And, time to turn my phone off again to enjoy the trip instead of scrolling social media (which I can do at home). Also, I only have so much battery. 🙃
Fun fact, the cat can slip out of his harness when spooked by a passing car. We're hanging out in the tent with him until we can sort out this logistical wrinkle.
So I think that when I took off after Benny when he got loose I got into some poison ivy/oak. I'm normally careful about such things, but I had to be quick to catch him.
I washed my arms immediately after and slathered them with afterbite (which I figured was the most useful thing we had on hand) but there was some itchiness/rash shortly thereafter. Fortunately Benny seems to have been unaffected.
Well, we forgot to bring bug spray. Rookie mistake, but it's been a while. Ran off to the nearby pharmacy to pick some up, then we'll finish setting up camp.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban's Minister of Education has announced that girls' schools are likely to remain closed permanently.
As a Muslim let me be explicitly clear. This is apartheid, vile, & inexcusable.
Prophet Muhammad(sa) declared, "It is incumbent upon every Muslim male & every Muslim female to attain education." His wife Ayesha was a leading scholar & jurist. His final words were "women are your committed partners." Not servants—PARTNERS.
Doing some last minute checking of the #camping gear for our trip tomorrow. We haven't touched any of it in like six years. I was sure the batteries in our lantern would be dead. I tested them and they're fully charged. I'm impressed.
I just pulled some Energizer lithium AAs from an old set of FRS/GMRS handheld radios. The batteries have "expiration" dates of 2010, but they read 1.7 V on my multimeter, 14 years later. These batteries are rated for a 10-year shelf life, so they are 24 years old.
Ugh, I hate that. My current EDC flashlight has a parasitic drain like that, so I have to keep the tailcap partially unscrewed so the battery isn't dead when I actually need it.
Remember, no matter how much neoliberals will try to convince you:
Public services should not be required generate income.
Water, Power, Communications, Healthcare, Education, Public Transport, Mail, Firefighters, Police, Libraries, Swimming Pools, Roads, Generally all infrastructure, Military
None of these things were created with the idea of making big profits with them, they are meant to provide you with a service which is being paid for with your taxes. Privatizing any of them will make them worse, not better.
Though, companies are very good at pretending they are better for a while, by simply deciding to lose money for a few years. The bill always comes due before long, though.
In fact, they were often being done by the government explicitly because capitalism refused to do it well enough for the nation to function properly...ahem.
Okay, finally took the plunge and just booked a #camping trip this upcoming week instead of waiting for everything to just fall in place. We haven't been camping since before COVID.
I've got to go through all our gear to make sure everything's still in working order.
Just for fun, I decided to look into how to use an abacus the other day. I have no practical use for this whatsoever, it was just something I was curious about. Learning this of course made me want to buy an abacus. I know myself well enough to know that while it would probably be an inexpensive purchase, it'd only end up collecting dust on a shelf within a week.
Then I thought about programming a virtual abacus that I could then play around with. I know this to be an absolutely absurd idea, but that absurdity only kinda makes me want to do it even more.
Just started down the rabbit hole that is the Japanese electrical system. At a glance, it actually seems to make the North American system look sane. That's an impressive feat.
!Haskell Users Group (unofficial) Has anyone successfully cross-compiled a #Haskell project to .exe from a *NIX system (preferably Debian)? I've casually looked into it in the past, but never given it a serious try.
Weird question but here on Masto, are there any #LGBT people in #oklahoma — especially those located in the greater #tulsa area or rural parts of the state? I need your help if you’re out there! Please boost!!!
EDIT: could have included this in the main post instead of replying it to everyone but please drop your LGBT-friendly resources in the comments or my DMs (doctors, social groups, assistance programs, anything but a bar/restaurant)
They aren't quite as deterministic as we might like them to be these days. I think some CPUs have a quantum randomness source, and task-scheduling across multiple computation units often _feels_ non-deterministic to me.
Plus, I do believe the term "Heisenbug" can be applied to bugs that go away when you turn on debugging/profiling/tracing or any other type of monitoring system that might be useful to diagnosis, even if everything is perfectly deterministic.
I mean, there is a basement floor and there is a hallway we could use down there in a worst-case scenario. Fortunately, the storm seems to be letting up.
if you don’t have access to a basement, go to the lowest and most centre area of your apartment or house that has no windows.. so a hallway or bathroom. Ontario tornados aren’t that strong.. yet.
