Ramin Honary @ Ramin_HAL9001 @lemmy.ml

Software engineer, functional programming enthusiast.

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Joined

4 yr. ago

you’re talking about centrists and liberals.

I suppose I am, though I think it is accurate to call centrists and liberals "right wing."

Those are both good articles, I have actually read them both before.

These megacorporations are why we left for the Fediverse in the first place

Exactly! I do have hope that Mastodon, Lemmy, and the rest will be resistant to enshittification. As long as these instances are funded by the users in a non-profit capacity, there will be no need for ads and therefore no enshittification. Even if they federate with enshittified for-profit instances where professional influencers are pressured into creating more and more ads, I think most of the good instances will just block the annoying influencers, or defederate entirely.

But I guarantee, if Threads succeeds in halting Mastodon's momentum and enough people leave Mastodon for threads, they will eventually end up enshittified exactly the way Twitter and Reddit ended up.

That sucks, I hope someone sees this post and un-bans you. My whole Mastodon instance got put onto a blocklist for reasons that I still don't fully understand, (fortunately I think people aren't using that blocklist as much as they used to).

Try to keep the big picture in mind. Politics is always a little messy, misunderstandings happen. I think you are 100% right to try assume good faith, and I think mods often make mistakes and ban people without good cause or good evidence, but on a whim or on a hunch, or maybe they are just tired and have been dealing with too many trolls or bots lately. Then they just forget about the ban and the damage is never undone. I wish more mods understood that it is not a good idea to ban permanently on the first offense.

constant hysterical posts about Threads on here are worse than all the Elon Musk ones

Congratulations, you passed the test! You didn't fall for the pro-Threads side of the argument or the anti-Threads side, you used your immense brainpower to transcend the petty debate and correctly called out both sides as "hysterical." Well done! You shall be rewarded with a free cookie, or a free beer, whichever you prefer, and you can shove it right up your ass.

People who are right wing support fascism. Full stop.

I very much agree with everything else you said, but I can’t grasp why you would make the extra effort to pander to them like that, it’s bizarre.

You are right, and I also agree with you, so let me just clarify... there is a difference between people who unconsciously support fascism merely because they are apolitical, and people who are very deliberately fascist, as in enthusiastic supporters of the Republican party.

Most fans of US movies are indifferent, and do not think of themselves as political beings. They think of themselves as just "ordinary." Like a fish not knowing what water is, "ordinary" for an average US citizen is about as close to fascism as a person can possibly be without enthusiastically actively waving around swastikas -- but there is still a difference between "ordinary" apolitical people like Tarantino and all of his fans who think of him as edgy, and someone actively wishing to purge the world of all non-white people. That is what I mean by "right wing" and not fascist.

I think it is important to draw that distinction because I don't like blaming apolitical people for being the victims of US mainstream cinema brainwashing.

I also love the Green Day cover.

Government bad, corruption everywhere, war for the sake of war, etc.

I’m certain Tarantino would double down on that and I just don’t want it.

Tarantino is kind of a bellwether for the mostly apolitical right-wing (but non-fascist) middle-class majority of the US population, the movie "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" convinced me of that. It also convinced me that Tarantino himself has lost the plot, or actually never really had it. He reminds me a bit of Beavis and Butthead, kind of just watching movies and TV all the time, sorting everything into the binary categories "cool" or "sucks", except he actually goes out and makes films that glorify all he thinks is "cool" which happens to be a cross-section of all media that glorifies violence and toxic masculinity.

So he likes Star Trek. Congratulations Tarantino, your "geek" bona-fides are authentic, but like the rest of the right-wing (non-fascist) middle-class majority, you really have no fucking clue and don't care about the political origins of Star Trek and are just itching to erase them so you can make it into another "cool" movie that glorifies violence and toxic masculinity. You can fuck right off, Tarantino.

