trynn

trynn, 9 months ago

What a dumb article. Sounds like an old C graybeard who's never understood the point of proper type safety or readable code. None of the performance gains the author talks about actually matter, whereas the entire point of clean code is to make it easier to read and maintain by other programmers. Let's also not forget this important quote from Donald Knuth: "premature optimization is the root of all evil".

Simply put, unless you're working in extremely resource-constrained systems, or have some code snippet being run an incredibly large number of times over a humongous amount of data, these kinds of performance optimizations simply don't matter and you get more benefit from writing the code in a way that reduces bugs and is easier to read. Heck, most of the time compiler optimizations make this entire argument moot anyway.

trynn, 9 months ago

The answer is simple. Games are categorized as AAA when they're built by large teams with large budgets at large companies. Puzzle games usually don't require a team of hundreds of people and tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars to produce. The gameplay and asset scope is tiny in comparison to a typical AAA game. Most games with puzzle elements that do end up getting made by AA and AAA studios (like Portal) have the puzzle aspect merged with some other genre (like FPS, in Portal's case), and those other genres do require more resources to produce.

trynn, 9 months ago

This looks like a Lemmy issue, not a /kbin one. Perhaps find a Lemmy development community somewhere to ask.

trynn, 9 months ago

No, you're not quite understanding what ActivityPub is. The data under all the fediverse services is not the same infrastructure at all. The communication between those various services just uses the same language (ActivityPub). Those various services can interpret and store (or ignore) ActivityPub messages any way they want. Service instances add another layer to the whole thing as well.

In order for an "everything app" to be successful (if you buy the argument that it feasibly can be), it would have to be a centralized service. Decentralization, by its very nature, encourages the opposite of that -- want to make some niche service because existing services don't satisfy some fringe need you have, but still want to interact with others on other platforms? You can do that with the fediverse. But that also means your new service isn't part of an "everything app"... it just can potentially talk to one that might exist.

trynn, 10 months ago

I have no idea how you browse the internet with uBlock Origin. It’s literally unusable to me. It’s free, and you should always have it installed, it’s simply essential.

Because uBlock Origin doesn't work on all platforms and browsers. Notably, it doesn't work with Apple's plugin system, so anyone using Safari or an iOS device cannot use it.

trynn, 10 months ago

is there a firefox app on iPhone?

Not really. There's something called Firefox available and it's published by Mozilla, but Mozilla has to deal with Apple's restrictions on web browsers by using the webkit rendering engine and Apple's proprietary plugin system. So it's not real Firefox.

trynn, 10 months ago

Yep. Musk is basing his idea about having an "everything app" on WeChat's success in China, which basically does what he's talking about. The problem is that he doesn't seem to understand that there are cultural differences at play between Chinese users and western users that prevent mass-adoption of a single app to do everything in the west, and that WeChat already exists and isn't popular in the west at all.

trynn, 10 months ago

That's a good point, but I'm fairly sure culture plays a part as well. It's likely some combination.

trynn, 10 months ago

Sure. Just look at Wordpress... it's a blogging platform rather than a forum, but it has an ActivityPub plugin available that allows federation of blog posts and comments. ActivityPub is a standard published by the W3C (the same organization that oversees the HTML standard, among many others). Anyone can implement the standard in their software if they want to.

trynn, 10 months ago

ChatGPT and Bard?

Doubtful, considering ChatGPT has only been public since late last year, and Bard's even newer. I also really hope those aren't a large factor, since most coding examples I've seen from ChatGPT only deal with questions of a really rudimentary nature and have given useless or wrong information about anything more nuanced or complicated.

trynn, 10 months ago

Try chatgpt 4 premium. I have heard it automatically auto correct itself with code.

I regularly use gpt-4 for coding since it's the backend behind github copilot, and my company has approved use of copilot (and I have copilot plugins installed for vscode and vs2022). It's useful for autocompleting boilerplate code, but gets things wrong all the time about anything more complicated.

trynn, 10 months ago

Why would they put META and TIKTOK on there?????

