SpaceCadet

SpaceCadet , 2 days ago

you just need to get in the habit of plugging in like you would your phone

Yeah but not everyone lives in suburbia with ample plug-in options available to them. Where I live the street-side charging spots are usually occupied, and the parking spot that I rent has no charging.

For journey’s long enough for it to be more than a single charge you really should be stopping for more than a few seconds anyway as you need recharging.

True to some extent, I have to check my travel logs but I do feel like stopping for an hour every 300km or so is longer and much more often than I would normally stop on long road trips. My (diesel) car has a range of well over 1000km so often I stop for only 15 minutes for a coffee and to stretch my legs, or just for a restroom stop and a driver swap. We usually plan just one big stop (1h) for dinner. Most destinations I've been to I could reach without refueling at all.

There's also the issue of contention for charging spots. On gas stations near the big highways towards popular destinations you often already have to queue to get gas. This will become worse when EVs become common place and people occupy a charging spot for an hour instead of a fuel pump for 30 seconds to top up.

Little anecdote: every year around the holiday season, there are several company wide e-mails from EV driving co-workers requesting to swap cars (with a co-worker who has a CE car) to go on holiday. So I think the practical experience may not be as rosy as you paint it.

SpaceCadet , 2 days ago

At a stretch, I guess you could say that a battery that's going bad doesn't make a sound.

But yes, electric motors are way more reliable than internal combustion engines and objectively superior. You would never use an ICE over an EE for any application where you have a reliable supply of electricity.

SpaceCadet , 2 days ago

Hmm, I can't say that I've ever noticed this. I have a 3950x 16-core CPU and I often do video re-encoding with ffmpeg on all cores, and occasionally compile software on all cores too. I don't notice it in the GUI's responsiveness at all.

Are you absolutely sure it's not I/O related? A compile is usually doing a lot of random IO as well. What kind of drive are you running this on? Is it the same drive as your home directory is on?

Way back when I still had a much weaker 4-core CPU I had issues with window and mouse lagging when running certain heavy jobs as well, and it turned out that using ionice helped me a lot more than using nice.

I also remember that fairly recently there was a KDE/plasma stutter bug due to it reading from ~/.cache constantly. Brodie Robertson talked about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCoioLCT5_o

SpaceCadet , 5 days ago

A... are you all women? Or are men like supposed to shave their legs too and somebody forgot to tell me?

SpaceCadet , 5 days ago

Of course, my comment was mostly intended humorously.

At the same time, social norms and customs do exist and while anyone is free to ignore them, I was also curious if it had become common for men to shave their legs when wearing shorts.

SpaceCadet , 9 days ago

What if you really want a warm hug but you only have the choice between a poke in the eye with a sharp stick and not a poke in the eye?

You still choose "not a poke in the eye", dumbo.

SpaceCadet , 8 days ago

Do you really want me to answer that for you? Is it really that hard to think for yourself?

Alright then... You get either one or the other, there's no way out of that whether you make a choice or not. Wouldn't you still want to influence the choice so you get the one that hurts a lot less?

SpaceCadet , 8 days ago

You can't imagine how wrong you are.

I say defederate the fucking bastards.

SpaceCadet , 8 days ago

Those communities should be urged to move away from lemmy.ml.

SpaceCadet , 7 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

I am one of the victims of the censorship you say doesn't happen, so I am banned on lemmy.ml for making a comment about the Tiananmen Square massacre.

replied to the wrong comment

SpaceCadet , 7 days ago

Where did I say that censorship does not happen?

You didn't, I got your comment mixed up with what someone else said on another comment chain, and I apologize.

SpaceCadet , 10 days ago

I read that as librarians and was very confused.

SpaceCadet , 10 days ago

So this is a huge pet peeve of mine: Flemish is not a separate language. It refers to a region inside of Belgium where Dutch is the official language. The Dutch and the Flemish share the same standard language.

