netvor

No, but you could achieve similar effect by giving me a few billion $.

Even more accurately: society is benefited by constantly exploring (and exercising) multiple different survival strategies (capitalism, collectivism, religion....) at the same time. These various strategies are inevitably in tension, producing tons of overall unhappiness.

Like an octopus spreading its tentacles, trying to explore every crevice of its environment, but sometimes accidentally bumping two or more tentacles together. Sure, the tentacles won't destroy each other but that's not the point: In this metaphor, we are merely the cells on the surface. Our suffering is just part of the whole organism trying to balance exploration with self-preservation.

or a trainplane

Along with other things said here, people tend to "forget" that there's a real person on the other end.

I vaguely recall Nicholas Christakis talking about a study they made, where they created a bot which would simply remind people of the fact that there's a real person on the other end, and they found that it would help. (That study was done in some university platform and is centuries old in internet time, though. I think he spoke about it about 6 years ago on podcast with Sam Harris.)

/s means sarcasm.

(I myself don't find this one funny though...)

I don't have experience with Twitter or Mastodon but it reminds me of time when I quit drinking.

When I quit drinking and tried to stay around people I used to drink with, I realized really fast how pointless this "engagement" (really just two people speaking past each other, and feeling like they have deep conversation) is. It's almost insulting what a waste of effort such an "engagement" can be.

my go_to NamingCovention: ANYTHING but camel-case 🤮

When it comes to identifying the server, hostname the first thing that counts. lemmy.world or mastodon.social or google.com are three different hostnames. At this point you can basically treat the period as no special character, it's just part of the funny world. This basically answers your question: those are two different domains, ie. for all purposes, different instances.

However, your computer does not really connect to hostname but to IP address, so the next important thing is to translate the hostname to an IP address.

Aside: a valid hostname does not even have to have period in it. For example, localhost is a valid hostname! But generally hostnames without periods don't get translated to any useful IP addresses. localhost is probably the only one widely used hostname but your OS will translate it to a special IP address which marks your own device.)

So to translate the hostname to IP address is done using so-called DNS. So before you can connect, your computer already knows an IP address of a DNS server, and asks it to translate the hostname to IP address. Technically, this is still not where the period is strictly important.

Where the period does start to be meaningful is when you think about: so we have billions of IP addresses, billions of hostnames, how do we organize it all? Who is going to maintain the huge massive list?

So it works like this: There are dozens of organizations, each of which is assigned one or more "top level domains" (TLD). Then they are responsible for maintaining lists of all hostnames ending with those domains. Many of these organizations are local to certain states. For example, in Czech Republic, where I live, we have organization called CZ.NIC which maintains all domains ending with .cz. So it's up to CZ.NIC how it manages permissions and gives out the domains. In this case, basically anyone can register any free domain ending with .cz, and what this registration means is that now they can get a server with an IP address, run whatever they want and have the registered domain name point to that IP address.

Note that other organizations may decide to add additional rules. For example .uk domains are managed with extra rules, where non-government (commercial) entities are normally allowed to register only .co.uk and other .uk names are not handed out easily. I don't actually know the details about .uk but my point is that if you are going to think about a hostname and how to begin to understand who owns it, first thing that matters is the TLD, and from that point the rules might be slightly different. To be fair, I haven't seen much variance between this; almost all public TLD's I've seen were either "simple", meaning myname.tld or this thing that UK does (also New Zealand, from the top of my head).

One almost universal rule is, though, that if I, say, register seznam.cz with CZ.NIC, then I automatically get not only seznam.cz but also any address I can possibly come up which ends with .seznam.cz. foo.seznam.cz, bar.seznam.cz, www.seznam.cz, I can now start organizing my servers using this whole infinite space, with any number of extra periods. I could totally start a business and start promoting my server foo.bar.baz.whatever.cz on billboards, as long as CZ.NIC grants me whatever.cz.

So back to your question: mastodon.social and piefed.social are two completely different domains. All we know that they have in common is that whoever registered them, had to deal with the same organization; that is whoever maintains .social.

So TL;DR: there's really nothing that suggests that they would be the same instance.

Also in my experience LLM can often propose solutions which are working but way too complex.

Story time: just yesterday, in VueJS I was trying to iterate over a list of items and render .text of reach item as HTML, but I needed to process it first. Note that in VueJS this is done by adding eg. <span v-html="item.text"></span> where content of the attribute is the JavaScript expression needed to get the text.

First I asked ChatGPT to write the function for processing the text. That worked pretty well and even used part of the JavaScript API which I was not aware about.

Next, I had a "dumb moment" when I did not realize that as I'm iterating through items I can just say <span v-html="processHtml(item.text)"></span>, that's all I really needed. Somehow I thought (or should I say, "hallucinated", ba dum tsss) for a moment that v-html is special or something (it is used differently than the most abundant type of syntax). So I went ahead and asked ChatGPT how to render processed texts while iterating.

It came with a rather contrived solution which involved creating another computed property containing a list of processed texts. I started to integrate it into the existing loop: I would have to add index and use that index to pull the code from the computed property, which already felt a little bit weird.

That's when it struck me: no, no, no, I can just f*ing use the function.

TL; DR: The point is, while ChatGPT was helpful I still needed to babysit it. And if I didn't snap from my lazy moment, or if I simply didn't know better, I would end up with code which is more complex, more surprising, which means harder to reason about for both humans and LLM's. (For humans because now it forces you to speculate about coder's intent, and for LLM's because it's less likely to be reminiscent of surrounding code in its learning data.)

Well, I was thinking of a quote that was much more similar to what I wrote (and it's not in the video you linked).

I had such a trouble finding it that I'm starting to feel like it might be one of those "quotes" where the credited author never really said that, but I haven't completely given up :D

Here's one closer to what I paraphrased (but not quite it)--quoting an article from cio.com

While Linux pretty much dominates almost every walk of our lives, even on the consumer devices like smartphones and smart TVs, it has not had the same success on the desktop. What does Torvalds think about it? Is Linux a failure on the desktop? Not really. “The desktop hasn’t really taken over the world like Linux has in many other areas, but just looking at my own use, my desktop looks so much better than I ever could have imagined. Despite the fact that I’m known for sometimes not being very polite to some of the desktop UI people, because I want to get my work done. Pretty is not my primary thing. I actually am very happy with the Linux desktop, and I started the project for my own needs, and my needs are very much fulfilled. That’s why, to me, it’s not a failure. I would obviously love for Linux to take over that world too, but it turns out it’s a really hard area to enter. I’m still working on it. It’s been 25 years. I can do this for another 25. I’ll wear them down.”