Russ

That would have the same effect as just taking the site offline…

No one is giving a random site their photo ID.

Yes you are, they are advertising their platforms like you are free to comment anything and most people beleave that.

I hate to break it to you, that’s your fault for making an assumption (and a bold one at that) or you’re just quite naive. Most places that you sign up for will either have you agree to a Terms of Service, or they’ll make you agree to the rules. I have even more bad news for you: Advertisements usually try their best to show only the “good” of what is being advertised (such as how an advertisement for a toy doesn’t usually make it very clear that batteries are required to use it).

Ask anyone if they think youtube will delete their commen even if they didnt offend anyone and they will tell you no way!

No, they might be angry that their comment was removed, but it’s a pretty common understanding that moderators will remove content at their discretion, even if people don’t necessarily agree with the decision.

I’m not sure why I’m even engaging in this, usually it’s pretty clear when someone gets upset that their “free speech” (that they were never entitled to) is being violated that their intent is to spread hateful content.

Perhaps that isn’t you, but nonetheless that is the group you’re putting yourself in (even if unintentionally) whenever you ride under that banner.

It would also be worthwhile double checking what actual “Freedom of Speech” is and what it covers. Assuming you are referring to the US’ first amendment, it has absolutely nothing to do with anyone other than you and the government (and even then it has its bounds).

As an example, let’s say you’re a writer for a newspaper. The government cannot take down an article that you write in which you criticize them (because that would fall under protected speech, unless you are making direct threats towards someone), but your boss could absolutely say “No way, we’re not publishing that” as they are not a government official.

This doesn’t even just include “Freedom of Speech”, as another example, with the right to assembly you can publicly assemble and protest the government - but it wouldn’t allow you to start a protest on someone’s private property.

Okay, who is promising you free speech then?

On most platforms, you were never promised “free speech” or entitled to it.

Oh interesting, it’s been a while since I have tried to use Apple TV (roughly 7 years or so - I don’t use any Apple devices anymore), this wasn’t available at the time so I’m glad to see there’s finally some native support.

I always assumed it was more or less targeting the federation of issues/MRs.

The git side of things is already distributed as you said, but if you decide to host your random project on your own GitLab instance you’ll miss out on people submitting issues/MRs because they won’t want to sign up for an account on your random instance (or sign in with another IdP).

This is where a lot of the reliance of GitHub comes from, in my opinion.

I think they meant Apple’s “tvOS” - which powers the Apple TV set top box.

There’s no client for it, if I had to take a guess it’s likely due to the costs of doing so.

Edit: Whoops, it appears I’m a bit out of date on this.

According to another user in here, blocking on Mastodon actually works. So seems like it is possible to do in the Fediverse.

I was not aware of this, but their implementation of how they do this does bring up the limitation I mentioned. The other user cannot see your posts only if you are on the same server:

If you and the blocked user are on the same server, the blocked user will not be able to view your posts on your profile while logged in.

I actually thought blocks were public already.

They’re not, well - the operator of your instance could go into the database and view it that way in the same way that they can see your email address. But aside from someone who has database access to your instance, blocks are not public. What is public is the list of defederated (“blocked” so to speak) instances for an entire instance (this can be viewed by going to /instances of any instance), which might be what you were thinking of?

And personally I don’t see how it would be an issue if people that I haven’t blocked can see who I’ve blocked.

How exactly would you enforce that, though? If your blocks were public, all the person who you’ve blocked would need to do is open a private browsing window and look at your profile to see that they’ve been blocked.

If we’re looking at blocks as being a safety feature, I would think that having your blocks broadcasted to every single instance would be classified as harmful and a breach of your privacy. This is why although an instance that you register with has to have your email address that you signed up with, they don’t broadcast it to all other instances (same with the encrypted value of your password) - because otherwise it would effectively be public.

Perhaps I’ve just got the wrong stance, but considering that you can never block someone from viewing your content with an absolute guarantee (if the blocks were broadcasted, you still couldn’t prevent someone from just simply logging out, or standing up their own instance and collecting the data anyways) I would not consider that tradeoff to be worthwhile. Not that my stance has any weight since I’m not a maintainer for Lemmy (or any of the Fediverse software), but I wouldn’t be surprised if that has at least come up to those who are developing the various Fediverse software.

Aside from the rest of the discussion that has already occurred here, I’m not actually sure how this would work from a technical perspective.

You and I are on two completely different instances, if I were to block you, how is your instance supposed to know this in order to stop you from reading my comment?

The only way I could see that working is if the list of users you blocked were federated too, and effectively made public (like votes currently are) - which seems counterproductive to the problem at hand.

Then what happens if you post in a community where someone you’ve blocked is a moderator? Or if you block the admin of another instance? If you can “cloak” yourself from being moderated by just blocking them, that seems like an exploit waiting to happen. As far as I’m aware, on Reddit blocking a user doesn’t hide your comments from them - but they can no longer reply to them, and I assume this is why that is the case. Unless that has very recently changed.

