HarkMahlberg

RE: Is Ernest still here?

I check in here quite often, but for now, I'm just focusing on clearing spam and keeping the instance alive. In January, I was working on the AP module, and there has been significant progress in the work, which hasn't been publicly published yet. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the year, I developed a skin condition that...

Universal under investigation after it trimmed trees that shaded SAG-AFTRA protesters | CNN Business (www.cnn.com)

The Los Angeles City Controller’s office is investigating after NBCUniversal severely trimmed a row of trees outside its studios where members of SAG-AFTRA were picketing company executives, eliminating shade during a searing heatwave.

RTR#48 Happy holidays everyone

For the past few days, I've patched up a few minor errors that there was never time for. I also took a short break from coding, but I'm still working on planning the federation. I'm trying to spend a bit more time with my family and recharge for the upcoming week.

While trying to wrap my head around the concept of the Fediverse, I made this map. How did I do?

Masks are out at In-N-Out after burger chain bans employees from wearing them in 5 states (apnews.com)

In-N-Out will bar employees in five states from wearing masks unless they have a doctor’s note, according to internal company emails leaked on social media last week.

masimatutu, 5 months ago to fediverse en-gb

Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse

I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.

Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.

But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.

The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.

And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.

The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person) and groups (!group), but I know that that is quite much to ask.

P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.

Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.

@fediverse #fediverse #threadiverse #mastodon #lemmy #kbin

[News] Conservative groups draw up plan to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump’s vision (apnews.com)

With more than a year to go before the 2024 election, a constellation of conservative organizations is preparing for a possible second White House term for Donald Trump.

Exclusive: Bernie Sanders worries young people are underestimating the threat from Trump (www.usatoday.com)

Murder victim Kelly Wilkinson repeatedly visited police in fear. They said she was ‘cop shopping’ (www.theguardian.com)

Exclusive: Family calls for inquest, saying Wilkinson visited police ‘almost every day’ before she was murdered by her husband in 2021

A case for preemptively defederating with Threads

With Meta beginning to test federation, there's a lot of discussion as to whether we should preemptively defederate with Threads. I made a post about the question, and it seems that opinions differ a lot among people on Kbin. There were a lot of arguments for and against regarding ads, privacy, and content quality, but I don't...

HarkMahlberg, 8 days ago to programming

Anyone got any good alternatives to #stackoverflow?

Pope says priests can bless same-sex unions, requests should not be subject to moral analysis (apnews.com)

Pope Francis has formally approved allowing priests to bless same-sex couples, with a new document explaining a radical change in Vatican policy by insisting that people seeking God’s love and mercy shouldn’t be subject to “an exhaustive moral analysis” to receive it.

[News] Dianne Feinstein, longest serving woman in the Senate, has died at 90 (www.npr.org)

Feinstein suddenly became the mayor of San Francisco when two other officials were assassinated. Later she was elected to the U.S. Senate after male senators grilled Anita Hill in public hearings.

Games that Don't Fake the Space (www.youtube.com)

Now you're looking for the secret…but you won't find it. | Watch my live library talk, as well as many other exclusive videos, by joining Nebula at https://g...

HarkMahlberg, 4 months ago to random

#paintdotnet You guys gotta stop making me call you out like this.

When I rotate a layer, and I want to rotate it by 270 degrees, you cap me out at 180 degrees. But I know you are perfectly capable of understanding how to rotate an image by 270 degrees, because you let me rotate by -90 degrees. You know. That's how circles work? You don't think I'm gonna use the crappy little slider to rotate an image by -92.09 degrees do you? Let me just type in an angle, any angle, and convert it to whatever you need after I mouse out of the field.

HarkMahlberg, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago) to citiesskylines

#citiesskylines2 I think I figured out how to satisfy low density residential demand in the game. It basically operates on the concept of Induced Demand. Just like adding a lane to a highway incentivizes people to use the highway more, leading to the same congestion problems. If you constantly zone low density residential in an attempt to "chase the demand bar," what you're doing is increasing the supply of houses. Meaning, driving down the COST of housing. Meaning more citizens can afford a house, meaning they buy up that supply, so they demand more... it's a feedback loop, like acquiescing to a child who only ever wants to eat chocolate.

So, counterintuitively, you need to IGNORE their demand. By keeping the supply constant, and with demand increasing, the cost of the housing goes up. This prices out some of your citizens, and so they will begin demanding lower-cost options. Enter, medium density housing. You start with row housing, then medium density, then mixed-use. This doesn't happen fast, let alone instantly, so you kind of have to plan this strategy from the founding of your city. At one point I had a 15k pop with almost exclusive demand for medium density housing.

As your citizens get more educated through college and university levels, they'll be able to afford those suburbs again, and the demand will return. But they'll also be young enough that living "in the big city" will be desirable and they'll start demanding high density apartments close to shops and offices. Beware the Low Rent zoning type! Despite being high density, if your citizens are too well educated and make too much money, they'll abandon these buildings the moment they can afford nicer places. But I guess they're a good stopgap measure between medium density and regular high density.

So Induced Demand is a double edged sword: you want to avoid inducing demand for low density suburbs, and purposely induce demand for higher densities.

HarkMahlberg, 9 months ago to random

Good to see people rejecting the X and still calling it Twitter. But why stop there? Call it Facebook, not Meta. Call it Google, not Alphabet. They can't hide behind a new coat of paint.

[News] House passes a stopgap bill to avert a government shutdown (www.nbcnews.com)

The bill now heads to the Senate, which is expected to pass it before Friday's deadline. It would keep the government funded through early next year while Congress debates spending.

HarkMahlberg, 4 months ago to random

Don't trust anyone who speaks confidently this fast. His entire intent is to sound authoritative while slipping things like this by you faster than you can raise an eyebrow. -- /u/ReallyNowFellas

There's your critical thought for the day.

HarkMahlberg, 4 months ago to random

"This article is terrible and nonsensical, it must have been written by AI."

Comments like these forget that real people can also create terrible and nonsensical articles. Or they don't agree with the point being made so they just claim it wasn't a real person's idea. Or both.

HarkMahlberg, 5 months ago to random

I have a meme scavenger hunt, a meme bounty if you will. Somewhere out there is this clip from George C. Scott's A Christmas Carol with the "It is Wednesday, my dudes" meme mixed in.

I want it.

Blocked users who move instances don't stay blocked

Posting to raise awareness of this behavior with kbin. Maybe it's something Ernest can address in the ActivityPub rewrite, maybe it's something that doesn't need to be (or can be) addressed at all....

Do the "Ernest needs to add more maintainers to KBin!" comments remind anyone else of the xz social engineering malarkey?

Comments such as:...