Examples:

• Microtransactions instead of asking for the price up-front
• Using gambling mechanics in non-gambling games (e.g. loot boxes)
• Eliminating potential stopping points in the user interaction, like e.g. endless scrolling instead of pagination
• Using big, visually engaging buttons for the actions they want the user to perform ("Accept tracking") while using tiny, grey links for the actions they don't want the user to perform ("Reject tracking"), or even worse, hiding the action they don't want the user to perform behind multiple menues.
• Using wording that creates fear or other negative emotions to stop users from performing such actions ("If you cancel your subscription now, you will lose access to this, this, and that. Everything you did will be lost. Do you really want to do that?")
• Disguising ads and other non-organic content as organic content. ("I found this product and it cured my hair loss, my potency issues and made me rich at the same time! _{sponsored ad}")
• Disguising ads as notifications
• Disguising ads as the download button
• Agreeing to do one simple action contains a hidden agreement to a ton of other things

And many more things like that.

So that's the reason for the weird actions of Tesla Robotaxis!

Sea cables are probably the most vulnerable point of the internet. There are comparatively few of them (on the order of a few hundreds), they are long, and most of their length is not guarded at all. The only reason I can think of, why nobody has targeted them at large is that it would also cut of the attacker.

Is it vegan if you eat carnivorous plants?

Try it out. Take a mirror, put it very close to your eye but angled sideways, since you can obviously not look through your head.

You will have no issues at all focussing on what you are looking at, since you aren't looking at the mirror at all.

You can also try that while looking at yourself through a dirty mirror. You can either focus on the dirt on the mirror or on your face. You can't see both the dirt and your face in focus at the same time.

Nah, doesn't have to be. Just try putting a mirror very close to your eye, but angled sideways. You will be able to focus onto anything you want without issue. Because you aren't focussing at the mirror, but at the thing you look at.

That's honestly not very helpful.

• It's not exactly at a place where someone joins lemmy. Most people likely join via downloading an app, and if they are lucky that app links them to join-lemmy.org, and more often than not, it doesn't link them anywhere and just asks them to either select an instance from a dropdown without further information or it asks them to enter an instance name from memory.
• The advice is very questionable and not really helpful without context.

• Lemmy.world is too big

There are Lemmy-reasons for why that's a problem, but in any other context, the biggest is the best. And even in regards to lemmy, bigger instances have a higher chance to remain, to be decently moderated and to be decently stable. Before joining Lemmy.world, I was on Feddit.de, and we all know how that ended. And even before they vanished without a warning or an explanation, Feddit.de servers were always outdated, slow and unreliable, and moderation was arbitrary at best and non-existent at worst.

Lemmy.world is stable and works just as expected.

• Lemm.ee is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad, something that is not very welcoming to new users (see this thread: https://sh.itjust.works/post/28798607/15305964 )

That's a somewhat decent reasoning, though not immediately understandable as a new user. And not relevant anymore because Lemm.ee will shutdown within a week or so from now.

• sh.itjust.works names contains “shit”, which can deter users

Thanks, I'm adult enough to know whether I'm offended by the word "shit".

lemmy.ca is Canadian-centric feddit.org, is German-centric, but technically English speaking too programming.dev is topic-centric blahaj is queer-focused infosec.pub is topic-centric aussie.zone is country-centric midwest.social is region-centric

None of that really matters thanks to federation.

dbzer0 federates hexbear

Like Lemm.ee, apart from the fact that it still exists

beehaw is way outdated

That's some relevant reasoning.

sopuli.xyz (neutral name

See also:

discuss.tchncs.de has a difficult name

Sopuli.xyz isn't any easier than discuss.tchnics.de, and jet discuss.tchnics.de was excluded for the name only.

While down in the comments it says

Sopuli doesn’t support gifs

Which is a really hard reason to avoid that instance, much more so than "has a difficult name". That's got much more practical implications.

But what's left regardless is: Even that link that is supposed to make instance selection easier isn't exactly easy to understand for a newcomer.

Relevant XKCD:

Read again. I quoted something along the lines of "just as much a development decision as a marketing one" and I said, it wasn't a development decision, so what's left?

Firefox released just as frequently before, just that they didn’t increase the major version that often.

This does not appear to be true.

Why don't you take a look at the version history instead of some marketing blog post? https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/

Version 2 had 20 releases within 730 days, averaging one release every 36.5 days.

Version 3 had 19 releases within 622 days, averaging 32.7 days per release.

But these releases were unscheduled, so they were released when they were done. Now they are on a fixed 90-day schedule, no matter if anything worthwhile was complete or not, plus hotfix releases whenever they are necessary.

That's not faster, but instead scheduled, and also they are incrementing the major version even if no major change was included. That's what the blog post was alluding to.

In the before times, a major version number increase indicated major changes. Now it doesn't anymore, which means sysadmins still need to consider each release a major release, even if it doesn't contain major changes because it might contain them and the version name doesn't say anything about whether it does or not.

It's nothing but a marketing change, moving from "version numbering means something" to "big number go up".

Huh, just checked out the ranking on join-lemmy.org. The default setting is "random", which might be why it's not featured up top.

