Kichae

@Kichae@kbin.social

Astronomer & video game data scientist with repressed anger

Kichae, (edited )

I don’t think anyone is advocating for literal communism.

So, you think the rest of us are as stupid as Fox and your Republicans, then?

Kichae,

Glad to hear the explosion has been contained and that you can stand down red alert.

Kichae,

Honestly, the thing that drives me the most crazy about self checkouts is people using them with full carts. They're perfect if you're just grabbing a few things: Just as fast, if not faster, than the 'N items or fewer' checkouts, and no need to interact with anyone. But if you're showing up with 6 bags worth of groceries, and everything in your cart has a coupon or at-cash discount with it, then you need the cashier anyway, so just GTFO of the way. Having the nanny cashier who's looking after 8 self-checkouts come over every 10 seconds to deal with another one of your discounts, or to let you swap bags because you've already filled the item placement area, slows things down for everybody.

Kichae,

just someone using the term to mean “young people”

Rude. How dare they stop using "Millennial" to mean "young people". They weren't supposed to recognize that some of us are in our 40s now!

Kichae,

Accurate. I'd like to go home now.

Kichae, (edited )

People keep claiming this this, and yet it does little to explain hmthr large number of smaller companies that have no real estate holdings.

Also, it totally overlooks what the actual purpose of money is to the wealthy, namely control. It's not money for money's sake, nor is it control for money's sake, but rather money for control's sake.

Meanwhile, WFH is a big shift in worker autonomy. Many employers have treated employees working from home with extreme suspicion, going so far as to accuse us of theft just because they can't directly watch us sit at a desk. They installed computer input trackers on remote hardware, they got belligerent over the idea that people maybe - just maybe - they were doing laundry or soemthing on company time, and they're nettled over the idea that people were sitting on their couches.

This isn't the behaviour of people concerned about their stock portfolios, or of landlords upset that their renters may not renew their lease in 5 years. These are not rational actors making rational decisions about long term consequences. These are people who have lost their fucking minds over having given up just the slightest, insignificant amount of control over their employees lives and, importantly, having handed it over to those employees.

They'll happily take a productivity hit, a revenue decline, or even a massive loss in institutional knowledge if it means clawing back these miniscule gains in worker power.

And if we're lucky, it'll cost them significantly more control over workers in the long run.

Kichae,

Man, do I have some bridges to sell you.

Kichae,

It's only the Metaverse if it comes from the virtual real estate brokerage region of Silicon Valley. Otherwise it's just sparkling VR.

Trudeau takes first step to break Canada’s addiction to rising home prices - The Globe and Mail (www.theglobeandmail.com)

At last, someone from the world of politics is being honest about a pervasive and harmful trade-off. When home prices rise faster than earnings, owners like me gain wealth, while non-owners lose because their incomes fall further behind housing costs....

Kichae,

The market crashed last year

The market: Still significantly above the pre-2020 trend.

Kichae,

They don't need good will, unfortunately. They just need devs to not abandon it for Unreal or some other engine, and the cost/benefits calculation on that is going to be made by short sighted people on a project-by-project basis.

Kichae,

But wages aren't socialism either.

And health care and food programs also aren't socialism, they're social programs, which are very different things from socialism.

Kichae,

community discoverability, [...], and moderation tools

Those are big. But so is the lack of smooth interoperability with Mastodon. There's a large population using Mastodon right now that could be participating in threaded discussions here, who are just totally blind to the space, and those that do engage have a super jankey experience.

And on top of that, it's also a super jankey experience on the Lemmy end when Mastodon users engage.

Hopefully things get better on that front once Mastodon has implemented groups.

not being able to group communities together

I honestly see this being a continued expectation to be a bigger issue. Two communities with the same name on different servers could be very different spaces. Giving users the ability to group them together homogenizes them in a way that is likely bad for the ecosystem overall.

Like, it's fine to have federated or merged communities, but I think that power needs to be in mods and/or admins hands, not end users.

Kichae, (edited )

I guess, but it also puts a lot of pressure on those small ones to be indistinguishable from the big ones, by having people treating them like they're the same place.

