leetnewb

@leetnewb@beehaw.org
0 Post – 82 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

You can point out back and forth violence going into the 1800s. Nobody has clean hands in this conflict.

39 more...

I think the headlines play on mushrooms for outrage and clickbait. It makes readers feel better that there is something tangible that can be "controlled" rather than a hard to define cause of someone's seemingly functional brain misfiring badly.

Selfishly, I would like to see beehaw remain on the fediverse. I enjoy the community, the curation, and desire for strong moderation. It is a great window to the broader fediverse link aggregator community. Beehaw's ideals and structure clearly appealed to many Redditors and the like. The concept of federated communities seemed appealing, and beehaw is an important voice in the evolution of the moderation of a federated network.

However, the sacrifice that the admins have had to put into making the platform survive while the software finds its uncertain way through a mountain of growing pains seems unsustainable (just my pov through the last 3 months) - not just on the technical side. There's that saying - when you find yourself in a hole, quit digging. It's hard to see how moving from Lemmy to something more sustainable, if it exists, would be the wrong move.

Painful decisions rarely come with a flashing light that scream "now's the time" - but the loss of your major technical contributors sounds stunningly close.

Edit> fixed a typo or two

Another article said he did shrooms 48 hours before the flight.

7 more...

I mostly blame Apple for walling off the default text messaging app on the iOS platform. It is ridiculous to me that we are over 10 years into the smartphone era and are stuck in a duopoly with two players that would rather degrade communications between platforms than prioritize interoperability for some base level functionality. I hope that Beeper's campaign forces regulation that puts an end to the insanity.

4 more...

The rise of distributed computing was at a time that CPUs didn't really throttle down. CPUs in general were just a lot more power hungry. But if you had to leave the computer on for some reason and had spare CPU cycles, it made sense to contribute them to a distributed computing project - the power was being spent anyway and it seemed like a good cause. Today, modern CPU sip power and throttle down and you are actively driving power consumption by taxing the CPU. There is a much less favorable cost/benefit equation today, but in terms of the cost of the power consumed AND the climate cost of the power consumed.

I always find responses like this funny. You know how old you are, but (mostly) nobody reading the comment does. You could be anywhere from 11 to 50!

The ADL was barely covered in the article. It was mostly anecdotes of jewish college students being or feeling attacked for outwardly expressing identity. I don't think you meant it this way, but leading by questioning the ADL's behavior seems to miss the point.

Mature web framework and highly productive language vs less mature framework and emerging language. Personally, I think Rust is the more surprising pick than PHP for this application. A link aggregator is a forum with some frills. Not to mention half of the activitypub implementations that I know of have been in PHP.

Think I'm getting the hang of a shift in dietary stuff. Feeling less overwhelmed after a few weeks of mental chaos. Little more glass half full.

I follow a couple of channels on youtube that post replays of interesting radio communications between pilots and air traffic control. There are technical issues that cause departing flights to return to the airport virtually every single day. Electronics, landing gear stuck down or stuck up, engine stall, engine fire, flaps jam, a sensor says something unexpected. Every brand of airplane imaginable. Pilots are trained to navigate every possible failure mode a plane can encounter. Getting permission to carry commercial passengers requires an incredible level of training and testing. Commercial planes are rigorously engineered.

I'm not trying to carry water for Boeing, but this article describes a relatively common operation (as far as I can tell).

Working almost every waking hour, struggling with migraines, and barely functioning. Things should slow down next week and I can hopefully begin to feel like a person again.

Not all that convincing, particularly when it draws quotes from other libertarian sources.

3 more...

Migraines. Reddit's community was highly active, supportive, and informative. Perhaps too narrow, but an estimated 15% of people are affected which makes the target audience fairly broad. Never saw toxicity in that community so it would probably be an easy one to moderate. No current migraine community on the fediverse.

There isn't off the shelf software to run things like Reddit, and the work to make that happen is pretty staggering. That isn't to say there isn't frivolous spending there - I have no idea.

