blocked me without responding

How dare you reach out to inquire how to view his art! The nerve!

Great job tracking it down. It’s too bad Latvia doesn’t have any rights to their performance.

This is this first time I’ve missed “watch post” as an option on Lemmy. I want to know if you find it!

There’s no aggregate karma on lemmy, so farming is meaningless.

Upvote posts and comments that are particularly interesting/valuable/topical/insightful, which often means that I agree. Downvote those that detract from meaningful discussion. Sometimes downvote on disagreement is a fine line, and it mostly depends on why I’m disagreeing with the author. If their opinion is racism, sure they get a downvote, and if they’re particularly abusive maybe also a report. But if they just see things differently that’s neutral.

I probably only vote on about 5% of the content I read, and engage in comments in 1%. As a poster I expect similar numbers from others. I don’t get over collecting fake internet points, but it’s important feedback to understand that people out there are reading your content and that someone finds it meaningful or useful enough to upvote. If you were just yelling into the void with no engagement, you’d likely stop pretty quickly.

I’m vaguely aware that I’m feeding the LLMs of tomorrow, but I engage in the fediverse to interact with humans today, and it’s important to see that some humans get value from the content. Formulating comments is a lot more effort than clicking the up arrow, and there’s often no real need to elaborate - 20 “I agree!” comments would just be annoying for everyone to read.

Kermit, so fancy! I remember the excitement of discovering ZMODEM and how much better it was than the old standard of XMODEM.

It’s true that Big Lemmy isn’t selling your data to LLMs. Here it gets given away to them for free because that’s the nature of federation. By now they’ve certainly stood up an instance so that they’re receiving the full firehose of ActivityPub in an easily digestible format (and they get to just ignore those pesky delete messages).

But bots posting AI slop is still only a nascent problem here. Most of your discussion is generally with humans.

Costcos exist in 14 countries, thanks.

Certainly prices can vary regionally, and the retail pharmacy options near you may be different than those near me, but that doesn’t make it irrelevant for me to share a tidbit about how I happen to get something for a good price.

But you’re right that Americans are dumb as fuck. That’s a problem that goes all the way to the top.

In addition to everything people are offering here, you might want to find a new vet. It’s bizarre that they apparently haven’t suggested anything to you about allergies given the saga you described.

You can also try a clay-free litter like Feline Pine. It’s made of compressed sawdust pellets (like for a BBQ smoker) that swell and fall apart when they get wet. You need to develop a very different scooping technique with it though. Get a scoop with larger holes to let the pellets through and grab poop. Ideally get two litter trays that nest, and drill a bunch of holes in one. Leave them nested, then lift the inner and shake to let all the used/wet sawdust fall through, like a colander, and pour it into a trash bag.

I get it at Costco for about $64 for 30 tablets, which is 4 months when you’re using a pill cutter! But my dog is small and can have a dose of 1/4 tablet for a large dog. If you have a large dog then that’s no good. (But all cats are small so OP could go my route)

You can also talk to your vet about Apoquel. It’s nominally only for dogs but it’s sometimes used for cats. It’s kind of expensive, but is the same cost per pill at several different dosing strengths. So if you do go that route try to get your vet to prescribe it at a level where the dose is 1/4 tablet and buy a pill cutter.

One action you could take as a mod is adding a clear rule in the community sidebar about bots/AI slop. As a plebeian, I don’t know whether I should report a suspected post, or how to categorize it if I do. Is it spam? “Breaks community rules” is at least an easy choice if there is a rule about it. Nice plebs don’t want to flood mods with questionable reports.

I appreciate you doing the web search for me! (No /s)

What a strange standard to have!

This sounds like it also partially explains why a sixteen penny nail is written 16d. But not why pennies are somehow used to describe nail sizes.

I don’t think market saturation was RainMachine’s specific problem, but you’re right in general. Our capitalist dystopia demands infinite growth, and planned obsolescence is part of that.

They don’t make ‘em like they used to, whatever the consumer product in question. I have a few tools that belonged to my grandfather and they still work just fine, partially because there’s no plastic to crack and the bearings all accept either oil or grease.

You’re probably also right that selling user data to advertisers is now a reliable source of recurring revenue, which all the MBA C-suite people want at any cost, even the alienation of their customers. This timeline sucks.

What’s an MRC?

This sort of thing is one of the reasons I chose a RainMachine irrigation controller over other options, because they specifically marketed their cloud-independent firmware design. It was vindicated a couple years ago when they started going defunct and grasped for recurring revenue by billing for proxied remote access, but even then they emphasized that everything else would continue to function without their servers.

The onus is on the consumer to reward cloud-independent designs like this. While it has been sad to see RainMachine’s collapse, my device indeed just keeps working. Hopefully it isn’t ultimately killed by firmware or app security vulnerabilities since it’s now thoroughly unmaintained.

This generation? Yeah, no.

System administration is a different skill than software coding, although there is some overlap. You should be technically minded and detail oriented, willing to read documentation and tutorials closely, and have the curiosity to dig into related details that you don’t understand. In many ways it’s “just” configuring and running software on a Linux server, but there are lots of details underneath all that (hosting, DNS, backups, security, etc). Of course it’s also then managing users as an instance admin, and presiding over deeply held opposing community views like whether to enable downvotes.

Edit: based on another comment I reread your question and maybe you’re just asking about creating a new community on an existing instance, not hosting your own instance. If so, then my above answer is irrelevant, sorry. Creating a community is very straightforward, you just have to be willing to be the head moderator and deal with everything that entails.

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Software engineering is so often dominated by a move fast and break things mentality, driven by a rush to deploy and scale and profit, with the ability to fix problems with later updates. It’s a very immature process compared to every other engineering domain, because fix-it-later is much more difficult, expensive, and dangerous when it’s a bridge, building, airplane, or anything else tangible (although Boeing did a great job of destroying engineering process and accountability after the MBAs took control away from the engineers).

The work detailed in this Signal blog post is clearly slow and methodical, with continual checks for correctness and curiosity for optimal solutions driving careful experimentation. Building on existing proven PQ standards and keeping their refinements open for public academic feedback is wonderfully responsible. Building formal correctness proofs into CI and blocking trunk merges is spectacular.

They’re doing everything right, even years after Moxie Marlinspike’s departure. Bravo! Working this way is very expensive and requires absolute support from upper management. I’m definitely a fanboy for Meredith Whittaker and the direction she’s running the organization. Hell yeah!