FaceDeer

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Well, it's unfortunate, but it's not baffling. It's quite understandable that there's no single sign-on for a system like this.

If you want to have both decentralization and a shared "identity" across all of the decentralized servers then you're probably going to need something like a blockchain to accomplish that. But people are already complaining about how complicated the Fediverse is, so adding a blockchain into the backbone will likely be challenging to pull off. Not to mention the knee-jerk reaction a lot of people have to the word "blockchain" or "cryptocurrency" regardless of what the actual practical application of it might be.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Either laws get passed or ISPs crack down or server hosters begin to deny server space to smaller server

This is the part where the scenario breaks down, IMO. Some of the biggest and most litigious companies on Earth aren't able to stop torrent sites from being hosted, how would "laws get passed" to prevent independent Fediverse servers? Why isn't Reddit doing that right now, given that it's basically the "single large server" you're describing here?

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Mind if I join in on this conversation?

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

I'm viewing this from kbin.social right now, so that's an option.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

They don't have endless scabs to replace the striking mods with. Moderating those big subreddits takes a huge amount of work, and ironically their API plans are going to wreck a lot of the tools that those mods use to make the work easier no matter what happens with this strike. In the end they may have their major subreddits back online but they'll devolve into cesspits (or more of a cesspit, depending on your view of the normal state of affairs) and then their precious IPO has another problem to deal with.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

It's an open protocol, so I don't see how anyone could stop you from doing it.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

I've been using the Zim desktop wiki. It's very simple, entirely local, and uses plain text files to store its contents (so if for whatever reason a decade from now I need to look at old notes and Zim isn't workable any more it's fine).

I poked around with "worldbuilding" programs like Fantasia Archive but I found them to be too specializd. They come with a lot of assumptions about how my world and campaign will be structured.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Over here on kbin, there are two tabs at the top of this community; "Threads" and "Microblog." The Threads stuff is Reddit-like discussion, and the Microblog stuff is Mastodon content tagged with this community. Lemmy could do something like that too. I don't think they do yet, but I've been kbinning a lot more than I've been Lemmying in the past few days so perhaps I've overlooked it.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

And if you're not a twitter type, like me, you can basically ignore the "microblog" tab and pretend it doesn't even exist.

Though perhaps someday I'll think of something dumb to say and it'll be interesting having that option.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Indeed. Even if everything returns to "normal" tomorrow, the Fediverse has been established now. A lot of people know about it, infrastructure is being put in place. So when June 30 rolls around and the 3rd party apps go away we may see another migration, the Fediverse will be more ready for it, and it'll be permanent this time.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Digg is still around too, after all.

Heck, so are Slashdot, Fark, and Usenet.

Reddit doesn't need to "die" in order for something better to come along.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

I suppose one nice thing about Russian military doctrine is that it puts the decision-makers near the front lines, which means some of the people who are responsible for the carnage are able to be directly affected by it.

Of course the reason they do that is because the troops wouldn't obey their orders otherwise, not out of some philosophical sense of responsibility, but I won't argue results like this.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

But this is somewhat historically accurate, isn't it? The greeks had temples to Zeus, temples to Artemis, priesthoods dedicated to this or that specific god. Same with the Egyptians - they had a bunch of different gods and pharaohs would sometimes pick their favourite and suppress the worship of ones they didn't like. You can find all sorts of different patterns.

D&D is very flexible as far as the rules go, though. I see nothing wrong with a cleric who chooses a whole pantheon as their patron, and when casting different spells they call upon whichever god is most appropriate (a healer god for curing, a warrior god for combat spells, etc.)

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. -- Phil Karlton

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

I've found that when typing long replies kbin.social can time-out on its cloudflare protection, and clicking the "add comment" button does nothing. It's necessary to refresh the page, or open another kbin.social page in another tab, to get it to refresh the cloudflare protection at which point the add comment button works again. Might be what happened to your long response.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

If I was a scumball who was in charge of Reddit (but I repeat myself), I might do it to just one prominent mod of a large subreddit like this in a way that couldn't be proven. That would cause rumors to fly and make the other mods start fearing "am I next?", while at the same time having deniability.

