CoderKat @ CoderKat @lemm.ee

I write bugs and sometimes features! I'm also @CoderKat@kbin.social.

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2 yr. ago

There doesn't have to be coordination if there's incentives.

It's like how so many people who drive cars act in ways that benefit cars and is counterproductive for those who don't drive. They want plentiful free parking, lots of lanes, and cheap gasoline. They're not particularly coordinated. They're just incentivized because of their position. They benefit from those kinda things, so gravitate towards them (and also don't oppose them).

I suspect that not all social media is equal. And that even within the same site, people can have radically different experiences because social media is always tailored to you in some way. On sites like Reddit and Lemmy, it's tailored by the communities you subscribe to. On Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, it's tailored by who you subscribe to and sorting algorithm.

I suspect that the difference in who/what you subscribe to would actually be bigger than the difference by site. You can find really toxic, harmful content on every site and you can also find really positive, helpful content on every site. Though some sites make it easier to be exposed to harmful content.

Eg, the Reddit/Lemmy model benefits from the fact that moderators can apply strict rules to communities you subscribe to (such that you only have to curate broad communities). By comparison, many other sites would let pretty much anyone reply to posts by specific people or groups and while the original poster can usually block or remove replies, that's not scalable and posters often won't.

But that said, we can't forget that Lemmy is still social media. It still has many of the risks that social media has and we must be cautious of that. I firmly think we can ensure Lemmy is better than all other forms of social media (I do think the Reddit/Lemmy moderation model is strictly superior), but there's a lot more we can and should do to ensure Lemmy is of high quality and that people can and do curate their feeds responsibly.

Small sample sizes don't invalidate studies. They reduce the statistical certainty, but can still be accurate and there's formulas for gauging how accurate a given sample size is based off the standard deviation.

The student only part does mean a sampling biase, but that doesn't invalidate things either. Mostly just limits it such that we can only make the claim for students and not anyone else (but it's still a meaningful result and provides justification for larger studies).

Yeah, it's good to see reporters actually pressing back on these blatant trolls with their well understood tactics. It's a shame, however, that the more centrist media is rarely willing to do the same. It's a common trap that people think you must give equal time to both sides in order to be fair. Reality is that some sides are so dumb and inconsequential that they don't deserve any air time.

It's stupid that the school district even moved the kid to a different class. They never should have caved an inch. That just empowers these maniacs to keep doing this racist, time wasting drivel.

I don't think that makes sense if you're worried about defederation. Porn instances are particularly at risk of being defederated from (and thus you potentially can't interact with large communities).

Yeah, those are frustrating. Some channels I watch have a ton of annoying YouTube ads, where premium becomes a must for sanity. But some others have baked in sponsors that can't be skipped (but no native YouTube ads). I wish they'd reconcile the two. It doesn't make sense that you can pay to only block some ads, and depending on what videos you watch, that could be either the majority of ads or none at all!

The pricing feels like it only makes sense if you want to use YouTube Music (and thus also don't use one of the many streaming music competitors). Paying a couple of bucks extra for ad free YouTube is fine and that's why I pay it personally. But if I wasn't a YTM user already, I don't think I would.

And most people don't want to switch streaming music services. I did that years ago and it sucked. Music is the kinda thing where you really benefit from the service knowing your tastes. I only did it because back then, Spotify was missing some of my favourite artists while Google Play Music had them. I don't even know if that applies today.

I mean, yes, it's a little more effort, but I think you're over playing how much effort is required. Writing a half decent readme is vastly easier than frankly any feature or bug fix. Taking a couple of notable screenshots is super easy. Writing docs is hard (I've written tons for large and complicated projects), but readmes are the easiest and including screenshots is really quite easy.

Everywhere supports markdown in readmes now. Literally everywhere I've ever hosted code. And markdown with links to images is perfectly fine even if viewed in plain text mode. They'll just click the link and view the image standalone. I've done that plenty of times, too. Every editor (plus in-browser code hosts in plain text mode) makes it easy.

