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Zak

@ Zak @lemmy.world

Posts
13
Comments
1287
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • To Lemmy people who came from reddit: Have you guys tried other fedi software like mastodon or sharkey?

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  • I tried Hubzilla, Akkoma, and Mastodon. I still use Mastodon. I have the ActivityPub plugin on a Wordpress site, but haven't yet migrated that site's Mastodon account because Wordpress doesn't offer a great experience for consuming content from accounts I follow. I may try out Wafrn.

    I've always had mixed feelings about the microblogging category. Low friction to post and interact is good. Character limits and a complete lack of formatting, not so much. I set the character limit on my self-hosted Mastodon instance to a big number I never approach; I routinely exceed the default 500.

    I was aware of Lemmy for a while, but didn't join until the Reddit API fiasco because most of the activity was weird political extremism until suddenly a ton of people wanted Reddit alternatives and new servers sprang up.

  • Why did you join Lemmy?

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  • I joined Reddit in 2005 and liked the format. I had been self-hosting Mastodon for a while before I joined Lemmy because it had long been evident that a centralized corporate internet is not exactly great for its users or the world at large. I had also experimented with Hubzilla and Akkoma.

    I looked at Lemmy a couple times before the Reddit API fiasco and it was just a couple servers that were dominated by people who thought Stalin did nothing wrong and killing Uyghurs is just fine and/or not happening. I was not motivated to participate at that time. When lemmy.world launched, I joined it because I had the impression mastodon.world was well-run.

  • Explained: Why you can't move Windows 11 taskbar like Windows 10, according to Microsoft

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  • KDE has a bigger team now. Gnome doesn't have a Windows-style panel by default. I was thinking of projects like Xfce and LXDE.

  • What popular belief do you disagree with?

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  • The effect of a downvote is that fewer people see the comment. If you think fewer people should see my comments, I can assist you with that by not posting them.

    If you feel I've missed your point rather than understanding and disagreeing with it, feel free to articulate it more clearly. Your claim as I understood it was life is harder and crueler (for most people, most places) these days (than at some point in the past).

  • What popular belief do you disagree with?

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  • Why would I continue this conversation with you if you're going to downvote my replies? That's rude.

  • What popular belief do you disagree with?

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  • No. I live under a rock and haven't noticed that there's a global increase in far-right movements, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and a race between Sam Altman and Elon Musk to see who can boil the oceans faster to make better slop factories.

    Bad news makes for good headlines, and we absolutely have serious, pressing problems worldwide. Despite that, ask yourself if you'd rather live in 1925 than 2025. 1825? 1725? Think about how the average person lived and died in those times. When was life actually easier and kinder for most people?

  • What popular belief do you disagree with?

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  • life is harder and crueler these days.

    I think you just found the popular belief that I disagree with.

    Compared to most of human history, life now is pretty good. This article uses childhood mortality (globally 4.4% versus 50% for most of human history) to make the point. There's still lots of room to improve - the EU has a tenth the global average - but humanity has made incredible progress on that front over the past two centuries.

    Looking at a smaller time scale, the human development index is trending upward everywhere since 1990.

  • Family ‘banned from more than 1,000 petrol stations’ amid fuel theft row

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  • An easier way to prevent fuel theft is to require prepayment or a credit card authorisation to activate the pump.

  • What was it like the first time you had to call 911?

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  • I've called for drunk or similarly erratic drivers a few times. One of them was in a tanker truck and had several near-misses before he found a place to stop. The cops started following and he tightened up his driving. I'm not sure if they actually contacted him.

  • What was it like the first time you had to call 911?

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  • I was 12 and I was on my way home from school. I saw an outbuilding in a neighbor's yard on fire, so I ran home and called 911. It had already been reported, and the firefighters managed to contain it.

  • Explained: Why you can't move Windows 11 taskbar like Windows 10, according to Microsoft

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  • The bit about apps having to reflow seems nonsensical. They have to reflow any time the user resizes their windows.

    I'm not accepting any excuses from MS about limited resources when Linux desktop environments built by hobbyists have the feature in question.

  • You can pry pattern matching from my cold dead hands

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  • In most languages, I would agree with that. In Lisp, I think I might not. If Common Lisp didn't come with CLOS, you could implement it as a library, and that is not true of the object systems of the vast majority of languages.

