Custom-made ear plugs. Even if you only wear ear plugs occasionally (I do when in a noisy hotel, or when a neighbor goes a bit too crazy), they are so worth having.

Basically you go to an audiologist and they put something kinda liquid in each of your ears to take a mold of your ear canals. A couple of weeks later, you have plastic earplugs that have the exact shape of your inner ears.

Upsides: • They work, always. I would typically use wax or silicon disposable ear plugs before that, and sometimes in the middle of the night they might move and let the sound in; those don’t. Also, foam disposable ear plugs don’t stay in my ear, don’t ask me why. • They never hurt. Since disposable ear plugs get shoved into your inner ear until they take the shape, they continuously push against the walls of your ear canals. I would often feel kinda bruised after using them for a long time. • They are crazy comfortable. Put your ear on a pillow, and you barely feel them at all. • But do they block too much sound? That’s up to you. Basically, you choose the level of noise you want to keep out, which I believe is achieved by using different kinds of plastic.

They’re not a trivial purchase (I think mine cost $150), but then you use them for decades, so it’s definitely worth it. It was a stupid purchase in my case, because I bought them on a whim out of anger against my neighbor’s party one night; but they’ve followed me everywhere since!

I once had a conversation under NDA (which has expired since) with an engineer at Apple who was working on iCloud infrastructure, and he was telling me that his team was a bit shocked to read that Dropbox was releasing apps for photos at the time “because they’ve noticed that most of the files users are uploading to Dropbox are photos”. He was like: how do they know that exactly? His team had no idea and couldn’t possibly find out if the encrypted files they were storing were photos, sounds, videos, texts, whatever. That’s what encryption is for, only the client side (the devices) is supposed to know what’s up.

Not having that information meant a direct loss of business insights and value for Apple, since Dropbox had it and leveraged it. But it turns out Apple doesn’t joke around about security/privacy.

20-something years ago, I was a struggling student with a shit side-job and a so-so relationship with my family. Life felt like being a hamster running in a wheel, it felt like there was nowhere to go.

I had dinner with a friend of mine, who announced that he was leaving for a study-abroad year for our last year of masters degree. I was glad for him, but definitely envious, and he told me: “well, do it too then”.

I spent the next 30 minutes trying to explain the myriad of things that were keeping me down in my life, but he dismantled them one by one.

Like:

• “But packing my studio apartment will be tedious…” - “So you’ll live the rest of your life in that apartment?”

• “But money…” - “You know you can take a reasonable loan for this and that it will pay off in opportunities.”

• “But I’m the one keeping everything together at work.” - “And they know it, it’s not in their interest for you to be find a job in your degree’s career. They’ll ask you for favors forever. You should look out for yourself there. It’s probably a good thing to make it stop now and have you be unreachable a while so they can figure it out.” (This was before smartphones.)

• “But my family will hate it.” - “Because they also don’t want to let you go, you should look out for yourself there too.”

He was spot on about everything, and eventually, I had run out of excuses. That night I ended it with a non-committal “I’ll think about it”, but that small conversation started a big train of thoughts that changed everything about how I made decisions. Basically, it turned me from being someone quite risk-averse and shying away from things, to becoming someone unusually risk-seeking and ready to take on opportunities that would present to me as much as I could without letting anything keep me down.

I wasn’t able to join the program he joined because the deadline had passed, so I had to carve out my own study-abroad opportunity, so I did. It was scary and tedious, but it paid off. Interestingly, I now live halfway across the world from where I grew up, and he is back in our hometown. We lost touch over time, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t realize how this small conversation that day changed everything of the path I was on.

I’ve been telling people that the notion that the ER lets poor people die in the US is false; instead, they make you wish you did.

I think it’s spot on. It’s people who were already going through the stages of grief, were kinda stuck in “bargaining” (like: “nah, Twitter is not really dead, it’ll come back”), and the symbolism there about Twitter really being gone-gone fast-tracked them to depression/acceptance.

It’s probably not the only reason, but Rust is a much more attractive language/platform for devs to work with than PHP. (Source: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-admired-and-desired-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages)

It’s also more scalable, because it’s a compiled multi-threaded technology, while PHP is interpreted and mono-threaded.

Reposting what I posted here a while ago.