@erin (she/her) You know, it's funny (in a not funny way). We've had a number of tornado warnings in recent years. In my childhood, I can only ever remember that happening once.
yes! They are attributing this to climate change, saying Canada’s tornado alley which was in Alberta I believe has now moved to the most populated area.. being southern ON up to Eastern ON and western QC
I hate it when I make an official release of a program with an ugly snippet of code that I can't figure out how to write more cleanly, only to come up with a solution 10 minutes after pushing the release. I just make the change in the dev branch so it gets incorporated into the next version.
In my defense, the thing I was overlooking was that #Haskell's Maybe type is an instance of Foldable. It's not the kind of data type that exactly screamsFoldable, is it?
Side note: I should use Hoogle's search by type signature feature more frequently. I needed a function that looked like this: Monad m => (a -> m ()) -> Maybe a -> m (), which is literally just mapM_.
Hah. In a similar situation, I knew I wanted whenJust (which is provided by various libraries on hackage), but in the end, I realized I could just use for_ from base. It's amazing how many functions are just traverse (or traverse_).
@Kalamata Hari Yeah, any time I end up writing a case statement on a Maybe or Either and one of the branches is -> return (), I die a little inside, because I know there's probably a better way that I'm just not seeing.
When in doubt, always check to see if `traverse` matches the function you need. It's odd how often `traverse` (or some variant, like `mapM` or `traverse_`) is what you want.
There's a notice posted on the front door of the building. Apparently the landlord is bringing in an exterminator tomorrow and we have ~24h to empty out all the cabinets, pull appliances away from the walls, etc. in preparation for their arrival.
Welp, I did have other plans for today, but I guess not any more. ಠ_ಠ
@Adam Hunt We've been very fortunate on that front. When we were living in the basement (we've moved up a floor), we had a singular rat once. Caught it and never again saw another one. That was the worst of it.
@Adam Hunt At the time, there was a massive construction project going on at the church next door. As near as we can figure, it migrated from there and the others went elsewhere?
Well, we've done everything we could think to do. There's probably more stuff that needs to be done, bit nobody has officially given us any direction at all.
All I know is that my neatly organized kitchen is in a state if disarray that's going to be a problem for my #ADHD brain for several days before I can reorganize.
And now, in typical and possibly pre-ordained fashion, the trades people won't turn up, because of... some reason they can't even be arsed to make sound as if it's plausible. And you'll be stuck this way for days, if not weeks, if you're really unlucky.
Make sure the people handling the pesticides are certified. Our friends' house was condemned because the idiot doing the termite pesticide application didn't properly seal the poison off.
@Ehay2k So if you're in a rental and the landlord is hiring them, what are you supposed to do if find out they aren't? Ask them to stop and leave, and if they don't threaten to call the police?
@janisf You're still free to ask about certifications, and also take down their name(s) so at a minimum, you have a path to recourse if they screw up. You can also ask (out of curiosity, not accusing them) what they are applying, how long it lasts, how long you should be away, etc. if they don't know any of those answers they're probably not certified.
Fun development: ours is not one of the apartments being treated. On the plus side, had we not gone through the exercise of emptying out all the cabinets, I wouldn't have noticed the leak under our bathroom sink. Gonna have to get that fixed. :/
I think this comes under the concept of, a silver lining. But still, it would have been nice if you could have been told this before you stressed and did all the work.
!Haskell Users Group (unofficial) So, I created a #Haskell #TUI program using brick. I wanted to have it support cursor keys, as well as vim and Emacs-style cursor movement, but for whatever reason I can't get it to register C-n and C-p keypresses. C-f and C-b worked fine though.
So, my partner who's "not into anime" and insistent that she dislikes the fantasy genre may or may not have spent the past three days binging on Frieren.
When the company calls their home appliances "smart", what I hear is:
- they spent money on features I don't care about - those features will be worse than standalone devices but will drive them out of market (looking at you TVs) - the appliance is more likely to break - my data is likely being sold to advertisers - when the company loses interest in it and cut support, I will need to buy a new device
Recently had reason to buy a replacement television and when I went to pay for it I was warned "Oh wait, you know this isn't a smart TV!" The lad on the register seemed awfully confused when I told him that was intentional.
Other people have other use cases. I *don't* want a TV that "shows channels" as that would be no use to me as I don't have a TV licence. I want a TV that plays DVDs (and yes, I accept that that's via another device) and shows stuff from the internet (and I don't see why that should need another device, it's only software and the telly already has a computer in it).