Lemmy has been developed since 2019 and the software crumbled when network-wide users spiked into the ~75,000-ish monthly range when some vocal Reddit users sought greener pastures over the app/api issue last year. A lot of talented new developers contributed scalability fixes that were obvious to them (but not obvious to the main devs), and we now have the largest Lemmy server handling ~10,000 monthly users without crashing. The work that has gone into making Lemmy, an open-source Reddit alternative written in Rust (vroom vroom) handle the waning spike of Reddit users fleeing, was substantial. Look through the lemmy github issues discussions page and merged closed contributions/discussions for that journey. Those people were largely contributing time and expertise for nothing in return. Imagine paying a market rate to all of the people who contributed substantial time into the betterment of Lemmy. By the way, Reddit was open source: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

Takeaways so far: this is a hard problem, even today with faster software and hardware - and Lemmy needed a diverse set of contributors to get its largest server stable at 10k monthly and ~50k across the network.

Reddit had 46,000,000 monthly active users in 2012, ~7 years after launch. Reddit has 330,000,000 monthly active users today. My guess is that Reddit employs a lot of smart software engineers that are needed to contribute solutions that allow the site to serve an ever-growing user count without major outages with new features rolled in. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Reddit users will never pay a thing to Reddit and it isn't a good platform to deliver advertising through.

My point: It is easy to gloss over the staggering amount of work, talent, and skill that goes into supporting a site that operates at this scale. Reddit is around the 10th largest site in the US (8th if you exclude search engines) and 12th globally excluding search engines.

Omemo is double ratchet and my messages sync to multiple devices. New device can't read old messages sent before exchanging keys with the other clients.

opensuse kalpa - the KDE version of its immutable desktop. Pretty neat combination of rolling core and applications separated out primarily into flatpak and other containers.

Is Reddit easy to explore for new places? Maybe it got better in the new UI, but search was historically bad and discovering relevant subs was pretty difficult. I sort of think people dipping their toes in fediverse waters forget how rough around the edges Reddit was/is. I agree that lemmy and its ilk have a lot of room to improve on usability, but the bar doesn't seem exceptionally high.

I think a Reddit-styled UI is ok for community forming. I found many nice, niche communities on Reddit. It takes time for those communities to really emerge, though. And they might not form on Beehaw.

Long period of underemployment and gradual employment gains following the credit fueled recession in 2009, is possibly one factor. In other words, the slack finally came out.

I use it for OMEMO encrypted family messaging and image transfer (snikket). Very fast messaging, lightweight server, and the A/V works quite well. Biggest issue, imo, is the lack of a great iOS client - not a judgement on the developers, I think that's just the reality of developing on iOS. But an iOS client that works as seamlessly as Conversations would go a long way to regaining lost traction.

2 more...

You can be appalled at both at the same time.

My perspective...in the US, EVs are at the tipping point of displacing ICE on cost and practicality. Battery research plus scale production of batteries will only push that forward from here. Average car in the US is ~13 years old. If we're looking out 15 years to the entire US fleet of cars transitioning to EV, that's a staggering change in energy delivery...largely paid by joe six-pack buying their next car. More on that in a minute.

I have no idea where battery recycling/reuse will end up, or whether vehicle/grid storage will play out, but I am fairly confident that there is economic value that will be extracted at the end of the car's lifespan or the battery pack's lifespan in that car. So...joe six-pack's rational big battery EV purchase today not only completely rewrites US energy consumption in the next decade, it bought enough grid storage to meaningfully push through intermittency concerns of renewables.

Meanwhile, in my area of the country that has extensive mass transit networks, the outlook is bleak. My state subsidizes mass transit that primarily takes residents to another state for work, where they pay taxes to the other state, then primarily consume services in the home state. The federal government takes way more in taxes than it sends back to the state in support or services. Occasionally, federal democrats take control and send a bone, that gets yanked as soon as Republicans are back in. My state and the public transit agency get starved, service diminished, more cars. Rationally, the other state should contribute some of those tax collections to my state's mass transit, for efficiency, fairness, and to keep cars off the road, right? Instead, the other state imposed a gas tax that it refuses to apply to supporting transit agencies in surrounding states that send workers.

I don't see things getting better for mass transit in my neck of the woods. Big battery EV adoption might not be ideal, but at least it drives decarbonization and convinces masses of unsuspecting people to fund batteries that have lasting value.

Headline sort of buries the lede of how important those two were to building lxd and supporting the container ecosystem on linux. Sad to see. I have been using lxd on my home network and vps instances for years. Disliked when the project moved to snap-only distribution, but at least other projects picked up native packaging. And it doesn't seem like lxd is going away, which is nice. But Canonical explicit seizure of control withers confidence I had in the long-term viability of the software for my own use.

opensuse aeon (Linux). Immutable and designed to just work and keep working. https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Aeon

1 more...