Companies abiding by the GDPR are not required to delete your account or content at all, only Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Lemmy instances are unlikely to ask for info such as real name, phone number, postal address, etc; the only PII I can think of is the email that some (not all) instances request. Since it’s not a required field on all instances, I’m going to guess that the value of this field does not travel to other instances.

Therefore, if you invoked the GDPR to request your PII to be deleted, all that would need to happen is for the admin of your instance to overwrite the email field of your account with something random, and it would all be in compliance. Or they could also choose the delete your account, if they prefer.

Source: I’m a software engineer who was tasked at some point with aligning multi-billion-dollar businesses to the GDPR, who had hundreds of millions of dollars in liability if they did it wrong and therefore took it very seriously. I am not a lawyer or a compliance officer, but we took our directions from them directly and across several companies, that’s what they all told us.

The Kbin creator had initially joined to help Lemmy, but decided to create his own thing when he couldn’t take their political alignments anymore. The Lemmy devs used to be vocal Uyghur genocide deniers and pro-North-Korea, and would answer questions on Reddit’s r/AskATankie (a tankie is someone who supports communist dictatorships), but now that Lemmy is successful, they’ve kind of grown hush-hush on it, without really addressing it.

So, he went to create Kbin, but since he’s not a software engineer, he chose foundations that won’t really scale too well. Kbin is written in PHP, which is an interpreted and mono-threaded technology, it’s great at some stuff, but not high-scale services (source: that’s what I do for a living). Lemmy was written in Rust, which is compiled and multi-threaded. It doesn’t mean Lemmy won’t meet tricky scale bottlenecks, but it will give it a much larger toolset to get through whole classes of them.

And of course, Kbin being much younger, it doesn’t currently have a bunch of critical stuff that Lemmy already has. For instance: an API, which has been allowing other people to build great native clients for it.

If you’re too broke to afford a TV, just watch on your phone or laptop.

Tell me you’ve never lived in poverty without telling me you’ve never lived in poverty.

I remember finding out about wireless internet from an Intel TV ad. There was somebody with a laptop, browsing internet (probably an AOL page or something like that considering the era) sitting on a chair in the middle of a stadium, with no cable to be seen.

I thought “well that’s stupid, I know you can avoid the power cable for a while if there’s a battery, but if he’s browsing the internet, there has to be a network cable”. But the ad ran over and over on TV, clearly insisting there was no cable, so I was like “hm wait…”.

Eventually I read about wireless networks somewhere a couple of weeks later, and suddenly it all made sense.

No, it wasn’t like that. Remember that while computer technology was fairly mainstream, it wasn’t nearly as engrained into our lives as today. So people were talking about a worst-case scenario that involved technological things: potential power outages, administrations maybe shutting down, some public transportation maybe shutting down, … To me, it felt like people were getting ready for being potentially majorly inconvenienced, but that they weren’t at all freaking out.

I do remember the first few days of January 2000 felt like a good fun joke. “All that for this!”

My best answer is: if they get to sufficient scale, both Lemmy and Kbin will face scaling issues to get through, but Lemmy is based on something that will make it much easier for humans to get through a lot of those bottlenecks.

I hope what this answer conveys is that the technology choice is a major factor, but not the only factor. If the Lemmy dev team doesn’t know how to scale a service, and don’t enlist the help of people who do, the underlying technology won’t make much of a difference. But it does give them a very strong upside.

Another Lemmy user was saying that the Kbin move to use PHP was like someone saying: “oh, I like the airplane you just built by yourself with the intention to fly above the clouds, I’m going to do the same thing, let me prepare my cardboard”, and there’s a lot of truth to it. 😉

Yes, but it just got released as part of Lemmy 0.18.0, which isn’t everywhere yet: https://lemmy.world/post/477633

Yeah… I had heard of it as a rumor, so I doubted it for a little while, until I was shown the receipts. https://lemmy.world/comment/562635

It really is disappointing.

Holy shit! 😱

For accuracy, it’s not just about the admins being busy, 0.18.0 removed the signup captcha, which has been crucial for preventing massive bot signups into instances, some number of instances can’t upgrade without that critical downside. The plan is for the captcha to be reintroduced in 0.18.1, so we’re all waiting for that.

… and built its initial wealth on slavery revenue.

It’s a shame because there are a lot of other great things to be proud about when it comes to the US. I guess when people boast about US freedom, what they mean is democracy, and starting the end of the colonial era, inspiring a tidal wave of democratic uprisings around the world, which is accurate. I wish they didn’t use the word “freedom” for that.