5-E's maybe:

• Embrace
• Extend
• Exploit
• Extinguish
• Enshittification

I also wrote a blog post on it,

The main difficulty I have with Rust (what prevents me from using it), is that the maintainers insist on statically compiling everything. This is fine for small programs, and even large monolithic applications that are not expected to change very often.

But for the machine learning projects I work on, I might want to include a single algorithm from a fairly large library of algorithms. The amount of memory used is not trivial, I am talking about the difference between loading a single algorithm in 50 MB of compiled code for a dynamically loadable library, versus loading the entire 1.5 GB library of algorithms of statically linked code just to use that one algorithm. Then when distributing this code to a few dozen compute nodes, that 50 MB versus 1.5 GB is suddenly a very noticeable difference.

There are other problems with statically linking everything as well, for example, if you want your application to be written in a high-level language like Python, TypeScript, or Lisp, you might want to have a library of Rust code that you can dynamically load into the Python interpreter and establish foreign function bindings to the Rust APIs. But this is not possible with statically linked code.

And as I understand, it is a difficult technical problem to solve. Apparently, in order for Rust to optimize a program and guarantee type safety and performance, it needs the type information in the source code. This type information is not normally stored into the dynamically loadable libraries (the .so or .dll files), so if you dynamically load a library into a Rust program its type safety and performance guarantees go out the window. So the Rust compiler developers have chosen to make everything as statically compiled as possible.

This is why I don't see Rust replacing C any time soon. A language like Zig might have a better chance than Rust because it can produce dynamically loadable libraries that are fully ABI compatible with the libraries compiled by C compilers.

I have a blog article about this. Here is the short version:

I can tell you how not to choose a distro: what its screenshots look like or what its default desktop environment is. Many begin shopping around for a distro that suits them best, which means visiting a website like DistroWatch.com, looking at the various screen shots, and picking one that looks nice. But any Linux distro can be made to look like any other distro without too much effort, what you see in the screen shots is just the default look. Really, the the screen shots should be the least of your concerns.

So don't worry about Xfce, KDE, Gnome, LXDE, LXQt or whatever else right now, you can try all of those in good time. First, just get Linux and, worry about figuring out which apps that you can get that work best for your work flow. Almost none of the apps you use now are available in Linux, the hardest part is figuring out how to replace the apps you use daily right now.

You should choose the distribution with the best web service, and the best apps.

• Is the service reliable? Do they have a good team of people making sure the packages are always online, and making sure they are providing timely security updates?
• Do they have corporate, or non-profit, sources of funding? Do you trust the people who are running it?
• Do they have the apps you want, are the apps up to date? Do they have things you need, like word processing, presentation software, photo scrap booking, file sharing, video editing, music editing, personal organizers, video conferencing (can you install Zoom, for example?). Can you easily install Flatpaks or AppImages?

Many of the really big Linux distros all provide completely reliable service, which satisfy the above requirements, but I recommend any of the following four:

• Mint
• Fedora
• Ubuntu
• Pop!_OS

Mint and Fedora are community-run with backing from various sponsors, Ubuntu is run by the Canonical corporation, Pop!_OS is developed by the System 76 company (a medium sized US-based business that sells laptops and PCs).

In this reply you haven't actually addressed any of the reasons I brought up for why federating with Threads is a horrible idea.

If you’re already up and running on Mastodon and can interact with people on Threads, there’s literally no reason to swap one for the other.

This is about encouraging new users to join Facebook instead of one of those other Mastodon instances. Realistically, what percentage of people who join Threads will consider joining Mastodon or an independence instance instead when Facebook decides to drop support for Mastodon federation? I would guess that number at 1% or less. In other words, 99% of all Threads users are stuck there for the entire term of their service, never actually joining Mastodon.

The point of Facebook investing all of this money into setting up Threads is to eliminate competition from decentralized services. They are terrified that they are losing all of the control over the Internet that they have slowly acquired over the past 15 years or so, they are trying to take it back and destroy the competing network of federated independent services.

