Mastodon also has a different outbox format (one that's paginated), so that's the other reason their posts don't show from Lemmy. Solving the problem of following users with fake communities has also been proposed (by me, and also here), but it's generally a bad idea - a hack that will come back to bite you. If Lemmy were changed to integrate Mastodon more, it'd ideally be a big project - one that would fully embrace the idiosyncrasies of Mastodon (like muting replies and denying Follow requests) because ignoring them would lead to trouble later on.
His Bio does include 'software engineer', and he's worked at Microsoft before from here. I get the sense that the problem that people have with Mastodon is that they've subbed the PRs, but they've not been approved. For example, there's apparently a 12k line PR for Groups that the main guy isn't keen on.
It can be tricky getting your own code into other people's projects - the maintainers need to have a lack of ego that can be difficult to achieve. Generally, developers react better to code, than to ideas about code, but you want to convince them to look at future code, and not waste your time creating it, by floating the idea first, so you can end up in an impossible situation. Subbing big PRs only for them to be dismissed by a maintainer is what causes people to rage-quit the project altogether (for Lemmy, see Tesseract UI, and the 'bulletintree' guy)
He's mostly known for the 'Culture' series of novels. His writing was a reaction to how dystopian sci-fi had become, and so the Culture depicts a Utopian society with no money, no work, super-intelligent machines and a human lifespan of about 400 years. The stories mostly come about from their meddling with other civilizations. They can be read in any order - the nerdiest one is Excession, which I like a lot. He wrote non-culture sci-fi too (of which I'd recommend The Algebraist, nommed for a Hugo in 2005).
The City & The City (China Mieville) is a book I remember being captivated by. Not sure what happened to my copy (think I must've donated it during some purge or other), but - yeah - it's something I want to read again at some point.
My favourite SF author is Iain M Banks, which I was surprised to not see on your list. I think my favourite book is another bit of Scottish Sci-fi: Learning the World, by Ken MacLeod.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I originally typed out a reply based on that assumption, but then re-read the post, and decided against it, in case I was assuming the wrong thing.
Currently, if you bring in a remote community, your instance fetches the details of: the community; its moderators (including their avatars and banners); the instance the community is on; the admins of that instance (including their avatars and banners); and the last 50 posts.
If you separated that into tiers, tier 1 could just be the community details (inc. the sidebar), and the instance name, and you could maybe skip the rest until someone subscribed to it. I don't think you'd want to bring in every available community, even for tier 1, because of the 29k communities listed on lemmyverse.net, at least 20k are completely dead (about 6k of that is just spam from a disgruntled lemmy.world user). The advantage of this is that a local user could find the community based on a local search. They'd be greeted by an empty-looking community though, so they'd have to know that subscribing to it would be worthwhile (probably by visiting it on its host instance, although apps can make that process difficult by being a bit too clever for their own good).
There's an Issue for PieFed that been raised about using something like lemmyverse to 'know' about remote communities. I'm 'freamon' in that discussion, but neither me or PieFed's developer have pursued it much further.
I think they were asking if you were a bot because your account has been set up as one: your profile on mstdn says 'automated', and if you do curl --header 'accept: application/activity+json' --location https://mstdn.social/users/internetisscary | jq . then it says your ActivityPub 'type' field is 'Service' rather than 'Person'.
I've worked this shift pattern before, and found it very difficult. They call it a 'continental' shift pattern in the UK - it's not a new thing, 'cos the job I'm thinking of was 30 years ago.
Switching from sleeping during the night to sleeping during the day is okay if you're on permanent nights, but trying to change every couple of weeks can be impossible (I remember once failing to get any real sleep during the day, having to spend the next 12 hours at work, and then collapsing on my way home the next day.)
This feels like an impossible combination, where your local instance doesn't have data from other instances, but also knows that they are out there. When a user searches their instance for something, the answer comes from local storage, in the same way that google responds by looking at its local cache of a webpage, not the webpage itself.
It's usually just because they have to pay an on-going licence fee to keep using it, and after a certain amount of time, the revenue that a particular game is expected to bring in isn't worth the fee.
If you can remember some dialogue, but not much else, then usually the best thing to do is download/rip the subtitles, and search them.
I did that for Breaking Bad, and found nothing:
$ grep -in plus *.srt
Breaking.Bad.S01E01.2160p.WEBRip.DTS-HD.MA5.1.x264-TrollUHD.srt:463:what, Plus P Plus loads
Breaking.Bad.S01E01.2160p.WEBRip.DTS-HD.MA5.1.x264-TrollUHD.srt:1496:Fourteen dollars plus shipping. Yes.
Breaking.Bad.S01E07.2160p.WEBRip.DTS-HD.MA5.1.x264-TrollUHD.srt:417:{\an8}Plus, there's an extra 15 in there.
Breaking.Bad.S02E01.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:147:Plus 360, plus 137.
Breaking.Bad.S02E04.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1687:plus the 500 you already owe me,
Breaking.Bad.S02E05.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:518:Inside, padlocked, plus gate privileges.
Breaking.Bad.S02E06.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1303:plus an extra round for your cranial,
Breaking.Bad.S02E06.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1345:your money, man, plus interest.
Breaking.Bad.S02E06.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1349:You're damn right, plus interest.