I know dialects exist, and those can be considered a language on their own, but there is no unified Flemish dialect. West-Flemish for example is distinctly different from other dialects spoken in Flanders like Brabandic or Limburgish, and variants of Limburgish and Brabandic dialects are spoken in large areas of the Netherlands as well. So it doesn't make sense to create a distinction between "Dutch" and "Flemish".

https://feddit.nl/pictrs/image/dfb5d748-d831-4af8-895e-70e119a072cf.png

The differences are on the level of American English vs. Australian English vs. British English. Or Austrian German vs. Swiss German vs. Bavarian German vs. North German ... So if those are not singled out, it doesn't make sense to separate Flemish from Dutch.

SpaceCadet , 12 days ago

If human skin was sometimes completely patterned

If?

Gingers would like to have a word with you.

SpaceCadet , 12 days ago

If you use shred instead of rm to delete a file, the contents should be unrecoverable for all practical intents and purposes.

I don't believe shred can work recursively on a directory structure, like rm, so you'll have to cobble something together with the find command I guess.

SpaceCadet , 14 days ago

Wait until you hear about Sesame street!

SpaceCadet , 14 days ago

But emoji's are not derived from the Simpsons. They're derived from the yellow smiley face ideogram that originated in the 1960s, it was designed by the artist Harvey Ball.

It's yellow, not because it's supposed to represent whiteness, but because the company colors of the State Mutual Life Assurance Company it was designed for were yellow and black, and because it feels sunny, bright and positive. It's an anthropomorphized representation of the Sun, and does not represent a human with a specific skin color.

Image

SpaceCadet , 14 days ago

My point is that everyone, who is being honest at least, interprets the Simpsons as being white. Do you think they’re white?

Yes, from the context it's crystal clear that they're white, they could be purple or green and they'd still be "white", but I think it's not relevant in a discussion about emojis.

As I said, it’s no surprise the default emoji is closest to white skin. Even if that association comes from the Simpsons, emojis didn’t come out until decades after the Simpsons became a cultural mainstay.

My point is that yellow smiley faces have been a cultural mainstay independent of the Simpsons, and that you grossly overestimate the worldwide cultural impact of the Simpsons. Most of the non-US world didn't even get the Simpsons on TV until the mid 1990s, while smiley face t-shirts and pins were all the rage in the late 1980s and 1990s. Source: I wore them myself when I was a kid, and from your comment I'm guessing you weren't born yet.

And decades? The Simpsons started in 1989, while the first instant messengers already had smiley face emoticons in the mid 90s.

SpaceCadet , 14 days ago

The Simpsons came out in 88. You are saying most of the world got the Simpsons about half a decade later. I would say this proves the exact opposite of your point and that it is a huge world cultural phenomena. I’m shocked that I’m having the defend the Simpsons as one of the most important and impactful TV shows of all time.

My point is, I didn't even hear about the Simpsons until I was in Uni, which puts it around 1995-ish, but I sure knew what a yellow smiley was.

Emoticon != emoji. Characters don’t have skin tone colors. The first emojis didn’t come out until 1999

I meant smileys really, because that's what they were initially called. Emojis is a more recent retroactive rebranding/appropriation of smileys by Apple when they launched the iphone.

Anyway ICQ had yellow smiley faces 1996-ish. AIM had them 1997-ish. Yahoo!Pager, later Yahoo!Messenger, had yellow smileys in 1998. And MSN definitely had them in 1999.

And then there's friggin minesweeper that had a yellow smiley face all the way back in 1992:

Image

I guess they all watched too much Simpsons?

SpaceCadet , 14 days ago

yellow skin tone is clearly adjacent to whiteness and this was well established before aughts.

Not it was not and it still isn't. The reason we think of the Simpsons as white is because the context makes it crystal clear that they're a typical white suburban family, not because of their color. If Matt Groening had made Simpsons green, purple or blue we'd still think of them as white, and at the same time smileys and later emojis would still be yellow. At best there is some parallel evolution here in the sense that both Matt Groening and Harvey Ball both chose yellow for the same reason: because it is perceived as a bright happy color.