Because they're alternatives to Twitter?
Not everybody on the Internet cares about censorship, data leaks, or centralized services. In fact, most people don't. You just happen to be in a bubble of mostly like-minded people here on the Fediverse. For everyone else out there, now that their digital house is on fire they just want to find a new house that's as close to their old one as possible.

trynn, 10 months ago

The impractical/implausible reason is likely because different groups of people are writing the different fediverse software and have different opinions about how objects are identified in their software. ActivityPub already requires objects to have unique IDs, so this isn't a protocol issue. But good luck getting every single developer for every single fediverse application to agree on one way to internally represent data in their apps. That's just never going to happen for a variety of reasons.

trynn, 10 months ago

You're applying the political science definition of 'federation' and not the computer science definition. They are different. Federation in CompSci terms has to do with networking providers using standardization to interoperate, which is exactly what the fediverse does.

trynn, 10 months ago

Sounds like someone doesn't understand what the fediverse is about.

trynn, 10 months ago

Some of us use our phones for work and letting other people have access to work content would violate NDAs.

trynn, 10 months ago

High interest in something isn't the same as bubble. Where's the overvalued assets that are out of touch with reality? The guy quoted in the article even referenced Google losing value after the lackluster launch of Bard, which is kind of the opposite of a bubble. The dotcom bubble wasn't a bubble because everyone was talking about the Internet... it was a bubble because companies were severely overvalued for putting literally anything on the web without having functional business models. The businesses were the bubble, not the Internet.

Could AI become a bubble? Possibly. But we're nowhere near anything like that at this point in time. It's just got mindshare, not overvalued assets.

trynn, 10 months ago

Using !community notation is a Lemmy-only thing. Not everybody is reading this from Lemmy, and this particular community and the OP are both on /kbin. Providing direct URLs is a more generally useful way of linking to communities in the fediverse.

trynn, 10 months ago

It works from a Lemmy instance to see a /kbin magazine. It does not work the other way (from /kbin to see a Lemmy community).

trynn, 10 months ago

My network mostly uses NPC and summon names from Final Fantasy XI, because I played that game for many, many years and can associate the personalities of those characters with specific roles the host needs to have. I've also considered using Pokemon names for similar reasons, and with over 1000 current Pokemon species it'd be hard to max out in a home environment.

trynn, 10 months ago

I don't think this is a good idea. Keep in mind that different instances have different policies, moderators, and users. This leads to different rule enforcement, culture, and federation status. Even if a magazine/community has the same name and the same discussion topics does not mean it's the same group of people reading those posts (some might be, due to cross-instance federation, but not all will be). In short, they are different groups and cannot be treated as the same without pissing off people.

The proper solution is to let each community just evolve until one naturally emerges over time as the go-to community or they all differentiate themselves enough to be considered different (albeit with similar names). Adding a bot to cross-post content just slows that process down and makes the problem persist for longer. If a topic is truly small enough that getting enough people for critical mass is difficult (like your DIY cobbling example), then it shouldn't be hard to start a discussion in each of the separate communities to suggest assigning one as the "main" one and then just stop using the others. This is something that should be driven by the communities, not the software.

trynn, 10 months ago

It’s the first change to the Office default font in more than 15 years.

Man, I remember the change to Calibri, and now I feel really old.

trynn, 10 months ago

Kinda curious what the actual use cases for this are. It's not going to replace consumer wi-fi, since walls exist. And we already have light-based transmission within cables (fiber-optic networking). So, is this supposed to provide fast networking to locations where installing fiber isn't feasible? What's the effective range on this?

trynn, 10 months ago

The super secret conference room is a maybe. Factories though? If you're going to be wiring up factory machines, you can easily just add one more cable for ethernet and it'd probably be cheaper and just as secure. We'd have to be talking about machines/devices that are in a large warehouse-like space and frequently moved around (thus requiring wireless networking) and that require either the security or bandwidth benefits of Li-Fi (most don't). That limits the applications significantly.

trynn, 10 months ago

The easiest would be to unsubscribe from two of them. Or even better, if people could stop cross-posting.

Except cross-posting has a purpose. In that example, one of the posts was to beehaw while another was to lemmy.world. Beehaw defederated from lemmy.world so users on beehaw are only going to potentially see two of the three cross-posted posts. If they also defederate from lemmy.ml, those users would only see one.

So yeah, the solution is to unsubscribe from two of those communities because they're essentially 3 completely different groups that just happen to have the same name and general focus. Either that or just get used to it.

trynn, 10 months ago

Well, the story is set a long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away).

trynn, 10 months ago

Some of the responders here have apparently forgotten about punching the stupid monkey and JavaScript popup ads. The "non-corporate-advertising" phase of the web was from about '93 (when HTML became a standard) until about '96 (when JavaScript was released). Unless they're talking about the pre-web days, when everything was text-based.

trynn, 10 months ago

Of course PHP is still a relevant language today. It's actively developed and there are several very high profile sites that use PHP, including Facebook, Wikipedia and Wordpress. If Ernest knows PHP well, there's no reason for him not to use it. Developer familiarity trumps language trendiness every time.

trynn, 10 months ago

This is one of the most ridiculous things I've seen lately. I assume whoever is behind this is relatively new to the Internet, because the "small web" has been how the Internet has worked for decades now. We've been able to have our own web presence nearly since the web was invented in the early 90s, and affordable self-hosting has been available since the late 90s. Furthermore, the claims on that site that "all our developer tools and technical infrastructure comes from Big Tech and the Big Web" is so divorced from reality it's astounding. The Internet largely relies on open source software and frameworks that have been developed over decades by volunteers.