  • You can pry pattern matching from my cold dead hands

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  • You don't even need to define a class to define methods. I'm sure that's surprising to people coming from today's popular language, but the original comment was about syntax.

    Whether Lisp syntax is ugly is a matter of taste, but it's objectively not unreadable.

  • You can pry pattern matching from my cold dead hands

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  • I imagine the tricky part for someone unfamiliar with Lisp would be that there's no syntactic clue that a particular thing is a macro or special form that's going to treat its arguments differently from a function call. Someone who knows Scheme may have never seen anything like CLOS, but would see from context that defmethod must not be a function.

  • Do you think western countries would benefit from adopting Asian Countries' harsh anti-drugs policies? Why or why not?

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  • I would not treat alcohol differently from cocaine.

    It would take some effort to come up with a comprehensive and fair framework for how I think advertising should be limited. In principle, I think it's harmless to try to persuade someone who is shopping for whiskey that they'll like brand X whiskey better than the competition. It's harmful to try to persuade someone who doesn't drink to start drinking.

  • Do you think western countries would benefit from adopting Asian Countries' harsh anti-drugs policies? Why or why not?

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  • No. I have the opposite perspective: all drugs should be legal and moderately regulated with regard to purity, packaging, and labeling. Advertising of drugs should be mostly banned. I have both moral and practical reasons.

    The moral reason is pretty simple: nobody has the right to tell any other adult what to do with their body. I believe this even when someone wants to do something very dangerous or harmful as long as there's no direct harm to others.

    The practical reason is that prohibition creates black markets, and black markets produce a litany of harms. Here are a few:

    • There's no legal incentive for sellers of an illegal product to ensure it is pure. There's a financial incentive to sell dangerously adulterated drugs in many cases.
    • Black market actors lack access to the legal system, and therefore tend to resolve disputes with violence.
    • Law enforcement pressures politicians for increased authority in order to try to stamp out black markets, often with harmful impacts on the rights of all citizens.
    • Legal and reputational risks prevent drug users from seeking help to break their addictions.

  • You can pry pattern matching from my cold dead hands

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  • Entirely readable to someone who knows Common Lisp, and unreadable to someone who doesn't know any kind of Lisp. Mostly readable to someone who knows Emacs Lisp, Clojure, or Scheme.

    Being able to correctly guess what the syntax does without knowing the language is a function of similarity to familiar languages more often than it is a characteristic of the syntax itself.

  • What is the technical hill you are willing to die on in your industry?

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  • build a Smalltalk program from the ground up while it's running the entire time.

    Lisp works this way too. An editor can provide completions, documentation, and the like by introspection of the running program. Experimental code can be tested immediately against live state.

    I'm puzzled that this approach isn't more common.

  • Deleted

    could any American explain to a foreigner how much freedom do federal legislators have to ignore their party, even to vote against it?

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  • However, there are no limits to political donations in the US afaik, which I guess means the rich and powerful ones can invest as much as they can to denigrate the other side, usually a democrat (correct me if wrong).

    Almost right. There are limits on contributing to candidates, but not on political action committees advertising anything they want, including a candidate. PACs aren't allowed to coordinate closely with a candidate's campaign, but that hardly matters in practice.

    Is it possible for local candidates to run against their own party and actually win? Like a republican that lost his party’s nomination for a district, then becomes an independent and actually wins against his former party?

    Yes, but it's extremely rare for it to succeed due to the voting system in use and in some states, ballot access rules biased against new parties. The governor of Alaska was elected that way in 1990.

    Do candidates have to give back the money that was given as a donation that wasn’t actually used to try to win an election?

    No. They can, but they can also donate it to charity, make (relatively small) contributions to other candidates, hold it for future campaigns, transfer it to a party committee, or give it to a PAC.

    Can a politician actually pretend to raise money for a campaign and then simply pocket it?

    That's illegal, which doesn't always stop them from doing it.

  • Verizon refused to unlock man’s iPhone, so he sued the carrier and won

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  • As I understand it, the practice remains common in the USA. Verizon, the carrier in the article agreed to limitations, but other carriers routinely finance phones and lock them until they're paid off.