Spyke

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reddit

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On bringing more users to Lemmy

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More than that - it would strain the nascent communities

Already we've started to see it with defederation - admins don't truly grasp the level of seriousness it represents, and are using it as a mod tool. It's one thing to use it against bots and malicious nodes, it's another to use it like a ban hammer

Plus, if you go on different servers, the experience is like a different site. Sh.itjust.works feels like shitpost central (not a criticism), lemmy.world feels like Reddit from a decade ago, lemmynsfw.com feels like a porn site built for tens of thousands and used by dozens.

I think it's great - half the draw of the fediverse is finding a new home, soon I'm going to start trying out some small servers and hopefully get to know some people alongside my accounts replacing the endless posts of Reddit (but with better quality IMO)

If a big wave comes all at once, it'll change the culture overnight. Small servers might close registration to preserve what they have, bigger ones might grow into it, but it also might be enough people to give the entire fediverse the feel of Reddit refugees

Once the culture becomes more stable, we're more likely to teach them the Lemmy way rather than rebuilding Reddit... It'll change no matter what as it grows, but the more gradual and organic the growth the healthier the community

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For my first post on Lemmy, I present the last post I made on Reddit 11 years ago. Thank you to everyone that has made the fediverse happen.

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I have an interesting protocol for this.

Moonlight rituals. The idea is, you get a bunch of people together, say 20-50, in the same place at the same time. Everyone opens an app, and it takes control of the screens and gives semi-random actions - like hold up your phone to the user to the left of you, get everyone in a circle with phone screens on your chest and walk forward, enter the middle of the circle and slowly spin around, hold it up to take a picture of the moon...

The idea is, you constantly change the screen, take synchronized pictures, record audio, get flickers in gps signals, record fluctuations in the magnomiter.

The idea is to synchronize everything with millisecond precision, randomly take snapshots both across the group and between groups, and use all this to corroborate the fact that there was one user per phone present at this point in space and time. By using reality to generate enormously complex data sets, you can make it arbitrarily difficult to simulate, and doing it in real time could use cheap hardware and require processing orders of magnitude faster to spoof.

Doesn't matter how much processing you throw at it - a system like this would theoretically be able to measure gravity waves and stellar radiation - no way you to measure that and adjust your data before you time out the recording window

On top of nodes doing all this, you'd build a web of trust with random nodes spot-checking each other.

It's crazy and impractical, but I love the idea just because it's turning technology to magic - making group rituals to authenticate is just such a fun concept to me

news

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This is not a forecast for 50 years time, it’s happening today.

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On one hand yeah, I'd look at us pretty dimly from the outside

On the other, we've been kinda fucked. Our mental health is in the gutter, we're unable to make connections the way every other generation could, we're missing all these milestones like buying a house and having kids and older generations keep telling us it's our fault.

Even as far as voting, we've been fucked. Previous generations had a choice - we get an ultimatum

They just keep gaslighting us.

We don't have the money, we don't have the power, but we do have the numbers and as a group we're not ok... Frankly, there's no way this ends well. It's hard to comprehend how the powers that be haven't realized that and thrown us a bone now and again

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Morgan Stanley credits Bidenomics for 'much stronger' than expected GDP growth

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Biden was old in 2020, he was old in 2016 too. So was Trump.

Nominating younger options would be great... Except we have 2 parties who have special rights and few restrictions - they can straight up throw out nominations if they want, and they've convinced the public at large that 3rd parties aren't an option

We need ranked choice voting desperately.

Personally, I also think all votes should be write-in. If you don't know which office they're running for and can't spell your candidates name correctly, you haven't met a very low bar of education on the topic. Maybe your vote shouldn't count

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Anarchists should rethink common vs private property

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North America, South America, central America, the Pacific islands... The list goes on.

This isn't some kind of metaphysical crap, they respected the land so it would provide for them. Respect in this context means you're mindful of what you take, and you plant the seeds to help more grow down the line. You hunt the herd, but you also chase off predators and make sure it stays healthy.