If you want to have your own "small web" presence on the Internet, there's nothing that's stopping you. You could've set that up a long, long time ago using open-source software on cheap hosting providers. The problem with the so-called "small web" is that you usually also want to interact with other people when online, and that's why things have gotten centralized over the years.

trynn, 10 months ago

There are larger macroeconomic issues at play here which are a big contributor to it. High inflation and an uncertain US economic situation has caused tech companies (as well as others) to lay off people and is making it harder for startups and smaller companies to raise capital to keep the lights on. So yes, there is something bigger going on that is indirectly causing all of this.

trynn, 10 months ago

Frankly, I think anyone bashing kbin while promoting lemmy just has some kind of agenda they're trying to push. I have both a kbin.social and lemmy.world account and I have experienced about the same amount of server instability on both. I've also seen reports of federation problems with both kbin and lemmy. Neither are "production-ready", but both had to deal with the sudden scale issues because of Reddit's API change drama and the ensuing Rexxit. They both have their issues (although they tend to be different issues). Fortunately there are many people working on both projects now, since they're both open-source.

trynn, 11 months ago

Yes, they will continue to coexist for the foreseeable future. There's a reason why people choose one or the other since they each have their pros and cons, and the fact that they do federate with each other (even if it can be buggy at times) means people will continue to be able to pick whichever one they prefer without having to lose out on most content from the other.

As for your experiences with federating, you do need to make sure federation is getting triggered. For instance, I created a magazine on kbin.social a few days ago but it was taking forever to show up on lemmy.world (I have accounts on both). I had to specifically search for the magazine URL in the lemmy.world community search before it triggered federating that magazine and created the mirrored community on lemmy. Once I did that, it showed up just fine. From what I've seen, federation of new communities/magazines doesn't happen automatically. It only occurs if someone specifically searches for it by URL in the other software. Hopefully that's a bug and will be fixed at some point.

trynn, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Welcome to how the Internet work? The thing you don't seem to be realizing is that this isn't an 'American obsession' thing. It's a population thing. kbin.social is advertised as an English discussion forum/link aggregator. It just so happens that the largest English-speaking country on the planet is the US, and by a lot too. The next-biggest is the UK, which has a population 1/5th the size of the US. Canada is even smaller, at about 1/10th the population of the US. Even if people post things at the same rate, you're going to get 5 US-related posts for every UK post, and 10 US-related posts for every Canadian one. There are simply more Americans online. This kind of thing is going to happen on any widespread English-language discussion forum on the Internet, and has been this way since Usenet in the 1980s.

trynn, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

I don't think you quite realize how much craziness is in the world at large. There are have been instances of pizzagate levels of craziness in my home country, as well as in the other countries whose news I follow.

You also don't seem to grasp how discussions on the Internet work. People will post about things that interest them. Telling people not to post things that are of interest to them because you don't like it is counterintuitive and borderline offensive. I told you the reason you're seeing much more US-centric posts. You have quite a lot of options if you don't want to see that stuff, but telling everyone else not to post it is not one of those options.

trynn, 11 months ago

Your first mistake is assuming that Elon Musk uses any kind of logic.

trynn, 11 months ago

I don't know anything about the mobile apps for the fediverse, but you can definitely search for communities from the Lemmy web UI (same goes if you're on kbin). If you go to the Communities tab there should be a search field in the upper-right.

trynn, 11 months ago

I think the Lemmy instances that disable downvotes are also the instances that have more heavy-handed policies and moderation. They're essentially centralizing moderation to the admins and mods rather than relying on community self-policing through downvotes.

trynn, 11 months ago

I think it's because there was a hope for wholesale migration of most/all users from Twitter to the Fediverse. Or at the very least for enough migration to make Twitter a barren landscape that would precipitate its imminent demise. Neither of those happened. Of course, neither of those are realistic outcomes either.

trynn, 11 months ago

This article kind of misses the forest for the trees. While I agree with many of the author's points, that's not why the #TwitterMigration failed. It failed because Twitter/Mastodon isn't really a social networking site, and Mastodon didn't provide the same service that Twitter does. At its core, Twitter is about small numbers of (usually famous or important) users communicating with large audiences of followers. #TwitterMigration failed because not enough of those famous and important people moved from Twitter to Mastodon, so the average user had no content they cared to read. Seeing posts from your friends about what they had for dinner last night is all well and good, but the stuff people actually want to see is famous person A throwing shade at famous person B while famous person C talks about the new movie they're in and important organization D posts a warning about severe weather in the area. You don't go to Twitter to have discussions, you go to Twitter to get news and gossip direct from the source.

