Just some Internet guy

He/him/them 🏳️‍🌈

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  • 245 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Cable infrastructure is built different, with multicast streams. All the channels are broadcast on their network at all times to relays all the way up to your neighbourhood, if not your cable box. It’s got dedicated, guaranteed bandwidth. It can’t get overloaded.

    With streaming, each user is one connection using one stream worth of bandwidth, so it doesn’t scale too well to millions of viewers. Technically there’s multicast stuff but it only works locally, and I’m sure all those cable companies that are also ISPs aren’t all that interested in making it work either. So for now we have thousands of identical streams crossing the country at the same time hogging bandwidth and competing with everything else using bandwidth.


  • Sometimes it’s also, is it really important to know? A lot of things I have complicated opinions of because things are nuanced and complicated in the real world, so for example even if you ask me it’s not like I can just be for or against Israel or whatever. And I certainly don’t feel like going over it again and again and again as people keep asking about random topics.

    I swear americans have this weird thing where everyone needs to have a strong opinion on every topic all the time, and talk about it all the time so they can sus out if you’re leaning democrat or republican. It’s so weird. I’m not even american, I can’t do anything about it! I’ll keep my opinions where they belong, in my head, thank you.

    It’s important to be educated about those topics but I don’t feel the need to make it my entire personnality, unlike some people. I have better things to do that actually brings me joy rather than doom and gloom over things I can’t do anything about.





  • Ah I see. I wasn’t using those as job suggestions but rather examples of jobs that are considered “loser” jobs and use those to drive the point that they’re important too, and there’s nothing wrong with ending up with those for your whole life. A job’s purpose is to give you money. Trying to comfort OP by removing the “loser” label and not focus as much on “well you could go flip burgers” because that just doesn’t help the emotional side of the situation.

    I wish her to aspire to do a little more than those, but even assuming she’s as dumb as she claims to be, there’s still options, some granted less good than others, but just as important to society. I do think she’s got more potential than she thinks though, she reminds me a bit of my wife when I met her and now she’s competing with me as DevOps/SRE.


    As another example: I’m autistic, I struggle with a lot of things. I make frequent use of DoorDash, I also hire cleaners every now and then to clean, and handymen to repair stuff in the house I just can’t deal with on my own. All of those jobs, people shit on continuously, and me too because I can’t manage some quite basic tasks. But using those services let me focus on what I’m good at, which is keeping thousands of computers happy. I make a fair bit of money which gets shared with all those that support me in being a productive member of society: cooks, waiters, delivery drivers, cleaners, trades. It’s good for the economy, it’s good for society. Those people deserve respect for their somewhat hidden contributions. Not having those people would ultimately make me fail, that would drag my employer with it, other companies wouldn’t have the software they need to operate.

    Every one that contributes to society is important and valueble, whether people recognize it or not.


  • Yeah that’s an intentionally extreme example. I’ve also seen garbage truck drivers being used in that context. The point is more that we need people on all tiers of jobs, even the literal shit ones. We need truck drivers, we need train drivers, we need people to pick up crops, we need people to take the trash out, we need people to maintain the sewers, we need people to empty out sceptic tanks. They’re critical infrastructure, and one shouldn’t feel bad because they ended up being a garbage truck driver. If you want a cozy repeated job and come home at 5 to your kids and family, that’s perfectly acceptable.

    We put way too much emphasis on “success” and its connection to highly educated and high paying jobs.

    IMO the fact that fastfood jobs are considered temporary bootstrap jobs that you’re expected to be exploited to hell is bullshit and an indication of the absolutely broken moral compass of the corporate world. We could do without fast food, but that doesn’t mean we should pay them them minimum wage. Everyone deserves a livable wage no matter what they do.


  • I wouldn’t exclude lower IQ as that major of a problem. Sure maybe it kind of excludes you from being an engineer or a lawyer or a doctor and these kinds of jobs. But there’s plenty of low education jobs around, and there’s no shame in that. If everyone was engineers and lawyers we’d have major problems keeping shops and fastfood open. My dad didn’t finish school and raised me no problem, and lives fine. He might not be good at math or writing, but it’s plenty for woodworking and being a handyman.

    As others have already pointed out, you’re articulate and sound smarter than a bunch of people I’ve seen on Lemmy. I mean hell, you found your way into Lemmy, a platform that’s still fairly niche and filled with nerds. You could have gone to Reddit but you came to the fediverse.

    Everyone have their strengths and things they’re good at. Finding what you like to do is a good start. Some people inherently take artistic paths, and art has nothing to do with intelligence. What you need to do is figure out what you like to do that’s pleasant and satisfying for you to do, and get out of your head that you have to go to higher education.

    Also worth noting, you mentioned ADHD. If you’re not diagnosed for it or treated for it, in itself that can significantly lower your IQ scores especially if not accounting for that. When I had my ADHD assessment, they spent time measuring exactly how much my cognitive performance declines under conditions harsh for ADHD. I swear I struggled to figure out how to take the bus after that because I was so fried, was very glad I was too lazy to take the car that day. They noted, initially being well rested I performed really well then my performance tanked the moment they started hammering the ADHD. It’s also important to understand IQ measures only one thing: intelligence. It doesn’t measure empathy, communication, art, or anything else. That might limit you for intellectual jobs, but you can still be great a people jobs. You could be HR, you could be sales, you could be support. Some of the best artists I know failed school hard.

