So, I was recently banned from a community for being a "serial downvoter". If the votes I've cast there were only downvotes, that surprises me, but I'm looking to gather more information about how, historically, I've voted in that community before I seek an appeal with the mods.

Being banned from that community, I can't see my my votes in that community just by sorting by "new" and scrolling through all posts in the community looking for blue (upvotes) here and orange (downvotes) there to get a rough idea of how much I've upvoted and how much I've downvoted specifically in that community. (And even that sounds like a pain.)

I tried lemvotes.org. It will give me every post and comment I've ever upvoted or downvoted, which is great, I guess, but it's not really easy to see which votes were for what communities. In fact, it's not really easy to see what votes are for what instances. Each vote has an associated link on lemvotes.org to the post (or comment) I voted on, but domain name of the link doesn't necessarily go to the instance that hosts the post. As in (for instance) a post I downvoted that shows up on lemvotes.org with a link to a piefed.zip may take me to a post that was originally posted to a programming.dev-instance community. So the domain of the link doesn't narrow it down any. As far as I can tell, the only option lemvotes.org affords me is to look exhaustively at all of my votes, click the link for each of them, take note of what instance/community the vote was cast on, and keep a tally of upvotes/downvotes only for the community I'm particularly concerned with, which would be super time consuming. And I haven't found any better options.

But I haven't really found any better options, and I'm hoping you folks might have an idea or two. I guess worst case, I can DM the mod without getting this information, but I'd really rather go into that conversation a little more informed. (And, I suppose, if I find out that the only votes I've cast in that community are downvotes, I might decide not to even pursue an unban. But I'll see what I can find out, at least.)

Sorry for the long story, here.

Yesterday, I fixed the washing machine. (Long story. Turned out to be the clutch, which is more of a pain to fix -- requires more disassembly -- than most other common fixes.) During the process, I jostled it and something metal fell out. A cotter pin sort of thing.

My mother checked on me while I was working on it and I mentioned the piece that fell out. She went and started researching about it. (Not something I asked her to do. I would have done the research myself had she not done so. But it didn't hurt anything to have her research. Or so I thought.)

She comes back 10 minutes later and says "this thing is a super important piece that holds something together somewhere. Better figure out where it fell out of." I looked her in the eye, knowing her penchant for reading Google AI overviews and asked "is that from the AI overview?" "No" came the answer. "Oh, some random forum or something?" "Yeah."

She leaves, I go back to the washing machine. (There was plenty I could still do even without an answer to the mystery of the random piece falling out.)

10 minutes after that she hollers from the other room. "Nevermind. It's packing material that isn't needed after the washing machine is installed." She'd found Reddit post where someone had a similar experience with the same exact kind of part falling out of their washer of a very similar model. Mind you, my washing machine is decades old, so I'm a little surprised it would still have parts that were only for packing/shipping, but whatever. Not really implausible at all.

Fast forward to today. She's telling me how she told her friend about the mystery part, and she let slip that "when she checked the references" she found on Reddit that it was a useless piece contrary to what it said first.

"References."

Random forum posts don't have "references." Google's AI overview pretends it can give you "references" telling you where it got the "knowledge" it used to generate an answer. (But it's bad about misinterpreting references, and I have to imagine when it provides references, those are complete guesses. Everything I've heard is that "knowing" where it got the information that went into whatever answer it generated just isn't how LLMs work.)

I brought up that she'd told me the first thing she saw that said it was super important wasn't an AI overview. And she admitted it had been.

And, honestly, I find it hard to describe how absolutely livid I am about it. I've asked her many times not to parrot AI overviews to me. (Whatever she wants to put in her brain is no business of mine, but I don't want her polluting my brain with that bullshit.) She regularly ignores my wishes and continues to read me AI overviews. It pisses me off, but I've learned to swallow it.

But I can't express just how huge a betrayal it feels like to be told AI bullshit and then lied to about whether it was AI bullshit. I'm a lot calmer about it than I was at first, but an hour ago, I was shaking.