If you then associate yellowness exclusively with whiteness that's purely a you thing, and honestly I find it pretty fucked up to see racial connotations like this in the most innocent things. Stop projecting your own prejudices.

emojis caught widespread support in the mid/late aughts

My argument is that bright yellow smileys have their own cultural lineage dating back to 1963, and it has nothing to do with skin color or race. Using these yellow smileys to express emotion in computer programs has been a thing since at least the mid nineties, not the mid/late aughts as you claim. The reason that it only appeared in the mid nineties and not earlier is technological and cultural. It has to do with the developing graphical and networking capabilities of computers around that time, and because smileys were popular in other aspects of culture around the same time. It has nothing to do with The Simpsons or other supposedly white cartoon characters.

SpaceCadet , 14 days ago

white-adjacent

You keep using that word as if it will somehow transform the color yellow into white and make your argument for you. It won't happen. It's yellow, and not just pale yellow but an extremely saturated and bright version of yellow. It is clearly not a natural skin tone of any race unless that person is very ill.

If you look at a white person's skin tone, it's not a saturated color and the hue is certainly not yellow. If anything, it's pink. How you can arrive at "yellow = white-adjacent" just boggles my mind. There are literally billions of people on this planet who are not white and whose skin tone is closer to the yellow of a smiley face. You can call any color with sufficient luminosity white adjacent then. Bright blue: white-adjacent. Bright red: white-adjacent. Bright green: white-adjacent. Wee look at all those white-adjacent colors:

https://feddit.nl/pictrs/image/3217cf90-d0fe-474d-a275-e7a3d0b83125.png

Anyway, I'm done with this discussion because I find you truly insufferable and I no longer want to spend my energy on it. If I can give you one piece of life advice: go find something worthwhile to get up in arms about.

SpaceCadet , 13 days ago

The way that I see it, the issue with lemmy ml’s administration and moderation is not quite political in origin. It’s about transparency

Well it's really both. The issue is the combination of a number of factors which on their own would be fairly easy to deal with, but put together they are very problematic:

1. The admins are political extremists
2. lemmy.ml has a very prominent position in the lemmyverse, because they were first and got a headstart
3. The admins are actively using their position to heavily police discussion according to their extremist political views. The fact that they're not being transparent about it is aggravating, but not the root problem.

This prominent position of lemmy.ml is the fundamental difference with the hexbear or lemmygrad situation. Those instances can easily be contained at the user level: most people can just block and ignore them entirely because nothing interesting happens on those instances for non-extremists. Not so with lemmy.ml, which hosts a number of large bona-fide communities.

So I think it's necessary to make a concerted effort to reduce lemmy.ml's prominence in the fediverse, so that political extremists can't put their thumb on the scale to nudge discussion in a certain direction. Part of that effort is raising awareness about lemmy.ml's nature, which is what this PSA does, but that likely won't be enough due to network effect. It will take more to get people to move their communities to other instances. If other large instances, like lemmy.world, would block lemmy.ml that would provide a real stimulus for a large amount of people to move away from lemmy.ml.

With that out of the way, most of your suggestions boil down to “use lemmy.world instead”. I don’t have anything against LW’s administration, but I think that it’s foolish to concentrate people and activity there even further

I agree that spreading out more would be desirable, but on the other hand "just use lemmy.world instead of lemmy.ml" is a very simple and practical suggestion to move away from ml.

SpaceCadet , 13 days ago

The thing is, as far as users and communities go lemmy.ml is pretty much a general purpose instance like lemmy.world, but it is controlled by political extremists who are using their admin position to put their thumb on the scale to push discussion in a certain direction.

SpaceCadet , 13 days ago

It's not even about which view is right or neutral. On .world posts and comments critical of the US aren't mass censored like .ml does with posts critical of China, Russia or the former USSR.

SpaceCadet , 15 days ago

Chartreuse is named after a liqueur, not after wine. It's literally green.

https://feddit.nl/pictrs/image/15137fb6-5fde-49bf-be33-45bb98592bb9.png

SpaceCadet , 15 days ago

My apologies, I didn't know this and stand corrected. I no longer think that one of your suggestions is stupid, I think both of them are.

