Neuromancer

@Neuromancer@lemmy.ml

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Neuromancer,

I wish they didn't throw "think of the children" in there.

Neuromancer,

Yeah, I stuck with Windows Phone very nearly to the end, but the lack of apps just made it totally unsustainable for anyone with any kind of social life that extended beyond SMS and email.

Neuromancer, (edited )

I'm not sure if I should make a new post or keep this in a single thread, anyway, I've managed to get the front page to load, but can't get any farther.

I used the instructions from @jax's branch, particularly their nginx config.

I'm running the whole docker-compose setup behind my own nginx reverse proxy, which is set to proxy requests to the docker nginx (and also handles SSL). I modified the docker-compose.yml to bind the host port on 9001, then my main nginx config looks like this:

http {
    server {
        listen 443 ssl http2;
        server_name lemmy.villa-straylight.social;
        ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/<redacted>
        ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/<redacted>

        location / {
            proxy_set_header Host $host;
            proxy_pass http://localhost:9001;
        }
    }
}

The front page loads, but pretty much anything else I do results in an endless spinner. The only possible problem I see is this in the docker terminal output:

WARN Error encountered while processing the incoming HTTP request: lemmy_server::root_span_builder: WebSocket upgrade is expected. NoWebsocketUpgrade

Neuromancer,

Thanks, that's the missing piece. Ironically I am a software engineer in my day job, but not the right kind of software engineer. It's fun to broaden my horizons though. I copied the proxy settings from the @jax's nginx.conf with the right edits for the hostname into my reverse proxy config and now everything appears to be working!

Neuromancer,

You have to make a new account unfortunately.

Neuromancer,

Is there a tipping point where it's a net loss? If I understand the protocols correctly, the whole back end federation part of the equation is push based, so if everyone was running their own instance, lemmy.ml would have to push every post to every individual instance in the network. At some point isn't it more efficient to only have to serve posts when people come here to look at them?

Neuromancer,

Content longevity: You can do your own backups and don’t have to worry about loosing content when another instance disappears.

Conversely, this is the main thing keeping me from setting up my own instance. You have to do your own backups and keep everything running. If you mess up, you loose your whole identity. I'm a software engineer, but I'm a mediocre sys admin. I have the technical skills to host my own instance but I don't want the stress of getting it right.

Neuromancer,

Content longevity: You can do your own backups and don’t have to worry about loosing content when another instance disappears.

Conversely, this is the main thing keeping me from setting up my own instance. You have to do your own backups and keep everything running. If you mess up, you loose your whole identity. I'm a software engineer, but I'm a mediocre sys admin. I have the technical skills to host my own instance but I don't want the stress of getting it right.

Neuromancer,

One related question I have about this: How much ongoing storage would one expect for this kind of instance? My understanding is that the fediverse is push-based, so if I run my own instance that means that all communities I subscribe to are pushing updates to my instance which presumably get stored in a database somewhere. It seems like that could really add up to a lot of data.

Neuromancer,

If that's true about images that does greatly reduce my concern. Text is small and easily compressed. That said, I fully hope to see multiple orders of magnitude of increased traffic if/as Lemmy gains traction.

Neuromancer, (edited )

I'm a NASA software engineer writing spacecraft flight software. A few thoughts:

  1. I'm not at JPL and I don't know how religiously they follow these rules, but we really don't. They're not part of our official or unofficial standard practice. Indeed, I can't even find a reference to the rules on nasa.gov
  2. Most of these rules are considered obvious these days. Most of the rest we don't follow either. (at least not absolutely)
  3. This video critically misstates the rule about heap allocation, which is perhaps the most significant difference between how we write software and how non-safety critical systems are written. Dynamic allocation is allowed during initialization. This is a massive, massive difference in terms of how easy it is to write code.
  4. The video also misses the mark on preprocessor usage. Especially in C, you have very little choice but to rely on the preprocessor. We avoid it, but the kind of multi-path compilation he describes is necessary to enable thorough testing of the code.
  5. We're still human. Even where the rule is good and we follow it in principle, you will still find all too many exceptions in the actual code.

If you really want to see how the sausage is made, the software framework used by many NASA missions is open source and on GitHub.

Neuromancer,

No. I come here to interact with people. One of my favorite features here is the setting that lets me hide all bot accounts.

Neuromancer,

The only thing that I find mildly annoying is when using the site on desktop there’s a ton of white/dead space on the left and right margins.

I've seen this come up a ton, but what do you want instead? Pretty much every website limits line lengths on comments (for good reason) and it makes a lot more sense for the text to go in the middle of the screen than on the left IMO.

I do wish that the stuff to the right of the comments would anchor to the right side of the screen instead of the right side of the content area though.