    Stop being jealous and ashamed. Those that shame you can go to hell, all they do is make you think you’re worthless and inferior to them. Find your own path.



  • A lot of them got sucked into the whole “the government is forcing it on you to control the population”, and they simply can’t comprehend that anyone would voluntarily wear what they now consider being the symbol of submission to the government. In their mind it doesn’t work and never worked and you’re just virtue signalling your support of the government. It’s wild and a lost cause.

    I’d expect it to get much worse now.


  • One thing to be careful with allowing some bending of the rules, is some are going to start testing how far they can bend the rules. Everytime you bend a rule you create a precedent for it as well, and you get into nasty fights of why was I banned but not them and have your clemency hit you right back in the face.

    If it’s okay to bend some rules, then that should explicitly be the rule instead. Offtopic discussions for example, you can have a rule be “all top level comments should be on topic” as a balance, so offtopic discussions can happen, just not take over the whole comment section. If you allow something, make a mod comment explaining why for transparency and set the right expectations: “This post is off-topic but is generating on-topic discussion so we’re keeping it.”

    Similarly, well designed punishments goes a long way. For example, automatic ban after N warnings can be unfair. What you’re really after is, you don’t want to be warning that user every day to stay on topic. So the punishment can be more like “more than 3 warnings within 10 days results in a 7 day ban”. But sometimes the situation is such, you can rack in 10 warnings in the same threads. So you can make the punishment account for that: “If you get warned more than 3 times during a 14 day period, you will be banned for 7 days”. Or per thread, whatever makes sense. Understand common mistakes community members do and how you can steer them in the right direction without being unnecessarily harsh.

    With those two combined, it shouldn’t matter if you moderate like a robot or not. The expectations are clear, forgiving and fair while enforcing some order for repeat offenders. The rules have the flexibility you need baked in so you don’t have to bend the rules.


  • Guarantee there will be questions of cost of setup, maintenance, and risks.

    And time moderating it, especially if they run their own. At least with Twitter/Facebook/YouTube, you get a lot of moderation for free whether you agree with it or not.

    And if they use another instance, there’s other liability questions about the particular instance to choose. If they’re gonna represent an official city account, you’d expect some cybersecurity certifications to be a requirement and all kinds of stuff, even if it’s a free service. The instance admins interfering, possibly steering opinions during city elections, etc.

    Nobody cares about decentralized social networks, the technology, or how terrible the other outlets are. For a municipality, you may want to focus on maintaining multiple channels of communications and ways to reach and engage the most users. You could then fold the fediverse into it as one more channel. Something they should keep an eye on. They’ll need a way to post the same content to all those channels with the least effort. Something easy that a trained intern or clerk can do.

    In this case IMO it might even be better to use something like Wordpress with the ActivityPub plugin, or alternatives to that. I imagine a city mostly posts announcements and stuff, so a blog that serves as both an official website and you can follow and interact with it from the comfort of your preferred social service sounds a lot more appealing than just another social media without that many users. Can even use more plugins to post to Facebook and Twitter as well, all from one place. Given the age of the board, they’re also more likely to know and care about Threads and Bluesky compatibility just because they have more users, and bureaucratic decisions are based on numbers. A nice graph showing if they join the fediverse they capture all the users fleeing Twitter by supporting AP and AT.


  • I went for a federated option specifically so that it’s resistant to one company going rogue like Reddit did with the API fiasco and the banning of every third party app that made Reddit great. That’s really the killer feature, if you’re tired of your admins you go to another instance. No need to protest and switch your subs to private, just move the whole community elsewhere.


  • It’s just not that good of a metric overall. Not just because it would be easy to fake it, but also because it would inevitably divide into tribes that unconditionally upvote eachother. See: politics in western countries.

    You can pile up a ton of reputation and still be an asshole and still get a ton of support from like-minded people.

    The best measure of someone’s reputation is a quick glance and their post history.


  • Those kinds of problems aren’t particularly new (PGP comes to mind as an example back when you couldn’t export it out of the US), but it’s a reminder that a lot of open-source comes from the US and Europe and is subject to western nation’s will. The US is also apparently thinks China is “stealing” RISC-V.

    To me that goes against the spirit of open-source, where where you come from and who you are shouldn’t matter, because the code is by the people for the people and no money is exchanged. It’s already out there in the open, it’s not like it will stop the enemy from using the code. What’s also silly about this is if the those people were contributing anonymously under a fake or generic name, nothing would have happened.

    The Internet got ruined when Facebook normalized/enforced using your real identity online.


  • The logins aren’t federated, the content is. Each instance receives a copy of everything, and normally you browse other instance’s content from your home instance. In your case you’d access lemmy.one’s content from your home instance, lemmy.world. If the logins were federated we wouldn’t need those domains after our usernames!

    The email analogy still works for this: if you’re on Gmail, you don’t go log in to Outlook to send an email to your friend: from gmail directly, you send an email to your friend and Gmail’s server takes care of sending it out to Outlook.

    There’s browser extensions to help go back to your home instance, as the linking on Lemmy is sometimes a bit weird and you do end up on other instances every now and then.