No, this will get people to leave Mastodon for Threads in droves. Really all Facebook is doing here is leaching users away from Mastodon. The average user doesn't know or care about the "perks" of non-Facebook Mastodon instances that Eugene is talking about. They will go with the service with the most name recognition every time, rather than trust an independent, small-time instance operator.

Threads is just Facebook with ActivityPub compatibility and Facebook ads and tracking, so basically they are pulling people away from decentralized networks and back to being under their control. Then the network effects Eugene is talking about will kick in, but moving people away from Mastodon and toward Threads.

Then Facebook can quietly drop support for Mastodon compatibility. Embrace (is done), Extend (with search, advertising, and tracking), Extinguish, cut compatibility with non-Facebook instances and sink the decentralized network, then finally Enshittification.

I don't hate Star Trek: Lower Decks, but I did find it to be pretty boring. I watched the first 3 episodes on a flight last year and I almost fell asleep while watching it. The jokes just don't land for me. I don't know, it seems to be trying to be like Family Guy or The Orville (which I both love) but it ends up being more like "Our Cartoon President", it is just dull, without edge. Maybe I will watch more episodes, it might get better, I don't know. But I still haven't seen all of DS9 and Voyager yet, so it will have to wait.

I just want to add, it is useful to boycott a company if the workers are on strike, but not so much otherwise.

As far as I understand, Unity is mostly just a Gtk-based desktop environment similar to Cinnamon, but with the Unity shell and launcher, and the global menu.

As a long-time Mac user I always liked the global menu, but it was just such a pain to always have to patch Gtk to get it to work, and in the end it isn't such a huge improvement to my quality of life that I think it is worth the trouble. It is nice that Unity takes care of this for you. That said, and I hate to admit it, but I think Gnome actually is more stable than Unity, mostly because there is so much more financial backing for it, so it is hard for me to recommend using Unity unless you really just love the aesthetics of it.

deuterium is liquid at room temperature

I think you are confusing Deuterium with heavy-water. Deuterium is a heavy isotope of Hydrogen, and so is gas at room temperature. Heavy water is water where the Hydrogen atoms of the water molecule are of the Deuterium isotope, and is liquid at room temperature.

This is not a very good question. If you are concerned about security you need to think about what specifically you are trying to keep safe? Here are some examples of different security scenarios:

1. Do you want your computer to be safe when it is stolen?
2. Do you want to run lots of native apps from untrusted sources?
3. Do you want it to be used by many people and you don't want them to be able to steal each others secrets?

Each one of those questions has different means of securing the computer. With question 1, it is not so much a matter of desktop environment, rather it has more to do with using full-disk encryption, setting a boot password in UEFI, and always having your lock screen enabled.

With question 2, this is a much more difficult task and you would probably be better off running apps in a VM, or carefully crafting your "Security Enhanced" Linux profile -- or not using Linux at all, but using FreeBSD which allows you to run apps in jails.

With question 3, be more careful with filesystem permissions and access control lists, setup your sudoers file properly, and use a desktop environment with better security auditing like Gnome or KDE Plasma.

In an episode of DS9 I heard some of the characters mention that they not only have deflector shields, but also "structural reinforcement shields." So whatever science-fictiony force field is used to protect them from phasers and micrometeorites is also coursing through the skeletal structure of the ship.

When I heard this it immediately clicked in my mind: whenever the ship is hit with phaser fire the explosions happening inside are recoil from these internal shields. Perhaps the catastrophic damage prevented by structural reinforcement shields outweighs the localized damage of potentially fatal recoil.

That is my favorite explanation, anyway.

(This assumes all ships have structural reinforcement shields, and not just the Defiant.)

I hated that show so much, those fucking pop-ups were like water droplet torture, each one that dropped slowly eroded away your sanity.

But I understand the sentiment. Licensing issues are such bullshit, and it is because of things like this that media "piracy" is a moral imperative. It is funny how copyright was originally to protect workers so that artists could actually make a living doing what they did, and how the laws were eventually appropriated and became just another means of rent seeking by massive corporations.