The Verge article is paywalled for me, but the screencaps Alex shared in his toot don't really support his summary. The article mentions that Threads can import content from Mastodon as an example of the sorts of things ActivityPub supports, and that's about as close as it gets.

And then there's this:

The company is planning to create a roundtable for administrators of other servers and developers to share best practices and work through problems that will inevitably arise, like Meta's server traffic putting strain on other, smaller servers.

Emphasis mine. How would Meta's server put strain on other, smaller servers if it's not federating with them?

I'm fully willing to believe Meta wants to EEE ActivityPub, but this particular claim doesn't seem to check out.

"Good vibes only" seems to be embedded in the culture of web development today. Influential devs' Twitter accounts have strong Instagram vibes: constantly promoting and congratulating each other, never sharing substantive criticisms. Hustle hustle.

People with deep, valid criticisms of popular frameworks like React seem to be ostracized as cranks.

It's all very vapid and depressing.

I only had occasional luck with this even on Reddit. Some smaller subs for hobby stuff had genuinely good advice, but a lot of times it'd just be people repeating the same brands and products with a shallow recommendation. And there was a lot of astroturfing. Over the years I've learned to ask elsewhere:

For major appliances, the best approach I've found is to find a local business – a well reputed one that's been around for years, and does service as well as sales – and simply ask the salespeople what they recommend. If the shop's willing to warranty it, it's probably good enough.

For gadgets I tend to start looking at recognizable review sites that are easy to skim (RTINGS is especially useful, but Ars, The Verge etc. all have decent reviews) and then expand out to YouTube for the products I'm most interested in. Sometimes it's a good idea to look up the company itself for anything that might change your mind about them (Western Digital's unlabeled change to SMR drives is a recent example).

Shoes and clothes are the hardest thing to get good advice on. The most useful advice I've received has been very general stuff about what to look for in fit and quality. I've also found that high ethical standards from a clothing company tends to go hand in hand with quality and longevity.

Cars are an area where Reddit was still helpful. YouTube can be helpful here, but not so much typical car review channels: the most helpful YouTube videos are often from people who've owned a particular model for a year or so and can speak with experience about its quirks.

Finally, and most of all, I've learned to check the instinct to look up reviews. It's worth spending some time to research stuff between you and the ground, or that you'll use daily, but I've wasted too many hours comparing details that really don't matter. Make sure it's something you legitimately care about before you reach for other people's opinions.

Thanks for this. I skimmed the proposal doc itself and didn't quite understand the concern people have with it – most of the concerns that came to my own mind are already listed as non-goals. The first few lines of this comment express a realistic danger that's innate to what's actually being proposed.

Blockchain technology hasn't contributed anything of lasting value, and too much money, energy, and good will has been burned by people trying.

Its most popular applications are cryptocurrencies, which are used for gambling, money laundering, and for collecting payments from ransomware victims. Someone once bought a pizza with them, but since that time their transactions have become too slow and their value too volatile to exchange them for anything so concrete.

Various attempts have been made to use blockchain technology for public or shared databases, but it turns out to be worse than all the other faster and much simpler existing solutions in that space.

Others have attempted to bolt it on to various business and social systems, but it hasn't provided any practical benefit there either. It remains a slow and cumbersome alternative to every problem.

Its unique superpower is that it can be used to make contracts between parties that have no trust in one another and no social or legal system of enforcement, so long as your definition of a contract is sufficiently narrow, can be reduced to terms understood by the world's slowest logic engine, and is perfectly encoded the first time around and doesn't require any adjustment thereafter. If one or more of those conditions fail, you'll find yourself turning to the social and legal systems of enforcement you thought you didn't have.

Because they're both part of the Fediverse, Lemmy and Kbin do federate with each other. You can follow Lemmy "communities" in Kbin, and Kbin "magazines" in Lemmy, and I believe other Fediverse groups (like Frendica groups) also federate.

I've been leaning into this from Kbin, as a way of dipping into communities on Beehaw and other Lemmy instances while keeping my distance from Lemmy's devs.

I have one concern. As we're seeing with Reddit, it's a huge effort to move internet communities. If Lemmy-the-app becomes untenable even for more reasonably admin'd instances, then the most obvious solution won't be to fork Lemmy (a huge undertaking) but rather to move to an app that's maintained by more reasonable people. That's probably going to involve a messy migration, some data loss, some loss of community, and some dead links.

I'll keep using Kbin as a way of tapping into existing communities, but when it comes to building new ones I'd much rather see it done on kbin.social or other Fediverse instances where there's no long-term dependency on Lemmy's devs.

Apparently not in Windows settings:

If the BIOS says it supports Modern Standby, Windows takes it at its word and completely disables the ability to enter S3 sleep (classic standby). There’s no official or documented option for disabling Modern Standby through Windows, which is incredibly annoying.