Threads isn’t currently using ActivityPub, but vocally expressed that they are planning to in a future release, in order to “join the fediverse”. They have not expressed when, or what people will and won’t be able to do, or what the business goal is.

About the latter, some are speculating that this is a typical attempt of a closed-source editor to pretend to join an open-source effort in order to destroy it, as has happened in the past. It could realistically be that, or something else, no one knows; but that explains why people are calling to defederate Threads when that becomes real.

I’m from France too and always disliked the taste of alcohol. Being young in France, it was frustrating the amount of time I had to fend off people who were trying to make me drink. And like you, sometimes they’d make stupid guesses about why, sometimes getting intentionally insulting.

Eventually, I got used to telling people that I was “trying to stop drinking”, implying that I was struggling to, because that people were actually respectful of and they’d leave me alone.

Eventually I went to live a year abroad (see my other comment), and realized people never reacted even once when I’d tell them I didn’t drink. French culture is great in a lot of ways, but there’s really something wrong with this.

I still live abroad today, and no one bothers me about it. Obviously it’s not the reason I live where I live, but damn I don’t miss the snarky booze-related remarks.

Nitpicking: I’d rephrase “playing an instrument” to “playing a first instrument”. I struggled as heck to learn the guitar as a young adult, while kids in my music class were having a much easier time; but once I got it after a while, all instruments I learned after that, even in my 40s, were a ton easier.

Lemmy and Kbin are very similar, it’s reasonable to be confused. Very important, Lemmy instances and Kbin instances can interact with each other’s content, so whatever your choice ends up being won’t be about content since they have effectively the same content.

The difference between the two lies in some behavior differences (for instance, Lemmy intentionally doesn’t have a karma system, and Kbin does), in their very different web UXs, and since their APIs are different, the native apps talking to each are also different apps.

There’s also an ideological aspect, the creators of Lemmy initially created it because they were finding Reddit content to be too US-centric. Some say that they support communist dictatorships, but I’ve looked a bit, and evidence of that is flimsy, it looks more like they decided not to suppress anti-American content on their instance, and people may have extrapolated a bit. Or maybe there is truth to the rumor and it’s just well-hidden? 🤔 I believe the creator of Kbin started it because he disagreed with what he understood as the ideology of Lemmy’s creators.

I’m on Lemmy because it and its apps are more mature, and I’m not convinced by karma systems and what they may incentivize. And because I don’t find the case for the creators being extremists to be very convincing, from what I’ve seen. But Kbin looks pretty decent too.

I’m afraid I don’t don’t have answers to your other questions, but I thought I’d inform on this.

Ouch, I think you are being oblivious to how your move is being received. I know it’s cultural and it can be complicated to understand when not used to a culture (I was born a European, and became a naturalized American), but in the US culture, that is a move only done by truly terrible people.

I’m not saying you’re a terrible person, clearly you’re not realizing how terrible this is in the culture. But I promise it really is. It would be similar in Europe to insulting the waiter, and then saying “but it’s fine in my country”. It might be true depending on where you’re from, but it doesn’t make it better because that’s not where you are.

Seriously ouch on this one…

Yup it’s been real. https://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/must-reads/bc-government-hit-tweet-limit-amid-wildfire-evacuations-7268169

The rate limits are because serving such a service at scale without the user noticing requires continuous innovation to get through scale bottlenecks; but with the engineering team greatly reduced, a lot of that work isn’t happening anymore. Typically, you’d get through those bottlenecks by coming up with some heuristics that make it seem like the service is doing a ton, when really it only needs to do little (like by sharding data, or by pre-caching a bunch of stuff). Without anybody to work on those heuristics to fake things, you gotta restrict with real restrictions.

Source: that’s what I do for a living. I’ve been working on some of the highest-scale services out there for over a decade.

I think there’s !games@lemmy.world, right?

I thought it was coined by Community initially, so when I heard it used on the Great British Bake-Off, I thought “wow, is that a Community reference?” Turns out it’s been a common saying in the UK and Ireland for ages.

Heh, it was still a good joke.

Yeah, that I do not get. It’s basically donating money to a corporation just to receive marketing updates about a product? I don’t get it…

“Reopen this, or else!”

