Google is already pushing Web Environment Integrity into Chromium
Err... not really? Python is a mature programming language which is more-or-less the same experience to write code within compared with 2 years ago. A few comfort features might have been added in that time, but all of the core stuff has been cemented in place for quite a long time now.
Yes, ChatGPT will struggle if you ask it something very domain-specific (e.g.: "write an example app for posting to Lemmy"), but it can be a great tutor if you stick to broader queries (e.g.: "write a boilerplate Python commandline application", "add a --help argument to this existing argparse code", "why am I getting an undefined variable error in this code?")
Skill issue
You've assumed that I want to explain the root cause of the initial decline. This is not the case. Historically, SO has seen several periods of decline. What I'm actually addressing is the question of why the decline has not stopped, because the sustained nature of this decline is what makes it unusual. If you look at the various charts, you can see a brief rally which gets cut off in late Winter 2022 -- this lines up rather nicely with the timing of ChatGPT's release, I feel.
Let's ignore that. Tell me more about your Google angle: what's the basis of your hypothesis?
It's too much to attribute to any one effect. 50% is a lot for a website of this size (don't forget that Lemmy exploded from a migration of <5% Reddit usershare). Let's KISS by attributing likely causes in order of magnitude:
- ChatGPT became the world's fastest growing website in a single month and it's actually half-decent at being a code tutor
- ChatGPT bots got unleashed on SO and diluted a lot of SO's comparative advantages
- Stack Overflow moderators went on strike, which further damaged content quality
- Structurally speaking, SO is an environment which tends to become more elitist over time. As the userbase becomes progressively more self-selective, the population shrinks.
- The SO format requires a stream of novel questions, but novel questions generally get rarer over time
- Developer documentation has generally improved over time. On SO, asking about a well-documented thing is a short-circuit pathway to getting RTFM'd & discussion locked
Delicious gruvbox. Excellent choice with the focus highlight color (I do something similar).
If you use picom, try out this shadow config I made for a similar theme. It creates a neat accent effect that complements the focus border and gives a flatter look:
shadow = true;
shadow-radius = 1;
shadow-opacity = 0.50;
shadow-offset-x = 2;
shadow-offset-y = 2;
shadow-color = "#211521"
I’m suggesting a whitelist, that each peer has to put in a substitute list of vlemmy.ml==vlemmy.ml to re-federate.
I don't see any inherent problem with that suggestion, though it does create something of a sticky situation with things like canonical links. It also kind of goes against what I've so far perceived as a "low-maintenance" operations ethos from the project maintainers, so I'm not totally sure if they'd greenlight it. Technically quite doable, though.
I'll cite my source, then: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/commit/1de7a08d973c1079b36e13e087960cc5cd1b345c .
EDIT: scratch that, I now see that the stated intent is to retain anonymized comments as Reddit does, but that the functionality is not yet implemented in the main code release for reasons that seem triage-related rather than a change in plans.
On the technical topic of renaming a domain of a Lemmy server… I think it is worth experimenting with the code.
This is unfortunately only possible if you still own the original domain. Think about it this way: if you could migrate domains without proving you own the original, then what's stopping a bad actor from migrating any domain they want? Keep in mind that Federated servers rely on DNS to verify who's who -- they don't have a backup system for deciding trustworthiness.
Yes, there's no technical reason Lemmy has to rely on DNS to establish trust (aside from the fact that changing this would require a massive rearchitecting effort), but why shouldn't it? It's possible to switch to a different trust system (i.e.: public/private keypairs), but that doesn't actually change the nature of the problem -- people can still lose control of the private key and blow the whole system up (and, arguably, this is a lot more likely to happen than permanently losing a domain).
At minimum, I think it should be an option to try and keep the same login/passwords for users from the old install of Lemmy.
So, login credentials aren't actually tied to the domain name at all. A user like example@lemmy.ml is simply known as example to the server internally. The server doesn't particularly care if it lives at lemmy.ml or microsoft.com -- if user example shows up and gives the right password, they're allowed to log in. What I'm trying to say is that -- assuming that the user database isn't destroyed -- login info would probably carry over without any special effort needing to be taken at all.
But even that could prove tricky if a particular domain changed underllying ownership more than once - and user@domain became rewritten by an entirely different person. I guess in the real-world people do often get mail for previous residence of a house.
The identity problem you allude to is not exclusive to this scenario. Let's use lemmy.ml as an example: where did the domain come from? The Mali government. Does this mean that the Mali government owned lemmy.ml before it became associated with the Lemmy project? At the risk of oversimplying: yes, pretty much! Prior to 2019, the government of Mali could have created "fraudulent" Fediverse posts under your username, /u/roundsparrow@lemmy.ml.
With that being said, it's kind of a silly concern. Despite being partially distributed, Lemmy is not a read-only database (i.e.: not a blockchain). There's nothing stopping the current domain owner from more-or-less completely undoing vandalism from a prior domain owner by simply asking the other federated servers to delete that fraudulent content. Keep in mind that the domain is not the server; the original operator keeps all of the original data even if they lose the ability to host that data under the original domain.
My biggest concern is legality because Lemmy claims to support privacy. I honestly think it’s a bad idea to claim privacy because you run into so many problems. If the user never knows that their lemmy instance changed names and can’t find it again, etc.
This is not a problem unique to Lemmy. If Google forgets to pay for gmail.com, then suddenly a lot of email addresses become untrustworthy. This isn't a privacy issue because your old emails don't leave Google's servers. It is a trust issue, however, since the new owners can now impersonate any gmail.com address and receive any new email that was intended for the original owner.