I don't think Lemmy scales the same way that Mastodon does. I don't think this topic-based community forum model translates to federation the same way the individual-based microblogging space does. It's a more complex space, with more layers to manage. It's often mod or admin driven, whereas microblogs are entirely about average user behaviour.

I don't think it replicates Reddit the same way that it replicates Twitter. I think the mental model just doesn't fit the tech.

Like, yeah, letting users make personalized community lists is one thing, and I get the appeal, but it ends up functioning very differently in a space where multiple communities can have the same handle, you know? I can lump 5 different gaming subreddits together into a single stream, and be totally and intuitively aware that they're different. They have different names, and they present differently, with different stylings, when you actually click through to a post. Without those signals, though, empowering users to lump communities together only has benefits to smaller communities if those communities are looking to grow for growth's sake.

Mastodon has done a great disservice to its admins and users by trying to mask the federated nature of the fediverse. By trying to sell 'Mastodon' as a space in and of itself. By trying to make the actual website you're using invisible. I don't think we benefit from that in any way. Indeed, I think it's only the platform developers who benefit, by making their product the only thing people really see. But the individual websites that make up these networks of social networks are entities in and of themselves. They're like neighbourhoods, or towns. They have their own infrastructure, their own residents, their own characters, and their own needs. Treating them as interchangeable or invisible, ultimately, I feel, stymies the actual potential of the space.

Because this isn't Reddit. It doesn't work like Reddit. It can't try to be "Reddit, but ____", because it fails at the first word. The way forward is in recognizing that, and trying to figure out what this new space really is.

And one of the things it is is not one space.

Kichae,

Yeah, if you don't like the tomato flavour of tomatoes, there's not a whole lot different varieties are going to do for you, or having them be vine ripened or freshly picked for that matter. Increasing the sugar content doesn't make them taste less like tomatoes, it just makes them taste like sweet tomatoes.

Kichae,

Puhleeze.

Homer Simpsons eating my screen was the peak of screen savers.

Though, I guess it wasn't much of a 'saver' if it was being eaten...

Kichae,

"People who study how society oppresses certain groups, and how those groups adapt and remain resilient in the face of that oppression, are brainwashing your kids!" - Dudes in the Oppressor's Seat

Kichae,

The current boom is an embarrassingly parallel task meeting an architecture designed to run that kind of task.

Plus organizations outside of the FAANGs having hit critical mass on data that's actually useful for mass comparison multiple correlation analyses, and data as a service platforms making things seem sexier to management in those organizations.

Kichae,

"Embarrassingly parallelizable" is just the term for a process that can be perfectly paralleled.

Kichae,

"I wish the public would pay for my kid to go to private school"

How about "No".

Kichae,

You already know the answer to that.

Alberta's not a monolith by any stretch, but a significant percentage of the province is neck deep in the myth of rugged Albertan individualism and supremacy.

Kichae,

Sure. Plenty of ghost towns still exist, and still have people living there, but visiting chat rooms that used to have dozens of active users at any hour of the day or night and finding 6 lurkers and one person who's overly excited to see a new name is not the same experience.

Kichae,

Negative utility is still utility, right?

Kichae,

I like the "antennas" feature a lot

For the uninitiated, Firefish's antennae are saved searches, where you can specify lists of keywords and users and come back to them over and over again. It's similar to Mastodon's hashtag follow feature, only more flexible. Though, IIRC, it doesn't add the search results to your home feed; it keeps them separate, and undiluted.

From an administrator's point of view, Firefish's Recommended timeline is super cool, and is similar to Akkoma's 'bubble' feature. It lets you specify a list of other federated servers to display posts from, creating a kind of "super-local" timeline. It's the kind of thing I'd love to see in Lemmy and kbin.

Kichae,

I don’t want to. I just want to have them in my home feed.

Fair enough. I'm glad there's something out there that meets your need, then.

Kichae,

There's nothing wrong with graphs whose y axies don't start at zero. They can be used to misdirect people, but if you're capable of actually seeing the numbers in the axes and doing a little bit of thought, they tell you exactly what one that starts at zero does.

Plus, the opaque spike is shown on the secondary y axis, which does start at 0. It's the translucent layer that's mapped to the primary axis.

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