What's accessibility like for Lemmy/kbin? I wonder if we could get an early start on accessibility with kbin, since it has a much younger codebase.

I want to offer my perspective on the AI thing from the point of view of a senior individual contributor at a larger company. Management loves the idea, but there will be a lot of developers fixing auto-generated code full of bad practices and mysterious bugs at any company that tries to lean on it instead of good devs. A large language model has no concept of good or bad, and it has no logic. It'll happily generate string-templated SQL queries that are ripe for SQL injection. I've had to fix this myself. Things get even worse when you have to deal with a shit language like Bash that is absolutely full of God awful footguns. Sometimes you have to use that wretched piece of trash language, and the scripts generated are horrific. Remember that time when Steam on Linux was effectively running rm -rf /* on people's systems? I've had to fix that same type of issue multiple times at my workplace.

I think LLMs will genuinely transform parts of the software industry, but I absolutely do not think they're going to stand in for competent developers in the near future. Maybe they can help junior developers who don't have a good grasp on syntax and patterns and such. I've personally felt no need to use them, since I spend about 95% of my time on architecture, testing, and documentation.

Now, do the higher-ups think the way that I do? Absolutely not. I've had senior management ask me about how I'm using AI tooling, and they always seem so disappointed when I explain why I personally don't feel the need for it and what I feel its weaknesses are. Bossman sees it as a way to magically multiply IC efficiency for nothing, so I absolutely agree that it's likely playing a part in at least some of these layoffs.

lol, I'd love to see the fucking ruin of the world we'd live in if current LLMs replaced senior developers. Maybe it'll happen some day, but in the meantime it's job security! I get to fix all of the bugfuck crazy issues generated by my juniors using Copilot and ChatGPT.

That's incredibly impressive! I haven't noticed a single hitch and I've been browsing nonstop for the past hour or so.

John Oliver understands the internet. Like, IMO it's clear he likes it because he posted more exploitable images of himself, but even if he felt ambiguously about it, the best path forward isn't to fight the internet, it's to say nothing, or make a joke of it.

Someone else could learn a lesson from John Oliver.

I wonder if we could find/contact/contract a developer with an accessibility focus. I'm planning on leaving some moderately significant donations in a few days (damn settling periods and bank holidays making that slow), and maybe there could be a community fundraising effort to get an accessibility expert in to submit some PRs. I made a big fuss out of accessibility on Reddit in the lead up to the protest, and it feels hypocritical of me to not keep pushing for it now. Not sure if Ernest would be interested in that or not, but it seems like it might be a good idea.

This is the second time I've seen someone incorrectly refer to chlormequat as a pesticide. It's not a pesticide, it's a chemical that encourages plants to grow thicker stems, which in turn makes harvesting easier.

I don't say this to defend its use. I just feel that it's important to call it what it is.

Perhaps only allow users to post titles and comments that are a command and a line? Like this: ⌘–

EDIT: and have that be the only moderation restriction going forward besides things that would get the subreddit removed. The more relevant the post is to the literal words "command" and "line" and the unicode symbols I posted, the better.

EDIT: correction, I posted an endash. Something like a box drawing line would be better, i.e. ⌘─

As much as I despise Oracle and the lawn mower man known as Larry Ellison, I don't think this is a problem. Oracle also had a lot to do with btrfs, and while that filesystem has problems, they're not the sort of problems usually associated with Oracle (i.e. rapacious capitalistic practices like patent trolling and suing the fuck out of everyone all the time always). Oracle won't own XFS, it's owned by every single person who has ever contributed to that codebase.

I really enjoy this form of protest. The "landed gentry" is giving the users what they want. I really hope that more communities do what /r/interestingasfuck and /r/justnomil have done to deprive Reddit of its advertising revenue.

In addition to the fact that it's not just English via hand gestures, I believe it's done because sign language is speech, with all of the benefits that comes with. There are extra channels of communication present in sign language beyond just the words. There's equivalents of tone and inflection, and (I beleive) even accents. Like, this video of this lady performing "Fuck You" in ASL is what made it click for me when I first saw it many years ago. She's just so fucking expressive, in a way that subtitles could never be.

EDIT: changed my wording to be more accurate, since sign language literally is speech through a different medium. There's no need to draw an unnecessary boundary.

I feel like there's very little to be lost from having more niche hobby communities, at least. Those were the thing I used Reddit for the most, and I feel that they were generally non-toxic.

