Pxtl @ Pxtl @lemmy.ca

- 🌇 #HamOnt,🍁

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2 yr. ago

Exactly. Any analysis of "embrace extend extinguish" WRT Google/XMPP needs to answer a simple question: how many daily active users did XMPP/Jabber have in 2004?

I, for one, support the right of every instance to federate with whoever they choose to federate with.

So do I.

I just think their decisions might be dumb.

How many users did Jabber/XMPP have in 2004?

recommending everyone I knew to switch to it

I think we've isolated the problem. Everyone is aware of the risk this time. nobody is going to abandon their Fediverse accounts for Threads.

1. Jabber was much smaller than the Fediverse when Google launched Talk.
2. Users are more aware of the risk now. "Oh you should go use Google Talk, it's an open standard" is stupid in retrospect. Likewise, "you should use Threads, it's an open standard" would be absurd. The value here is "you should use Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever, it's a good open platform and still lets you interact with Threads users".
3. It's important to remember that the most famous example of embrace-extend-extinguish ultimately failed: Microsoft's tweaks to Java and Javascript are long dead, Microsoft having embraced Google's javascript interpreter and abandoned Java in favour of their home-grown .NET platform.

That's an awful lot of words to say "yes, that's me".

Get some help.

Have you looked into the process of actually spinning up your own Mastodon instance? It's not exactly the good old days of throwing together a LAMP box and installing PHPBB on it.

Ditto. I also try to file good, clean bug reports with detailed repro steps where I hit them. Not just "it's busted, fix it". I'd love to contribute actual code, because I'd like to think I'm a really good programmer (been coding professionally for decades), but actually fully getting a hosted Masto instance up to the point where you can edit the code and see it live is a freaking nightmare.

Part of it is just today's polarized political climate, especially since the popularity of the Fediverse is partially a backlash to reactionaries taking over Twitter and the corporate enshittification of Facebook and Reddit.

Everything is a war now, and solidarity and boycotts are basically the only weapons that small, independent actors have. So people apply "don't cross the picket line" thinking to everything, even where it doesn't make sense.

Want to act properly? Contribute money and labour towards your instances. Help them build better moderation tools so they can handle the flood of crap from Threads, and onboarding tools and better UX so they can steal away the Threads users.

I'm over 40 and slowing down with age, so I do 1.3 for most podcasts. I usually leave video at 1X but I'm generally doing something else at the same time like folding laundry or gaming.

Honestly, getting old sucks. Like, I used to play Lemmings a lot and hum the theme song to myself constantly. But I hadn't played the game in 20 years. I heard the song recently, and the tempo sounded twice as fast as I remembered, so much that I fired up emulators and whatnot to confirm... yes, that's really how fast the song is.

The song didn't get faster, I got slower.

Dumb. Federation is how we escape from every cloud-based service being a dictatorship of the person who owns the platform. That includes federating with privately own orgs to provide them an exit.

By all means make good tools to allow individual users to block Threads (or other private instances ruled by amoral coporations), but doing it at instance level is just dumb.

edit: also, number of instances doesn't matter. Number of daily active users matters. Most users are on mastodon.social, mastodon.cloud, lemmy.world, hachyderm.io, lemmy.world, etc. And all of those are federating. The only large instance that is not federating with threads is mas.to

Google messages (the only real implementation) still sucks at automatic failover when a data connection is unavailable.

Google Messages RCS is basically flip a coin on delivery if you don't have consistent data for your phone.

Same as it ever was Kill a Pedestrian, Pay a $500 Fine

Come join the war on cars. !fuckcars@lemmy.world

Give me an F-zero 99 + Mode7 Mario Kart Mario Maker game. Simple 2D maps.

The highlight on new comments is ugly as sin. Do not want.

They seem determined to destroy one of the top 3 most prestigious universities in Canada.

Or an agent orange business.

Thanks! I've heard a million explanations but this is clear - so the synth is taking the composition as input from what most people would think of as the "instrument" (as in, the place where somebody is picking notes and rhythm), but the synth is the thing that controls the shape of the actual soundwaves, and ideally that waveform is fully constructed within the synth from first principles, instead of just being a set of samples that are just pitch-shifted to hit each frequency to play different notes, right?

And obviously, adjusting the parameters synth itself is also part of the performance and composition, just as muting a trumpet or hitting an effects pedal is part of that, even though it's not really part of "what note do I play when", and with far more parameters available since the sound is wholly constructed instead of just being modifications of eg. a vibrating string or brass.

So when people talked about "synthesizer music" in the '80s and the popular image was of a guy jamming on the keyboard, what was actually meant was that the keyboardist was playing a keyboard that was using a synth to generate the actual sound, which might or might not be a separate unit from the keyboard.

