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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Fediverse software tends to be kind of hostile to convenience features people have grown accustomed to. Recommendation algorithms, for example. Lemmy is on the cutting edge for having a “Hot” sort.

    I know Mastodon has historically been pretty hostile to even more basic things like being able to search posts.

    I get why they think like that, and I honestly agree with some of it, but it inevitably creates a culture shock for outsiders coming from corpo media. I think that plus the network effect means the fediverse will always be kind of niche.



  • Being able to sell FOSS is one of the freedoms “free software” refers to.

    Honestly though I think the thing that struck me the most and I found kind of scummy was their “value statement” where they were advertising the OS by comparing it to the prices of the proprietary software is includes alternatives to. You misreading the website wasn’t an accident, they designed it in a deceptive way IMO.

    If they were more honest about it, I wouldn’t have any problem with them charging for the convenience of having everything pre-bundled. Of course you could set everything up yourself, but Linux is notoriously finnicky. People want a complete experience, they want support. They want the slick branding.





  • LLMs are very good at giving what seems like the right answer for the context. Whatever “rationality” jailbreak you did on it is going to bias its answers just as much as any other prompt. If you put in a prompt that talks about the importance of rationality and not being personal, it’s only natural that it would then respond that a personal tone is harmful to the user—you basically told it to believe that.







  • I think your take is reductive. Gender isn’t about stereotypes. I’m sure that for many trans people, part of their trans discovery was not feeling like a stereotypical member of their sex, but there’s more to it than that. You can say that gender relates to a lot of things. Gender is ultimately an internal experience that means different things to different people, and isn’t necessarily related to identifying or not identifying with any given stereotype.

    Bioessentialism in turn reduces people to genitals, and sort of refuses to address intersex people because something something “outliers don’t count”. At best it says sure, you can dress up however you want, but it’s super important that everyone know What You Really Are so they can put you in a box and appropriately segregate society.


  • I don’t think “identifying with social stereotypes” is really an accurate representation of what being trans is.

    Sure, there are some people who transition and identify as stereotypical members of their desired gender, but there are also people who transition and are gender nonconforming after their transition, but still identify as binary trans.

    Identifying with social stereotypes also doesn’t account for physical dysphoria, which is very real for a lot of trans folks. Some trans folks change little about their presentation when they transition but still want hormones and/or surgery.


  • Most people earn their currency in-game, which would make it awkward to have a real-world conversion attached to everything—especially when there’s no way to pull it out so it’s not really meaningful.

    It’s already hard enough getting people to undock and risk their internet spaceships, it’d be even harder if there were little real-world price estimates attached to everything.

    A better solution would be to attach the prices only to PLEX (the premium currency), since that’s what maps directly to real-world money and would be what you’re spending your money on. They could also post the going exchange rate for euro to isk on the market itself without having to attach price tags to every individual item.


  • Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlOff by one solitude
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    8 months ago

    Yeah, fair enough. To my mind I guess I don’t think of array indexes as an example of actual zero based numbering, simply a quirk of how pointers work. I don’t see why one starting from zero has anything to do with the other starting from zero. They’re separate things in my head. Interestingly, the article you linked does mention this argument:

    Referencing memory by an address and an offset is represented directly in computer hardware on virtually all computer architectures, so this design detail in C makes compilation easier, at the cost of some human factors. In this context using “zeroth” as an ordinal is not strictly correct, but a widespread habit in this profession.

    That said, I suppose I still use normal one-based numbering because that’s how I’m used to everything else working.


  • Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlOff by one solitude
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    8 months ago

    Indexes start from zero because they’re memory offsets, but array[0] is still the first element because it’s an ordinal number, not an offset. It’s literally counting each element of the array. It lines up with the cardinality—you wouldn’t say ['A', 'B', 'C'] has two elements, despite array[2] being the last element.


  • The “make a fork” thing is part of the issue, I think. In general there’s this culture in the open source community that if you want a feature, you should implement it yourself and not expect the maintainers to implement it for you. And that’s good advice to some extent, it’s great to encourage more people to volunteer and it’s great to discourage entitlement.

    But on the other hand, this is toxic because not everyone can contribute. Telling non-technical users to “make it yourself” is essentially telling them to fuck off. To use the house metaphor, people don’t usually need to design and renovate their houses on their own, because that’s not their skillset, and it’s unreasonable to expect that anyone who wants a house should become an architect.

    Even among technical users, there are reasons they can’t contribute. Not everyone has time to contribute to FOSS, and that’s especially notable for non-programmers who would have to get comfortable with writing code and contributing in the first place.


  • Google destroys their own search engine by encouraging terrible SEO nonsense and then offers the solution in the form of these AI overviews, cutting results out of the picture entirely.

    You search something on the Web nowadays half the results are written by AI anyway.

    I don’t really care about the “human element” or whatever, but AI is such a hype train right now. It’s still early days for the tech, it still hallucinates a lot, and I fundamentally can’t trust it—even if I trusted the people making it, which I don’t.


  • Just because you can work with one monitor doesn’t mean multiple monitors isn’t more comfortable though. You can have multiple windows open at once, at full size, and glance between them freely. No need for them to share the limited real estate of a single monitor.

    I run Sway on my laptop because it lets me take full advantage of my single monitor, but on my multi monitor desktop setup I use a regular floating DE.