The biggest difference between Lemmy (and all software within the Fediverse - for example, I’m pretty sure Mastodon is this way as well), is that there is not one singular authoritative server. Actions like this need to be handled on all instances, and that’s impossible to guarantee. A bad actor running an instance could just rip out the function that handles this, and then it’s moot. I mean, they wouldn’t even need to do that - they’d have the data anyways.

You could enforce it if both users are on the same instance I suppose, but this just seems like it would only land with the blocking feature being even more inconsistent.

I pretty much agree, personally I rarely ever downvote a comment/post - to the point where I cannot even recall when my last downvote was, unless I accidentally have done so via a mobile gesture (I try to be cautious about this). If I were at my PC, I’d check my instance’s database, but alas.

[The rest here on is more of a “6 o’clock in the morning stream of thoughts from my perspective” thing. My friends know me as being very verbose - last paragraph is where I try to steer back on track]

If I do upvote something, generally it’ll be something that I feel is driving forward a discussion in good faith (even if I don’t necessarily agree with the content itself) and is respectful of all parties involved.

Though a lack of an upvote from me doesn’t indicate disagreement either.

An actual flat-out disagreement from me tends to be more on the rare side of things. Because so many comments are an opinion / viewpoint rather than solid fact. It’s one thing to say “No, 2+2 does not equal 5” since that is rooted in fact.

Whereas I have to feel pretty strongly about something to directly challenge an opinion, especially since it super easy to misjudge tone on the Internet/across text and I’m not here to unintentionally start a war over something that doesn’t have a right or wrong answer (within reason - but even that itself is something that isn’t binary). I try to be cautious about asserting something is wrong unless I’m very sure of it (even if I do often fail at that, given the previous issue of tone being hard to judge across text), and of course in most cases you can’t really say another person’s opinion is unequivocally wrong.

I don’t mind giving a different viewpoint, but again I try to be cautious about it because I don’t want to come across as “My viewpoint is ultimately right and yours is wrong” and that is unfortunately how a lot of discussions end up being seen (or I just simply make the human error of just having a far too strong opinion of my own).

I do my best to keep my tone as neutral as I can, though as they say “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” My original comment is a good example of this, because I do agree that downvotes are far too often used in the manner that you stated. I also agree that they’re typically a poor way of criticizing someone if they don’t include a corresponding reply (if I say something that is factually wrong - or even just poor taste, I usually want to know about it so I don’t keep doing so!), my only divergence from the matter was that they are a criticism - just a really bad way of doing so.

I do wonder why Valve hasn’t enabled it by default. It’s only defaulted on SteamOS and in fact, I believe they removed the option to turn it off on SteamOS recently…

I think downvotes are criticism/judgment - even if it’s more of a silent type (in lieu of actually replying, as you pointed out).

Even from the standpoint of “You should only use downvotes to indicate that a comment/post is off topic for the community” that Reddit originally tried to (naively IMO, you can’t enforce it not being a “I disagree” button, but I digress) have is still what I’d consider to be criticism. Mainly because regardless of the vote being cast as that vs a general “I disagree”, it’s still an indication of disapproval of the commenter.

Criticism of course comes in a lot of forms, and can vary on the “level” of it - I wouldn’t say that downvotes are a high level of criticism, but one nonetheless.

That’s just my view of it, at least, I can’t see how they wouldn’t be a form of criticism - you shouldn’t use them as a “This breaks the rules” indicator because that should be a report instead of a vote IMO, otherwise it’s far less likely to be acted upon/handled.

I definitely don’t doubt their utility, despite my facetious comment regarding them - however it’s not likely I’ll ever be able to actually appreciate them (in this lifetime at least) due to my struggles with understanding far “simpler” areas of math haha.

I can only speak for myself, but honestly I’ve never been able to figure out that root of why it’s so complex to me and difficult to keep track of / understand. The only thing that seems to have a “rational” explanation to me is… Selective memory. It has been a burning question to myself for so long.

For a while I just said “It’s too arbitrary and not logical” except math is built upon logic - 1 + 1 is clearly 2 because if I hold one finger on one hand then bring another finger from my other hand I have two fingers held.

(Imaginary numbers though can fuck off)

I got into programming long ago because it is logical - there’s (almost) always a reason why a computer does $THING even if I can’t tell you, someone surely can. Though generally the answer is “someone told it to do the wrong thing”. If I dig deep enough, I can usually find the answer. My life is full of so many questions that I’ll probably never have the answer to, and I found refuge in the fact that I can get the answers here.

However… computers follow a set of rules, just like mathematicians do. So for me to call it arbitrary would just be wrong. I mean sure, a lot of the rules and formulas certainly seem arbitrary to me, there’s a reason why they are the way they are and it can be tracked down just like you can track down why a computer does $THING.

When it comes to numbers though, my brain just doesn’t seem to hold on to it properly. I can randomly recall weird functions and quirks in libraries that I use - even remember plenty of arbitrary “things” like Vim motions… Yet ask me what nine times seven is and I can’t tell you what the answer is without doing the weird finger trick.

So the only explanation that I can come up for that is just selective memory. I like computers and as such my brain is willing to actually memorize these things. Whereas I’ve never liked math and so my brain doesn’t see a reason to “memorize math”.