Side note: for a while, there was actually a registry setting you could change to disable Modern Standby on the Windows side. Unfortunately, Microsoft removed it, and to my knowledge, has never added it back.

I'm not a Windows user, so I can't confirm one way or the other, but toward the end of the end of the article the author gives vendor-specific instructions for disabling the S0 Low Power Idle capability from BIOS.

It was like this for a few months on Mastodon when Twitter did the same. At least spez doesn't have any kind of celebrity status: I was able to go out with some friends last night and not a single person raised this topic. (A couple of them know what Reddit is, but none of them really use it much. And I'm sure no one in the group other than me knows who its CEO is.)

I just hope we have a good network of people here after this story fizzles out of the news. I'd be happy with kbin never becoming as popular as Reddit, so long as there's a healthy bunch of curious people sharing and discussing interesting links.

Maybe this is just a contrarian view, but I see "AI" as a potential rather than a technology. Right now, transformer-based technologies are what most of us mean when we talk about AI, and it's not clear to me how much more potential that idea really has. When I look at how much energy it takes to set up something like GPT-4 I see us pushing hardware to its limit and yet the outcomes are still too often unsatisfying. Significant breakthroughs are needed somewhere in that architecture just to do the kind of things we're trying to do today at the fidelity we expect and without breaking the bank.

The technology we have today might be to AI what the phonograph was to audio recording. As a technology we hit the limits of its potential pretty quickly and then… we fixated. Entirely different technologies eventually led to the lossless spatial audio experiences we can enjoy today, and seem more likely to carry future potential for audio too.

In that analogy, GPT might just be like someone arranging 8 gramophones in a circle to mimic the kind of spatial audio experience available in some headphones now. Impressive in many ways, but directionally not the path where potential lies.

A lot of nuance and empathy in this piece, it's worth a close read.

As women, we didn't feel we should have to defend ourselves against such a ridiculous statement, we shouldn't need an uncomfortable public confrontation; but why did none of the men say anything? This is where it got interesting. They felt they didn't want to speak on our behalf, didn't want to be perceived as jumping in and taking our voices. We were surprised, we felt they didn't have our backs and didn't see it as an issue. They felt confused as to how to act.

I've had similar experiences on both ends of that. Confrontation is wearying so usually I just do an internal eye-roll and move on. But at other times I've felt something ought to be said, but thought I lacked the expertise or lived experience to make a convincing case.

The linked article summarizes the problems in the paragraph starting "I've been aware of Lemmy for a long time". For an alternative view: the Fedi.Tips account on Mastodon – typically a cheerleader for all apps of the FediVerse – shared some more pointed words about them in this thread and reiterated the warning just yesterday after noticing the Lemmy team's successful recruitment campaign on Reddit.

I was one of the people they recruited, and ran into problems myself only after signing up at lemmy.ml and being surprised by the amount of CCP propaganda posted there. At first I thought it was strange that I was being downvoted for pointing it out, and that the devs (also admins of that instance) ignored/downvoted me when I flagged the issue for their attention. After researching a bit, I found that Lemmy's basically developed and maintained by two people, both of whom seem to be westerners fetishizing Mao Zedong Thought – literally to the point of writing lengthy apologetics for the CCP's human rights abuses including the Uyghur genocide.

They're clearly skilled engineers, but I can't trust or support them, and relying on instance of Lemmy means I'd have to do both.

I guess that clinches it. I'm AFK right now but later today I'll be checking out PowerDeleteSuite (thanks to @solidgrue for mentioning it in this thread).

This comment thread is behaving very strangely right now: comments with the same ID are showing up multiple times in different places, and I just received a notification about a reply that I don't see in the thread.

Anyone found any decent wireless ones with replaceable batteries? I was interested in the Fairbuds XL but it's not well reviewed.

For a while I had a pair of Sennheiser TV headphones that took AAAs, but they required a dedicated transmitter and weren't great for music anyway.

Like the other replier and GP, my Linux and Mac desktops run for months at a time without a restart. I only restart when there's a software update that demands it. I don't have much experience with modern Windows, but I expect that's the norm from a modern OS.

If you're running into runaway resource issues like this then you may want to spend a few minutes hunting them down and maybe replace the programs responsible. Daily restarts shouldn't be necessary.

Looks like this has sorted itself out now!

Alex Russell is a good read on React. His position gives him a broad view of its impacts and has kept him from being sidelined. This Changelog podcast is a decent distillation of his criticisms – it was recorded earlier this year, a few days after his Market For Lemons blog post.

(Sorry for the late reply! I've been a bit swamped lately and away from kbin.)

Yep, it's fixed. Thank you!