@TimWardCam non UK readers might not understand the concept of a "TV licence". In Britain, you can't watch TV until you've taken the Television Aptitude Test, or TAT, which gauges your understanding of BBC4 arts programmes, your ability to follow long running soaps in a regional dialect, and whether or not you laugh at Ant and Dec.
Marketing spin is just wild sometimes. I literally just heard this one: "the only EV that's a Mustang", which is just another way of saying "the only EV we make". (Yes, I know Ford makes other EVs.)
I love when I'm writing software and I end up re-implementing functionality that already exists in a library I was already using because I didn't know it was there. 🙃
But now you understand the functionality much better than you used to. I implemented a really short and to me fun algorith for generating / calculating corporate dates like Week X Period Y Day z of Quarter and then I found out that someone just made a table with all the dates from 2000-2999 and was using that lol
I think centralized social media is the reason we fucked up a lot of decentralized social media.
I was thinking earlier about Lemmy, and how when Reddit did their API changes everyone tried to rush to Lemmy. Which would be fine, except everyone tried to just recreate reddit. Everyone tried to make Everything servers. Do we need ten thousand Technology subs? Not really. But people just tried to all make large general purpose instances with all the generic subs. Because they feel like they have to recreate reddit--ALL of them.
Nobody needs to run a Whole Reddit. Something like Lemmy would have been better if 99% of instances were single or limited topic. Keep the scale small, keep the moderation focused and knowledgeable.
I remember checking out Revolt, which is a discord alternative, and I think it has the same scale problem. Discord has three basic levels: channels, servers, and Discord itself which is a collection of servers. Revolt assumes that you don't want to self host a server, you want to self host a Discord. You want to self host All Of Discord. I don't think that's the case for most people! They want to run their one server!
Decentralized social media can't take a centralized approach, you can't try to recreate these horrible giant bloated behemoths but now with less budget and less moderation. You have to relearn to think at a smaller scale, the beauty of decentralization is that we can link all these smaller scale projects together.
My favorite sub was /r/AskHistorians - aggressively moderated, top comments by vetted experts, its great. Niche subs like that should have their own Lemmy server. Think thehistorychannel.social , omg it would be great. Fuck, I would _pay_ for that.
And by pay I mean I would help pay for the _hosting_ for that.
I think you’re right, and somewhere in here I think there’s an important subtlety: Somewhere along the way it seems like many of us forgot the whole concept of community.
In my recent interactions with teenagers, it feels like everyone wants to be the person with a billion followers. There’s no consideration for who those followers should be and what kind of relationship you should have with them. It’s just “number go up!”
cosigned, all of this! Cosocial began an experiment with a Lemmy server, but quickly found we didn’t have a space for what people seemed to think it should be, the whole “all of Reddit” idea.
Mastodon.social is itself a demonstration of this problem, and its paradigm encouraged things like counter.social, and even Spoutible - clones wanting to be “the new Twitter” and feeling like they needed the “everyone must BE HERE AND HERE ONLY” in order to survive.
the great thing about being able to create any sub on any server is that you have somewhere to go when one server or sub isn't run the way you like. That's the entire democratic benefit of the fediverse.
@roofuskit But instead of any sub on any server people tried to make every sub on every server in an attempt to replicate a gigantic corporate website without having anywhere near the resources to do so
It's really interesting to consider an instance not as a source of identity, but of topic and moderation hereof. How would things differ if you didn't register with a particular instance - you posted to it when the topic and people were right. Instances would be like mailing lists or groups.
Of course, that leaves identity unhandled. In ActivityPub that still requires an instance, so I don't know how different it *can* be, but I really think you got the right idea.
>Do we need ten thousand Technology subs? Not really. But people just tried to all make large general purpose instances with all the generic subs. Because they feel like they have to recreate reddit--ALL of them.
yeah idk why there isn't a better way to consolidate all the different "technology", " programming", "memes" boards into combined views
This is probably correct; I took a gander at Lemmy before deciding to stay on Reddit, because instead of r/cyberpunkgame for example (the subreddit for Cyberpunk 2077), you had... 8(?) individual replacements all with like 80 people in it. At most.
@WhyNotZoidberg yeah honestly the other problem with Lemmy is that I think the only reason people use Reddit is because there are so many people there. Not because they love how Reddit works.
