Unblended

Unblended, 9 months ago

I saw the writing on the wall a few years back, it was so painfully obvious. I started switching to KiCAD early, and feel so bad for ever recommending Eagle to people who will now have to learn yet another new tool in order to find something usable.

Fusion360 is so bad, I had to explain why SolidWorks was different earlier today and they were shocked by things like "if I move the case the board I say is attached to the case moves to" and "I don't have to align it by eye, it's a computer".

And I'm definitely not starting VMWare to run Fusion360 with nonsense online components that slow it down to uselessness and integrate it into a tool that doesn't need to be on at all... it's just not possible. It was obvious once they stopped updating the version. It's pathetic nonetheless that they cannot think beyond the one-true-way of integrating a dozen mediocre tools into one extra-mediocre product.

Unblended, 9 months ago

Thanks for looking, and indeed signal still works fine on my desktop computers with the VPN running.

Really feels like their tech support was lying. I do just enough of this that the recommendation makes my eyes glaze over while sounding transparently wrong. Suddenly I need open UDP and TCP ports, but only on my phone (computer is fine) and only as of a few weeks ago (prior to that it was fine)? What?

Allow *.whispersystems.org, *.signal.org, updates.signal.org, TCP port 443, and UDP traffic. If you have a transparent or reverse proxy it needs to support WebSockets. Signal uses a non-standard TCP port to catch filtering issues at the signaling step and also utilizes a random UDP port. All UDP ports will need to be opened. The underlying IPs are constantly changing, so it'd be hard to define accurate firewall rules.

If the wildcard FQDN config is not working properly and you notice issues with calling, allow turn2.voip.signal.org, turn3.voip.signal.org and sfu.voip.signal.org. These are subject to change at anytime.

Unblended, 10 months ago

I mean, largely to me this is fine and great as long as the reverse is also true. It's fabulous to have two totally independent systems that are fully interoperable to such an extent.

I don't think there's a meaningful competition in growth or anything, that's just a number. The main downside is reduced development focus...

But -- If Lemmy is like a frontend for kbin and vice versa, isn't that fine? The Lemmy apps will load kbin posts and kbin apps will load lemmy posts.

Unblended, 10 months ago

TL;DR: I think it is basically impossible to have that much money and claim it was earned ethically. Therefore it is basically impossible to be "good" without giving it away.

I think that it is borderline impossible to ethically accrue that much wealth. Is it possible? Maybe? I'd love to hear more examples of where a company owner made sure all their employees shared in the success when the company is large enough that the owner is that rich. I remember hearing that Google did right by their early employees, but it's been the exception that makes the rule and was also a long time ago in a different world where their ethics were different anyway.

And if you inherit that much wealth, what are the odds that it came to you free and clear of having been generated from exploiting others? Colonizing/"settling" and redlining making property values super high? Using eminent domain to tear down minority major communities for the sake of putting an interstate down the middle instead of risking devaluing the richest people's property more? Because odds are that even if they didn't cause the system they certainly benefited from it.

And unfortunately, "charity" is a horror in the USA because it's used as a very bad and very biased by rich people version of an actual welfare system that worked. The idea that there are food banks operating off donations while billionaires exist is horrific. If billionaires did not exist I frankly think that a lot more things like food banks (and public transit maybe?) would find themselves with funding.

Unblended, 10 months ago

Thank you @ernest !

Unblended, 10 months ago

Car stereo that can't play .ogg or something? Maybe it's about rar, I do hate those.

Unblended, 10 months ago

Personally, I don't get the benefit and they just make it more difficult to do things like download partial torrents to get a missing file.

In the context of the OP, I meant that "Codec Inconsistency" seems like the kind of vague error that you might get trying to merge rar files and, say, mkv files. Mostly a joke, I assume they know better than that.

Unblended, 10 months ago

I think I'm much too old for Prodigy or something because one episode was too much.

But Lower Decks is absolutely amazing, it's really nice to have a legitimate comedy within the honest-to-god Star Trek universe so they can just actually make fun of Riker by name.

I like Strange New Worlds alright. It's better than Discovery, and I liked Discovery fine.

Picard was great until the S1 twist and I refused to watch further. Maybe that's not fair, I found it a bit Disney-ish but wow that ending. I just have to head cannon a more respectful ending and I imagine I'll get around to it.

Though I have somehow never managed to get around to Enterprise...

Unblended, 10 months ago

I sure hope the timing of this happened to avoid it getting wrecked by the writers guild strike, this seems worrying. Would be a shame if it was bad and/or written by AI.

Unblended, 10 months ago

I just went to reddit and redditmigration and blocked those magazines, and just do that for the magazines/communities I get annoyed by since each instance has their own. It's actually kind of nice, people are at least forced to add a tag to every post (unlike mastodon where we have to rely on text filters when people do cute mispellings like "elno tusk" or whatever).

Unblended, 10 months ago

I'm not from reddit, what is a reputation and what practical effect does it have? Is it just upvotes minus downvotes?

I found a reputation in my profile of "1" but I don't have a clue where that came from. I'm not sure why we need to have scores associated with our accounts, that in itself seems toxic to me to care about (clout chasing).

Upvoting comments in threads makes sense, I'm just not seeing any actual practical connection with the thing called "reputation" on my profile. What does it do in a best case?

