theneverfox

I just realized... Add in every tv sold this decade, the box bought got because the smart TV sucks, and the third one you got because it was cheap. Probably blue ray players too, if you have one.

That's gotta beat PC sales several times over on its own... We truly live in an absurd world

Huh, I've never actually come across that, I've only gotten it indirectly. I bet my first mentor put it on in my head, the guy built out our entire system, then a v2, with one intern while the rest of us extended the framework he built.

As long as the Lemmy API can be used as a de-facto standard

And that's the sad part... The Lemmy api is not only not that, federation is an API+ that gives an amazing starting point. As far as I can tell, the lemmy API was made with the official clients in mind, and everything else was an afterthought made in a hurry during the last Reddit Exodus

I started reading through the kbin API, which starts with "here's a link to activity pub standards, they're surprisingly readable". They were... It's unwieldy in a lot of ways and maybe too all-encompassing, but they left so much on the table.

For one, uri ids. Lemmy has them for everything (which is nice), but they aren't directly usable. You can get the local ID for the home instance, but if I've got a url for lemmy.world I want to see on my instance, my only option is a search. Which should kick off federation, but what if it's there already? I want an endpoint to resolve it (or even to tell me it's not here right now so I can fall back).

And the way they handled metadata is pretty awkward... They next objects inside of collections of activity data and object properties, which is annoying because it's so inconsistent. Like, if you get a comment response, it gives you the comment reply, which is basically a comment without the usual metadata like vote count or the full actor object.

It gives you too much, then suddenly too little - I don't need the bio, tagline, and banner of a server every time I see a post, and I also don't need it for the community and user

But I do need the comment votes when I get a reply - I'll wait on the comment chain and root post, but I don't want to have to build a post-body only component to show while I wait to replace it with the whole thing

I do really like that they autodoc everything... Even if a lot of it is indecipherable with no context offered. Like the honeypot parameter on getPosts... It's actually intended to be a honeypot. Like if you set it to true, it's supposed to not give you posts, or log you or something? I tracked down a one line confirmation on GitHub which left me baffled. I had to try it... It didn't seem to do anything

/Rant

It is getting better though, the amount of completely breaking changes that pop up is very frustrating, but this time around it is significantly improved

I'd love it if the API that exists was more reliable... It's getting better, but the amount of basic features that didn't work (usually without specific combinations of params or unknown ranges, but sometimes not at all) is pretty crippling. (If there's a central place of discussion, I'd love to hear about it...I don't speak rust or flutter, but I've had to muddle through source several times)

I've never done anything as a mod so I have no idea what kind of tools they need, but I noticed enough basic parts to build all sorts of things.

There's definitely no reason to build it into the core though... Why put it on the machine busy serving everyone? You could do stuff so much cooler if you offload it... Like you could track mod actions against users/communities/servers, give a sample of random posts across their vote distribution, show the top few communities they get down voted.... All things psychotic to even consider in the core right now, but a reasonable project for a separate system

And since you seem like you'd get it, I want to share a win I made today. I've got a lemmy app I want to mix feeds (including between accounts and servers) to make a unified feed algorithm on your device. I also want it to support kbin, and maybe more... I took a couple cracks at it and charted out several designs, but I was getting too deep into abstraction.

Today, I finished working on a ridiculously generic abstraction layer - it handles not only tracking pagination, buffering, and preprocessing, it also enumerates all of the options in the Lemmy sdk so I can auto magically build most of the controls when I update. It also disambiguates resources (and actors) across instances and could describe valid actions you can take on it (I think that might be too far, so I'm resisting the urge... This time)

Everything is done through the account level, everything knows where it came from and can call the API by passing itself to its account to be worked on. It's also neatly serializable, you just have to write one function to pull the next page, and the rest is just an absurd amount of generics

Now, if I can figure out how to translate all that into a usable UI, I'll be getting somewhere...

I just had to share that with someone who can appreciate crazy data flow, it's been in the back of my head for months and today (after pulling my hair out for an hour and realizing I was forgetting to actually pass the posts to the UI) it worked beautifully

I like to think of it like this - many hands makes for a very stable project. Stable as in reliable, but also stable as in resistant to change.

Everyone is going to pull in a different direction, and it kind of averages out and slows things down.

Right now, lemmy is extremely immature. It's amazing how well it's held up really. There's a lot to go to get to a solid baseline - just enough to keep

If everyone dogpiled it, someone could easily solve the image problem. Granted, that might block someone else working on the database, and changes to improve or extend federation would likely be set back as they step on each other's toes.

We could still probably quickly get popular features quickly... For example, one person could get more useful mastodon and kbin federation going in a reasonable period of time. But then, when the core team goes in to overhaul the database or the API, now they need to make sure they don't break it - and the person who did those changes won't have the same vision as the core team, and now you have to either refactor the whole thing or work around it until it's causing too many problems

Certain things can be spun off more easily than others - I think other people have totally taken over deployment of instances.

Some are good candidates but require more maturity - like if they handed off jerboa and the default web client, there's one place that would need to be reinforced - the API.

Way down the road, they could build plug-in/mod interfaces so instances could choose feed algorithms, or individuals could come up with their own karma systems, or all sorts of other things.

To get to that point, you have to have a clear vision and stable growth though - that takes time, and is better done by an individual or small team keeping things heading in one direction

Counterpoint, a congressman released a sex tape of himself with a prostitute.

I've never heard of a man getting fired because someone stumbled across his nudes - not saying it's never happened, but it doesn't happen much. I've heard of plenty of female teachers getting fired for it, but also female office workers.

It seems like there's this idea that being able to see a woman nude somehow discredits her and undermines her authority. The same idea doesn't exist for men

And I'm pretty confident that you could post nudes online, and even if someone found them, it wouldn't end up with you ending up in HR or having to justify yourself... Maybe you could have personal complications because of it, but probably not social ones

Money is a weapon in western society. You can't win just because you're right

I want choices that aren't false dichotomies

Dog... Do you think there's a lower carbon technique to capture hydrogen than bottling a stream of naturally occurring hydrogen?

Electrolysis requires energy, and it degrades the anodes and cathodes. It generally is used with additives, because pure water isn't conductive.

Pure hydrogen, for free, is as good as it gets. No matter how good our tech gets, this is the closest to a freebee we'll ever get

Mofo I've been trying. 15 years, and I've never once checked my voicemail.

When is it going to fill up!!?!

I called this an unpopular opinion before, but maybe it's just an uncomfortable one

This isn't going away. It's in the wild, there's no putting it back in the bottle. Maybe, let's take this chance to stop devaluing women because their nudes exist. Men can post nudes with zero consequences - what's the logic here? IDGAF if they're a teacher with an only fans, if everyone can be rendered nude, no one can be.

Let's live in a post nudes world. Next time a woman is about to get fired over nudes, let's say "it's probably ai generated, you're disgusting for suggesting such a thing". Let them do it behind closed doors, or we shame them relentlessly. Anyone sharing nudes without consent should be the target here, who cares if they're generated, shared with trusted partners, or shared publicly for their own reasons.

The person bringing them into an inappropriate setting are the ones doing something wrong. No one should be shamed or feel fear because their nudes are being passed around - they should only feel disgust.

Their stance is "if it's illegal for a person to do it, it's illegal for an algorithm to do it"

If you use a 3rd party to collude, that's still collusion. Here, that algorithm is the third party

Jeez, that's crazy... That's an insanely high effectiveness, but it does seem like there's something behind it. Guess I'm going to buy more carrots