FaceDeer

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

I haven't tried all of them, but the ones I did check were ones that had not had posts on them at their source instance for quite a while. A few random examples:

• https://kbin.social/m/CampingAndHiking - https://fedia.io/m/CampingAndHiking@kbin.social
• https://kbin.social/m/NonCredibleDefense - https://fedia.io/m/NonCredibleDefense@kbin.social
• https://ttrpg.network/c/bladesinthedark - https://fedia.io/m/bladesinthedark@ttrpg.network
• https://lemmy.ca/c/dnd - https://fedia.io/m/dnd@lemmy.ca

I had 43 failures and 111 successes, so visual inspection wouldn't really help. I kept copies of the error log and the script output in a text file to figure it out later.

I assume that this means these communities haven't had activity since fedia.io opened, and so fedia.io doesn't know they exist? I've always wondered how the first person to subscribe to a community on an instance is able to do that.

And yeah, I'm using "community" to refer to "magazine".

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

This site never worked without a hitch.

That is not a ringing endorsement.

I was very enthusiastic about kbin when it launched, I donated a fair bit to Ernest in those early heady days. But if he's refusing to accept help from other devs and admins I don't think it's sustainable, something like this just can't work as a one-man show. I wish him all the best but if that doesn't change I don't see this working in the long run.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

It has been getting worse for me. In addition to the sporadic outages, the spam, and the slow federation, I've had to develop the habit of refreshing the page before I try to respond to or vote on any comments. If I open the page and let it sit for a few minutes before trying I invariably get an error. It definitely didn't used to be that way.

If it was that bad for you from the outset I'm surprised you stuck around. I wouldn't've. I've only held on because I started to feel "settled".

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

First thing I'd do when boarding a Federation ship is tell the computer it's authorized to keep an eye on my vitals.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Same here in Canada.

I'd be curious what the "cutoff" date is for eligibility for this. It could be that they generated the list of accounts they'd be sending this offer to some time ago, and OP deleted his account after that point.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

I'm in a campaign (with rotating GMs) where I'm playing a character who is literally an alien infiltrator that has infiltrated the party. Except he's really bad at it and it's obvious he's an alien infiltrator, and because he's bad at it he has no idea that it's obvious. The party's superiors told them to play along for now and try to find out what my character is up to.

It's been about four years now, going on five, and I practically had to spoon-feed them useful tidbits about his mission. I've finally just kidnapped them all and took them back to my homeworld, we're now running through the adventure where they escape. I had to put an alien diplomat in their cell to monologue information about them.

Still, I've been having fun so I don't mind. Just amusing how much PCs are willing to trust other PCs simply because they're PCs. :)

Sometimes it's different for NPCs, but not always - in another campaign just now the party encountered an Aboleth who told them that he was a good Aboleth that wasn't interested in mind control or manipulating anyone. And by the way, there's this list of quests he's working on and he'd appreciate some help. They jumped right in. He actually is on the level, but come on - Aboleth. If there's anyone to be instantly suspicious of it's someone like that.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

"They broke the law fair and square" is an odd defence.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

But now that AI has become advanced enough to get uncomfortably close to us, we need to move the goalposts farther away so everyone can relax again.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

No, we're describing a human endeavour. If the promotional flyers had been made by outsourcing it to Fiverr and they came back wonky it would have been the same basic problem. They outsourced this and then ether didn't have the resources or interest in checking the work that came back.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

This is how representative democracy works, none of the presented options are likely to be "perfect" for any given voter.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

I can't imagine how a representative democracy would operate otherwise. In representative democracies you're picking some person to make decisions on your behalf, and that person is different from you so some of their decisions are not going be the ones you would have made if you were in their place.

You may be wanting direct democracy, in which you would personally get to vote on the government's actions. Your "representative" would be perfect in that case because your representative would be you. But since you would only represent yourself, that's not what would normally be called "representative democracy."

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

And replace it with what? The only two basic forms of democracy are representative and direct, and direct democracy has its own problems.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Boycott your votes for Biden until he stops this Genocide.

Because Trump will be so much better for the Palestinians.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Are there any laws against it where? You need to specify a jurisdiction.

My main reaction would be that whoever is paying for that data is a fool. It's available for free.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

They swore an oath to do no harm. They didn't swear an oath to mindlessly obey anyone with a badge. It actually should be easy.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Indeed, this is a common misunderstanding of the status of fanworks. Most fanfics likely violate the copyright of the IP they're based on, but that doesn't mean that they aren't themselves original copyrighted works. The original IP's rightsholders can't simply claim the fanfic's copyright for themselves. It likely means that each party would need the other party's permission to make legal copies of the fanfic.

This is why most studios or authors will refuse to even read unsolicited ideas that are sent to them, they don't want to end up in a bind if someone sends them a fanfic that's got elements in it that they already intended to use in future books or episodes and then sues them for "stealing" their work.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Famously, "50 Shades of Grey" started out as a Twilight fanfic. The author later pulled out all of the Twilight-related stuff and then it was free and clear to publish as their own work. Given how much money 50 Shades raked in I would imagine there's been some legal scrutiny there from various sides.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

I'm a big fan of fanfic, I support it and consider it a serious literary genre. It's basically the folklore of our modern times. I'm also not a fan of how extensive and restrictive copyright protection has become.

That said, I do find it amusingly ironic when fanfic authors get in a big huff about their copyright being violated.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

The case was a rare criminal prosecution of emergency medical personnel, and stirred outrage among paramedics and firefighters across the nation who worry that urgent decisions made as part of their jobs can be criminalized.

Maybe don't ignore the Hippocratic Oath and commit basic blatant malpractice at the behest of the police and you won't have to worry about that so much.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Criticize Biden all you like, but if you advocate not voting for him in the Presidential election then you are a Trump supporter.

Unless something unexpected happens in the Democratic primaries those are going to be the only two choices the Americans have. And Trump is not going to be better for the Palestinians.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

That just makes my point stronger, though. The basic gist of what I was saying is that even if there is a statistical clustering of data into two groups that seem correlated with some category, that doesn't mean that you can absolutely rely on that data to classify people into those categories.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

You missed "techbro grifter scam" from your list of buzzwords.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

It's true, go ahead and read the ToS. It only grants a license to Reddit to use your content. It explicitly says:

You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:

And then goes on to enumerate what you're licensing them to do with it. There's also a section titled "Changes to these Terms" about how they can change the ToS going forward.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

This is another example of a scary sci-fi novel needing a very specific set of circumstances to arise in order for the scary sci-fi novel's story to work. It isn't a plausible case to be basing any real-world decisions or science on.

It's like trying to have a serious discussion of vigilantism and the death penalty and someone brings up Freddy Krueger as the basis for their argument.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

The Dark Forest theory is something that makes for a scary sci-fi novel, but it isn't really plausible in the real world. One of the major reasons is that individually doing atmospheric analysis for every planet in the galaxy actually is an entirely possible task, especially for a civilization that's supposedly advanced enough and close-by enough to be able to destroy our civilization somehow. If advanced alien civilizations were present in our galaxy and had the philosophy of destroying potential competitors before they also become advanced then we should have been wiped out hundreds of millions of years ago already. We shouldn't exist under a Dark Forest scenario.