lotanis

I think the whole "no life mods" thing got a bit overblown. Reddit communities flourished generally due to the ones that had good active moderation. Setting a consistent theme and tone for the subreddit and keeping the bad actors out. It takes a lot of work, they did it for free and we benefited.

The issue is when some people are mods for tons of major communities. That's when it is overreaching.

You can update your version of Fedora through the updater software as well but it's a very clear separate process that is initiated manually.

Distro version updates bring major updates to key packages - the one you'd notice most would be to Gnome, the desktop environment. There will be other things too that get only bugfix and security updates during the life of that version, and then after a while that version will lose support and you won't get any updates at all (https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/releases/lifecycle/).

Updating is very safe and reliable. I've had my Fedora install at work for 3 years, updating periodically and it's working extremely well.

I do it, because it makes a massive difference to me how tidy my bedroom feels and how welcoming the bed looks at the end of the day. I just have a duvet though, so it's 10 seconds of pulling on each corner until it's reasonably even - not going for perfection!

Do not declare your undying love for someone. It puts way too much pressure on, and unless they're in exactly the same mental place it's unlikely to go anywhere.

Instead, just ask them if they'd like to go on a date. That obviously communicates that you're interested in them, and gives a good starting point to build a connection.

I think they mostly died when GChat turned off XMPP support and became a walled garden.

If Beeper does become a successful business though, there'll be a full time development team "playing catch-up" with money behind them. It's interesting if you read this that they're rolling out features ahead of the message providers in some cases!

They're also leveraging some existing infrastructure. Beeper is built on Matrix which does a lot of the heavy lifting for them.

Context: I am an embedded software engineer. I write a lot of low level code that runs on microprocessors or in OS kernels, as well as networking applications and other things. I write a lot of C, I write some Rust, I write Elixir if I possibly can, I write a lot of Python (I hate C++ with a passion).

I don't think you want Rust. Python is unbeatable on "idea to deployment" speed. Python's downsides:

• Painful packaging/distribution if you want to get a load of people who don't have Python installed to run your thing (e.g the GUI program we currently maintain for talking to our hardware)
• Performance under some circumstances. There are some things that are not quick in Python. They're not always the things you expect because Python actually drops down to C modules for a lot of the number crunching that you might do. E.g. for ML you are basically using Python to plug a load of bits of fast C code together

Rust is good when you need at least one of:

• High speed
• Control over use of memory
• Low level systems programming (drivers etc.)
• Can't cope with a Garbage Collector
• Compiling to a microcontroller

If you're doing one of those and so have become expert in Rust, then it is actually excellent for a lot of other things. E.g. you might build your data processor in it, and then distribution is easy because it's just a single binary.

One option you might look at is Go. You get a lot of performance, you get good parallelism if you need it, it's designed to be easy to learn, and it also compiles programs to a single binary for easy distribution.

There's a massive cultural thing in the US about the iPhone being the preferred phone and if you don't have one it must be because you're too poor to afford one. Obviously this is a result of marketing and isn't universal but it is a surprisingly widely held view.

Given that, showing up in a group chat as a lone blue bubble marks you out as the inferior group member (in some people's eyes). It doesn't matter so much 1:1 but if there are 10 people the odd one out stands out.

I personally think that a sign of a healthy technology platform is one where some people can make money from it, while the platform itself remains open. To use Linux as an example, it's wonderful that it's open source, and it's great that Red Hat can be a profitable company based on Linux. It's a good sign and it helps the Linux ecosystem thrive due to RH's contributions.

For Lemmy there are plenty of free apps - no-one is being forced to use Sync. I'm happy to pay for something that provides some more polish to my Lemmy experience, and doesn't require anything of anyone else.

I bought it to play in hotels while travelling for work, but what I most use it for is playing games while sitting on the sofa.

There had always been this separation between PC gaming and handheld/console gaming. With the Deck that separation goes away. The things I would normally go upstairs to play on a PC on my own are now things I can play anywhere.

