• 2 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Stress is relative to your own personal conditions. It’s not absolute. A tech executive might have a nice house and financial security, but if he’s working 80 hours/week under intense pressure to meet some deadline, that’s still stressful. Nobody wants to be perceived as a failure at work, even if their personal financial consequences for failure are minimal.

    Your argument seems to imply it’s impossible to feel stress if you’re comfortable in life. Even the poorest Americans can count on access to food, clean running water, electricity, internet, etc. For most of humanity’s existence, and still today in some parts of the world, these would be considered enormous luxuries, so anyone with access to them would be seen as extremely comfortable in life. Clearly though, people can still be stressed out despite having access to these sorts of things that most of history would consider luxurious.

    Stress is relative, not absolute.


  • The play to earn model is literally a ponzi scheme with a fancier name. The money you earn has to come from somewhere. It doesn’t appear out of thin air. In 100% of P2E games, the earliest players get paid by the revenue from later players. Eventually, the game stops growing, so the later players are left holding the bag.

    Obviously, some people make a lot of money in ponzi schemes (most notably, the people that start the ponzi scheme in the first place), but it’s a terrible design for people that aren’t the ponzi creators or the first adopters lucky enough to get in on the ground floor.


  • Defederation works against that though. When I first joined a few weeks ago, a lot of the discussion was taking place on Beehaw. I joined a few communities over there and started to enjoy the experience but in an instant, all of that was blocked because Beehaw decided to defederate from Lemmy.World (and others). That sort of thing will happen more and more in the future. I don’t want to have to create a dozen different accounts on a dozen different instances to view the content I want to see: I want a simple interface with everything in one spot.

    Reddit offers the “everything in one spot” piece, but they killed the simple interface possible via apps like RIF and replaced it with an abysmal official app.

    Lemmy offers the “simple interface” piece with apps like Jerboa, but the federation aspect of it makes it hard to get everything in one spot.

    The second a competitor offers both features with a large enough community to allow for meaningful discussion, I’d be happy to make the switch.


  • So far, yes, but I don’t really have any allegiances to this site and will jump ship to a competitor in a heartbeat if something better comes along. I know some people like the decentralized federation approach here, but I actually see that as the biggest downside to using this site. The value proposition of Reddit in its heyday was that it offered a single landing point for all sorts of discussions that used to be scattered across hundreds of different forums. The decentralized federation approach moves away from that, and while that offers some advantages, it also comes with a lot of disadvantages too.




  • Why? You should let each post stand on it’s own merit.

    First, account age is silly for Lemmy, as almost 100% of people on here will have an account creation date in June 2023 or later because this place was a ghost town before Reddit decided to kill the APIs. A month from now, is someone with an August 2023 join date automatically presumed to be a troll, or are they just someone making the switch from Reddit a month later than everyone else?

    As for karma, neither negative karma nor positive karma really tell you anything about the poster:

    For instance, people can make good faith arguments advocating for conservative political opinions, but because the user base skews pretty far left here, those arguments will be downvoted. A discussion forum that bans opposing viewpoints is useless, and the echo chambers on Reddit are something I’d love to avoid here.

    Similarly, it’s also possible to effortlessly build positive karma. Simply copy/paste highly rated comments from the last time a common repost appeared on the feed, and chances are, your copy/pasted comments will get upvoted too. You can even automate it with a bot.

    Karma meant nothing at Reddit, and moderators shouldn’t be using it for decisionmaking purposes. It’s useful for ranking posts and comments, but anything beyond that isn’t helpful.






  • The past 15 years of growth in anything technology adjacent has been fueled by one thing: Extremely cheap debt. Interest rates have at been rock bottom since the 2008 crisis, and they’ve only started to tick up recently. That means the ability to fund infinite growth for basically nothing, so tech companies have relied heavily on debt financing.