Neuromancer,

I think it could all be summed up with "options". Everyone has their own idea of what a good UI is, so give use the tools to make the site work for us. For me it would be three things:

  1. By far, the front page needs options to make it more compact. My current reddit front page fits more than twice as many links on a single screen (21 vs 9).
  2. Make the center content area wider. I don't want it to go all the way across the screen, but it's to narrow on my 4k monitor.
  3. Make the stuff to the right of the content area go all the way on the right of the screen. It's distracting in its current position.
Neuromancer,

I just tried it. No way I can fit 3 columns on a 16:9 4k monitor, which means the main window area is offset to one side, which would quickly drive me crazy. Same reason I have never understood the ultrawide trend. I have three monitors and it works a lot like your screenshot but way less cramped.

Neuromancer,

The same thing has happened in traditional professional sports in the past. The entire 2004-2005 season in the NHL was cancelled due to a labor dispute.

Neuromancer,

There's good reason for setting a maximum bound on the width though. It's much harder on the eyes to read long lines of text. That said, I do think Lemmy goes a bit overboard, and I would really like to see all of the non-post content on the right side anchored to the right edge rather than centered.

Neuromancer,

Maybe it's just because I never really "got" Twitter, but this seems like a boring tautological argument to me. A more interesting question would be whether we even care? Platforms come and go. For some reason people seem to have decided that platforms have gotten "too big to fail", but it's clearly not the case.

anders, to lemmy

Lemmy is booming

I have never before received so many reactions and comments on my Lemmy posts before, so it's obvious to see, that there are many new members here.
Welcome to all the new! And I'm looking forward to see more of you here.
Cheers!

Neuromancer,

It will happen over time. Lemmy and Beehaw are still infinitesimally small compared to reddit. Trying to push people onto other servers right now is extreme premature optimization.

Neuromancer,

Can you explain what the issue is? I think it's all but inevitable that one server will become the "default" server that most people will create an account on first. As they learn more about how everything works, they may choose to create another account on a server with different rules that suite them better. That flow seems much easier to me than putting pressure on new users to pick the "right" server from them off the bat.

Neuromancer,

On reddit, I have always started with my normal front page, which here would be "Subscribed" and eventually migrated to /r/all ("All") if I get through a few pages of my subscribed feed. I imagine it will be the same here.

As for activity sorting, I think "hot" is really the secret sauce in a community even 1/10th the size of reddit today, but as small as Lemmy is right now I think new is probably going to be the way to go for a while.

help me choose my next distro

I'm resetting windows 10 on my Thinkpad T580 for work but would like to create a partition for linux. It's an older laptop and really chugs through games like Minecraft or RuneScape but I enjoy playing relaxing games while I listen to audiobooks at night. I grew up using windows which is why I've mostly used Ubuntu and ZorinOS...

Neuromancer,

I use KUbutu at work and have tinkered with Arch (and recently the arch-based Manjaro) for many years on personal computers.

In my opinion, setting up a desktop Arch install is more work than it's worth, but wrapping it behind Manjaro makes the experience much better and the Arch wiki is a treasure trove of information about all thinks Linux.

Ubuntu, regardless of flavor, is the boring white bread of Linux distros IMO. There's nothing really wrong with it, but it sure doesn't excite me in any way shape or form.

Neuromancer, (edited )
  • Prehistoric C++: Core language for my main project at work. Unfortunately we're stuck with C++98, but it's still a massive improvement on C.
  • C: For some of the older parts of the aforementioned project
  • Python: For test automation for the aforementioned project, also rapidly becoming the main language within the community that covers my secondary work project. I used to really not care for Python, but to the extent it displaces MATLAB I'm 100% in favor of it. I've also grown to really like it in the test automation role. The only thing I could wish for is that it had a mode that required type hints across the board.
  • Modern C++: Used for my other work project. While I do think that C++11 is a huge step up from C++98, I think the later standards have added a lot of cruft and very little value. Given the choice I would definitely take modern C++ over C++98, but I'd really rather be writing something like Rust
  • Java: This was a mistake I made years ago when I started a project as a very junior developer. Unfortunately I work in a research context where even as the junior developer I was still the most experienced developer on the team when it came to some things. We needed a REST API for this project and doing it in C++ didn't seem feasible at the time (no idea if it's better now). Some other teams in my org where using Spring so I jumped on that bandwagon. In hindsight, I wish I had written the API in Python since we're slowly moving a lot of our C++ code into Python on that project now.
  • Shell: For automation that's just a little too easy to bother with Python
  • Rust: Only used on hobby projects for now, but it scratches the same itch as C++ a thousand times better. The language itself is wonderful once you get used to the borrow checker and cargo is an incredibly valuable part of the ecosystem as well.
Neuromancer, (edited )

Slightly off topic, but is there a proper way to link communities across nodes? If I click that link, it (obviously) takes me to lemmy.ca, but what I really want is to go to that community on my home node.

Neuromancer,

That's actually a really good point. There's an optimum number of users that's obviously orders of magnitude higher than where Lemmy is at right now, but it's probably an order of magnitude lower than reddit's current position. If reddit's changes could drive the most technologically literate 10-20% of reddit's user base over here, that might be a very good thing indeed.

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