It works well with almost any game, but it works particularly well with games with control systems designed for gamepads. A great use case are the former Playstation exclusives ported to PC - Spiderman, God of War etc.

The general concept you're describing is called Risk Compensation. It feels intuitively correct, but in whatever context it's been studied in almost all cases it turns out that the safety feature is actually better overall. Some people might be a bit riskier knowing about the safety net, but not enough to counteract the safety improvement.

Also - in the UK - road deaths go down over time, while miles driven goes up. Driving is getting safer. Cars are part of that, but so is road nd signal design and driver training.

One more note on learning Rust: what Rust does is front-load the pain. If you write something in another low-level "direct control of memory" language you can often get something going much more easily than Rust because you don't have to "fight the borrow checker" - it'll just let you do what you want. In Rust, you need to learn how all the ownership stuff works and what types to use to keep the compiler happy.

But then as your project grows, or does a more unusual thing, or is just handed over to someone who didn't know the original design idea, Rust begins to shine more and more. Your C/C++/whatever program might start randomly crashing because there's a case where your pointer arithmetic doesn't work, or it has a security hole because it's possible to make a buffer overrun. But in Rust, the compiler has already made you prove that none of that is possible in your program.

So you pay a cost at the start (both at the start of learning, and at the start of getting your program going) but then over time Rust gives you a good return on that investment.

Proton is a fork of Wine. It was created by Valve and they have done amazing work getting it to support basically everything. It's made the steam deck and amazing machine.

The Steam Deck shines as a handheld because you only have middling graphics power but it's only trying to drive a small screen (small in both size and pixels). If you plug it into a TV then that tradeoff stops working and it's going to look worse than any console (except the Switch).

I do use my Deck on the TV and it isn't as bad as I was expecting, but I've got a PC as well for demanding games.

"A laughable claim, Mister Bond, perpetuated by overzealous teachers of science. Simply construct Newton's laws into a rotating system and you will see a centrifugal force term appear as plain as day." https://xkcd.com/123/

Yeah, the ROG Ally particularly makes zero sense to me and misses the point. It runs Windows and it doesn't have the touchpads.

The touchpads really broaden the utility of the console, from being able to select small UI elements in normal programs to being able to play more mouse enabled games (FTL being the most recent for me).

And Linux is the real special sauce - nobody seems to get why Valve did all that work rather than "just" putting Windows on it. Windows isn't a selling point (you can put it on the Deck if you want), it's slow, the UI doesn't work well on that screen and you lose out on being able to suspend games etc.

The way I see it everyone naturally assumes we're trying to recreate Reddit but with distributed computing.

I think instead we should be trying trying to create something that gives us the community and communication that Reddit gave us, but democratically and without reliance on or control from any one organisation.

This is going to result in some things that work differently from Reddit. We should work to make the experience smooth and intuitive, but it can end up with a different way of working.

This is like the physical product version of the Nigerian prince scam - have something so shit that the only people who engage with you are idiots.

It's not quite NO evidence. I would say that it's very weak evidence of a minor effect. For example: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2000/04/video-games

It's a nuanced point where the people who complain that video games are ruining society should be completely ignored, but things like age ratings on games are probably a good idea.

Isn't dust what you get when things disintegrate?

I agree, but this provides a path towards that. It is Matrix underneath so if we get a proportion of people using Beeper they it becomes easy to transition to using Matrix to talk to those people.

Everything else in my life is USB-C now - my laptop, my Steam Deck, my ear buds etc. My wife and I are both Android so we only have to have one charging cable anywhere in the house or our bags.

It absolutely discusses phone size - in some detail both in the intro and as part of the reviews.

I only recently realised that I desperately need "sort by date added" and was surprised that I couldn't! Glad it's here - I accidentally bought a lot of games in the summer sale...

It basically a badge for a more premium film experience. It's a bigger screen, on an aspect ratio that fills the vision, with seating that puts you in the right place, rather than trying to see over the person in front.

GeForce Now is Nvidia's game streaming service.