    Now though, that’s no longer viable. Silicon Valley Bank was very heavily involved with all these tech companies, and it went insolvent in March largely because of rising interest rates. They held a lot of long term bonds at low interest rates. In normal conditions, rising interest rates mean lower bond prices and unrealized losses, but not a major problem because they can just hold them to maturity and never realize the loss. Bank runs forced SVB to sell the bonds for huge losses though, turning unrealized losses into realized losses, and a non-issue into a major problem.

    Now that cheap debt is gone, these tech companies are desperately scrambling to attain profitability. It hasn’t been discussed much, but this is a big reason for the changes at both Twitter and Reddit.



  • Side downloading .apk files from something other than the Google Play store is shady as hell. It’s way too easy to sneak malicious code into the app that way. Even if the project is open source, I don’t have the time or the skillset to review the code to confirm it’s not malicious. No offense to the developers, but there’s no chance in hell I’m doing that for an upstart app I knew nothing about a month ago.

    As a result, I’m using Lemmy via Firefox’s mobile browser right now, with Jerboa completely useless crashing the second I open it.

    Hopefully they fix it soon (i.e., within the next 24 hours). First impressions matter a ton. For the masses migrating tomorrow once RIF and others shut down, Lemmy and the different apps for it will appear to be dead on arrival. If we expect any actual content on Lemmy beyond complaints about Reddit and questions about Lemmy, we need those people to migrate over.

    The idea that different fediverse instances can all be on different incompatible versions is mind bogglingly dumb. The federation/decentralization design choice overcomplicates things to a huge degree. There are far more downsides than upsides to this approach. I want to like Lemmy/Jerboa, but at this point, the official Reddit app is looking more and more appealing.




  • In the early days of the pandemic, I got a low-tech version of that: I had one of those electric desk fans that move from left to right and back again to keep a room cool. I took an old wire coat hanger and bent it to attach one part to the fan, and one part to my mouse. As the fan moved, so did my mouse, so I always appeared active in Teams.

    Software solutions like powershell scripts are neat, but they can be detected by IT. They can’t really detect a hardware solution without a lot of digging though, and as long as I’m still getting my work done, they have no reason to dig.

    I quickly stopped caring about it though. Like OP, I go inactive for long periods of time, but fortunately, my manager is smart enough to recognize that my work’s still getting done, so he doesn’t care at all. Same thing for my direct reports: As long as we continue to meet deadlines, I don’t care if they’re working 40 hours / week or 10 hours / week.


  • The “Top Day” sorting option does this, but posts fall off a cliff rather than falling off gradually. My understanding is that they’ll remain on the page from hour 0 to hour 23, but then completely disappear starting in hour 24.

    Instead of that, it would be ideal to implement a mathematical formula that pushes pages higher into the rankings with every upvote, comment, or view it gets, but pushes posts lower in the rankings with every additional hour passed. You have to tweak the specific parameters of that formula to get it right, but it essentially forces posts off the page after enough time has passed, while introducing new posts to replace the old. Unlike the “Top Day” sort where things are a step function, the idea with this is to make it gradual so that a popular post falls from #1 overall down to #2, then #3, etc. over the course of a day.


  • Agreed. Something like Top for the last 4 hours would be super easy to implement because Top for the last day already exists (just change 24 hours to 4 hours in the code that fetches comments). However, for those that are used to checking the site multiple times in a day, you don’t want to ge served up the same content every time you check. Top for the past 4 hours would seemingly be a decent balance between giving posts that have some type of traction while not giving posts that are stale.



  • Agree that it shouldn’t be so complicated. I see that as a major flaw of the platform that will curtail adoption, but who knows, maybe one will win out over the others?

    In any case, my understanding is that you can’t log into the other instances with your username from lemmy.one, but you can read posts and interact with communities on different lemmy sites. For instance, I’m commenting from lemmy.world on a post you made using lemmy.one at a community hosted on lemmy.ml, but we can both read each other’s comments, and so can people that signed up on other instances like beehaw.org.