Formerly @russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net

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

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  • According to another user in here, blocking on Mastodon actually works. So seems like it is possible to do in the Fediverse.

    I was not aware of this, but their implementation of how they do this does bring up the limitation I mentioned. The other user cannot see your posts only if you are on the same server:

    If you and the blocked user are on the same server, the blocked user will not be able to view your posts on your profile while logged in.

    I actually thought blocks were public already.

    They’re not, well - the operator of your instance could go into the database and view it that way in the same way that they can see your email address. But aside from someone who has database access to your instance, blocks are not public. What is public is the list of defederated (“blocked” so to speak) instances for an entire instance (this can be viewed by going to /instances of any instance), which might be what you were thinking of?

    And personally I don’t see how it would be an issue if people that I haven’t blocked can see who I’ve blocked.

    How exactly would you enforce that, though? If your blocks were public, all the person who you’ve blocked would need to do is open a private browsing window and look at your profile to see that they’ve been blocked.

    If we’re looking at blocks as being a safety feature, I would think that having your blocks broadcasted to every single instance would be classified as harmful and a breach of your privacy. This is why although an instance that you register with has to have your email address that you signed up with, they don’t broadcast it to all other instances (same with the encrypted value of your password) - because otherwise it would effectively be public.

    Perhaps I’ve just got the wrong stance, but considering that you can never block someone from viewing your content with an absolute guarantee (if the blocks were broadcasted, you still couldn’t prevent someone from just simply logging out, or standing up their own instance and collecting the data anyways) I would not consider that tradeoff to be worthwhile. Not that my stance has any weight since I’m not a maintainer for Lemmy (or any of the Fediverse software), but I wouldn’t be surprised if that has at least come up to those who are developing the various Fediverse software.


  • Aside from the rest of the discussion that has already occurred here, I’m not actually sure how this would work from a technical perspective.

    You and I are on two completely different instances, if I were to block you, how is your instance supposed to know this in order to stop you from reading my comment?

    The only way I could see that working is if the list of users you blocked were federated too, and effectively made public (like votes currently are) - which seems counterproductive to the problem at hand.

    Then what happens if you post in a community where someone you’ve blocked is a moderator? Or if you block the admin of another instance? If you can “cloak” yourself from being moderated by just blocking them, that seems like an exploit waiting to happen. As far as I’m aware, on Reddit blocking a user doesn’t hide your comments from them - but they can no longer reply to them, and I assume this is why that is the case. Unless that has very recently changed.

    The biggest difference between Lemmy (and all software within the Fediverse - for example, I’m pretty sure Mastodon is this way as well), is that there is not one singular authoritative server. Actions like this need to be handled on all instances, and that’s impossible to guarantee. A bad actor running an instance could just rip out the function that handles this, and then it’s moot. I mean, they wouldn’t even need to do that - they’d have the data anyways.

    You could enforce it if both users are on the same instance I suppose, but this just seems like it would only land with the blocking feature being even more inconsistent.


  • Russ@bitforged.spacetoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    How is that the case? I’ve got pretty much zero experience with decompiling software, but I can’t say I’ve ever heard anyone who does say that before. I genuinely can’t imagine that it’s easier to work with say, decompiling a game to make changes to it rather than just having the source available for it.

    I suppose unless the context is just regarding running software then of course it’s easier to just run a binary that’s already a binary - but then I’m not sure I see where decompiling comes into relevance.






  • I can only speak for myself, but honestly I’ve never been able to figure out that root of why it’s so complex to me and difficult to keep track of / understand. The only thing that seems to have a “rational” explanation to me is… Selective memory. It has been a burning question to myself for so long.

    For a while I just said “It’s too arbitrary and not logical” except math is built upon logic - 1 + 1 is clearly 2 because if I hold one finger on one hand then bring another finger from my other hand I have two fingers held.

    (Imaginary numbers though can fuck off)

    I got into programming long ago because it is logical - there’s (almost) always a reason why a computer does $THING even if I can’t tell you, someone surely can. Though generally the answer is “someone told it to do the wrong thing”. If I dig deep enough, I can usually find the answer. My life is full of so many questions that I’ll probably never have the answer to, and I found refuge in the fact that I can get the answers here.

    However… computers follow a set of rules, just like mathematicians do. So for me to call it arbitrary would just be wrong. I mean sure, a lot of the rules and formulas certainly seem arbitrary to me, there’s a reason why they are the way they are and it can be tracked down just like you can track down why a computer does $THING.

    When it comes to numbers though, my brain just doesn’t seem to hold on to it properly. I can randomly recall weird functions and quirks in libraries that I use - even remember plenty of arbitrary “things” like Vim motions… Yet ask me what nine times seven is and I can’t tell you what the answer is without doing the weird finger trick.

    So the only explanation that I can come up for that is just selective memory. I like computers and as such my brain is willing to actually memorize these things. Whereas I’ve never liked math and so my brain doesn’t see a reason to “memorize math”.

    It really frustrates me because math and computer science intersect in a lot of ways, and I’ll always be held back by this. Games for example, they run really well on your GPU because GPUs happen to be excellent at math, specifically in parallel. Encryption? Fancy math equations! Almost everything at a low level comes down to math.

    Similarly, for as much as I love logical things, I could never hold the concepts of logic gates in my head. I mean, logic is literally in the name! Even when I was heavily into Minecraft I couldn’t pick it up through Redstone.

    As such, I think for me, the “logic” argument doesn’t hold up as much as I like to think it does. The analyst in me says that I want it to be something as logical as “math is illogical” because that’s easier to admit and sounds better than “I just don’t like math”. Even worse, perhaps that subconsciously stops me liking it, thus blocking myself from ever being able to excel at it… And yet, here we are (or rather, “here I am”).