SpaceCadet , 15 days ago (edited 15 days ago)

It's easy enough to switch instances, but which instance you joined is actually far less important than which communities you engage in. Rule of thumb: avoid any ...@lemmy.ml communities. Not because the communities are bad per se, but because the tankies have power there and they don't shy away from banning you from unrelated communities if you say something they don't like.

Ideally nobody who's not a tankie should create or join communities hosted on lemmy.ml anymore.

SpaceCadet , 15 days ago

I'm perfectly fine with just avoiding interactions with lemmy.ml communities

I would be fine with that too. If the instance was just tankie people talking tankie bullshit, like lemmygrad or hexbear, it would be easy to ignore. Unfortunately it's not that simple.

The problem is that lemmy.ml has a more privileged status in the fediverse: being the first Lemmy instance in existence it still holds quite a number of popular communities that are still frequented by people from the whole fediverse, and the tankies wield their power there as well. Like literally: make a disliked comment on /c/memes and you get banned from /c/Technology, /c/linux, /c/Progammer Humor, /c/Mechanical Keyboards,... and all your other favorite communities on lemmy.ml as well. This actually happened to me.

A second issue is that the mods make efforts to hide the censorship that they are doing, because they know it's not a good look. If you examine the modlog over there you'll see that the first half of the page is like a day's worth of moderation activities, and the second half covers 4 years. So where's the rest? The many controversial comment removals and bans that happened a few days ago on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, and who knows what else, have all been disappeared.

So yes, I think it is very important that people are being made aware of this and I also think a concerted effort should be made to move bona fide communities away from an instance ruled by bad faith actors.

SpaceCadet , 15 days ago

https://feddit.nl/pictrs/image/70a4700c-aff6-497e-8b2c-ad31dd4dae79.png

SpaceCadet , 15 days ago

It's basically the underpants gnomes meme

1. Dictatorship
2. ???
3. Utopia!

SpaceCadet , 15 days ago

We should still try to have instances get along and try to find some common ground

Common ground can only be had with reasonable people you actually have common ground with. Personally I think it's a fool's errand to try to talk sense into the lemmy.ml admins.

The only solution I see is to salvage what we can from the bona fide communities that still reside on lemmy.ml and then put a big fence around it, so can have their toxic waste dump of an instance all to themselves.

It’s still annoying to migrate

I've switched instances three or four times when I was still getting my bearings on lemmy. I didn't really find it annoying. The only tedious part is resubscribing to the communities you were in, but there are tools for that.

SpaceCadet , 15 days ago (edited 15 days ago)

I think the problem is not so much that "communities don't exist", but that they are far less popular and active than the lemmy.ml ones, and when presented with a choice new users will typically choose the community that is more active and has the most subs. You can't simply solve that by creating another community on another instance. A concerted effort would be needed to get people to move and to get them to pick the alternative community over the lemmy.ml one. Raising awareness and defederation by bigger instances (like lemmy.world) would help immensely.

For me the big ones are !linux and !programmerhumor btw, which do exist elsewhere but the alternatives are stale.

SpaceCadet , 15 days ago

Hey I applaud your effort, yesterday the top post was several days old and top day was empty on one of the subs, so this is already better.

I'm a bit skeptical if that will be enough though. Active discussion is the meat and the potatoes for me when I go to a tech community, and for that you need more subscribers.

SpaceCadet , 15 days ago

When presented with a choice, people usually pick the community that is the most active and already has the most subs.

But I am definitely giving it a shot.

SpaceCadet , 16 days ago

I believe some guy got banned from all .ml communities for posting things .ml didnt like about tianamin square.

That was me, yes.

SpaceCadet , 16 days ago

You can still see that your comment has been removed, but you can't see the biased mass removals of content, like mass purging all China critical comments from a post, unless you're quick enough to screenshot the modlog.

SpaceCadet , 16 days ago

It's not defederating on the basis of political opinion. It's defederating on the basis of extreme intolerance towards and censorship of people who have different, non-fringe opinions that aren't even controversial in most parts of the world.