In contrast, sites like Reddit and kBin/Lemmy are about having group conversations around a topic. Interacting with famous people is neat but not the point. Think of Reddit/kBin/Lemmy as random conversations at a party whereas Twitter/Mastodon is some random person on the corner shouting to a crowd from a soapbox. #RedditMigration has a much better chance of succeeding simply because the purpose of the site is different. As long as enough people move to kBin/Lemmy to have meaningful conversations (aka content), it will have succeeded.

trynn, 11 months ago

Both the Lemmy and kBin UI show the domain of the link in a post. I would assume if someone got a post to the top of hot/active/whatever and edited the URL, then the UI would be updated to show the new URL's domain.

trynn, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Yeah that could be worded better. No units. Resumably it's about the number of visits.

Looks like that number lines up with their reported DAU (daily active users) metric rather than site visits.

52 million DAU is about where Reddit was in the summer of 2021, per data on Statista. It also tends to vary up or down by a few million at each sample point, so we'd really have to see a long-term trend-line rather than a 2-week data snapshot to know whether the blackout had any real effect.

trynn, 11 months ago

It'll have to be tested, but I'm not sure Perspectives will do what the 'reddit' query does for many people. I can only speak for myself, but I typically would add 'reddit' to searches because I was looking for thorough information on a subject, and I was certain there would be some random subreddit out there full of experts and enthusiasts on that specific niche topic. I don't want social media or influencer content, I want content from people with extremely deep knowledge about very specific things.

trynn, 11 months ago

Many people don't quite grasp the concept of the fediverse or different instances, and just landed somewhere after following an article or guide talking about Reddit replacements. We shouldn't be surprised that such people interact with their instance like it was a monolithic Reddit alternative.

trynn, 11 months ago

If you want to have absolute control over what other instances you federate with, then yes. Even then, though, other instances could still potentially defederate from your instance.

trynn, 11 months ago

I think it's basically the same idea as Citrix. They're targeting the same market, anyway, as far as I understand. I assume they each have their own pros and cons.

trynn, 11 months ago

And even if an average user gets things installed and running, they're going to run into graphical issues and lack of polish that pretty much every Linux DE and application has. Stuff like dialog boxes opening up that are too big to fit on a smaller-resolution screen; inconsistent use of widgets, fonts, and icons; help strings being misspelled or completely missing; applications that look wildly different from each other just because they use different GUI frameworks; etc.

Linux "just works" in the loosest sense possible, and I say this as someone who has been using Linux for many years. It's certainly much better than it used to be in the early 2000s, but it continues to lack the design polish and cohesion of Windows and macOS, and that makes it rather off-putting for an average person to use.

trynn, 11 months ago

Perhaps I've just read too many Microsoft business documents (I used to work for them years ago), but that's not how I interpret that slide. It looks more to me like they want to "cloud-ify" functionality that could be used either from a desktop install or from a cloud streamed version. The key phrase in that slide to me is "Use the power of the cloud and client to enable improved AI-powered services and full roaming of people's digital experience".

That kind of fits with what they've been doing by moving Windows login to use a Microsoft Account by default (which I hate, btw -- I'm one of those local account people), as well as integration of OneDrive as default file save location. It's the same kind of thing Apple's been doing with macOS for the past few years, adding iCloud integration with everything. If you move that functionality for desktop installs to mostly be cloud-based, it also allows you to create a more viable cloud-only offering. But it doesn't mean there's a reason to stop selling a desktop-installable version.

Microsoft is still a business, and they'd lose a ton of market-share by killing off desktop installs, especially in the enterprise sector, which is their bread and butter. They're looking to expand into other markets, not kill off large existing ones.

trynn, 11 months ago

Yep, you're absolutely right. I think my main point is that switching to only offering a cloud-streamed OS as their only offering would kill off a massive market where they have market dominance (enterprise desktops). It doesn't make business sense for them to leave that market. If the demands of that market change, then you're right -- they're going to do whatever is most profitable. But we're nowhere near there yet.