Some of them didn't have to take food with them when they traveled, because over generations they stocked the forest with edible plants. They knew how to, but they often didn't have to plow the soil because their ancestors artificially selected for the environment into being great for humans

They surrounded themselves with food forests. The uneaten food draws in animals too, making for easy hunting. No worries of depleting the soil, you don't have to work the land, you just walk around and gather what you need

It's very efficient and probably what humans did in most places that had good conditions. You get to spend most of the day on your hobbies and hanging out. They had trade networks from Argentina to the Pacific Northwest. They had advanced math and their technology was moving at a reasonable speed. They had hundreds of thousands of people, and plenty of room to grow

Farming has one advantage - a small group working their asses off can feed a much larger group. That let's you field big armies with bupply lines, and then you can turn the "savage" land into farmland, and extract profit from it while denying their food source

Their situation wasn't unique, every indigenous people either had forest gardens or managed herds of wild animals. They even had empires like the incas and the Maya, who were able to build roads, pyramids, and floating cities with huge populations

That's why they started wars when people started killing buffalo for profit and leaving the meat to rot - they were willing to share because they had more than enough due to generations of work, and profiteers slaughtered their food source for no good reason. It wasn't moral outrage, it was an extensional threat

They rejected the idea of ownership of the land because it wasn't theirs to exploit, it belonged to future generations. And that's why our generation is fucked, because capitalism isn't about efficiency, it's about maximization

linux

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Is there really no viable alternative for Photoshop on Linux?

IDK if you can convince it to run on Linux, but I've been pretty happy with paint.net lately

It's basically a newer project like gimp. It's got the core abilities and appearance of Photoshop. Feature wise, it's less than gimp or Photoshop, but what it has works decently well

Most importantly for me, the UX is much better than gimp... Not as good as Photoshop, but I find stuff is usually where I'd expect it to be

Obviously it's built on .net, so theoretically it could run native on Linux... Not sure if anyone has done the work to make that actually happen

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Those of you who shower barehanded: Do you lather and then use your hand, or just shove the soap wherever it needs to go?

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Huh... I'm a huge proponent of brushing your tongue (it doesn't take much, just a brush with a scraper on the back makes a big difference). I've never really tried washcloths, but now I'm going to give them a shot

On the flip side, my skin is weird. I get hives for literally no reason, I tried one of those plastic poofs and it makes me itch like crazy.

🤞

world

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New Covid wave has begun and masks should be worn again, scientists warn

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Oh, the global economy is going to break regardless. China is physically and economically collapsing right now, and it's going to have huge knock-on effects

Meanwhile, we still don't even have a consensus that long COVID is a thing. I definitely feel slightly foggier long after the fact, it seems to me that it might be less about COVID doing something special - maybe all illnesses chip away at long-term health, and COVID put a lot of people in a state much worse than the flu and got us thinking about it.

Or maybe COVID has unique mechanisms, but it seems to me there's an assumption - why do we assume that once we recover, we get all the way better? If anything, I think it might be the opposite - there's plenty of people in my life who never felt the same after getting an illness, but no one talks about it in a unified enough way to give it a name

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Anon talks about Joe Rogan

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He's not an idiot or anything, but he's pretty ignorant about a lot of topics, particularly science. He's quick on the uptake, but he isn't good at understanding how things fit together

That's fine, it's a fantastic way to do interviews. It's a stand-in for the audience - he says "I'm a dumb guy good at punching, so can you break it down really simple?" People that are sharp don't feel patronized, and people that are actually dumb feel it's much more approachable

The problem is somewhere along the way, Joe started believing people were there for him and not the guest, and he started doing more talking and less listening when he doesn't agree with what's being said (especially since he has some pretty bad takes)

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What would happen if caffeine was made illegal?

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Have you ever had coca tea? It's amazing - way better than caffeine. It's more gentle, but stronger - like it gives you more energy, but you don't get a hard crash, it's less likely to make it hard to sleep, plus it has all sorts of health benefits - being able to adjust to high altitude for one

Cocaine probably shouldn't be sold at the drug stores, but it would be amazing if we treated it like caffeine - you need a license to buy it, but you can get the leaves or products made for it

Plus we could make a path to legitimize cartels and stop getting people killed over the the war on drugs, which would be nice

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direct messages in jerboa?

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My big thought is this: one bot-infested instance could get anyone up to infinite "karma". So, direct "karma" doesn't work.

Now, you could do some simple stats, and be like "how many lemming's worth of karma do you have, taking an instance's active population divided by your share of 'karma'".

IDK - I like stupid internet points. I never cared how much other people had of them, but it's fun to watch mine go up. It's gamification in the most pure state - quantifying something to make it more pleasurable

I think it's best they remain pointless, and someone's 'karma' only appear when you click on their profile... but it'd be a shame if there was no way to earn them. Even if you received a total per-server, it's just fun

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*Permanently Deleted*

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There's a Linux phone by pine, people on here seem to like them a lot. I wanna get their $30 watch and $200 tablet when I get some cash - it seems like they make all the things I've always wanted, super hackable Linux hardware in a nice form factor and low price

The specs on their phones don't look amazing, but the cheapest one is $100 - low enough I might give it a try if I like their other stuff. Now, if only they'd make a hud that drives your phone without shooting for head tracking... Just something you can read and scroll with