I don’t think anyone can host a relay right now aside from bluesky.
People can host their own data / Personal Data Server, which is somewhere between self-hosting a mastodon instance and creating an account on someone else’s instance. The actual equivalent would be self-hosting your masto account separately from any instance (which is just not a thing with the current state of mastodon nor activity pub).
I like the idea, but then who gets to decide who is and isn’t a credible source? Is it only intra-account verifying? Can anyone verify anyone else, or do you need to be authorized by bluesky to start verifying others?
Succinctly put, though I got some cognitive dissonance when the author wrote about bluesky being their choice of decentralized network to get involved with without even mentioning the hosting costs involved with running a bsky relay (or whichever component of the ATP network actually holds the data “firehose”).
According to this article it took a server that costs around $150/month over 4 days to spin up a working relay, most of which was spent ingurgitating half a terabyte of data (that’s what ended up on disk in any case). Far from exorbitant, yet if I want to self host for my own personal needs it’s still gobs more data and compute than any activity pub software needs.
Maybe my view of “decentralization as in democracy” is just fundamentally different from the author’s. I get the feeling that to them, as long as each friend group has 1 self-hoster in it then democracy through decentralization is preserved. This would make sense that they orient themselves towards something like bluesky and the AT protocol. Personally, I don’t think we should be satisfied with that level of decentralization/democracy - it’s a nice start, but we should strive for reaching at least 50% of people self-hosting an activity pub instance to truly achieve the type of decentralization that serves democracy. Of course, I’m not aware of any activity pub software that can be selfhosted by even 10% of the population, currently, so there’s definitely a lot of work to do before my vision is feasible.
Unironically: the patriarchy. “Women and sex exist to serve men’s interests” thus, pleasuring a women in a manner most often associated with that of a man being pleasured by a women (oral sex aka blowjobs here) is ceding too much power to women.
They’re actually confused why women won’t touch them? Jesus.
My thoughts exactly.
Season 3 of Legend of Korra does this pretty well, though the villains are also united by an ideology that drives them to act.
Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me
Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me
Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me!!!
Those that wear ties are justified
For wearin the suit, you’re the chosen white
Big news! I hope this is from a position of relative trust and not the SDF feeling like they will disappear elsewise.
A second good read is her follow-up/response post: Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization
Artificial Intelligence Image
For some reason it’s hilarious to me that the person who made this flyer felt the need to specify that the ClipArt-level illustration, placed next to 3-4 pictures of the kid the flyer is complaining about, is not, in fact, an actual image of the kid.
I think downvote anonymity is the bigger part of the problem, not downvotes in general. Unless I’m misunderstanding, what you’re proposing amounts to “if you want to downvote in a community you’ll need to make an account on it’s instance”. This would be a nice option to have, but it should also remain an option.
In your +50/-90 example, showing at least the instance provenance for votes allows more (sub)cases. If I can see that 55 of the downvotes come from the instance hosting the community, that’s potentially a very different situation than if only 5 do. Or if 70 of the downvotes come from a pair of instances that aren’t the community host. The current anonymity of these downvotes flattens these nuances into the same “-40”, which I agree isn’t great when it can lead to deletion - but I’d argue that’s also an entirely separate problem that might be better addressed from a different angle. I find that disabling downvotes from other instances entirely flattens things just as much if not more, just not in the same manner. Instead of wondering how representative a big upvote or downvote count is, I’m now wondering how representative a big upvote count is, period. That might seem like 50% less wondering but with no downvotes at all it might also only be about 50% less votes.
I’m not convinced silencing negative outside contributions won’t just shift the echo-chamber-forming to one that’s more based around a form of toxic positivity and/or reddit-style reposts and joke comments, either.
Revealing from which instances downvotes come from doesn’t prevent opinion downvotes but it allows dulling their bite. The same is true for opinion upvotes.
From my understanding votes are more-or-less already somewhat public on lemmy between it’s implementation and what federation needs to function properly. At the very least, each instance knows how many votes they’re getting from the other instances. We should embrace the nuances federation brings to the problem instead of throwing them away entirely.
So much thought has been put into “how do we convey the different instances’ character and their relations to each other to new (potential) users in a way that doesn’t a) overload them and/or b) scare them away with content that rubs them the wrong way” in communities and posts like these, when potentially we just need to render more visible the data that is already present on the instance servers.
