mo_ztt ✅ @ mo_ztt @lemmy.world

Posts

40

Comments

673

Joined

2 yr. ago

Hopefully this time they’ll stay there.

That's not exactly what I was saying... Linux powers 70% of the cell phones in the world, 96% of the top 1,000,000 web sites, and literally all of the world's supercomputers.

I'm not saying your 15% number is wrong, just that including end-user desktops in the "market share" misses the mark of what I meant when I was talking about serious computing. I wasn't talking about trying to replace Windows as an end-user system of choice. Windows arguably still does a better job than Linux does at that, just as fediverse may never replace Tiktok. I was talking about suppressing competition within a different badly-needed niche creating a more resistant competitor in the long run.

That's how Linux happened. Microsoft got so good at eliminating competition, and so lazy about making a product that was more than barely-passable, that it created a unique combination of "we want something good" and "something good cannot be constructed" that drove a whole generation of techies to get familiar with Linux simply because there was no good alternative for certain types of serious computing. The selection pressure of "any competitor company will get destroyed" eventually produced a competitor that wasn't a company.

I think that's what's happening right now in social media. For a long time ActivityPub went nowhere, and then the big players all got so godawful that you couldn't ignore the godawfulness, and now look what's happening. It's not because Mastodon and Lemmy are great "products" as such; mostly, people just want something that's not shit. Then in the longer run the selection pressure will create something that'll be a lot harder to kill or control.

It would have been easier for Facebook and Twitter not to be shit, but apparently that's too much to ask. I think the ultimate outcome will be way for the better this way.

I literally just installed an mbin instance for more or less exactly this purpose 😃

Most clued-in people have moved to Mastodon as the Twitter replacement; it just hasn’t been fully noticed by the mainstream as the new platform. But a lot of the journalists etc are there. Unifying the Lemmy platform with the Mastodon platform to make them interoperable for real seems like it’d be a really good thing.

Almost as if they spend significant time and effort strategizing how to interfere with threats to their dominant position 😕

Whataboutism is shifting focus away from something person A did, by bringing some action by person B into it when it doesn't belong.

Asking how a legal theory would apply in some other context, to highlight the absurdity of what the lawyer is saying because the answer would be absurd, is a very different thing.

I can see maybe saying it without the word "Biden" but focusing it on Trump would be better, yeah. E.g. asking if some other president would be allowed to murder his political rivals (specifically including Trump), without opening to door to complications. Obviously the answer is that Trump thinks he should have a special set of rules that don't apply to anyone else, but the closer you can get to forcing his lawyer to explain out loud that that's what they're asking for seems like it'd be a good thing.

How on EARTH did the judge miss his chance to ask the obvious follow-up.

"Does this apply to Biden also? Can he murder his political rivals under your legal theory? Can he murder your client?"

"Why not?"

Surely all the people who wanted Nazis off Substack will also celebrate the ban on the Hamas flag

Oh wait, the Israeli government is very clearly promoting a violent ideology as well... we need to... outlaw the Israeli flag?

Oh wait

Hang on

Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:121.0) Gecko/121.0 Firefox/121.0.

I just did a bunch of testing. The issue is that final version number, "Firefox/121.0". Google returns very different versions of the page based on what browser you claim to be, and if you're on mobile Firefox, it gives you different mobile versions depending on your version:

    
% wget -O - -nv -U 'Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:62.0) Gecko/121.0 Firefox/41.0' https://www.google.com/ | wc -c
2024-01-08 15:54:29 URL:https://www.google.com/ [1985] -> "-" [1]
    1985
% wget -O - -nv -U 'Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:62.0) Gecko/121.0 Firefox/62.0' https://www.google.com/ | wc -c
2024-01-08 15:54:36 URL:https://www.google.com/ [211455] -> "-" [1]
  211455
% wget -O - -nv -U 'Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:62.0) Gecko/121.0 Firefox/80.0' https://www.google.com/ | wc -c
2024-01-08 15:52:24 URL:https://www.google.com/ [15] -> "-" [1]
      15
% wget -O - -nv -U 'Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:62.0) Gecko/121.0 Firefox/121.0' https://www.google.com/ | wc -c
2024-01-08 15:52:04 URL:https://www.google.com/ [15] -> "-" [1]
      15

  

If you're an early version of Firefox, it gives you a simple page. If you're a later version of Firefox, it gives you a lot more complete version of the page. If you're claiming to be a specific version of mobile Firefox, but the version you're claiming (edit: oopsie doesn't exist or even really make sense didn't exist when they set this logic up or something), it gets confused and gives you nothing. You could argue that it should default to some sensible mobile version in this case, and they should definitely fix it, but it seems to me like it's clearly not malicious.

