You know the phrase "business genius"?

Spez is a business idiot.

He's had money thrown at him from VCs, thousands of people generating content, and administering content for free, sitting on a goldmine of data and goodwill and Community spirit, and he's managed to lose money, burn bridges, and fuck up the whole deal all for thppe sake of chasing a few dollars of API revenue and a bruised ego. All while others make millions and gain significant community support using the exact same data with business models he could have just copied or shared in.

He's had every opportunity. He's fucked it up at every step.

Business idiot.

Fire spez.

The more time I spend on lemmy, the less I'm missing reddit.

Lemmy feels fresher, more positive, and faster. It's a bit rough around the edges, but things will only improve, and there seems to be a large number of people willing to get involved and help out.

Even if the current blackout amounted to nothing, at least Lemmy has had a boost in users and engagement. Lemmy and the fediverse will learn lessons, improve, and fix bugs, and will be here for the next time reddit fucks up, and gain even more users.

I think I'll be staying regardless, reddit has been pissing me off for the last couple of years. It was mainly the lack of a viable alternative that kept me there.

Sp*z has fucked up badly this time. And he will continue to fuck up.

Also a way to harvest personal data and passwords, and drive traffic to instances.

New users tend to register with the busiest servers. So, start your own instance, flood it with fake users to get to the top of the rankings. Tweak Lemmy to store passwords instead of hashes. Allow open registration, sit back and wait for people to sign up with their emails and potentially-reused passwords.

Ranking instances by number of users drives undesirable behaviours all-round.

OMG I can't believe you had the audacity to write an answer about cats in response to a serious question that is clearly about goats.

In addition to other reasons already given, commercial software may contain licensed code, libraries, assets, trademarks, and other IP that cannot legally be given away for free, or under an open source licence.

Sure, it may be possible to strip those things out, but that may leave the software broken or fundamentally changed, and it may be a significant amount of work to do, which am author or publisher is not likely to spend on abandoned software, especially if their free release would compete with any current products.

And many "circles" aren't circles either, but 2D torus approximations. The edge of a true circle is made of infinitesimally small points so would be invisible when drawn. And even if you consider a filled circle, how could you be sure you aren't looking at a 1-torus with an infinitessimally small hole? Or an approximation of all the set of all points within a circle?

Clearly, circles are a scam.

Fair point. And yes, there's just so many ways he could have made money from third party apps and their users without trashing them. The AI explanation just didn't make any sense to me at all.

A business brain would have followed the money. He's just following half-witted ideas/ego. I don't think he really realises or understands what he had.

If its possible to watch the video, then it's possible to watch the video without ads.

Worst case scenario: videos can be downloaded and adverts stripped from them. (If you can watch it, you can copy it.) Would you be prepared to trade, say, a 20 minute timeshift delay on your YouTube videos' initial publish time for no adverts? I would.

Sorry, but this is completely wrong.

Windows has ACLs and they are an important part of Windows administration, and used extensively for managing file permissions.

Windows has supported ACLs on NTFS since Windows NT & NTFS were released in 1993 (possibly partly influenced by AIX ACLs in the late 80s influenced by VMS ACLs introduced the early 80s).

ACLs were not introduced to standard POSIX until c.1998, and NFS and Linux filesystems didn't get them until 2003. In fact, the design of the NFSv4 ACL standard was heavily influenced by the design of NTFS/Windows ACL model -- a specific decision by the designers to model it more like NTFS rather than AIX/POSIX.

Technically, at the filesystem level, exFAT also provides support for ACLs, but I am not sure if any implementation actually makes use of this feature (not even Windows AFAIK, certainly not any desktop version).

In this thread: people who don't understand what power is.

Power isn't something that is "pushed" into a device by a charger. Power is the rate at which a device uses energy. Power is "consumed" by the device, and the wattage rating on the charger is a simply how much it can supply, which is determined by how much current it can handle at its output voltage. A device only draws the power it needs to operate, and this may go up or down depending on what it's doing, e.g. whether your screen is on or off.

As long as the voltage is correct, you could hook your phone up to a 1000W power supply and it will be absolutely fine. This is why everything's OK when you plug devices into your gaming PC with a 1000W power supply, or why you can swap out a power-hungry video card for a low-power one, and the power supply won't fry your PC. All that extra power capability simply goes unused if it isn't called for.

The "pushing force" that is scaled up or down is voltage. USB chargers advertise their capabilities, or a power delivery protocol is used to negotiate voltages, so the device can choose to draw more current and thus power from the charger, as its sees fit. (If the device tries to draw too much, a poorly-designed charger may fail, and in turn this could expose the device to inappropriate voltages and currents being passed on, damaging both devices. Well designed chargers have protections to prevent this, even in the event of failure. Cheap crappy chargers often don't.)

Back in the day, I discovered I could i) print over IR to our office's HP laser printer from my Psion organiser, ii) print control codes from the built-in OPL language to change the display message on the printer. I would occassionaly send messages like "insert coin", "too much paper", "grammatical error", etc. when colleagues were printing.

I took a brief look at the code for this recently.

Hot is similar to the old reddit ranking. A combination of upvote score with a decay over time, starting from when the post was made.

Active is essentially the same ranking, but the fade away is based on the time of the most recent comment on the post. Any new comment will bump it back up, resetting the timer. There is a 48 hour cut off, so posts don't keep getting bumped up indefinitely.

It is possible to an extent with certain breeds, e.g. Egyptian Mau. However, they are curious and skittish so may not follow you everywhere if they find something interesting or get spooked. When you get too far from their known "territory" they may stop and wait for you to come back, (while also yelling at you to come back to the concern of passers-by!).

I used to go for walks with my gf and her egyptian maus. They would follow along like a pride of tiny lions but spread out a bit, so while we walked on paths their parallel routes would go through gardens, over roofs, fields, fences, etc.

In fact it was more of an effort to train them not to follow us everywhere, e.g. to the shops, work, etc. They would often follow neighbours' children to school and back (and sometimes follow the wrong child home and get lost!).

Maus are also more amenable to being on a leash than most breeds, although you need to get them used to it early in life.

The main problem is if they decide to run away from something they are blazingly fast and near impossible to catch and recover from whatever inaccessible perch or hidey-hole they run to. My gf's cats had been trained to return to the sound of jangling keys, but that only worked most of the time.

While a 3 year service contract was clearly overkill, your estimate of 1 hour is ridiculously tiny. Nothing of any worth can be audited with a 1 hour phone call.

Over what time period? How many hours did you need to grind to earn that amount?

Jolly Ranchers

I was once asked by our CTO to remove all instances of the word "nonce" from our crypto code. (British slang for paedophile/pervert)

And writing code to find, kill, and reap orphaned children is routine stuff. I mean, you wouldn't want to risk pesky zombie orphans running amok in your system!

Firefox + uBlock origin, and reVanced for YouTube ad-blocking/other features.

3D printer that can print fully-populated functional electronic devices. Design or download a schematic for, say a new camera or phone, make whatever modifications I want, and just hit print!

Basically a replicator for electronic devices...

I'd never heard of kbin at all until I actually signed up to a Lemmy instance.

I'd heard Lemmy mentioned somewhere before (I've searched for reddit alternatives a few times in the past as I got increasingly annoyed by their pushiness towards the app), but only really took notice of it a few days before the blackout when I saw it mentioned many times on reddit.