I’ll acknowledge up-front that the “just” in the previous sentence is carrying a lot of weight; data viz is not easy on the best of days and votes have so little screen real-estate to work with. On top of that, any UI feature that can make what I’m suggesting palatable and accessible to non-power users would also need to be replicated across most popular clients. They’re written in a motley assortment of programming languages and ecosystems, and range from targeting browsers to native smartphone OSes, so the development efforts would be difficult to share and carry over from one client to the next. Still, they’re called votes: there’s a lot of prior art in polling software and news coverage of elections from the past few years that should be publicly accessible (at least in terms of screenshots, stills, and videos of the UI, if not a working version of it to play around with).
On top of this, I don’t know how much effort this would require on backend devs for lemmy (and kbin/mbin I forget which is the survivor, and piefed, and any other threadiverse instance software I’m currently unaware of). I wouldn’t expect keeping track of vote provenance to prove immensely difficult, but it could cause some sort of combinatorial explosion in the overhead required by the different sorting algorithms proposed (I’m ignorant on how much they cache vs how often they’re run for lemmy, for example).
I can’t foretell if this would “solve” opinion downvotes on it’s own, but I do think it would contribute to the necessary conditions for people to drift away from the more toxic forms of it. It could also become another option for viewing feeds on top of “subscribed”/“local”/“all” + the different vote rankings.
From what I understand its origin in street racing was because japanese drivers (specifically? might have been Asian more generally) were souping up cars to look pretty but still not run great. I’m hazy on the details and my google-fu is failing me - I wish I had a more precise answer but overall I recall being bummed out at how even the origins of the term weren’t as clean as I had hoped.
Math underlies programming in a similar fashion to how physics underlies automobile driving. You don’t ever need to know about newton’s laws of motion to pass your driver’s license and never get a ticket until you die. At the same time, I will readily claim that any driver that doesn’t improve after learning about newton’s laws of motion had already internalized those laws through experience.
Math will help your intuition with how to tackle problems in programming. From finding a solution to anticipating how different constraints (notably time and memory) will affect which solutions are available to you, experience working on math problems - especially across different domains in math - will grease the wheels of your programmer mind.
Math on its own will probably not be enough (many great mathematicians are quite unskilled at programming). Just as driving a car is about much more than just the physics involved, there is a lot more to programming than just the math.
“dise-player, carder”
Ah, so this is probably some law trying to curb gambling-
“tenys player” wait, what? Were people betting on tennis matches back in the day or something?
“What was Windows even doing for us?”
Beautiful 🥲
“I need some more [input] sanitizer for my eczema script, the console is red and inflamed whenever I check it.”
the police say they are targeting the criminals responsible but cannot “arrest their way out of the problem”. They also say manufacturers and tech firms have a bigger role to play.
Even though I fully expect the police here aren’t doing as much as they could (I mean come on, are they expecting phones to come with wiimote hand straps?) , I’m at least glad their public rhetoric is that they can’t “arrest their way out of the problem”.
I imagine that’s poor compensation when you’ve just had your phone snatched, however.
Having just watched the lecture, the only classified info I can recognize is the capabilities of 80s era satellites.
Given that, I think it’s quite a shame that the whole thing is only now available. Rear Admiral Hopper seems to have been someone who deeply understood both computers and people. The prescriptions she gives regarding “systems of computers” and “management” vs “leadership”, to name just two, are spot-on. Her lecture is quite grounded in what I’d call “military thinking”, but that’s just because she’s in a room filled with people who are of that life. In my opinion, everything she talks about is applicable to communities and businesses.
The general gist of the entire ~90mins reminds me of Project Cybersyn in its perspective on how computers could serve society.
The idea is neat, and there is a certain precedent for the approach in .htaccess files and webserver path permissions.
Still, I worry about the added burden to keeping track of filenames when they get used as stringed keys in such a manner. More plainly: if I rename a file, I now have to go change every access declaration that mentions it. Sure, a quick grep will probably do the trick. But I don’t see a way to have tooling automate any part of it, either.
I don’t expect ai/LLM tools to make it easier to create nice looking art, but they should make it easier for anyone to create their own placeholder graphics that at least would allow them to run the game on their own.