It's time to change how we cover Elon Musk
exactly. a little bit of elbow grease and greed is what got us all to the fairly awful future we find ourselves in, who's to say it can't get worse? never let the hope die. lol
I think there are a combination of factors intermingling, situations like the API backlash just jostle things a little harder and that's when you see big spikes. Once a platform like Lemmy begins to see more and more traffic and, in turn, content, it starts to become a viable alternative.
Lemmy existed for at least a couple years before I joined, for instance, and I came with what I would guess was the biggest wave so far (June 2023). Provided the userbase can keep up a respectable momentum generating discussion and content, the next wave could be bigger or it could be more resistant to leaving because there's enough content here to consume and interact with.
Reddit could take years to lose substantial portions of its userbase or it may shed some and stay solid, but Im not one of these people who obsesses over it's ruin. If they survive long term, God bless, whatever, who cares. What's interesting to me is seeing an alternative sprout up and actually generate traffic and start building a community, whether that's Lemmy or something else built on ActivityPub or something else built on a different federated framework or even something else entirely that's centralized... I think Lemmy is one permutation of this and it has undoubtedly got some traction.
I sometimes wonder if/when I'll start getting random Lemmy links from people instead of ones to Reddit.
edit: I should also add that considering reddit is trying hard to get value on paper and probably still hoping to ipo, we probably shouldn't put it past them be shitty once again at some point in the future.
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That's basically where I'm wedging myself in now. Ansible and Python, higher value but lower stress projects. Bigger wins, but ones that are able take the time needed to put them together, test, and refine.
It's almost a back-to-my-roots kind of thing for me, but with a fresh twist in terms of approach. I'm basically writing automations that make life easier for ops guys, to boil it down to it's essence.
Yeah, they all definitely seem quite polished. Sometimes I get the itch to play a MUD, find one or return to one I've played before, and get hooked for a few months. Other times, I'm done after a few days... they'll always be an option for me though. IRE games are just fine for my purposes in that regard.
exactly this right here. we saw the same phenomenon with threads and mastodon before it inre twitter annoying its userbase. depending on how engaged each wave of incoming users ends up, i'd guess you could expect it to look something like:
- spike
- drop off
- plateau
- spike
- drop off
- plateau above the last plateau
- etc etc
sometimes the drop off is really bad. sometimes its just people getting bored with the initial hype while others stay. rinse and repeat until the platform succeeds or dies.
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Ah, alright, not quite me - I'll be 14 years deep in November. Honestly, one of the things that kept me motivated over the years was moving around - I stayed at the same company, but I started out doing QA (by hand, no automation), then got moved to handle release management, then moved to IT as a general Linux admin and spent a few years doing that, made friends with an infosec manager and he offered me a spot on his team working remote and doing container/docker security which morphed into a cloud security thing after he left the company (I hated the cloud). A couple years back I moved back to non-cloud/non-infosec work doing automation stuff with Ansible mainly, and for the time being only for our on-prem infrastructure (this may change in the future and I'm not really looking forward to it all that much).
At this point, nothing is really helping get my head back into the game 100% but I can still put out work and I'm just trying to find the joy in small victories and chasing the high you get when the code you wrote works flawlessly. I'm blessed to have a solid management structure above me who a) know me, b) like me (and the feeling is mutual, they're all great people), and c) are happy with my output.
I don't envy you working with kubernetes - my time in container security came during the early days of large companies trying to move to turning everything into microservices. It was a wild west kind of vibe and I basically had free reign... nowadays, I don't think I'd enjoy any of that in its current form.
I have great soft skills and I write pretty well, but outside of that my skillset is basically a degraded/decayed technology one because I've been treading water for a while now and not actively keeping up with all the shit in our sector that changes on a constant basis.
I've also seriously weighed moving into development, but I'm not sure if that's just going to fix anything for me. I like writing Python, but I don't know how that would feel full-time. Sucks, man.
Same, back when I played a lot more. There was a period of time where I felt completely unfulfilled and unappreciated at work. I was a Linux admin at the time so I spent 90% of my time in a text environment. One day, I installed TinTin++ which has a non-GUI version and I'd just keep one ssh connection opened to a VPS I pay for and would just MUD throughout the day (mainly just running quests over and over). This was years before "quiet quitting" was cool lol
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oof its like you're either me or i'm you. hope you find your way past the burn out or out of it if you end up sinking into it. i'm going on like 3.5 years of battling it and there are better days and worse days, but i have no idea what else to even do. managing infra and writing code have been my entire career up to now.
If you've never tried a MUD, there are still a few out there that are alive and kickin'. Funny enough, I've been scratching that itch over the last few days and seeing whats out there. They're something like a pre-cursor to MMOs - online, text-based games. If you get really deep into stuff like PVP, you'll like wind up writing scripts that trigger actions based on what's happening since its quicker than typing out commands when things get hot and heavy.