I was very calm with her about it, though I'm sure my face was super red. I asked her pointedly not to lie to me about where she gets her information, but I don't expect any change in her behavior moving forward. 😐

I hope not very many of you are wondering WTF awkward interactions have to do with privacy, but hopefully the following examples make it clear to any of you who are wondering that.

Story 1

So, I go to sign up for a bank account at <insert big-ass household-name (in the U.S.) bank name here>. As soon as I walk in the door and tell the person I want to sign up for a checking account, they say "ok, let's get you set up with the app."

Now, I was running Lineage at the time with no Google apps. Just F-Droid and stuff I could install from there. I had yet to install any proprietary apps on my phone. (Not necessarily saying there was nothing proprietary running on my phone. I'd be surprised if Lineage doesn't depend on some binary blob drivers and such for my particular phone. But still, my rule was "no proprietary apps." And even if I decided to break that rule at the time, I kindof doubt the bank's app wouldn't just refuse to work without Google Play Services.)

My mistake was to say "it won't work on my phone" rather than "I'm not interested in the app; can I still get a bank account here?" They pushed it hard. "It's Android, right?" "...Technically, but not the way you're-" "Ok, go to the Play Store." "I don't have the Play Store." "Let me see your home screen." (My second mistake was not ending that line of conversation there with a "no, just give me a bank account.")

Before it was all said and done, I'd scanned their QR code and hit the "install" button so I could show them the error message that resulted. It wasn't until then that they dropped it.

I honestly wonder if they didn't get a commission when folks installed the app.

Lesson learned. Don't say "my phone's weird and it won't work." Say "I'm not installing the app. The only question that remains is whether that means I'm taking my business elsewhere or not."

Story 2

Much more recent. Same phone, but by that point I'd switched to Ubuntu Touch. My phone just stops working as a phone abruptly. No calls or texts.

(The astute among you may already be thinking "oh, probably the carrier dropped 2G/3G support and now requires VoLTE." And if you're thinking that, congratulations you get 100 internet points, but don't spoil it for the rest of the class.)

Now, I've always been really nervous about cell phones. About the time they started being ubiquitous (back in the days of Nokia candy-bar phones with black-and-white LCD displays), I had just quit Windows for OpenSuSE, and then not long after that, Gentoo. And when cell phones started becoming smart phones, stuck with the dumbest phones I could find in the used-phone bin at the phone repair place in the mall. In other words, I was (and largely still am) Amish for QWERTY.

So, I honestly don't know shit about cellular communication technologies because I've never really used them. I've literally never had a data plan. I'm still grandfathered in on a no-data prepaid plan with my carrier that isn't available any more.

Anyway, back to my current story where my phone wasn't working. I had gotten a message a while previous that my SIM card (a physical SIM) would stop working at some point and I had to get a new SIM card. And my SIM card was super old. It was one I'd had to cut down to size and everything. I hadn't followed through on the SIM card replacement, so I figured that was the issue.

I don't have an online/web account with my carrier. And I still have never installed any proprietary apps on any phone, so I didn't have my carrier's official app. The chat and phone support wouldn't help me because they couldn't get proof that I was me. (They required text-message-code authentication, but my phone didn't work, so I couldn't receive the text.) They referred me to the T-Mobile store to get a new SIM card that would ostensibly work.

So, I suppressed my gag reflex and walked into the T-Mobile store. At the door, they asked me some basic questions and entered me into the queue. They told me it'd be 15 to 20 minutes of wait time.

I went and had a seat to wait. Well over an hour later, I finally asked someone for an updated wait time estimate. I'd apparently slipped through the cracks because as a prepaid customer, I appear on a different wait queue in their software than other customers. But at least prompting them got me attended to.

I told them the whole situation. I was glad they didn't try to push me to get a new phone and plan. And they did give me a new SIM card. But when they found out I was running Ubuntu Touch, they referred to it as a "bootleg rom", intimated that I might be doing something shady (because custom roms can supposedly "break the rules" and... I dunno get calls for free or some shit, I don't know), and warned me strongly to be very careful with what data I store on the phone. (As if a stock-firmware phone is completely trustworthy. Heh.)