  • Welcome to Lemmy!

    For me the first Linux distribution I used was Ubuntu 8.04 - though I never had installed it on physical hardware, just a VM - VirtualBox IIRC (that didn’t occur till Ubuntu 8.10). I was in my early teenage years and had discovered Linux and found it interesting, I used the WUBI tool to install it through Windows and updated the bootloader to keep Windows as the default (with a one second timeout) since it was the family computer, I think my family would’ve shat their pants if they randomly rebooted the PC and was greeted with Linux heh.

    Though a few years later on an old secondary family laptop (it was the “someone else is using the other computer” spare/backup) that was running Vista, it had gotten so buggy and bogged down that I installed Kubuntu for my family and they happily used that until eventually that laptop was retired. It never got them to really look into permanently switching to Linux, but I think that’s more than fine - I’ve never been one to “proselytize” Linux: If it is the right tool for you, fantastic - if not, no hard feelings is how I see it. In the aforementioned case, it was the better tool over the bogged down and buggy Vista.

    As for nowadays, its CachyOS on my desktop (I’m not married to it, but its been working alright for me for about a year now), SteamOS on my Deck, Fedora on my secondary laptop (an old intel macbook), and then Bazzite on my ROG Ally. Windows is still installed on a secondary drive on my desktop, but I very rarely have to boot into it.



  • Not to my knowledge, no*. Though it’s been a while since I looked into it.

    * Outside of running them inside a Windows VM on Linux, but that has its own issues. Especially if you use any of the CC apps that need GPU acceleration. It can definitely be done, but I’d argue most people are not going to want to go through the effort and rather just use Windows directly.


  • That’s a tough one. While I do think AI can be fun to play around with (though I personally prefer the ones I can run locally), there’s always a sort of “monkey’s paw” element to it. Text generation? Hallucinations. Image generation? All sorts of weird artifacts, and are heavily influenced by the training data (yes of course they all are, but what I mean is, if you pick a model that is heavily inspired by NSFW content for example, then you’re very likely to get NSFW content - sounds “common sense”, but nonetheless).

    So I suppose in a world where it’s “perfect” then I’d want it to make some form of media that can make everyone happy. If everyone on the planet were happy, then it’d be a much better place.

    Or if we’re talking less altruistic desires, probably a continuation of some TV series that I enjoyed which ended on a cliffhanger.


  • Russ@bitforged.spacetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWomen in Metal
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    4 months ago

    Hmm, I always have a hard time picking favorites, but I’ve always enjoyed Halestorm! Pretty sure “can u see me in the dark?” has been pinned in the number one spot of my On Repeat playlist on Spotify for a couple of months now… Lzzy’s vocals are fantastic in it!

    Also, a couple of years ago Alex Reade joined Make Them Suffer, and I’ve been enjoying their latest album (also called Make Them Suffer), a few of the tracks from that album (Epitaph, Oscillator, Weaponized, and Small Town Syndrome) have also coincidentally been stuck in my On Repeat playlist for a while.


  • I’ve never had to downgrade Firefox, most of the time I don’t even notice its been updated unless it pops up a “Welcome to Firefox vSomething” page which it hardly ever does.

    I did try out Zen, and its certainly an interesting browser, but there’s a couple of issues with it that I have:

    • It’s a browser that is as far as I understand, maintained by one person - I learned a while ago not to use critical software that is only maintained by one person
    • It’s still in alpha, and things change very quickly with it. Unlike Firefox I do notice when Zen updates because some behavior will have heavily changed. A few weeks ago there was an update for example that completely removes the new tab page (pressing Ctrl + T or the new tab icon just opens the URL bar and then when you submit your address/query then it navigates directly to it in a new tab). Interesting change for sure, I’m not sure I dislike it but that is a major behavior to change in an update with no prompt about it being updated, and it wasn’t togglable in the settings menu - you had to go to about:config to change it back. When I looked at the GitHub issue regarding this, the dev seemed a bit… unhappy with people’s reaction, to put it lightly.
    • Because its still in alpha, there can be stability issues like you mentioned; I recently finally switched back to Firefox when I noticed for some reason Zen was causing my GPU to run in high power mode and using high utilization as if I were running a game and dragging the rest of my system down. Thought maybe I’d left a video running in a tab somewhere and that it was just HW accelerated decoding, but nope.

    Obviously those last two points as mentioned are more understandable because the browser is in an alpha stage, but browsers are for better or worse very critical pieces of software. I can’t have it just randomly crashing out on me, or behavior changing out from under me every week. This combined with people selling Zen as if its the next coming of Christ has kinda left a bad taste in my mouth for it. Don’t get me wrong, what the dev has pulled off is incredibly impressive and major props to them for it, but I’ll be waiting for it to leave the alpha stage until I’m able to daily drive it. For now I’m just back on regular mainline Firefox.


  • I’m not sure if this counts because it wasn’t intentional on my part, but… When I was a kid, my mom had a digital camera. The lense on it would extend when it was powered on, and then retract when it was powered off.

    At some point the lense got stuck, which caused the camera to not turn on properly and made it useless so she ended up getting a new one. I had gone to take the old/broken one to mess around with it and accidentally dropped it.

    Apparently the angle that it fell at was just enough to “lodge” the lense back into place yet the fall wasn’t high enough to cause it to shatter or break. It worked perfectly after that, and while my parents were a bit upset they needlessly bought a new camera, they ended up letting me keep the old one.

    (Later on I figured that was their way of justifying not returning the new camera that probably had nice new features or something)

    I also vaguely remembering them saying something along the lines of “That’s probably the only time in your life dropping a piece of equipment will actually fix it and was just luck - don’t go trying that on other things randomly”.