Yes. Git can store binary files fine. It's not the most efficient for storing them, but it works, especially for a small number of screenshots. For updating and theme, that's entirely up to you. It's all a judgement call. If you want to show off your functionality (like a dark mode), I encourage you to include screenshots of it. If you substantially change your UI, update the images.

You don't have to update for every new button you add. It's more about giving a general impression of the UI. Is it minimalist? Is it a chaotic mess? Does it look like it fits in naturally with whatever OS appears to have been used? Does it look like any thought was put into UI and UX? Those are the kinds of things you're trying to answer.

I think that doesn't work for most smaller projects. That'll work for something like Firefox, but there's little reason for random, unheard of tools to have an image on the web. Plus the naming of some projects is super generic, which can make it hard to find correct images.

Some software changes appearance often, too, and google is bad at knowing what up to date is. It can be really easy to find wildly out of date images as the top results.

Even for a CLI tool, there should be a real world example showing how it works and what the output looks like. Eg, for jq:

    
$ cat file.json
{"field: "value"}
$ jq '.field' file.json
"value"

  

And a few other examples.

Eh, I don't agree. Cops regularly act on shoplifting and commercial damages. It's only when burglars attack regular people that cops don't care. eg, try complaining to a cop if someone breaks into your car or steals a package off your porch or steals your bike. They don't give a shit about any of those things. But you can regularly see cops detaining shoplifters at any Walmart or the likes. There's regularly cases of cops being shamed because they bragged about arresting someone stealing food (heck, I saw such a post literally minutes ago on this site).

The university I went to explicitly did in person written exams for pretty much all exams specifically for anti-cheating (even before the age of ChatGPT). Assignments would use computers and whatnot, but the only way to reliably prevent cheating is to force people to write the exams in carefully controlled settings.

Honestly, probably could have still used computers in controlled settings, but pencil and paper is just simpler and easier to secure.

One annoying thing is that this meant they also usually viewed assignments as untrusted and thus not worth much of the grade. You'd end up with assignments taking dozens of hours but only worth, say, 15% of your final grade. So practically all your grade is on a couple of big, stressful exams. A common breakdown I had was like 15% assignments, 15% midterm, and 70% final exam.

Fuck no. Nobody wants NFTs.

I wonder how many people would see the warning and assume it just means an 18% auto gratuity? Because that's very common and the amount is exactly what many auto gratuities have (or at least had when I last was in the US, which was several years ago). Because if I saw something saying there was an 18% service fee, that's what I'd assume. I would not think there'd be a tip on top of that.

That said, the US custom of not including the final price (including taxes) in the posted prices is a shitty, toxic practice and should be illegal.

Let's not pretend people acknowledge warnings, though. It's a popular meme that projects will have hundreds of warnings and that devs will ignore them all.

There's a perfectly valid use case for opinionated languages that don't let you get away with that. It's also similar to how go has gofmt to enforce a consistent formatting.

Honestly, I've been using Go for years and this unused variable error rarely comes up. When it does, it's trivial to resolve. But the error has saved me from bugs more often than it has wasted my time. Most commonly when you declare a new variable in a narrower scope when you intended to assign to the variable of the same name (since Go has separate declare vs assign operators).

Personally, I sometimes like when a game feels like just a new storyline (and map) for the same game. Sometimes I just want more of a good thing and don't want to have to learn new mechanics or risk the game making things worse.

And since dev time is limited, I think in theory, this could mean more time could be spent on making the story missions perfect. But in practice, I don't think that usually happens. Publishers would rather cheap out.

Ugh, ARR is horrible for that. It really is a good game after all that bullshit, but it doesn't excuse the bullshit existing in the first place. Plus it's so weird for Final Fantasy, a story driven RPG, to have so many low quality quests in the first place (both story and side quests). I can't fault anyone not wanting to deal with that.

Best thing it has going for it is that the dungeons are really fun even when the story quests suck. But it's been years since I've played and my knowledge may be stale. Someday I'll go back, but no way I'll start with a new character lol.

In return, Riyadh wants Washington to [..] help in developing a nuclear program.

Uuuuuhhhhhh, no. No no no. Please no.

How the hell have neither Mean Girls or The Princess Bride been posted yet?? Those are, like, the most quotable and fun movies ever.