It really frustrates me because math and computer science intersect in a lot of ways, and I’ll always be held back by this. Games for example, they run really well on your GPU because GPUs happen to be excellent at math, specifically in parallel. Encryption? Fancy math equations! Almost everything at a low level comes down to math.

Similarly, for as much as I love logical things, I could never hold the concepts of logic gates in my head. I mean, logic is literally in the name! Even when I was heavily into Minecraft I couldn’t pick it up through Redstone.

As such, I think for me, the “logic” argument doesn’t hold up as much as I like to think it does. The analyst in me says that I want it to be something as logical as “math is illogical” because that’s easier to admit and sounds better than “I just don’t like math”. Even worse, perhaps that subconsciously stops me liking it, thus blocking myself from ever being able to excel at it… And yet, here we are (or rather, “here I am”).

Welcome to Lemmy!

For me the first Linux distribution I used was Ubuntu 8.04 - though I never had installed it on physical hardware, just a VM - VirtualBox IIRC (that didn’t occur till Ubuntu 8.10). I was in my early teenage years and had discovered Linux and found it interesting, I used the WUBI tool to install it through Windows and updated the bootloader to keep Windows as the default (with a one second timeout) since it was the family computer, I think my family would’ve shat their pants if they randomly rebooted the PC and was greeted with Linux heh.

Though a few years later on an old secondary family laptop (it was the “someone else is using the other computer” spare/backup) that was running Vista, it had gotten so buggy and bogged down that I installed Kubuntu for my family and they happily used that until eventually that laptop was retired. It never got them to really look into permanently switching to Linux, but I think that’s more than fine - I’ve never been one to “proselytize” Linux: If it is the right tool for you, fantastic - if not, no hard feelings is how I see it. In the aforementioned case, it was the better tool over the bogged down and buggy Vista.

As for nowadays, its CachyOS on my desktop (I’m not married to it, but its been working alright for me for about a year now), SteamOS on my Deck, Fedora on my secondary laptop (an old intel macbook), and then Bazzite on my ROG Ally. Windows is still installed on a secondary drive on my desktop, but I very rarely have to boot into it.

You absolutely do not need AI in order to sound different in one context versus another. I mean, I highly doubt most people on Lemmy speak to their bosses in the exact way that they write their comments here.

Hell, I’d be surprised if they spoke to their friends and family the same way all the time (yes, I’m aware that you can generally be more lax around friends - but there’s a time and place for it, whereas comments on message boards tend to just be lax all the time).

That very concept has been around far longer than “AI” has.

I really don’t think there was any malice intended by them. Pretty sure the intent was more along the lines of"Yes, it has gotten better. Here’s a quick demonstration using the current conversation as context." (which reads very similar to what they said)

They could’ve left it at “Yes it’s gotten better” but I suppose it’s similar to the idea of “A picture is worth a thousand words”. Rather than “Ugh your grammar is terrible.” Of course no one should expect perfect grammar on Lemmy or similar platforms.

(Unless I’m just missing a giant ‘whoosh’ moment here - in that case, I’m sorry)

That’s a tough one. While I do think AI can be fun to play around with (though I personally prefer the ones I can run locally), there’s always a sort of “monkey’s paw” element to it. Text generation? Hallucinations. Image generation? All sorts of weird artifacts, and are heavily influenced by the training data (yes of course they all are, but what I mean is, if you pick a model that is heavily inspired by NSFW content for example, then you’re very likely to get NSFW content - sounds “common sense”, but nonetheless).

So I suppose in a world where it’s “perfect” then I’d want it to make some form of media that can make everyone happy. If everyone on the planet were happy, then it’d be a much better place.

Or if we’re talking less altruistic desires, probably a continuation of some TV series that I enjoyed which ended on a cliffhanger.

Hmm, I always have a hard time picking favorites, but I’ve always enjoyed Halestorm! Pretty sure “can u see me in the dark?” has been pinned in the number one spot of my On Repeat playlist on Spotify for a couple of months now… Lzzy’s vocals are fantastic in it!

Also, a couple of years ago Alex Reade joined Make Them Suffer, and I’ve been enjoying their latest album (also called Make Them Suffer), a few of the tracks from that album (Epitaph, Oscillator, Weaponized, and Small Town Syndrome) have also coincidentally been stuck in my On Repeat playlist for a while.

I’m not sure if this counts because it wasn’t intentional on my part, but… When I was a kid, my mom had a digital camera. The lense on it would extend when it was powered on, and then retract when it was powered off.

At some point the lense got stuck, which caused the camera to not turn on properly and made it useless so she ended up getting a new one. I had gone to take the old/broken one to mess around with it and accidentally dropped it.

Apparently the angle that it fell at was just enough to “lodge” the lense back into place yet the fall wasn’t high enough to cause it to shatter or break. It worked perfectly after that, and while my parents were a bit upset they needlessly bought a new camera, they ended up letting me keep the old one.

(Later on I figured that was their way of justifying not returning the new camera that probably had nice new features or something)

I also vaguely remembering them saying something along the lines of “That’s probably the only time in your life dropping a piece of equipment will actually fix it and was just luck - don’t go trying that on other things randomly”.