances. There's a couple of directories that allow you to search for them. Looking for some briefly came up with https://instances.social/, https://mastodon.help/instances and https://mastodonservers.net/. Also note you can migrate your account from one instance to another, taking your followed content and even followers with you.

This works until you have debug .NET.

I might be too old-school for this but this video felt like it focused on AI assisted programming and I really don't give a damn.

1 more...

Version 5 of a software, device, vehicle or such isn't necessarily better than version 4, and no official definition of the word "version" require this, either. If I may make another anology: You may pick one of 5 different versions of an outfit to wear, and even though they were labeled in the order they were made, from 1 to 5, none are inherently, objectively better than any other. In the case of UUIDs there are versions that are meant to supercede others, but also simply alternatives for different use-cases. Anyone with access to some up-to-date information can learn what each version's purpose is.

Shonk.

At the moment, upvotes and downvotes, while not used that way by many people, is more about what others will see, rather than what content you like. It's more like a community moderating and rating effort. Upvotes make posts more visible, by pushing them further up in what's currently popular. Downvotes do the opposite, and in my personal opinion, should be reserved for posts that don't fit the community they were posted in, spam, or things that break rules – typically the same reason why you would (and should) report a post. They are not "agree" and "disagree" buttons. Topics you disagree with can still spark interesting conversations.

Using the same mechanic, voting, to tell an algorithm whether similar posts should have higher visibility on your own feed, would be incompatible with this existing system. Posts that get a quick reaction or emotion out of you are even further encouraged, while things you simply don't want to see (but aren't necessarily "bad") get punished heavily.

This system works through subscribing to communities you are interested in and actively participating in improving the health of those communities, rather than passively consuming content. That takes some effort, yes.

All in all I think this proposed system is not compatible with Lemmy, and maybe not even a good idea.

1 more...

The Minecraft that implemented microtransactions into the Bedrock Edition?
The Minecraft that forced everyone to move over to Microsoft accounts?
The Minecraft that implemented broken chat reporting that had to be fixed by the community?
The Minecraft that can now ban you from multiplayer altogether, even if you run your own server?
The Minecraft that shut down and DMCA'd a 18+ only but non-explicit bondage server and mod?

Oh right, that advice would just be for the poor Windows users. Use your package manager on Linux.

My current go-to is Auto-TerraFirmaCraft which combines TFC with Create. It has a lot of custom recipes to fit the two together. Perfect for playing along while watching a let's play series at the same time.

If you're looking for something that's like Minecraft, but not, and overhauls especially the early game (which is virtually non-existant in Vanilla), along with lots of later-game mechanics, but you also enjoy the fun contraptions you can build with Create to automate and generally be creative with, this could be worth checking out? Warning though, it might take a while to unlock Create machines. (I'm still in the copper age, myself.)

I started playing Create: Prepare to Dye (Modrinth, CurseForge) which removes all survival elements from the game and has you focus on purely automation. You crash land on a unique looking planet devoid of resources and have to figure out how make everything from scratch using all-custom recipes, starting by making things from just milk.

There's (funny) contracts that push you to discover how to make new resources and automate them, and they give you neat things in return. Many things can be made in a number of different ways, so it's up to you to pick one, or decide when to move to a different recipe when it becomes available to you.

Everything is themed around dyes so instead of iron plates, you'll see white plates. Instead of gold or brass ingots, you have yellow cubes. Copper is orange. Diamond is light blue. I've been very happy with the choice of mods used in this pack. Two essential ones are Create (obviously) but also Botania – the tech / automation mod everyone forgets about.

I think at that point you could just look into Entity Component System design. I'm particularly fond of Flecs. Here, entities are empty objects to which you can add any number of components. Typically components are void of logic. Instead you write systems that match entities that have the components they need, and then just operate on that data.

It's still refreshing to see how many subreddits ended up joining the blackout. Over 8000 joined, including some big ones, and (as of posting) 6800 are still either private or restricted.

Not hating on people who like and enjoy PvP games, but to me it feels like it's a good way for a developer to make a game that doesn't actually have that much substance. Lacking content? Nothing to actually do in the game? NPCs are difficult to make interesting to fight? Just have players shoot each other. It's basically content that creates itself, not to mention (if you have good matchmaking) the difficulty ramps up naturally without you having to write better enemy AI.

I just want to fight stuff alongside other people, rather than potentially making another person's day just a little worse because I shot them before they shot me, you know? Is that too much to ask?

4 more...

And you can use the with expression to create clones of the object with some properties modified.

If you want your freedom – whatever that means to you – you go to an instance that represents those values. Admins that run their own instance get to decide how they moderate that instance. And that includes blocking (or defederating) whole instances, communities, or individual users. You don't have to sign up to one that does something you don't like.

Besides, you don't seem to understand the importance of moderation. If it wasn't for the ability to defederate, we'd have tons of fake instances with fake users creating fake posts. Not to mention people going out of their way to make others feel miserable. Do they have the right to spew their hatred? I have my opinion, but it doesn't matter. I happen to also have the right to join an instance that has a policy to take care of that stuff so I can browse for things that actually interest me.

1 more...

Allow the admins of the instance to enforce their rules?

Say you have an instance with a "no-NSFW" rule, for people who don't want to randomly come across NSFW communities. Their admins could take care of the curating of rule-breaking NSFW communities without having to resort to defederating from the entire instance. This doesn't have to be an outright block but just a filter that could prevent the community to show up in "All".

11 more...