Is the title editorialized?

Original: Netanyahu Calls Palestinians ‘Collateral Damage’ As Israel Destroys Gaza Post title: Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu says Palestinian civilians being killed en masse are simply “collateral damage”

The revised title reads as Netanyahu using the world simply, which doesn't appear to be the case in the article.

Can anybody translate the video?

2 more...

I don't think that cultivated meat technically requires the death of an animal at all.

I'm not much of a programmer and my free time is too limited to move quickly, but the functionality looks possible based on the published frontend API. Someone will almost certainly beat me to it, but I am hoping to write a browser extension that replaces the blue "You are not logged in..." boilerplate text about how to subscribe to a remote community with a subscribe button that does the dirty work in the background for you.

Nothing gets solved overnight. I realize that f-droid isn't the be all end all, but hey, be the change you want to see in the world. Maybe Aurora is a stop-gap, but maximize your use of f-droid alternatives and support the developers however you can. Be active in alternatives to the big-tech sites, like posting in beehaw communities.

Poaching something I posted on Reddit /r/selfhosted at the beginning of the year:

Back of the envelope math. Assuming 30,000 active users here on /r/selfhosted x $50/yr = $1.5M / 20 -> $75,000 per year. In other words, if /r/selfhosted gave $50 per person per year, "we" could contribute $1.5M to open source projects we use. Some projects probably wouldn't know what to do with resources and/or don't have the infrastructure in place to receive anything, so not a panacea. But for the well organized and developed projects?

It's sort of wild if you think about it. There are probably 10-12 very popular self-hosted applications with a very long tail, but 20-25 probably captures a very healthy cross section of use. Not every project or developer can accept monetary donations or use them effectively. But $75,000/year is median household income in the US.

There are almost certainly many more open source software and app users than there are self-hosted people - I'd imagine the self-host people are a subset. So what if we add open source software and mobile apps to the collective pool we could financially contribute to - again, $50/year/per able user - maybe the number of supportable applications goes up to 50 or 80.

Leading the thought experiment to a logical conclusion - if 80 open source projects received $75,000/year in donation income (at a minor cost to those able to pay and none to the vast majority), enough in most parts of the world to support a person and possibly a family, we would have more amazing, privacy respecting options. It doesn't necessarily solve everything, most people naturally free-ride, and organizing many small contributions at a massive scale isn't a solved problem itself. But, my point is that users collectively have way more power than we realize.

It is a nice p2p, e2ee messaging app/service that doesn't use phone numbers, e-mail or other domain addresses as an identifier. I think it used to be GNU Ring, and can be used as a SIP client.

1 more...

Your view, if I'm parsing this correctly, is that because Palestinians were wronged 75 years ago by the creation of Israel, the Israeli state should not exist - and that while violence is wrong, Palestinians inherently have a more legitimate right to violence - is that an accurate framing of your view?

If I have that right, is there a point in time, or a number of generations of living on the land, that grants Israelis rights or determination or legitimacy to the land, in your view?

2 more...

I haven't used Matrix for messaging, so take this with a grain of salt. But xmpp servers and clients seem to be lighter on resources. Matrix has more capabilities for large groups.

No major issues with the upgrade to 14, yet. On a pixel 7a. Not that I spend much time in the play store, but that design has become less pleasant over time.

Discourse is offering an AP plugin - not sure what it does: https://github.com/discourse/discourse-activity-pub

While it might not explain everything, you can take a look at some stats here: https://fedidb.org/

Random thoughts....

Odd to talk about timing without referencing the election year.

Protecting the solar industry with tariffs in 2012 was probably too late. The US and Europe panel industries were decimated and effectively ceded the market to China.

China bankrupted the only US supplier of rare earth metals in the early 2010s (Molycorp).

There is reporting from April that Chinese EV are piling up in European ports and not being moved to dealers.

Generically, security cameras are computers in a box that have a good camera, a surprising amount of processing power to deal with the video stream, and an evolving level of ability to do inference. Hikvision is/was effectively the leading networked security/surveillance camera manufacturer on the planet for the combination of price and quality, but it seems odd to blame the company for what is a sort of generic tool at this point - maybe a bad analogy, but it would be like blaming Google for Android devices being everywhere.

1 more...

I don't have experience using it, but it is worth looking at BigBlueButton.

2 more...