https://www.thespherevegas.com/

My guess is the blue screen picture is fake, but it’s still pretty funny.

“Reopen this, or else!”

But they’re carefully avoiding to say or else what. My guess is every next step option would cost them resources at the scale of subreddits they’re reaching out to, so they’re hoping that the empty threat alone will cause some to relent without costing them anything. Right?

20-something years ago, I was a struggling student with a shit side-job and a so-so relationship with my family. Life felt like being a hamster running in a wheel, it felt like there was nowhere to go.

I had dinner with a friend of mine, who announced that he was leaving for a study-abroad year for our last year of masters degree. I was glad for him, but definitely envious, and he told me: “well, do it too then”.

I spent the next 30 minutes trying to explain the myriad of things that were keeping me down in my life, but he dismantled them one by one.

Like:

• “But packing my studio apartment will be tedious…” - “So you’ll live the rest of your life in that apartment?”

• “But money…” - “You know you can take a reasonable loan for this and that it will pay off in opportunities.”

• “But I’m the one keeping everything together at work.” - “And they know it, it’s not in their interest for you to be find a job in your degree’s career. They’ll ask you for favors forever. You should look out for yourself there. It’s probably a good thing to make it stop now and have you be unreachable a while so they can figure it out.” (This was before smartphones.)

• “But my family will hate it.” - “Because they also don’t want to let you go, you should look out for yourself there too.”

He was spot on about everything, and eventually, I had run out of excuses. That night I ended it with a non-committal “I’ll think about it”, but that small conversation started a big train of thoughts that changed everything about how I made decisions. Basically, it turned me from being someone quite risk-averse and shying away from things, to becoming someone unusually risk-seeking and ready to take on opportunities that would present to me as much as I could without letting anything keep me down.

I wasn’t able to join the program he joined because the deadline had passed, so I had to carve out my own study-abroad opportunity, so I did. It was scary and tedious, but it paid off. Interestingly, I now live halfway across the world from where I grew up, and he is back in our hometown. We lost touch over time, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t realize how this small conversation that day changed everything of the path I was on.

Custom-made ear plugs. Even if you only wear ear plugs occasionally (I do when in a noisy hotel, or when a neighbor goes a bit too crazy), they are so worth having.

Basically you go to an audiologist and they put something kinda liquid in each of your ears to take a mold of your ear canals. A couple of weeks later, you have plastic earplugs that have the exact shape of your inner ears.

Upsides: • They work, always. I would typically use wax or silicon disposable ear plugs before that, and sometimes in the middle of the night they might move and let the sound in; those don’t. Also, foam disposable ear plugs don’t stay in my ear, don’t ask me why. • They never hurt. Since disposable ear plugs get shoved into your inner ear until they take the shape, they continuously push against the walls of your ear canals. I would often feel kinda bruised after using them for a long time. • They are crazy comfortable. Put your ear on a pillow, and you barely feel them at all. • But do they block too much sound? That’s up to you. Basically, you choose the level of noise you want to keep out, which I believe is achieved by using different kinds of plastic.

They’re not a trivial purchase (I think mine cost $150), but then you use them for decades, so it’s definitely worth it. It was a stupid purchase in my case, because I bought them on a whim out of anger against my neighbor’s party one night; but they’ve followed me everywhere since!

I once had a conversation under NDA (which has expired since) with an engineer at Apple who was working on iCloud infrastructure, and he was telling me that his team was a bit shocked to read that Dropbox was releasing apps for photos at the time “because they’ve noticed that most of the files users are uploading to Dropbox are photos”. He was like: how do they know that exactly? His team had no idea and couldn’t possibly find out if the encrypted files they were storing were photos, sounds, videos, texts, whatever. That’s what encryption is for, only the client side (the devices) is supposed to know what’s up.

Not having that information meant a direct loss of business insights and value for Apple, since Dropbox had it and leveraged it. But it turns out Apple doesn’t joke around about security/privacy.

I’ve been telling people that the notion that the ER lets poor people die in the US is false; instead, they make you wish you did.

I think it’s spot on. It’s people who were already going through the stages of grief, were kinda stuck in “bargaining” (like: “nah, Twitter is not really dead, it’ll come back”), and the symbolism there about Twitter really being gone-gone fast-tracked them to depression/acceptance.

Engineers who work with very high scale will try to limit the size of operations so that they’re not as resource-intensive as they would otherwise be. For instance, instead of running a data query on the entire database of the service, the data might be sharded (segmented) into several physical databases, so that only the relevant databases get queried, limiting what resources get used.

So, this is what Elon is doing here. Except nobody told him that engineers who are experimented with scale will implement resource limitations that the user doesn’t notice, so it always feels to them that they’re seamlessly interacting with a massive service even when they’re not.

But that only works if you still have engineers experimented with scale on staff…

Software engineer here, of the kind who works for companies similar to Reddit.

I don’t know more than anyone else about their financials, and I can surely believe that Reddit has been wasteful in a lot of ways in the past financial climates, since they didn’t have to optimize for profitability. But I can tell this firsthand: people tend to drastically under-estimate how much constant innovation is required to get past bottleneck after bottleneck just to keep the lights on, on very high-scale services.

Reddit’s scale is humongous, so I can see how it would require hundreds of employees just to keep it up and going.