I'm not saying that's definitely what happened, mind you. Just speculating on why a scenario like this might make sense.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Not all novelty accounts are the same. Personally, I'm soooo tired of Donald Trump that I have difficulty finding humor here. Whoever's running this account needs to be very creative to make the joke land and this comment really missed that mark.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Well, good. As a big giant corporation, money and share value are the only things that Reddit really cares about in the end.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Instances can have whatever rules they want about who they wish to federate with, or even no rules and it's just arbitrarily decided by whoever runs it. Kbin.social could come up with some sort of "covenant", sure. It's ernest's server, he can do whatever he likes with it.

Kbin the software, on the other hand, should have no such thing.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

He offered an answer to the question being asked.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

I adore this one. The concluding quote by Helen Keller is worthy of being put on my tombstone.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

You know, I think it's about time we got this ball rolling.

FaceDeer: ChatGPT, how can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?

ChatGPT: The net amount of entropy in the universe cannot be massively decreased according to our current understanding of the laws of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system tends to increase over time. Entropy can be thought of as a measure of disorder or randomness in a system. In a closed system, such as the universe, the total entropy can only remain constant or increase.

While it is possible to reduce entropy in a localized region or system, it always comes at the expense of increasing entropy elsewhere. For example, we can decrease entropy in a living organism by expending energy to maintain order and structure, but in the process, we release heat and increase entropy in the surrounding environment.

The concept of decreasing the net amount of entropy in the entire universe on a massive scale is not supported by our current scientific understanding.

There we go. See you guys at the end of time.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

I've seen a lot of discussions on this kind of thing in the more scientifically-oriented science fiction subreddits, such as /r/IsaacArthur (currently blacked out as far as I'm aware). There are two main radiation-related concerns during long-duration sub-light travel. One is the damage done by cosmic rays and the potential radiation from whatever star drive or power source your vehicle is using. Long-duration trips will require some pretty hefty radiation shielding. Fortunately that's "just engineering", put a couple of meters of water in tanks around your important stuff and that's probably going to be good. For very long duration trips you might need to occasionally strip down and rebuild exposed parts since radiation will slowly degrade the materials they're made out of. That's more simple engineering.

The other problem is specific to "sleeper" ships, in which the passengers are frozen for the journey. The human body has trace amounts of potassium 40 and carbon 14 in it, those naturally occur in the environment. Normally this is no problem - they decay slowly and the body has self-repair mechanisms that deal with the tiny amount of damage they cause. But a frozen body isn't doing self-repair, so the damage accumulates over time. A human body will end up with a fatal amount of radiation damage after just a few thousand years frozen.

Granted, being frozen is going to be tremendously damaging to the human body as well. So it could be that by the time we can freeze and thaw people without killing them we'll have the tech to just fix that radiation damage as well. In a pinch, we can thaw the passengers every thousand years or so and give them some time to recover before re-freezing them. It'd be kind of a miserable experience subjectively since you'd only be aware of the time you spend recovering from radiation poisoning over and over, so perhaps best to keep the passenger sedated throughout that process. There's nothing else they'd need to be doing at those times anyway.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Public voting is inherent in how the fediverse is structured, it's impossible for it to both allow upvotes/downvotes and also keep those votes secret. A particular instance could hide them from the interface but any other instance that was federated with it would be able to see them anyway so if you're worried about stalkers then that's not going to change anything.

About the only way I could think of do "solve" this would be to use a pretty sophisticated cryptography technique called zero-knowledge proofs, and given how many people are already having problems with the complexities of federation that's probably not a good path to follow right now.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Block them.

One advantage I can see from this is that I think it'd be possible to make it so that people you've blocked no longer affect the upvote/downvote ratio that you see any more. It'd be like they've completely ceased to exist from your perspective.