I wonder if they just want some more data they can then sell off to others.

You buying at a grocery store is out of convenience, the alternative is learning how to hunt like a survival hunter.

At some point that was an alternative, but today the natural ecosystems have been so encroached upon by human civilization that we can’t just decide to become survival hunters - we’d simply starve. Grocery stores are all you have if you’re living in a high-rise apartment in most cities, for example. Most suburbs can’t support enough wildlife to then be hunted for survival by the humans living there.

Vegetable gardens might be a better analogy than survival hunting. There are even some initiatives being taken to break the cycle of dependency that grocery stores encourage, which I suspect is what @subignition@fedia.io is getting at: collective effort is needed beyond just letting the techies do their thing in their own corner, otherwise we all suffer. Everyone needs to move beyond their comfort zone at some point, for some amount of time - be it the techies teaching others, or the others learning a bit more about how their tools work.

the average user wants the convenience of easy to use software, because they don’t want to learn the alternative […] If everyone was like you, then easy to use software wouldn’t be selling so much.

I can’t tell if you are simply stating how the world currently is or claiming that it is destined to always be that way, but in either case I don’t see how “people prefer convenience” is a good argument against trying to help them get over that preference. I don’t think convenience is nor should be the end-all-be-all of existence, in fact it can be actively detrimental to life when prioritized.

Unless I’m mistaken, the average user wanted asbestos in their walls, lead in their paint, and asked their doctor for menthol cigarettes instead of regular ones when said doctor was prescribing them for stress. The average user in the USA couldn’t tell that their milk was full of pus and mixed with chalk to the point it was killing their babies, all for the convenience of still owners and milk producers. Their society had built up so much around the convenience of drinking milk in places that couldn’t produce it locally, that it took an Act of Congress as well as the development of technology to safely transport milk long distances before the convenience stopped killing people.

Don’t get me wrong, convenience is great when it doesn’t come at the expense of our well-being - in those cases it tends to dramatically improve our well-being. I tend to agree with @subignition@fedia.io that currently the software market is overly delivering convenience to the point that it is negatively affecting our collective well-being - with regards to software, at the very least.

Also, wasn’t Trump the reason the largest non-nuclear bomb in the USA arsenal was first used in combat? The bomb that had never been deployed in the almost 15 years since it’s creation specifically because the US military thought it would create too many civilian casualties?

The same Trump that allegedly wanted to nuke hurricanes to disrupt them before they hit the US’s coast?

The dude just wants to play with the shiny toys and see things go “boom”. He has literally stated to his own biographer that

When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different."

(source: The Week)

I suppose it suits him just fine that Israel is now flirting with open warfare with their neighbors.

Paging Ray Bradbury… https://www.libraryofshortstories.com/storiespdf/the-veldt.pdf

I have gotten cynical to the point of assuming the “endgame” here is properly kicking off WW3, so that Trump gets an excuse to drop a nuke or two on an adversary.

“The last time we had a world war, we won it! We were the best - and we won it with our nukes, our big beautiful nukes - it’s really a shame we haven’t used them since, don’t you think? We ended the war by dropping 2 on Japan, and now Japan is our best friend. Why don’t we drop some nukes on Iran? Don’t we want them to be our friend?”

But there is one other, probably even more important advantage: Prolog is a programmer’s and software engineer’s dream. It is compact, highly readable, and arguably the “most structured” language of them all. Not only has it done away with virtually all control flow statements, but even explicit variable assignment too! These virtues are certainly reason enough to base not only systems but textbooks on this language.

The 90s certainly were a different time…

Does this make “be gay, do crime” easier or harder now?

I don’t think anyone can host a relay right now aside from bluesky.

People can host their own data / Personal Data Server, which is somewhere between self-hosting a mastodon instance and creating an account on someone else’s instance. The actual equivalent would be self-hosting your masto account separately from any instance (which is just not a thing with the current state of mastodon nor activity pub).

Red

Batter

Shit I can’t remember most of them, but the “add 3 enchanted aces” is pretty solid (that is a spectral effect, right?)

As you might be able to tell, I play pretty conservatively. Though that might change once I’ve unlocked more.

The guardian apparently wrote an article that was shared in .world/c/news : https://lemmy.world/post/28450666

I like the idea, but then who gets to decide who is and isn’t a credible source? Is it only intra-account verifying? Can anyone verify anyone else, or do you need to be authorized by bluesky to start verifying others?

Succinctly put, though I got some cognitive dissonance when the author wrote about bluesky being their choice of decentralized network to get involved with without even mentioning the hosting costs involved with running a bsky relay (or whichever component of the ATP network actually holds the data “firehose”).

According to this article it took a server that costs around $150/month over 4 days to spin up a working relay, most of which was spent ingurgitating half a terabyte of data (that’s what ended up on disk in any case). Far from exorbitant, yet if I want to self host for my own personal needs it’s still gobs more data and compute than any activity pub software needs.

Maybe my view of “decentralization as in democracy” is just fundamentally different from the author’s. I get the feeling that to them, as long as each friend group has 1 self-hoster in it then democracy through decentralization is preserved. This would make sense that they orient themselves towards something like bluesky and the AT protocol. Personally, I don’t think we should be satisfied with that level of decentralization/democracy - it’s a nice start, but we should strive for reaching at least 50% of people self-hosting an activity pub instance to truly achieve the type of decentralization that serves democracy. Of course, I’m not aware of any activity pub software that can be selfhosted by even 10% of the population, currently, so there’s definitely a lot of work to do before my vision is feasible.

From what I understand, you could un ironically do this with a file system using BTRFS. You’d maybe need a udev rule to automate tracking when the “Power Ctrl+Z” gets plugged in.

If it’s a single, generated, “initial” commit that I actually want to keep (say, for ex I used the forge to generate a license file) then I would often rebase on top of it. Quick and doesn’t get rid of anything.

Thank you!!!

Doo you happen to have a good, informative link? Or perhaps a company name I could look up?

This sounds incredibly cool.

The whiplash from the two titles in your second pic really hit me hard

To extend your metaphor: be the squirrel in the digital forest. Compulsively bury acorns for others to find in time of need. Forget about most of the burial locations so that new trees are always sprouting and spreading. Do not get attached to a single trunk ; you are made to dance across the canopy.

Why do we even need a server? Why can’t I pull this directly off the disk drive? That way if the computer is healthy enough, it can run our application at all, we don’t have dependencies that can fail and cause us to fail, and I looked around and there were no SQL database engines that would do that, and one of the guys I was working with says, “Richard, why don’t you just write one?” “Okay, I’ll give it a try.” I didn’t do that right away, but later on, it was a funding hiatus. This was back in 2000, and if I recall correctly, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton were having a fight of some sort, so all government contracts got shut down, so I was out of work for a few months, and I thought, “Well, I’ll just write that database engine now.”

Gee, thanks Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton?! Government shutdown leads to actual production of value for everyone instead of just making a better military vessel.

Thanks