Not only that, but the new SIM card didn't resolve the issue. Reverting to the stock firmware did. VoLTE is the only thing Ubuntu Touch doesn't support on that phone. So now I either stick on the stock firmware until that red x turns into a green checkmark or try to figure out if Lineage supports VoLTE on the Pixel 3a as a stop gap until I can go back to Ubuntu Touch.

Anyway, those are my stories. I'd love to hear more such painful interactions with "normies" who don't understand why you wouldn't use Facebook or smart kitchen knives that won't work without WIFI or what have you.

My employer just laid off a huge amount of the IT department where I work a year or two ago. I survived it, but today they announced they're going to require everyone to come back into the office. And coincidentally they're opening a new office in India. (Their first office outside of north/central America. And they do no business/sales in India and have no plan to start. Pay no attention to the fact that the going rate for labor in India is a fraction of a fraction of what we're paid in the U.S.)

It's painfully obvious that they're just trying to incentivize people to leave on terms that aren't considered "termination" for purposes of... say... unemployment benefits payment and such.

So, now I'm in the market for a job. It'll basically have to be full-time remote for reasons. And I super don't relish the idea of becoming a vibe coder. Nor job hunting in the current market.

Stressful bullshit.

I'd never heard of this artist until today. This song wasn't billed as a "Nerdcore" song (but it totally is). I don't know if any of their other content is Nerdcore or not. But I'll be listening to find out.

It's just the sweet version of sauerkraut.

Is it a certain number of days? Until it smells off? Until it's got visible mold?

40, cis, never been sexually active.

I feel like I'm crazy for even asking this. When I try to google for anything about anxiety from not masturbating, all I get are a) results about anxiety/guilt from masturbating, b) articles about how women shouldn't feel inhibited from masturbation (which is great, mind you, but not what I'm looking for), c) things about social/relationship things with regard to masturbation, d) alt-right #nofap propaganda, and e) just stuff that seems completely irrelevant to what I'm talking about. I just generally haven't had any luck finding any similar experiences or information about anything remotely like this online.

But I feel like I've been caught in a vicious cycle for a while now. I randomly skip a day or two, feel demotivated, and end up not masturbating for a week or more just because I'm so depressed and anxious and completely not in any sort of mood to do so. A part of me has thought that maybe it's just natural that at 40 my sex drive should be lower, but every time I start masturbating daily again, my mood improves until the next time I skip for a day or two and the doldrums take hold.

I don't think this is any kind of OCD thing where I'm making myself anxious by obsessing that I'm not horny or that I'm not masturbating either.

This isn't new, really. I've known for many years that I get depressed if I don't masturbate. But it's much more pronounced now than it used to be by a long shot.

Another thing I wonder is whether this might be an indicator of low T. I've heard some sources say (though they're mostly drowned out by the cacophony of bro-science #nofap bullshit to the contrary) that masturbation does boost testosterone, at least acutely. Maybe (lots of speculation here, but) masturbating regularly keeps my baseline testosterone levels closer to normal than not masturbating does and if I don't masturbate for a while, my testosterone levels dip lower for longer periods, worsening symptoms. And if that's the issue, maybe TRT would be warranted. (IANAD. Can you tell?)

It's just really weird how the whole internet doesn't seem to know that's a thing that can be, but it's a major part of my day-to-day experience.

Is this anything that anyone here can relate to or give any insight into at all?

This actually happened a while ago, but it came to mind again recently. It was at the grocery store and my internal monologue thereafter went something like:

• "Oh I got a compliment! That's going to make my whole day!"
• "Wait, what shirt am I wearing again?"
• "Right, my Gorillaz t-shirt." (It's a... I think phase 6 shirt, so not a terribly old shirt or anything.)
• "Yeah, I like this shirt too!"
• "That guy was kindof old. It's cool that there are old people who listen to Gorill-"
• "Oh. Oh no."

I very much believe the world needs more DSLs for doing traditionally-point-and-click-adventure kind of operations in an easily auditable, reproducible, parameterized, precise, and programmatic way.