But they’re carefully avoiding to say or else what. My guess is every next step option would cost them resources at the scale of subreddits they’re reaching out to, so they’re hoping that the empty threat alone will cause some to relent without costing them anything. Right?

Agreed, we don’t want them to be aware of it.

This. Beating Reddit is not the point, and it sounds resentful. It’s good to let go. I would say that the point is to built a sustainable, healthy, and compelling community, and I’m rooting for it to be on its way there.

Yeah, that’s what I’ve been thinking too. Zelenskyy had to know that a NATO invitation right now is not realistic. I think it’s posturing to invite constituents in other countries to also act offended that Ukraine isn’t helped more, which then would be in the form of more war support, since it can’t really be much else. Can’t blame him for always taking all opportunities to get more support.

And to consider another looming environmental catastrophe: the currently rising water scarcity can’t scare you too much if you live next to one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world.

Oh you’re probably right; I’m no specialist and I’m referring to the ear canals as “inner ear” in my post and could very well be wrong in doing so.

Software engineer here, of the kind who works for companies similar to Reddit.

I don’t know more than anyone else about their financials, and I can surely believe that Reddit has been wasteful in a lot of ways in the past financial climates, since they didn’t have to optimize for profitability. But I can tell this firsthand: people tend to drastically under-estimate how much constant innovation is required to get past bottleneck after bottleneck just to keep the lights on, on very high-scale services.

Reddit’s scale is humongous, so I can see how it would require hundreds of employees just to keep it up and going.

That’s a pretty long-winded way to try to make hot air grow solid.

I did! I noticed it written on a box of disposable earplugs at some point, so I abided. It made things marginally better in my case, but not by much. Either I was doing it wrong, or it’s that ear canal shapes are different enough that different people have to have different solution (why on Earth can some people use foam earplugs all right, and yet they just spring out of my ears?? 😆)

I’ve been part of a startup that was looking to exit shortly, and yeah they go through all kinds of long-term-destructive behavior just to make the numbers better on the short-term. I do also think a shrunk IPO timeline because of the tech VC market tightening is the cause of all of this.

Sounds like the plot of Terminator, but told wrong.

Mint uses an OAuth token (I think through Plaid). This is not the same thing as sharing a username/password, and is authorized by your bank, since they provide the OAuth flow; otherwise OAuth wouldn’t work in the first place.

Definitely not a stupid question, it’s a big topic, and there are people whose entire job is dedicated to removing that cruft as much as possible.

At a micro level, for instance if you only look at the people I directly know and work with, there’s actually little cruft at all. We sometimes get stupid wasteful mandates from execs, and they waste a bit of everybody’s time, but it’s rare, and typically very small amounts of time. Other than that, I can tell you what every single person is useful for, and I can’t think of a single person who isn’t pulling their weight.

But at a macro level is the hard part, and I don’t think anyone can really know. An organization can’t scale if it doesn’t get seriously decentralized. As a worker, you need to make bold decisions for yourself and the teams around you, without having to know what the hundreds of other teams are up to. That means I can’t tell you for sure that there isn’t another team far from mine (for instance, from an acquisition or something), who is doing 95% the same thing my team does, but that we don’t know about.

Execs are constantly trying to identify those possible collaborations and introduce relevant teams with each other, but even they can’t know what everybody is doing.

I worked at Apple for a while, and since it’s a very secretive company, they had a very odd way of embracing it completely, which I’ve never seen elsewhere. I worked part-time 3 months on a project, before finding out that a team under the same VP had already solved the problem years ago. I whined about how inefficient it is to my director and he basically told me that unlike other companies, at Apple it’s by design. Basically, they’d rather have duplicate efforts, in order to maintain the project secrecy for the goal of “surprising and delighting” customers, and also in order to find always new and innovative ways to solve problems if the new solution turns out to be better. (Mine definitely was not. 😂) Apple really has an unusual innovation culture in general, I liked some of it, but definitely not that part.

Lemmy is decentralized, you can think of it as being organized more like e-mail than Reddit is: people may have their account on different instances (for emails it’s gmail.com, hotmail.com, etc), and yet they can communicate with each other.

Lemmy communities, just like people, also each belong to a given instance; and yet can also be used by people of any instance.

With that: “local” will tell you what’s going on in communities of the instance where your account is specifically, “all” will tell you what’s going on across all instances.