It’s probably not the only reason, but Rust is a much more attractive language/platform for devs to work with than PHP. (Source: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-admired-and-desired-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages)

It’s also more scalable, because it’s a compiled multi-threaded technology, while PHP is interpreted and mono-threaded.

Reposting what I posted here a while ago.

Companies abiding by the GDPR are not required to delete your account or content at all, only Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Lemmy instances are unlikely to ask for info such as real name, phone number, postal address, etc; the only PII I can think of is the email that some (not all) instances request. Since it’s not a required field on all instances, I’m going to guess that the value of this field does not travel to other instances.

Therefore, if you invoked the GDPR to request your PII to be deleted, all that would need to happen is for the admin of your instance to overwrite the email field of your account with something random, and it would all be in compliance. Or they could also choose the delete your account, if they prefer.

Source: I’m a software engineer who was tasked at some point with aligning multi-billion-dollar businesses to the GDPR, who had hundreds of millions of dollars in liability if they did it wrong and therefore took it very seriously. I am not a lawyer or a compliance officer, but we took our directions from them directly and across several companies, that’s what they all told us.

My understanding is that chances are slim to none. I understand that whatever malfunction happened that cut the contact, has some likelihood to have been a much greater malfunction than just radio, and that they’ve quite possibly already been dead a while.

And even if not, my understanding is that they’re scanning a massive swath of sea and it’s very much a needle-in-a-haystack situation. I wouldn’t be surprised if the only reason such an unlikely operation is taking place, is because the people involved can afford it.

The Kbin creator had initially joined to help Lemmy, but decided to create his own thing when he couldn’t take their political alignments anymore. The Lemmy devs used to be vocal Uyghur genocide deniers and pro-North-Korea, and would answer questions on Reddit’s r/AskATankie (a tankie is someone who supports communist dictatorships), but now that Lemmy is successful, they’ve kind of grown hush-hush on it, without really addressing it.

So, he went to create Kbin, but since he’s not a software engineer, he chose foundations that won’t really scale too well. Kbin is written in PHP, which is an interpreted and mono-threaded technology, it’s great at some stuff, but not high-scale services (source: that’s what I do for a living). Lemmy was written in Rust, which is compiled and multi-threaded. It doesn’t mean Lemmy won’t meet tricky scale bottlenecks, but it will give it a much larger toolset to get through whole classes of them.

And of course, Kbin being much younger, it doesn’t currently have a bunch of critical stuff that Lemmy already has. For instance: an API, which has been allowing other people to build great native clients for it.

So true.

With LLMs, I can think of a few realistic and valuable applications even if they don’t successfully deliver on the hype and don’t actually shake the world upside down. With blockchain, I just could never see anything in it. Anyone trying to sell me on its promises would use the exact words people use to sell a scam.

Yes, but it just got released as part of Lemmy 0.18.0, which isn’t everywhere yet: https://lemmy.world/post/477633

Definitely not a stupid question, it’s a big topic, and there are people whose entire job is dedicated to removing that cruft as much as possible.

At a micro level, for instance if you only look at the people I directly know and work with, there’s actually little cruft at all. We sometimes get stupid wasteful mandates from execs, and they waste a bit of everybody’s time, but it’s rare, and typically very small amounts of time. Other than that, I can tell you what every single person is useful for, and I can’t think of a single person who isn’t pulling their weight.

But at a macro level is the hard part, and I don’t think anyone can really know. An organization can’t scale if it doesn’t get seriously decentralized. As a worker, you need to make bold decisions for yourself and the teams around you, without having to know what the hundreds of other teams are up to. That means I can’t tell you for sure that there isn’t another team far from mine (for instance, from an acquisition or something), who is doing 95% the same thing my team does, but that we don’t know about.

Execs are constantly trying to identify those possible collaborations and introduce relevant teams with each other, but even they can’t know what everybody is doing.

I worked at Apple for a while, and since it’s a very secretive company, they had a very odd way of embracing it completely, which I’ve never seen elsewhere. I worked part-time 3 months on a project, before finding out that a team under the same VP had already solved the problem years ago. I whined about how inefficient it is to my director and he basically told me that unlike other companies, at Apple it’s by design. Basically, they’d rather have duplicate efforts, in order to maintain the project secrecy for the goal of “surprising and delighting” customers, and also in order to find always new and innovative ways to solve problems if the new solution turns out to be better. (Mine definitely was not. 😂) Apple really has an unusual innovation culture in general, I liked some of it, but definitely not that part.

I was on similar threads on Reddit where 90% of the replies were: “do it! do it! who gives a fuck! do it!”, and here the replies seem to be 90% “actually we care about what happens to you, so let’s weigh the pros and cons”. I guess it says a lot about the difference between both communities. 😉

I know it’s a bit late for that, but adding people proactively just in case I need them to vouch for me later is the #1 reason I even have a LinkedIn account.

If you’re too broke to afford a TV, just watch on your phone or laptop.

Tell me you’ve never lived in poverty without telling me you’ve never lived in poverty.

For accuracy, it’s not just about the admins being busy, 0.18.0 removed the signup captcha, which has been crucial for preventing massive bot signups into instances, some number of instances can’t upgrade without that critical downside. The plan is for the captcha to be reintroduced in 0.18.1, so we’re all waiting for that.