Unblended, 10 months ago

I appreciate that on Mastodon I had the ability to hide stats from my UI view, no harm making it optional I suppose.

Unblended, 10 months ago

I hate recommending software too hard since it's so heavily dependent on your situation.

If you're able to get Debian of some variety working, I think it is very simple to use.

If it doesn't work easily, Ubuntu is like debian but has more proprietary drivers.

There are also different window managers you can use that look and act differently.

The simplest thing to do is to get a live CD for debian and see if it works right away. If not, maybe try live CDs for the Ubuntu versions.

Dunno about other options, I only really know those two anymore.

Unblended, 10 months ago

I wonder if China has a favorite.

Unblended, 10 months ago

I think that bots that repost automatically are lame, personally, but as long as they are clearly tagged and I have the ability to ignore anything from any bot that's fine. We had the same issue on Mastodon, I still can't figure out how to straight up block bots on there which is frustrating so instead I just filter out any posts that say "twitter" or "RT".

I don't have any issue with bots as long as they're easy to block across the board instead of individually.

I do think it's lame and that y'all are better than that.

Unblended, 10 months ago

Can't control when you do it.

Unblended, 10 months ago

I've been kind of suggesting the same thing a few times inside of posts. I'm coming at it from the perspective of having had to do a lot of in-person recruiting for voluntary activities, mentoring, and teaching -- you cannot tell people things like "you should just join lemmy/kbin" -- you have to wait for them to ask "how do I join lemmy/kbin?"

That's okay! It just means that the focus when introducing people to it has to be "here's what you're missing", positive about where they could go rather than negative about where they are.

It's an uphill battle trying to argue with people who do have a point about it being harder to use (we shouldn't gaslight people), but they're also saying what the audience is wanting to hear because it gives them permission to do nothing.

How many are just admin accounts or sock puppets for some agenda or another anyway?

Consider focusing on the positive -- link to specific posts on these systems that are objectively worth going to participate in. They don't need an account to read and enjoy.

Then, if they discover that they wish that they could participate in the thread -- that is the time to explain that they should just join whatever instance the post they really enjoyed was on for starters. They'll realize that they can see magazines from other instances, probably after a week when they realize other instance domain names are showing up on things. Then some nice person explains what's going on.

And now they've convinced themselves it's worth joining...

Unblended, 10 months ago

While true, people seem to pretty immediately get it once it's clear where to see the source instance. If they care, they're usually surprised, and then the reason magazines on different instances are different makes sense.

I'm not sure what there is to do about it, the impression that there is one magazine is a relic of centralization, all there is to do is explain that it is not the case when people are inevitably confused. I hate simplifying it to "bob@microsoft.com and bob@apple.com are different people" because I know it feels more complicated than that but it seems like it doesn't take that long to click honestly.

Best I figure is to have welcoming communities that don't turn into asshats if someone is confused or asks questions. This doesn't seem like something you can force people to understand before they run into a problem and try to figure out what's going on. Eventually there will be an AI bot that answers questions I'm sure...!

Unblended, 10 months ago

I wonder to what extent the massive imbalance in news coverage was simply super wealthy families handing journalists pre-written pieces so that laziness would dictate this result (rather than the journalists doing this naturally, although laziness is natural enough I guess).

Unblended, 10 months ago

In your case, lemmy.ca says this about the instance you are on.

Lemmy.ca
A canadian-run community, geared towards canadians, but all are welcome!
Welcome to Lemmy.ca!

“Lemmy.ca” is so named due to it running the Lemmy software, in the Fediverse, and it’s geared toward Canadians, hosted in Canada, and run by a Canadian. It is, however, not at all restricted to Canadians, or Canadian culture/topics/etc. All are welcome!
We have some rules here:

No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
No porn.
No Ads / Spamming.

That gives a fair amount of information about what is and is not acceptable on that particular instance. Looking at your local communities only should tell you a lot about the general character of the group, I don't use Lemmy (this is from kbin, hi) but it seems like your UI has multiple buttons to show all/subscribed/local feeds, so switch it to local and see if it pisses you off.

Telling who owns it is harder, I think that's often somewhat obscured for dox/harassment reasons. However, in this case the website shows at the bottom of the right-side column who the admins are:

admins: @smorks @crb

And now I see that @smorks noticed your post and hopefully that will clear things up ;-) Hopefully they don't mind being doxxxxxxed.

Unblended, 10 months ago

No, absolutely do not run your own instance, that's absurd. That's like saying you shouldn't bother using email if you don't host your own server.

Your concerns make sense, they have complete access to anything you post and I can't imagine that any sort of messages are encrypted. That's just true. They could theoretically take your posts and sell them for profit, though anyone can already do that by simply federating with your server.

Anyway.

There's a limit. Just assume anything you post is not private for sure. I don't know if you can edit things, but I'd be shocked if it were impossible for an admin to. Maybe I'm wrong, they're such early software...

The good news is that in theory you should be able to migrate your entire account from the one you are on to a new one if you don't like the policy. Maybe? Not sure if that works yet.

But no, do not roll your own instance, that is silly and ruins discovery. At the same time be aware that the one you are on is ultimately owned by someone with the root password.