Not to downplay how catastrophic this scenario would be... but I don't think there's any law on the books which would legally obligate Google to operate gmail.com until the end of time. Nothing lasts forever and eventually gmail.com won't be controlled by Alphabet Inc. anymore -- that's just how time works. Those bothered by this uncertainty can instead choose to host their own mail server (or Lemmy instance) on their own domain -- this won't last forever, either... but at least you're in control now.
Especially on technical topics, 15+ years of having Reddit keep messages from deleted user accounts offered a lot of great search engine hits. With Lemmy, a person moving to a different instance and deleting their account, so much content is going to get black-hole in favor of 50 instances having copies of a meme post or trivial website link - and solid original content (often in comment discussions) gets removed.
Just FYI: Much like Reddit, comments continue to exist even when the author deletes their account. The user must explicitly delete each individual comment before deleting their account if they want it all taken down. EDIT: This is not actually currently the case, though as far as I can tell the stated intent is to prefer anonymizing comments over deleting them when deleting an account (source). I don't really get this complaint in the first place, actually... surely both kinds of content would get lost when a user deletes all of their data, right? There's no button that says "delete all of my stuff, except for the shitposts".
Yeah... not much you can do beyond DNS-based blocking for most dumb SmartTV OSes and obviously sideloading iOS apps sucks if you're not jailbroken. Cases like these are really where they get you!
Regarding Chromecasts, just in case anyone's interested: they're still Android under the hood, so you can simply send the Revanced Manager APK via Send files to TV and proceed as usual. FYI: you need to enable developer mode (see step 3, specfically) to install custom APKs -- this won't impact your warranty.
You may be surprised to hear that the revenue split on Premium is the same as the split on Ads: 55% of all Premium money goes directly to creators on a member viewership basis. Alphabet increasing the price of Premium does increase the money going to Youtube corporate, but the revenue structure is fundamentally designed so that creators also receive an equal raise.
My comment is actually an unrelated in-joke forcibly coerced into the shape of a discussion about git. It's a whole fictional magical universe thing with a lore wiki and stuff:
- "Odium"/"passion": https://coppermind.net/wiki/Odium
- "invested": https://coppermind.net/wiki/Investiture
- "Pushing": https://coppermind.net/wiki/Steel#Allomantic_Use
- "Pulling": https://coppermind.net/wiki/Iron#Allomantic_Use
Here is my list:
- emacs -
emacs
Deleted
Permanently Deleted
Jump
Js is what you make of it. It can be a godawful mess but it also can be really awesome.
Agreed. It wasn't always a great language, but by some miracle it eventually became pretty alright.
But it’s also a double edged sword because that means that novices can write absolute spaghetti code in it. That’s not the fault of the language though.
Disagree. The best languages are those which can be intuitively used without having to learn the pitfalls. Take Rust vs. C++, for example: both languages have pitfalls, but only Rust is intentionally designed to help you steer clear of them. JS is like C++ in this regard -- decades of cruft have coalesced into tempting yet painful footguns, much to the chagrin of many a new learner.
An IDE written in Electron?? What a terrible idea! Nobody would ever be stupid enough to let something like that take off...
Pushing/Pulling might seem simple to you, Odium, but not everyone is so passionate or invested.
Compared to nothing. I have used Nvidia graphics cards under Linux for many years. The last one was a GTX 1070. In order for the cards to work, I had to install the driver once with the command pacman -S nvidia-dkms. So the effort was very small.
Kernel modules work until they don't. I'm genuinely glad that you've had a good experience and -- despite appearances -- I'm not interested in provoking a vendor flamewar... but the fact remains that among the three major patterns (builtin, userland, module), modules are the most fragile and least flexible. I'll cite this response to my parent comment as an example.
Unfortunately, when it comes to Nvidia, many people do not judge objectively. Torvalds’ “fuck you”, for example, referred to what he saw as Nvidia’s lack of cooperation with the kernel developers. And i think he was right. But it was never about how good or bad the graphics cards were usable under Linux. Which, unfortunately, many Linux users claim. Be it out of lack of knowledge or on purpose.
That's a fair point, but to a certain extent I think this overlooks the importance of developer sentiment on a project like Linux. Take (Intel) Macbooks as an extreme example: kernel developers liked the hardware enough to support it despite utter vendor indifference. It's clearly a case of hypocrisy compared to NVIDIA who (at the very least) participates, but at the end of the day people will show love for the things that they love. NVIDIA remains unloved and I do feel that this bleeds through to the user experience a fair amount.
In any case, you're right to say that legitimate criticisms are often blown out of proportion. Developer problems aren't necessarily user problems, even if we sometimes romanticize otherwise.
I'll believe it when Mastodons fly
I'm particularly amused by the pro-NVIDIA "it just works" comments. Compared to what exactly? With AMD, the 3D acceleration driver is bundled directly into VESA, so it's already ready & working before even the first-boot of almost all desktop distros. That's how drivers are supposed to work on Linux and it has taken NVIDIA 10+ years (and counting...) to get with the basic program.
I applaud the long overdue decision to move their proprietary firmware directly onto the card and making the rest of the kernel driver open-source, but I'll remind you folks of a few things:
- The open source driver is still in an alpha with no timeline for a stable release
- NVIDIA has so far elected to control their own driver releases instead of incorporating 3D acceleration support into VESA
NVIDIA had to be dragged screaming to go this far and they're still not up to scratch. There's still plenty of fuel left in the "Fuck NVIDIA" gastank.
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