I hate righty-tighty lefty-loosy. Depending on whether you're looking at the top or bottom of the screw, you can see movement to the right or the left. I hate whoever came up with it, and I wish I had been taught the right hand method. It works exactly the same as the electromagnetic right hand rule:
an example of the right hand rule as it relates to a screw thread

Basically, you take your right hand, stick your thumb out, and curl your fingers like you're grabbing a broom handle. Point your thumb in the direction you want the screw to move to. Want to screw something in? Point your thumb towards the thing. Want to unscrew? Point your thumb away from the object the screw is currently in. Then, just look at the way your fingers are pointing! If it helps, squeeze your fingers into a fist and see which way they move. Alternatively, bend your wrist in, and observe which way your fingers are moving. Works every time.

It sounds complicated, but there are plenty of people who are unable to intuitively differentiate from right and left the way they can differentiate up and down. I am one of those people. Thanks to this method, I've been able to develop the muscle memory/intuition to know which way to turn a screw.

It's important to note that this only works for screws that are "right hand threaded." If the screw is only getting tighter when you're using this method, then it's likely reverse threaded, or left hand threaded. If that's the case, just use your left hand instead of your right hand.

Lemmy, kbin, and Mastodon all speak the same underlying protocol -- ActivityPub. I've found that the best way to think of it is to compare it to email. If I send you an email from my gmail account to your outlook account, it just works (well, mostly, email is a bit of a mess lol) even though the two email clients look vastly different from each other. ActivityPub (and federated protocols in general) are like email, but for twitter/reddit.

There are some different message types (it wouldn't make sense to present twitter-like content in the context of a threaded forum like Reddit), and not all instance types support all the different message types. I'm using kbin (via kbin.social) and I can see Mastodon content, but I'm not sure if Lemmy has that ability.

Not sure if that was helpful, and I hope that others come and fact check me, but that's my understanding of it.

He can definitely speak with a lot of vitriol :/ It's why I stopped watching his videos. I'm glad he's pushing for right-to-repair stuff, but I just couldn't handle the anger and negativity.

Hey @Ernest and @piotrsikora,

I haven't looked too closely at how kbin is architected yet, but would it benefit from horizontal scaling? I do full-time development of tooling to administrate very large k8s clusters for a company that you've probably interacted with today without knowing it. Not sure if k8s is the right orchestration system for you, but I'd be more than happy to provide some input on a potential migration to k8s (if kbin is a good fit there). I know there's a community on Matrix as well — I'll try to reach out there too, although it may be a bit.

There are no free lunches. You want a nice platform? You've gotta pay for it somehow. You want a platform not filled with spam? You gotta keep it clean somehow. Funding and moderation. I really hope that kbin can survive off of donations, and I have already financially contributed fairly heavily in pursuit of that. Ernest is doing the right thing by communicating about these issues early, and often. Part of why Reddit got so fucked up was that there was no community engagement when it came to raising money. That's the nature of all for-profit platforms IMO.
This is where federated, FOSS platforms can do better.

I've been incredibly happy with Kagi. All of the listicles and blogspam get shunted off into their own sections. Kagi also seems to do a pretty good job at finding "deep" results. Like, when I want to find out more information about some home automation gizmo, Kagi does a good job of finding some random blog post where someone has torn the gizmo apart and analyzed every strength and weakness it has. I still prefer Google for looking up restaurants and stuff, but I hardly use it anymore. I don't at all regret the $10 a month I pay to use Kagi.

Edit: I also like that Kagi lets you define rules. Occasionally I'll be forced to go to Reddit to get some information (I really try to go elsewhere first). I deleted my account, so I go to new Reddit by default (which I hate). I don't want to add an extension to redirect to old Reddit, but I can just replace the www with old automagically for all Reddit search results. Works great.

Same here! I upvote/boost a lot more than I did on Reddit, and my threshold for commenting is much lower than it used to be. Part of it is that I want this place to succeed, so I want to help it be more active. I absolutely agree that this community is smaller, friendlier, and less cynical than what we had on Reddit. That's the other part, it's really lowered my threshold of engagement.

Methinks this will pass, or at least get better. Some degree of community centralization will happen. I don't think (and also don't want) complete centralization to happen, but I expect a we'll reach a fairly agreeable middle-ground. Lemmy and the fediverse have been around for a bit, but this is still early days.