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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • I mean, Lemmy used to have a big issue with CSAM being spammed by malicious users. Many people believed that it was pro-Reddit trolls, because it started happening right around the same time as the giant API debacle. It was a huge liability for the instance owners, because their server would automatically cache the content and they could be held liable for the CSAM being present on their server. It took a few months of dev time to add moderation tools, blacklisting, setting up automods, etc before it finally calmed down to the point that instance owners felt comfortable again.

    By your logic, every single user in instances that got spammed should be banned. Because even if they didn’t see it, or interact with it in any way, they’re still personally responsible for it. After all, personal responsibility doesn’t stop existing in a large group of people.


  • It will only take two years if people actually fucking vote in the midterms. But midterm turnout is historically… Well… Complete dogshit. And republicans are statistically more likely to vote in midterms.

    That’s why Trump is moving so fast to try and secure things; He doesn’t truly have four years to cement himself as god-emperor. He only has two before he potentially loses his majority in congress. So he has to be crowned before then.

    But even with that being said, I don’t have high hopes. As I said before, republicans are more likely to vote in midterms. Maybe Trump’s antics will be enough to get some blue voters off of their asses. But at this point, I’m not holding my breath.





  • I’ve long said that every retail worker should be legally allowed to physically fight ten customers per year. And not a calendar year, where all the employees would be out of fights by the time holiday shopping season rolled around (or would be forced to save all of their fights for the holiday season). Give them ten points, and each point takes a year to fall off of their record once it is used. And the retail employee would have zero obligation to tell the customer if they have any points. Leave the customer guessing until the employee swings on them.

    As gun nuts are so fond of saying: An armed society is a polite society. I think it would solve a lot of the problems with Karens. Karens only go full Karen because they hold all of the power in the relationship. But the threat of potential violence would go a long way towards quelling the most unreasonable ones, and people would only bother going full Karen if they truly felt they were justified and were willing to back it up with a fight.




  • Yeah, there’s also the “debugging is just as hard as writing elegant code” side of things. Vibe coding is largely just putting yourself in a permanent debugging role.

    The big issue I see with vibe coding is that you need to know best practices to build secure code. Even if you don’t adhere to them all the time, best practices exist for a reason. And a programmer who doesn’t even know them is a dangerous thing, because they won’t even be able to see what is insecure (until it’s far too late).

    Studies have found that vibe coders tend to produce less secure code, but have higher confidence in their code being secure; It’s essentially Dunning-Kruger in practice. I’d have no issue with someone using AI to get the broad strokes down. But then they need to be able to back it up with actual debugging. Not just “I didn’t even bother looking at it. If it compiles, push it to prod.”



  • Back in my desk tech days, one of the most useful cable testers I ever used had a “hold” mode. The lights would only come on if the circuit was interrupted. And then they would stay on until I hit a reset button. It made testing cables much more reliable, because it allowed me to find all of the cables that would randomly pop and crackle when wiggled juuuuuust right.

    I’d plug both ends in, and shake the hell out of the cable. If I saw any lights, I knew the cable would crackle at some point because it had a break somewhere in the middle. And the fact that the light stayed on meant I didn’t need to worry about missing a tiny flicker (which would sound like a big pop when the cable was in use)… If it disconnected, it was stuck on until I reset it.




  • If you already have a Plex instance running, Prologue is an app that turns it into an audiobook host as well. Plex doesn’t natively support audiobook metadata like chapters, but Prologue simply uses Plex’s remote access to reach the files.

    All you do is throw the .m4b audiobook files into a music library on Plex, sign into your Plex account on Prologue, and Prologue handles all of the metadata for the audiobooks instead of using Plex’s built-in music player.

    I mention this because I had massive issues trying to get ABS to work on my setup. It simply refused to read or write any data from my NAS. After a day or two of throwing myself at it to no avail, I found Prologue and haven’t looked back. I already had Plex running for some friends and family, so setting up the music library was as easy as dropping the audiobooks into a folder.



  • Yup, camp toilets are a similar concept. It’s just a 5 gallon hardware store bucket with a snap-on toilet seat lid. You line it with what is essentially a trash bag, just to make disposal easier. Then you use a gelling agent (just like what is in disposable diapers to allow them to soak up a bunch of moisture) to reduce sloshing and smell. It’s handy for when you’re going to be away from toilets for a day or two, but don’t want to (or aren’t able to) dig a hole to shit in.

    But the same concept applies for when you’re going to be trapped somewhere (like a classroom) for an extended period of time. Like, for instance, during a school shooting. When you have 30 kids in a classroom, there’s a very good chance that at least one of them will need to piss after an hour or two. And nobody wants to deal with human waste in something like an open trashcan during a lockdown.

    And as an added bonus, the bucket can be used to store all of active shooter supplies when it’s not in use. So everything is in a single location to quickly grab and prep. Active shooter happens? Great, just grab the big bucket out of the closet, dump all of the supplies out, and you’re ready to go. Now all of your tourniquets, styptic bandages, etc are accessible.

    But it quickly got distorted into “they’re making kids use litter boxes to indoctrinate them” instead.



  • For anyone looking for a wonderful example of this, check out the RuneScape wiki. It’s hosted by a company that is partnered with the game maker, and is fully maintained by the community. It is the single most expansive and in-depth wiki I have ever seen. It is truly the gold standard for what a wiki should aspire to be.

    It has everything you could need to play the game, all the way down to automatic calculators (with built in character lookup functionality, using the game’s high score leaderboard system) to tell you things like how many of [x] resource you’ll need to get [y] experience, or what your estimated return on investment will be for turning [x] resource into [y] product.

    The game has over 250 quests, (and not just basic fetch or kill quests like most MMO’s have) and the wiki has in-depth walkthroughs (including in-game screenshots) for every single one.

    You can even open the wiki directly from the game. There’s a “Wiki” button on the chat box, so you can search the wiki directly via chat, and it opens in your desktop browser.