This is my first significant project in service of being the change I want to see in the world. (It's a few years old at this point, but I wanted to show/tell it anyway.) It's a DSL for making simple web comics and story boards.

This is a "scratch my own itch" kind of project. I was GM'ing a 5e game and I do my notes digitally. I have a system for managing my GM'ing notes in digital form that translates extended-syntax Markdown into HTML pages for me to reference at the table. (Yes I should open-source that as well, but I haven't gotten to it yet.) And my brain absorbs a story board way quicker than text. So I wrote codecomic and added some code to my GM notes system to let me just embed codecomic source code in the markdown such that it would render the comics to images and embed them in the HTML. That all took me from "ok, hold on everybody while I read the next paragraph of dense text about what's going down over the next 5 seconds of in-game time" to getting all the same information at a glance. (I still had bulleted lists of more reference information surrounding the story boards, but the story boards really improved the flow of the game.)

Go is my (no pun intended) go-to language for most things lately, and codecomic is written in Go. (I don't know quite what to call the codecomic program. "Interpreter"? "Runtime"? "Engine"? "Processor"? Maybe just "program".)

So, I'm writing a piece of software (in Go). Specifically, a domain-specific language (DSL) for making 3D models. (Roughly speaking, what I'm going for is that what I'm building is to Blender as OpenSCAD is to FreeCAD. You write code in a language I'm designing and it uses that code to build and spit out, for instance, 3d game assets with textures, normal maps, rigging, animations, etc.)

I intend to publish it under a FOSS license once it reaches roughly an "alpha" stage. (Once it's actually usable to create generate meshes and export them as files of a couple of different popular 3d file formats.)

I intend at some point to support both interpreting and transpilation of my DSL into Go. As in, you can write code and execute it with something like modelgen run program.mg, or you can transpile it into Go and run it with modelgen transpile program.mg program.go ; go run program.go. (Yes, I get this is pretty ridiculously ambitious, but at least it's good to have a star to set my bearing to.) One potential feature of the transpilation approach is that a game developer could write some code in my DSL for generating models on the fly, transpile it to Go, and then build that Go code directly into the binary of a game they write in Go for purposes of generating models on the fly at runtime. (Based on, say, a list of parameters that the game provides at runtime. "The biome here is cold, so let's generate some humanoid figures with lighter skin to soak up limited light and stockier, stubbier purportions who might appear better able to conserve their body heat. And maybe we generate some wolves with really thick fur that blends into the snowy environment well. Oh, but the biome over there is a hot desert, so let's have some humanoid figures with darker skin to better handle harmful solar radiation.") Making that work properly would also involve building somewhere between "a lot of" and "all of" of my DSL's standard library into their application.

As to the license, first off, I think copyleft is a fucking awesome idea and I want to leverage it to make sure that my DSL is never used to subjugate users or developers, and to promote a cooperative means of development. Given that I have such warm fuzzies for copyleft, my main contenders are: AGPLv3, GPLv3, and LGPLv3.

I've heard Stallman talks in which he indicated that the reason the LGPL was developed in the first place was "strategic", which leads me to believe that less stringent copyleft provisions in service to greater adoption can indeed ultimately serve the cause of increasing users' freedom. (Stallman isn't exactly the most "practical" and "flexible" sort of guy in a lot of regards, so for him to recognize this face makes it seem important.) So I suppose one argument for using the LGPL is to allow other developers to publish software using my project in a way that allows them to keep their code proprietary, even if users who receive a copy of their software still have the right to demand a copy of the source code of all components of my DSL's codebase (including any potential changes/improvements to my DSL's codebase) that might have been included.

Does using the GPL or AGPL, however, mean that if they either statically or dynamically link my code into their program, their whole program becomes a derivative work covered by the (A)GPL? And if so, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

I definitely would love to see a future in which some big/popular game includes a good portion of my AGPL software in the server side of their MMO and players who connect to the official servers are able to demand the source code of the entire server codebase, enabling the game to be modified and improved, and enabling continued playability even after the developer of the game has EOL'd it and shut down official servers. Or if I use the GPL and a game company sells a game with a bunch of my code in it, I'd love for users to discover they have the right to the source code of the whole game and not just the part that is from what I wrote. But honestly, I'm not sure if that's quite how it works.