But what's weird is that lemmy.world isn't in the ranking at all.

If you sort by active, the top two are lemmynsfw.com, followed by lemmy.ml.

"Privacy"

In that case, and I keep repeating myself: don't roll.

Don't roll for things that can't fail.

Issues that would be solved by time/gaining more users

• Not nearly enough people to cover all the niche interest communities that Reddit does. At Reddit you find an expert on almost any topic to help you with your problems and you'll find information on pretty much anything. Lemmy isn't there yet.
• Not nearly enough history. A lot of content is still good and informative after many years. Lemmy doesn't have a library of old-but-still-relevant content to search.

Issues independent of user count

• Search sucks. Reddit's search does too, but reddit is easily searchable via Google. Lemmy isn't.
• Onboarding is difficult, because you have to choose an instance, which is hugely important, but a newcomer has no idea what makes/is a good community to join

Issues that get worse with more users (aka, the potentially deal-breaking issues)

• Lemmy scales terribly. Every larger instance needs to retain a copy of pretty much all other content out there, and each comment/like/delete/update/... needs to be propagated to every other major instance out there. Adding more instances thus increases complexity and cost instead of decreasing it. Running a major lemmy instance is already prohibitively expensive now, with just about 50k monthly active users. If Lemmy was to scale to Reddit numbers (1.1 billion monthly active users, roughly 22 000x the number of users), everything would just break down.
• Moderation work scales just as terribly. Not only does an admin need to make sure the communities on their instance are moderated, but they also need to moderate all other communities on all other instances.
• Related to the last point, there's some legal issues as well if an admin doesn't moderate all other instances. Since content is copied from other instances to your instance, illegal content (e.g. illegal pornography, copyrighted works, ...) are also copied to your own server without your active participation. That makes it legally mandatory to moderate all other communities.
• Legal pitfalls in general. If lemmy becomes sizeable enough, all sorts of laws in regards to social media platforms will apply. That's one thing if the social media platform is run by a huge corporation with a legal department, but it's an entirely different story for a tiny group of non-profit idealists running the social media platform.

I haven’t read too much into the topic, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this was as much a marketing decision as well as a developer one.

Version numbering has no implications on development. Firefox released just as frequently before, just that they didn't increase the major version that often.

If your skill level would guarantee a win if you ignore the concept of a natural 1 auto-failing, then there should be no roll.

Yeah, as soon as the question could be interpreted as leading, it will directly follow your lead.

I had a weird issue with Github the other day, and after Google and the documentation failed me, I asked ChatGPT as a last-ditch effort.

My issue was that some file that really can't have an empty newline at the end had an empty newline at the end, no matter what I did to the files before committing. I figured, that something was adding a newline and ChatGPT confirmed that almost enthusiastically. It was so sure that Github did that and told me that it's a frequent complaint.

Turns out, no, it doesn't. All that happened is that I first committed the file with an empty newline by accident, and Github raw files has a caching mechanism that's set to quite a long time. So all I had to do was to just wait for a bit.

Wasted about an hour of my time.

Isn’t that right foot easy stuff?

Sorry, don't know if I understand what you mean with that.

Why should they fail to tie a simple knot on a +5, dc5 use rope check 1 in 20 times?

Why should they roll for something as simple as tieing a simple knot? I don't make my players roll whether they manage to tie their shoes either.

Yeah, the problem is that proper science is incredibly hard to do, and incredibly time intensive and thus expensive.

And since only a single metric (amount of published content) is really rewarded, anything else (including the fail-safes necessary for proper science) falls by the wayside.

If your argument is that the whole bible is unreliable due to canon selection that's a totally viable argument to make. But that then goes both ways and means that you can't make an argument about anything Christ did or did not teach or do. It means, you can neither make the argument that Jesus was for eating animals or against it, because any scripture supporting any of these points was subject to canon selection and thus is unreliable.

The problem with AI here is that it tends to prefer agreeing to you over being correct and it's very likely that it teaches patterns and terminology to you that doesn't exist.

For example, I just asked ChatGPT to explain a "backflip" in the context of agile development (I claimed I was an university student and that a teacher used that term in the context of moving tickets), and it came up with this:

If your teacher linked "backflip" to moving tickets in a predictable fashion, they might have been emphasizing:

The importance of minimizing rework or regressions.

Understanding why work items move backward (if they do) and making that visible in your process.

Managing workflow policies so that tickets don’t repeatedly “backflip” between stages, which can disrupt predictability.

How This Might Help You Move Tickets More Predictably: If "backflip" means work moving backward:

Track the Cause of Backflips: Identify why tickets are moving backward (incomplete acceptance criteria, insufficient definition of done, unclear requirements).

Improve Definition of Ready/Done: Tighten entry/exit criteria to reduce backflows.

Add Checkpoints: Build small validation steps earlier to catch issues sooner.

Visualize Flow: Use a Kanban board to visualize backward movement and analyze bottlenecks or quality gaps.

It just takes the nonsensical word, makes something up, and claims that it's right.

I hated writing pointless essays about topics I don't care about, and yet I still like to research and debate.