Breaking.Bad.S02E07.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1654:Plus he's married with a family.
Breaking.Bad.S02E08.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1560:Plus, he's scared shitless of me,
Breaking.Bad.S02E09.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1030:Plus the genny needs gas,
Breaking.Bad.S03E01.2160p.WEB-DL.3xRus.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:902:Plus, neither plane was full.
Breaking.Bad.S03E10.2160p.WEB-DL.3xRus.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1576:And plus, my daughter wasn't born yet.
Breaking.Bad.S03E11.2160p.WEB-DL.3xRus.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1050:Plus, they got bumper boats, so...
Breaking.Bad.S03E13.2160p.WEB-DL.3xRus.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:629:- Plus, there's that big nose of his.
Breaking.Bad.S03E13.2160p.WEB-DL.3xRus.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1361:Plus, you get to shoot at kids.
Breaking Bad S04E04 Bullet Points (2160p x265 10bit Joy).srt:849:and plus-seven...
Breaking Bad S04E04 Bullet Points (2160p x265 10bit Joy).srt:858:But its most stable state is plus-two,
Breaking Bad S04E08 Hermanos (2160p x265 10bit Joy).srt:922:Plus there's a little extra in there
Breaking Bad S04E08 Hermanos (2160p x265 10bit Joy).srt:1031:Plus, it shows our crew
Breaking Bad S04E08 Hermanos (2160p x265 10bit Joy).srt:1748:We add a plus douche bag
Breaking Bad S04E09 Bug (2160p x265 10bit Joy).srt:867:-...plus five years in prison.
Breaking.Bad.S05E11.2160p.WEB-DL.3xRus.2xEng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:357:{\an8}Plus
Breaking.Bad.S05E11.2160p.WEB-DL.3xRus.2xEng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1650:and, plus, he was acting kind of shady.
Breaking.Bad.S05E13.2160p.WEB-DL.3xRus.2xEng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1591:Plus 5, that is 20.
Breaking.Bad.S05E15.2160p.WEB-DL.3xRus.2xEng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1165:Plus you can cook on it.
Breaking.Bad.S05E15.2160p.WEB-DL.3xRus.2xEng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:2472:<i>- Black plus white makes gray.
$ grep -in minus *.srt
Breaking.Bad.S01E06.2160p.WEBRip.DTS-HD.MA5.1.x264-TrollUHD.srt:689:minus 25 bucks for that phone.
Breaking.Bad.S01E07.2160p.WEBRip.DTS-HD.MA5.1.x264-TrollUHD.srt:849:Minus the half for wasting my time.
Breaking.Bad.S02E03.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:2010:minus cash on hand...
Breaking.Bad.S02E09.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:229:minus my fee, which is 17 percent
Breaking.Bad.S02E09.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:935:minus distribution charges...
Breaking.Bad.S02E12.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:2134:he gonna do, give you a B-minus?
Breaking Bad S04E04 Bullet Points (2160p x265 10bit Joy).srt:222:Zero, minus one, 0.6.
Breaking Bad S04E04 Bullet Points (2160p x265 10bit Joy).srt:848:...of between minus-three
Breaking Bad S04E08 Hermanos (2160p x265 10bit Joy).srt:1749:to a minus douche bag...
I image it started life as JPEG, and then lost pixels every time it was re-uploaded. At some point, it was either converted into a WEBP file and uploaded to Lemmy, or Lemmy converted it into one. Either way, it always uses about 70% compression for WEBP files, so you end up with already compressed file getting compressed again.
I just tested uploading a WEBP file to Lemmy, and the picts-rs backend made it a) bigger and b) worse.
I think I'm using ChatGPT because that's what Bing's chatbot is. I've searched for some many dumb Python questions that it started promoting paid-for courses at one point. It gave me exactly what I was looking for the other day, but that doesn't mean it never hallucinates answers, or provides the answer to the question it assumes I must be searching for (rather than the one I am searching for).
One could argue that it's the same nerds. The difference isn't generational, it's the forums for discussion. Modern platforms offer more validation (in the form of echo chambers) and monetisation in response to over-reacting to this kind of stuff.
The cookie pop-up for this site gives you 2 options: 'Accept and continue' or 'Decline and subscribe' which I've never seen before and enters a new level of cookie choice abuse. (Accept is for 823 partners, btw)
Something's not quite working btw. It's tricky to chat about because various front-ends auto-convert absolute links to instance-specific ones, so I'll surround them in code blocks and hopefully they'll leave 'em alone. Anyway: the fedi-link for this post is https://dubvee.org/post/1007192 which is where it is, but if you try to visit that with a browser you're re-directed to https://tesseract.dubvee.org/post/lemmy.world/1007192 which isn't correct - it should either not re-direct you or re-direct you to the correct URL at https://tesseract.dubvee.org/post/lemmy.world/14138451
Mastodon also has a different outbox format (one that's paginated), so that's the other reason their posts don't show from Lemmy. Solving the problem of following users with fake communities has also been proposed (by me, and also here), but it's generally a bad idea - a hack that will come back to bite you. If Lemmy were changed to integrate Mastodon more, it'd ideally be a big project - one that would fully embrace the idiosyncrasies of Mastodon (like muting replies and denying Follow requests) because ignoring them would lead to trouble later on.