I guess the main argument to prefer AGPL over GPL is just that it afforts users more freedom and more rights to assert their freedoms than the GPL does. But one major downside I can see is that developers may well see that "A" on the front and completely disregard using my code in their code as an option, making their software entirely proprietary.

Beyond that, I don't want to see any future version of my DSL become proprietary. If some day a very small number of people own the copyright on my code and they conspired to change the license to something proprietary (like, say, Redis did for a while), I think that'd be a bit of a travesty. Which is why I intend for the copyright on contributions from others to be owned by the contributors. A diverse mishmash of different copyright owners for different tiny slivers of the codebase makes it somewhere between "a lot harder" and "impossible" to change the license later. And that's a feature, not a bug. (See also "Ulysses pact".) And if I want to make it harder to change the license in the future, that kindof implies that it behooves me to choose the right license now before it's difficult to change my mind later.

So, I'm hoping some folks here have had the same choice to make at some point in the past, or at least have been involved in such decisions in the past, and might have some insight that might help me choose what's best. I do think probably AGPL would best let me sleep at night, but something like LGPL might well in practice much better preserve the freedoms of downstream users in a more concrete way. I'm not sure!

Thanks in advance for any input whatsoever!

Edit: I'm learning a lot about sheep dogs.

The man who brought us Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns has now written the book (literally!) on "vibe coding".

Brothers, sisters, siblings, today we are truly lost.

I'm watching Campaign 4 as it comes out. (I don't have a Beacon subscription, so I'm catching it live on Thursdays. Except it goes later than my bedtime, so I save half of each episode until the following Monday when it releases on YouTube.)

But aside from that, I've watched all of the first campaign (Vox Machina) and I'm nearly done with the second campaign (Mighty Nein). I'm planning to take a little break from binging old Critical Role content and just keep up with Campaign 4. But at some point I do intend to come back to binging old Critical role content.

I have yet to start Campaign 3 (Bells Hells). And I'm faced with a choice. I could grind through 122 episodes of the actual campaign. But they also have the abridged version that I could watch instead. It'd save a lot of time.

But I don't necessarily know how much of value I'd miss by just watching the abridged version.

So what would folks in this community do in my position? Abridged or the full campaign? I know which way I'm leaning currently, but I'm interested to hear people's opinions as well.

No idea what the deal is here.

This is on my slightly modded Creality Ender 3 Pro. (It's got a CR-Touch, better springs, a metal extruder assembly, an upgraded official Ender 3 Pro motherboard with quieter stepper controller capability. Nothing all that invasive.) Identical gcode worked perfectly fine on my Ender 3 V2 Neo. (Which is sufficiently similar that gcode is interchangeable.) I've used that particular roll of filament for other prints before and had no issues. And the same printer has given me no other similar issues with other prints, including prints that were taller than where it failed on these photographed prints.

After the one on the right failed, I assumed it was a clog and did a cold pull. The second print (still on the bed) started out just fine, but started underextruding the same way at almost exactly the same place. I say "almost" because looking closely in person, it does look like the second started underextruding just maybe 3 to 4 layers later than the first.

I suppose it's possible it was a second clog at almost exactly the same place on the second print, but it's pretty coincidental if so. Plus recovering spontaneously on that second print is pretty weird.

I dunno. Just very weird and I'm hoping folks here have an idea what I might look into to find a solution. Thanks in advance!

Also, just a few more images in case it helps:

Update (finally): Thanks to all who commented. I printed it again with different filament and it printed fine. I'll probably give the offending filament a dry, but I probably don't have enough of it to try another print, so I may not get confirmation that was the (only) issue. Anyway, I'm happy it's not some painful configuration thing, though. Thanks again for the input!

Edit: After I posted this, I found out there are serious questions about how true any of this is. See here for more info. But also, self-serving propaganda is pretty strongly on-brand for anything in the "aRtIfIcIaL iNtElLiGeNce"(tm) space.