I think it's ok, as long as federation still works and migration is sorted out. The problem with centralisation is the control that can give. If there's a mechanism to move a community or user to a new instance without too much disruption, then the users maintain control and have recourse if the operators do something unpopular.

Mastodon has a pretty good system that automatically moves people's follows to your new account if you move. We need something like that for Lemmy.

I think we lose sight of why "powermods" gained power: they built the big successful communities. Reddit was largely successful due to some fantastic communities being built up, and that takes work. We need that work on Lemmy just as much as we needed it on Reddit.

Yeah, it's not ideal if a small number of people control a large number of communities but we should understand why they got there, and I think the structure of Lemmy is likely to make it a bit less prevalent.

I've been playing more single player games. My PC has mostly been for multiplayer stuff with friends - Siege, Deep Rock etc. My Deck has opened up time to a load of Single Player things - AAA things like Spiderman, Control, Mad Max and indie stuff like Black Skylands.

Plus I had a load of work travel in the first part of this year. The Deck made hotel rooms much more pleasant!

I think the stuff about "experimenting" with limited editions is because they're trying to find ways to make it hard for scalpers to buy them. That's why they've got stuff about having a Steam Account in good standing etc.. Maybe it's actually working!

Desktop Linux had been a bit behind the others on display features due to the legacy of X. As everybody moves more to Wayland that better enables these sorts of things, they're catching up.

I think you're close - someone well travelled is someone who has a broader view of how the world works than just the one country they were brought up in.

That happens when they go to countries and actually experience them. I've just been to the Canary Islands for a week - I went airport to hotel, sat beside the pool for a week and then went home again. This was lovely and relaxing (which I needed) but did nothing for expanding my cultural horizons.

Deep Rock Galactic. "Well, you just shoot lots of bugs. And there's different objectives and you can mod your guns in different ways". Doesn't really sell it like the incredibly enjoyable experience that it is

Which he is now also doing - one time payment to remove ads permanently.

Great article. Similar to "NASA's booster size is the result of the size of a horse's ass": https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/4-feet-85-inches-space-shuttle-horses-ass-william-batch-batchelder

There's an absolutely practical reason for doing it that's consistent with everything they've done so far - they want to control how we get to and see Reddit. So that they can advertise in the feed etc.

RSS means you can skip the normal feed (where they would advertise) and go straight to the post.

It's not a good idea - they seem to have forgotten that user hostile decisions reduce the number of users - but it does make sense in their twisted world. I'm amazed they still work.

I decided it wasn't worth it.

I bought the 256 GB deck. That filled up fairly quickly obviously and I looked at the alternatives. It turns out that if you buy the right SD Cards they're basically the same speed as the SSD, so I just bought a 1TB Samsung EVO and it's been great. Also, I didn't have to lose the existing 256 Gb of space that I had and it was zero effort.

Maybe one day I'll upgrade to a 2TB internal, or maybe I won't.

1 bit of information in flash memory is stored using one cell. Each cells is very similar to a transistor in a processor. We already know that through years of development we can fit 100s of millions of transistors in a very small space - these days they're only a few thousand atoms big. If you look at any chip on a circuit board mostly what you're seeing is the plastic packaging - the actual functional area of the chip (called a die) is much smaller. Even a massive processor like an i7 is only a few millimeters square.

Flash can actually pack in even smaller than a CPU. The structure of cells is much more regular, and they can be packed in 3 dimensions as well rather than just laid out on one flat surface. And that's how you can fit a trillion memory cells into a micro SD card.

Learning a new thing. Whether you use it or not, you've expanded your mind.

I think we need to be realistic that we aren't going to do much better than this price point. Instead, I'm hoping that they can stay at this point and periodically improve the hardware.

It is in your control, just not on a day to basis. You choose which instance your account is on and that is an important decision with consequences. People have signed up to lemmy.world because it's easy but maybe their approach doesn't match what you're looking for.

It is hard at the moment because everything is in flux so the consequences of choices aren't very clear. One thing to remember though - you don't have to have just one account.