Yeah, Reddit is the successor to the old usenet groups and quite frankly a lot of games have better communities on Reddit that on their respective official forums. Which is why I still use it, 90% of the subreddits I have joined is for games I play.
For a new network to be able to saddle that responsibility so to speak there has to be some very thought thru adaptations happening.
@WhyNotZoidberg that is the default problem of each and every social media platform. No people => No Posts => No people. The fediverse is somewhat breaking with this because of federation, but as you pointed out: we have to utilise it better.
this is activitypub by design at this point. Creating a magazine/group is done on a server. Only very large instances will get enough traction that others will follow the group on another instance. So the key problem is that the larger the instance the bigger the groups become, the better the group will spread. And the larger that community.
Until that instance goes down, losing a lot of big communities at once!
It could be partially solved by introducing additional hash tags. But yea
@thegibson I've been a big proponent of just going back to forums but it's a hard sell for most people. Especially because old forum software is a lumbering mess of baggage and new forum software just...sucks...
yeah! When people ask me why a federated thing isn’t like Twitter or Reddit these days I just say, “No, but nothing is. Maybe it’s just that the Twitter / Reddit you knew is dead? Other things are different.”
Part of it to is that decentralized social media is sold as more similar to what's it trying to replace than what it actually is. The usage isn't necessarily 1 to 1 but a lot of people walk into it like it will be the same and are turned off by having to learn and remaster a new way to engage.
I think decentralization should build on its strengths and be more clear and honest about what it is.
yes yes yes this!!! lots of projects could get lots of acquisition but they're too busy setting themselves up as The Entire Thing rather than just pieces of it
@zeolith Not really the same thing. A forum-based system is centered on posts and topics, a microblogging-based system focuses on individual users. There's also a pretty big UI difference when it comes to reading a conversation influenced by those differences.
agree and i think this is a symptom of the bigger open source problem which is, is our vision of a better world simply an open source clone of what the corporations do? i think none of this software really solves any problems people acutally have and is therefore destined to be niche toys for nerds forever
while revolt but server focused would have probably done better, lemmy would need something like an address book to find the correct one I think, an maybe some new paradigm? Like from one reddit account I can participate in many topic but with lemmy? I could participate from a mastodon account but what about posting? Unless I'm missing something it would require a mechanism like asking a bot on the lemmy instance to boost my post or something
I think that's more valid for something like Reddit clones than Twitter clones. I'm on what is nominally a topic-specific server, but my followers/follows are scattered across a hundred servers. "Topics" are far more porous here. What you're choosing is the mod team.
For what is effectively a forum, yes, server-per-topic makes sense, as long as the user-traveling-federation is seamless (as it mostly is on Mastodon).
@Crell Yeah I'm more talking about Reddit-clones, Discord-clones, etc. Fedi has its own problems with trying to replicate Twitter or whatever too but it's different than the whole topic-based posting thing.
This really shows when you search for any kind topic and get 100s of communities called exactly the same, all with like 9 subscribers. All abandoned of course.
A good counter example is startrek.website that only does Star Trek related stuff
@katrinakatrinka If the employees are surviving by supplementing their income with government aid and food banks, it is the employer that is an undeserving welfare recipient.
I have a stainless steel travel mug that I have my coffee in (almost) every day. It's supposedly dishwasher safe, but I still usually hand wash it.
A few months after I got it, the paint started peeling. Within a year, it had all completely peeled off... except for the logo, which is painted over top of the said peeling paint and still in pristine condition.
a few years ago I moved somewhere with a significantly lower crime rate than the place I was leaving, with the result that my car insurance became more expensive.
I live in an area where I can safely leave while leaving the door wide open and nothing happening(1), no thefts, no fires, no flooding (top of the mountain, no public works), no tornadoes, no nothing, but seeing the rates go up every year, you’d never know that!
I did switch this year because by doing so and getting both cars and the house on the same one (previous best deal had them separated), I ended up saving some $1,000 a year…
… I was like, wut? Yes please! And took it before they changed their mind 😅
Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • •So I think that when I took off after Benny when he got loose I got into some poison ivy/oak. I'm normally careful about such things, but I had to be quick to catch him.
I washed my arms immediately after and slathered them with afterbite (which I figured was the most useful thing we had on hand) but there was some itchiness/rash shortly thereafter. Fortunately Benny seems to have been unaffected.
Could've been a lot worse.
like this
Kevin Davy and Adam Hunt like this.