I love STV but imho it just doesn't work for Canada. We have too many massive wilderness ridings. If you had a heavily-urbanized province like if Southern Ontario was its own province, I'd say it would be the perfect system for that area.

Here's why: The northern areas of every province are extremely low-population and are enormous. For example, if BC had 5-seat-riding STV federally, the entire province north of Kamloops would be one massive riding. It's possible all their MPs would be from the populated end of the riding, so that people in the ass-end of the riding live over 1000km from their "representative". Ontario would look similar - Northern Ontario is probably the most sparsely-populated area outside of the Territories. That's not an acceptable outcome -- being 1000km from your MP means you are not represented.

Contrast this vs Mixed Member Proportional, where local ridings still exist - under MMP, 2/3 of the seats are normal-ass ridings that work exactly like we do today. Then we group them together in "regions" and back-fill the most popular party-members within that region to make it proportional. A lot of people get upset about non-local representatives, or "unelected party staffer MPs" in MMP, but it doesn't have to be that way.

The plan that was floated for BC is actually really awesome -- imho it should be applied Canada-wide. It's basically a vanilla MMP plan but there are details that do great work to mitigate the main complaints about MMP:

1. Take the map of Canada and carve it up into regions of 14 ridings (obviously for provinces with less than 14 ridings, just take the whole province). These are our "regions". So, for example:
   • Saskatchewan is one "region"
   • Peel Region (Mississauga + Brampton + nearby towns & exurbs) is one "region".
   • Niagara Peninsula (including Hamilton) is one "region".
   • A big city like Montreal would probably be 3 different electoral "regions".
2. Within each Region we have 9 ridings (or 2/3 of the total number of Seats if the Region is smaller than 14 seats). Those are normal-ass elections. So Calgary Centre still has its own MP, and so do more remote areas like Gaspésie—Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine. These ridings are only about 50% larger then our current ridings.
3. The other 5 Seats within the Region are backfill seats, that are used to fill up the Region until the proportion of party-members roughly matches their % of the vote within the Region. So even though the back-fill people don't represent a riding, they're still somewhat local. Flin Flon's non-riding members are still from Manitoba. People in Markham will still have a local MP, but also will have regional MPs from the rest of York. So locality is still good for the regional representatives, and we have a proper local riding MP, we're not losing that guarantee of locality.
4. Avoid the "nobody elected this asshole" problem with open-lists. The ballot is simple, it has 2 sections:
   1. A section to pick your local MP, which is exactly as it is today. Pick 1 person here.
   2. A section to vote for your regional MP, grouped by party, which has multiple options per-party. Pick 1 person here. As a side-effect the person you select here is also your party PR vote.
5. So, we figure out how many seats to back-fill by % of votes per-party (on the regional section) - so if there are 14 seats in a Region, and one party gets half of the regional MP votes, got 5 local seats? They'll get 2 Regional seats. And which of their Regional candidates get those 2 seats? The 2 that got the most votes.

So it's not like they're unelected. They still have to be the most popular people within their party and within the region.

So let's think a concrete example - imagine Southeastern Quebec region, which includes Quebec City. Generally not a very Red area except for the city itself. The Liberals continue to run Steven Guilbeault in Quebec City itself as a local MP, but to drum up interest they also run Stephane Dion and Joël Lightbound as regional candidates in the Quebec City regional area, including a massive amount of rural and suburban area they expect to get a little support from but generally lose. To pad out the rest of the list, they also run Ricky the Pigfucker as a regional candidate. Now, this is an open list - if the Liberal voters outside of Quebec City really hate Dion, they can still vote for Ricky. And so instead of the expected three MPs for the Quebec region being Guilbuealt (elected directly by Quebec City), Dion, and Lightbound, it's an upset and they get Guilbeault, Dion, and Ricky the Pigfucker.

And Independants "I don't want to run as a party" types? They can still run as a local riding MP. They're not frozen out like most people think of about in "Proportional systems" that are very "party-oriented".

It's not a perfect system. It's very party-oriented in the way that STV isn't. It's weirdly complicated. But it works. It's used IRL in real first-world countries like Germany and New Zealand and Scotland. There's lots of fiddly knobs to argue about like whether it's okay to add more top-up MPs beyond the fixed size to preserve proportionality (true-MMP vs AMS - personally I'm on the fixed-size side AKA AMS) But with Canada's geographic considerations, I strongly think it's our best option.

For somebody who has no idea about them at all:

When I was a kid in the 80s, a "synthesizer" was an electronic keyboard. Now, a "synthesizer" is a mess of knobs and buttons that looks more like a drum machine than a piano.

So, uh... my Q: "what's a synthesizer?"

Right? Seems like there are ways they could make that less one sided. "Unnamed Canadian man killed in Cancun; Mexican authorities say he had a record of gang activity". And the preview contradicts the headline -- was he killed at the resort or at a mall?