Edit: Wait, I am wrong. I didn't realize Firefox's version numbers went up so high. It looks like the cutoff for where the blank pages start coming is at version 65, which is like 2012 era, so not real old at all. I still maintain that it's probably accidental but it looks like it affects basically all modern mobile Firefoxes, yes.

What's the user-agent? I'm curious now.

Is this still true? I just tested and it works for me on LibreWolf, both for google.com and google.com.br.

Honestly, Google doing this as a deliberate anti-Firefox measure seems so wildly stupid and counterproductive on their part that I'd assume it was some failure (serving a slightly different version of the page to Chrome as for other browsers, and the non-Chrome side breaks for some reason) before thinking it was malicious.

If I were a user, and the system told me that it was aware of what I wanted to do, and capable to do it, and it was in both of our financial best interests that the system fulfill my request, but it was deciding not to until I went back and jumped through an additional pointless hoop, before doing what I'd attempted to do in the first place... I definitely would be more irritated than not.

It might be worth having a prominent notification that the system was fulfilling the expired request, so it's not confusing that the expired tickets work sometimes and not other times. Or, maybe just tell them the JWT they've got is expired, and ask them yes or no if they want the new (current) price instead, and update it transparently if they say yes. You can have a higher price if it's higher, and depending on your relationship with the customers, you could either lower the price if it's lower or just leave it at the current price and have them get what they get. But I would definitely make things easy and smooth for the customer in this type of situation as opposed to making the system easy to make, at the expense of having them have to click through a little circular runaround when the system is aware of exactly what they're trying to do.

0.19.2 you mean? 0.19.1 is from 3 weeks ago and the fix was merged 4 days ago.

Ayyy, that's wonderful! Thank you, that's awesome. It still doesn't work (my log says things like "failed: Failed to get chain object https://lemmy.world/comment/6479326"), but presumably that's a problem on the kbin side, and I'm happy digging into it and seeing what I can find. If I have any questions or anything I'll reach out, and thanks again for the quick response + resolution.

You saw that this isn't a "bot" in the normal sense of the word, but just a kbin instance doing federation, right?

I mean I'm fine with however you want to limit access; I'll leave it as "kbinBot" so it'll get blocked, if that's really what you want, but completely preventing a kbin instance from federating with lemmy.world because of how the user-agent looks seems like maybe not the right thing to do. (Assuming that's what's going on -- kbin.social identifies itself as kbinBot also, and its posts seem like they're going through, so maybe I'm just misunderstanding something about the situation.)

If someone learns something bad about you, and your first reaction is not "this is why it's not true" but "how did you find that out, we must punish the person who told you," you might be a violent POS.

I'm a little new to it all, but this bothered me as well. As far as I can tell, the underlying issue is that ActivityPub isn't strict enough about how these things should be implemented, so everyone implements them in similar but slightly incompatible ways.

I think either Lemmy or Mastodon "could" fix it on their ends if they wanted to, but it's not super easy and so far they're deciding not to. I'm actually right in the middle of messing around with kbin right now, which aims to support the best of both worlds (can talk to Lemmy and interoperate well with Lemmy communities but can also follow / message / hear from Mastodon users within a UI that makes sense for Mastodon). It doesn't seem like it's as mature yet as either Mastodon or Lemmy though, but I'm pretty likely to switch to it for exactly this reason, that I'd like to have one account that can talk to both.

I looked at it super-briefly. Honestly, I tend to prefer the kbin "I have a vision for what I want this to be and I don't want democratically inspired changes to my codebase" system over the mbin "if it looks good we'll merge it" system. Based on my little bit of experience with it, the backend of kbin seems relatively well-organized, and obviously he put it together well enough for it to be able to work in production on a busy site, so I trust his judgement a little. I didn't look in detail enough to make a real informed decision about it though. I do have some nitpicks with kbin (definitely as far as the frontend in particular) but relative to other Fediverse software it seems above average (although, that's a low bar.)

Looking over mbin now, the one thing that seems like a serious point in its favor is talking about security fixes. Do you know anything more about that? Are there security things that the maintainer(s) of kbin are not wanting to address or something?

Edit: Oh, also, update: It looks to me like lemmy.world is currently configured to break all incoming federation from default-configured kbin instances. Maybe I am wrong about that, but that's how it looks to me right now. I posted about it.