Right now, the instance hosts a lot of let's say mainstream, non-political communities, purely because lemmy.ml was the first instance and so "popular" by default. The way the mods over there behave, it's clear that they're not suited to be a mainstream instance for these communities. Unfortunately due to network effect, people won't just move.

The only way to dislodge these communities and move them to more neutral instances is if larger instances like lemmy.world start defederating lemmy.ml.

SpaceCadet , 16 days ago

let’s pretend lemmy was heavily conservative instead of liberal making this exact post.

I think you misunderstand the issue, so as you mentioned conservative, let's illustrate it with an analogy.

The situation with lemmy.ml right now, and apologies for the reddit analogy, is the equivalent if on reddit the batshit crazy mods of formerly /r/the_donald or /r/conservative could ban you from /r/linux because you said something bad about Trump on /r/memes. At that point it's not about dissenting opinions, it's about them wielding power they shouldn't have over those dissenting people.

An instance that operates like that shouldn't be part of mainstream lemmy and host general purpose communities. The only way to take that power from them is to shun them, i.e. defederate.

SpaceCadet , 16 days ago

I told them something like: "The modlog of this community is ridiculous" and posted the same screenshot of the modlog that I posted on my thread on !fediverse. Forgive me if I'm paraphrasing, because my exact comment is gone.

SpaceCadet OP , 16 days ago

Living in the bubble of "CCP did nothing wrong (and we will ban you from all your favorite communities if you dare to disagree)" isn't exactly a great alternative.

SpaceCadet OP , 16 days ago

I didn't react to any of the "but the West also..." comments. I replied directly to the top level of the post, linking to an article that goes in depth on what actually happened as most people in the West nowadays only know about the iconic tank man image.

SpaceCadet OP , 16 days ago

Yeah the modlog is where you can normally see them. Mind you they seem to selectively purge the modlog too, presumably to hide their obvious censorship bias.

SpaceCadet OP , 16 days ago

The problem is more that they're holding several large bona fide communities hostage this way. For example !linux is by far the most active Linux community on Lemmy, and because of network effect it's not easy to get people to move to another instance.

It would take something huge to get people to move, for example some of the larger instances like lemmy.world defederating lemmy.ml.

SpaceCadet OP , 16 days ago

No they don't. I received a two week ban in the wake of the API protests, never got an explanation why or what comment triggered it.

SpaceCadet OP , 16 days ago

Defederation of lemmy.ml from the larger instances would be a solution.

SpaceCadet OP , 16 days ago

Like "how dare you actually show the atrocities my Chinese overlords committed in a way that can't be denied" ?

SpaceCadet OP , 15 days ago

This is the best solution - the answers are in our hands

There is the problem of network effect though. People who frequent communities on lemmy.ml are often blissfully unaware of how problematic that instance is, like I was until a few days ago, and so they're unlikely to just move as they have no immediate reason to.

It's easy to say just pack up and move ... but I've been really struggling to find an alternative for !linux, to name one example. The equivalent communities !linux and !linux are rather stale with days old posts without comments.

So I think it's not just something an individual user can solve for themselves, and I think that the larger instances also have a role to play here. If they would defederate from lemmy.ml, it would urge users along to move away from lemmy.ml communities towards communities on other, more suitable instances.

Next to that, we should also spread awareness about the lemmy.ml problem, and that was my intent when I originally made this post.

SpaceCadet OP , 12 days ago

People have choices. If they want to keep using the Lemmy.ml community, that’s their freedom. The alternatives exist, if they want to switch, they can.

Because network effect is a thing, it's really the illusion of choice. When a lemmy.ml community has 50k subscribers and the equivalent lemmy.world or programming.dev community has just a tenth of that, it's not really a choice. People will always gravitate towards ml and the smaller community will never gain critical mass unless some strong enough outside force influences that decision.

Which brings me to ...

Intrigued by your name change, you are really pushing for this.

I think defederation from lemmy.ml together with raising awareness about ml should be the outside force to move communities off lemmy.ml.