If I had to guess, I'd say Aardwolf is probably the most populated and has the most users online at any given time. I have an old char on there that I occasionally log into and run some quests on:
I just created a character in Alter Aeon and it's alright so far, but I haven't spent more than about an hour logged in:
I don't know how people generally feel about Iron Realms Entertainment. Some or all of their MUDs end up with you kind of having to spend some money if you get super engaged, but I'm pretty sure most of their games are perfectly fine without paying for casual players. They have a handful of MUDs that cover different themes (classic fantasy, vampire stuff, etc). I actually tried out Starmourn recently which is a sci-fi themed one, but I think they're no longer developing it actively - the servers remain up (for now, at least, I guess). Regardless, all of their games seem pretty polished and thoughtfully made.
Iron Realms Entertainment main site
The cool thing about IRE is that their games are all playable in a browser and the browser-based apps include some QoL UI stuff like maps and stuff. The others generally require a (free) MUD client like Mudlet. Aardwolf has a highly customized version of Mudlet that has frames/windows within the client that show you your characters stats, maps, a chat window, and some other stuff.
Peter Santanello's videos are usually really enjoyable and pleasant. He has a calm, respectful demeanor and he just goes to random places you usually don't think about and just kind of shoots the shit with people. He did a couple videos a while back where he went to a couple of native reservations in like one of the Dakotas, I think, and they were an intensely interesting look into that life and culture.
His titles can feel kind of click-baity sometimes and I don't always agree with his take on things, but I find him a really likeable and honest-seeming guy.
I think i have the 13-year badge. I visit maybe a few times a week when there's nothing left to doomscroll on Lemmy. I was never really a huge contributor, in posts or comments, but now I'm purely a lurker and I spend maybe 15 or 30 minutes in a single sitting on the site instead of a few hours cumulatively throughout a given day.
With that said, the overall quality of content and discussion had been going downhill for years at this point, I just didn't have anywhere else to go that provided the same dopamine hit. Lemmy doesn't do it quite as well, but once the Reddit API controversy kicked up and a ton of people started actually using Lemmy, that helped give me a good reason to spend time with it since there was activity. I'm honestly not sure if Lemmy is the future but I'm willing to stay if it's a road to the future... and I'm willing to try out new platforms and communities before I find something that I feel fits me as well as Reddit did for so long.
I kind of miss 2010-2013ish era Reddit (minus the bacon/narwahls stuff which kind of felt forced to me), but hoping something like that comes along would probably be along the same lines as wishing I could get the same near magical feel and interaction out of IRC as I did in the mid to late 90s/early 2000s. These are one-and-done things. The next thing that elicits that kind of homey feeling will probably be something entirely new and not a clone of the OG thing.
I sit here in my ivory tower, casting judgment on 16GB weaklings.... while typing all of this from my old gaming desktop which has just 16GB. hahaha (all my gaming happens on a Steam Deck now which also only has 16... but all it does it run steam and video games, so it suffices)
I'm arriving at basically the same conclusion. Thanks for the feedback!
If I was solely interested in using it to write code, I might just say screw it and buy an Air or the 10-core M2. My goals here are pretty much: writing code, music production, lots of browser tabs, and a laptop that will last me a MINIMUM of 5 years. The last point is why I'm looking to the higher end vs. the lower/sensible/reasonable end. Oh, and the possibility of doing graphical stuff for fun, but it won't be rendering hour long 8k videos.
I dont disagree with this fully, but the default 14" Max build has 32GB and that's what i'd consider a sweet spot for having a DAW open with a bunch of synthesizers in there and a browser with a bunch of tabs open. The era of 16GB being more than enough is over.
I think music production is really more about the processor itself and the available memory (I don't bounce SHIT to audio because there's always room for last minute tweaks to the 20 synthesizer patches I have open at one time lol) - so from what I'm seeing, you might be right. Now its a matter of deciding to splurge a bit and going with the Max which I can go pick up any time or being a patient person and ordering a Pro with 32GB.
With this take, you (and others, from my research) are really making me lean towards putting on my big boy pants and maybe just ordering a 14" with an M2 Pro and 32GB RAM (the 32GB makes it a non-default build and jumps the wait time to about 3 weeks). I really wish there was a 14" Pro chip variant with 32GB as a default.
I might do some light gaming on it, but that's really what my Steam Deck is for. I'd personally consider the added GPU power a road into maybe learning 3d modeling/rendering or animation or something down the road for fun, so really just hobbyist level stuff.
So the heat/throttling is really coming from/caused by heat generated by the GPU and not the CPU cores, then?
Funny, I just came off a 2-week task and it took 6 months. Just started a 3 day task... get back to me at the end of July.
I think in a lot of cases, it's less about them having a lot of money and more about how they're able to effect change using that money or the power/influence associated with that money. Unfortunately, this can often happen at a relatively large scale, like by upending a popular social media platform or disrupting the automobile industry (for good or ill) or discussing futuristic public transportation ideas to take the wind out of the sails of more realistic/attainable projects and efforts.
All things considered, I wouldn't mind hearing less about these people - a lot less. We're well into mud slinging territory and some of these dickheads absolutely thrive on that. I'm sure the worst of them feel egged on when the media talks about them so they say or do more crazy shit very publicly to draw attention from fanboys and detractors alike. Call it a vicious cycle... or a hyperloop or something.