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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • This sort of thing is just awesome. I really wish there was more information on repairing these sorts of electronics out there and accessible to non-electricians. I do get that sometimes it really does take someone with a lot of specialized knowledge and training to troubleshoot and fix things like this. But, even basic, “look for X and try Y” type stuff for us plebes to make the attempt. Sure, we’ll fail as often as we succeed, but even that would save a lot of electronics from the scrapheap.





  • The big ones for me were a frequent, sudden, urgent need to pee and getting up multiple times a night to pee. I also drank a copious amount of water. Like, the whole “eight glasses a day” thing which used to be popular was confusing to me, as I’d drink that much in the first couple hours of the day. I finally went in to the doctor and got a blood test and my A1Cs were well over the “welcome to Diabetes Land” number. With diet, exercise and drugs I’m well controlled now and caught it early enough that I still have good feeling in my feet. Given my family history, and all the shit I ate in my younger days, it’s not really a surprise. I just have to be more careful now, but I have discovered an enjoyment of climbing because of it.

    Really, if you have any family history of diabetes, start visiting your doctor on an annual basis and getting a blood test. It’s simple, and catching it earlier is good for preventing problems with neuropathy in your feet.




  • sylver_dragon@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDoes this really work?
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    1 month ago

    For the ones they own or have a contract with, probably. However, there are two problems with that.

    1. It will do fuck all for the AI models which are just scraping the internet and which have no contractual agreements with the blog (e.g. all the big ones).
    2. It’s a fixing a problem the blog hosting platform created. They likely have a data sharing agreement with some organizations to make the scraping easy for those organizations (e.g. direct content database access). So, they are like the mob, offering you “protection” so long as you pay them not to break your shit.



  • Location: ~87% of respondents are from Canada

    As others mentioned, this would be an interesting data point to validate. I’m not familiar with the server side of Lemmy, but does the server provide any logs which could be used with GeoIP to get a sense of the relative number of connections from different countries? While there is likely to be some misreporting due to VPN usage and the like, it’s likely to be a low enough number of connections to be ignored as “noise” in the data. Depending on the VPNs in question, it may also be possible to run down many of the IP addresses which are VPNs in the connections logs and report “VPN user” as a distinct category. This would also be interesting to see broken out by instance (e.g. what countries are hitting lemmy.world versus lemmy.ml versus lemmy.ca etc.).

    All that said, thank you for sharing. These sorts of exercises can be interesting to understand what a population looks like.




  • If the goal is stability, I would have likely started with an immutable OS. This creates certain assurances for the base OS to be in a known good state.
    With that base, I’d tend towards:
    Flatpak > Container > AppImage

    My reasoning for this being:

    1. Installing software should not effect the base OS (nor can it with an immutable OS). Changes to the base OS and system libraries are a major source of instability and dependency hell. So, everything should be self contained.
    2. Installing one software package should not effect another software package. This is basically pushing software towards being immutable as well. The install of Software Package 1, should have no way to bork Software Package 2. Hence the need for isolating those packages as flatpaks, AppImages or containers.
    3. Software should be updated (even on Linux, install your fucking updates). This is why I have Flatpak at the top of the list, it has a built in mechanism for updating. Container images can be made to update reasonably automatically, but have risks. By using something like docker-compose and having services tied to the “:latest” tag, images would auto-update. However, its possible to have stacks where a breaking change is made in one service before another service is able to deal with it. So, I tend to tag things to specific versions and update those manually. Finally, while I really like AppImages, updating them is 100% manual.

    This leaves the question of apt packages or doing installs via make. And the answer is: don’t do that. If there is not a flatpak, appimage, or pre-made container, make your own container. Docker files are really simple. Sure, they can get super complex and do some amazing stuff. You don’t need that for a single software package. Make simple, reasonable choices and keep all the craziness of that software package walled off from everything else.


  • An economy is really just a way to distribute finite resources in a world with infinite wants. Even the most egalitarian of systems is going to require deciding who gets something and who doesn’t (winner and losers). It’s perfectly valid to be frustrated by being on the “doesn’t” end of that equation. And we (US and other Western Democracies) could certainly do a lot more to shift some of the resources away from the few who are hording a lot of them, even without a radical “tear the system down” approach. The difficulty is the political will to do so.

    Unfortunately, mustering political will for a collective good, which may come with some individual losses can be a tough sell. Especially when large parts of a population are comfortable. Not only do you have to convince people that the collective good is an overall good for them, you also have to convince them that the individual losses either won’t effect them or will be mitigated by the upsides of the collective good. And given peoples’ tendency to over emphasize the short term risks over the long term risks, this can be especially hard. But, that doesn’t mean you should give up, just that you need to sharpen your arguments and find ways to convince more people that things can be better for them, if they are willing to take that step.


  • Traditions exist to pass on learned knowledge and for social cohesion. Prior to widespread education, many local groups had to learn the same lessons and find a way to pass those on from person to person and generation to generation. Given that this also tended to coincide with societies not having the best grasp on reality (germ theory is not that old), the knowledge being passed on was often specious. But, it might also contain useful bits which worked.

    For example some early societies would pack honey into a wound. Why? Fuck if they knew, but that was what the wise men said to do. It turns out that honey is a natural anti-septic and helps to prevent infection. They had no knowledge of this, but had built up a tradition around it, probably because it seemed to work. And so that got passed on.

    The other aspect of traditions is social. When people do a thing together, they tend to bond and become willing to engage in more pro-social behaviors. It isn’t all that important what the activity it, so long as people do it together. The more people feel like they are part of the in-group, the more they will work to protect and sacrifice for that in-group.

    Sure, a lot of traditions are complete crap. They are superstition wrapped in a “that’s the way we’ve always done it” attitude. But it’s important not to overlook their significance to a population. The Christian Church ran headlong into this time and again through European history as they sought to convert various groups. Those groups tended to hold on to old traditions and just blended them into Christianity. This resulted in a fairly fractured religious landscape, but the Church generally tolerated it, because trying to quash it led to too many problems. While stories of various Easter and Christmas traditions being Pagan in origin are likely apocryphal, there are echos of older religious beliefs hanging about.

    It’s best to be careful when looking at a particular group’s traditions and calling them “backwards” or some other epitaph. Yes, they almost certainly have no basis in the scientific method. But, the value of those traditions to a people are very real. And so long as they are not harmful to others, you’re likely to do more harm trying to remove them than by simply allowing folks to just enjoy them.