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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • As long as websites/advertisers see their visitors as using a Chromium based browser they will continue to target for Chromium, regardless of whatever front facing UI is used.

    The inherent problem is Google has an outsized voice in Chromium’s developmental trajectory, and any major changes to Chromium will have downstream impacts, whether in actual implemented feature sets or forks making continued modifications on top.

    The best way to protest is to not use a Chromium browser. Switching from Chrome to another Chromium browser is at best a side grade; everyone using Chromium is subject to Google’s whimsy.

    Pragmatically it doesn’t matter if Microsoft chooses not to implement it; as long as Edge is on Chromium, Google can leverage this to continue to bully the web to their own devices.


  • I’m 100% sympathetic to the “I want to not eat out but it’s a chore to cook”.

    Ovens, pressure cookers, and rice cookers are absolutely wonderful because of how set and check back later they are.

    Dressing up even simple foods like ramen with blanched leafy vegetables, poached eggs and some ham is fun.

    Furikake is a great way to add a bit of flavoring to white rice. Alternatively some soy sauce and sesame oil are both good pairings for rice and ramen as appropriate.

    Wraps can be fun too and may be a nice alternative to bread.


  • Frozen vegetables and frozen fruit in smoothies are considerable replacements. Alternatives include looking into sandwiches or wraps using stuff you can reasonably expect to consume in a reasonable amount of time. Could also consider throwing stuff into the oven (oven roasted root vegetables or broccoli/cauliflower and a rice cooker can make a decent meal with very little active cooking and more just watching the clock).

    A pressure cooker is also a nice idea along that vein (dump everything in, leave it and come back to some chilli in a few hours).


  • From my PoV it’s probably many of these projects are effectively public good spaces. Hosting a code repository has become less of an esoteric thing and turning into a public good benefit (like a physical library but virtual for code). Spaces like Reddit and Twitter are todays analogous of a public discussion forum in a park or at a bar.

    Internet tools have become so ubiquitous they are critical to serve public needs and public benefits. However these internet spaces are increasingly commercialized and privatized, which runs against them being valuable public goods (see the difference between Wikipedia, run primarily for public benefit, and Wikia/Fandom).


  • Yep lemmy.world is live (stress) testing in production. It has its benefits, like when a set of patches were committed to vastly improve performance that was a big problem on a huge instance like lemmy.world but not on the smaller ones, and its downsides with all the random issues that pop up which happen when testing live in production.


  • Yep, notwithstanding the poor tooling on Reddit’s end. I don’t even think the developer portal was fully functional and ready for production use when the pricing was announced. In fact, Christian had to implement his own API tracking back-end to get a good picture of how many API calls Apollo was making because this information wasn’t readily and transparently available from Reddit’s developer tools.

    Imagine charging for an API but not making it easy for your collaborating developers to know how much of the API they are using and will therefore be billed for.


  • Laxaria@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldBotDefense is leaving Reddit
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    1 year ago

    Generally speaking, responsible stewardship of a service involves a tail of wind-down and end of life support. It gives time for people to adjust to new services and/or set-ups, troubleshoot the transitions, and provide some lingering support while the service is deprecated.

    As another example, Christian was willing to try to find a way to make Reddit’s new API pricing work, but would likely need a good amount of time (say, maybe 6-8~ months of notice) to be able to refactor the application to minimize API calls, trial out new subscription tiers, and figure out what to do for the lifetime users. Instead, he got 30~ days of advance notice after repeated promises that the pricing would not be like Twitter (a lie) and/or no major changes to the API in 2023 (also a lie).

    At the end of the day, the people leading these efforts want to end on a good note so they can point to their work as an example of their skills for future opportunities. It is not a good look, where in the face of a belligerent collaborator (i.e. Reddit leadership), one responds in a belligerent manner. Even if Reddit leadership is well deserving of scorn, responding in kind does not create a great professional image.

    BotDefense (and many other third party tools) for Reddit were built for its community members, not for Reddit the corporation, which is to say the “client” here are Reddit moderators and community members. In that regard, the developers are adopting good practices for their primary clientele.



  • Yep since the first party app’s primary goal is to generate revenue (over actually providing a good user experience), it’s packed full of everything to achieve revenue generation:

    • Ads
    • Tons of tracking to figure out how long you viewed something, what you clicked on, and so on to build an advertising profile that can be sold
    • Obtrusive Ads
    • Lots of suggested/recommended stuff to get you to keep your eyeballs on the app longer
    • Ads masquerading as real submissions
    • Paid promotions

    Third party apps don’t have revenue generation as their sole highest priority (if at all), so naturally they strip out all of that stuff which makes for a terrible user experience.


  • One of the great things about lemmy.world’s insane user count growth is actual live stress testing of Lemmy software. Instead of having an open question of how Lemmy might scale with large instances, there’s now real world production systems providing that opportunity.

    The technical issues will pass, but the notion that merely spreading out the load will alleviate them is probably just treating the symptom than the cause.

    I suppose from my PoV I see this as very much live testing in production and have adjusted my expectations around that instead of anticipating a wholly seamless experience.


  • Yea unfortunately the nature of Federation means that instances (servers) are dissociated from each other but nonetheless communicate with each other via a standardized protocol. Consequently, there is nothing stopping one instance from saying they want to stop communicating with another instance

    In some situations that makes sense. For example, if you are running an instance and don’t want to get people/content from another instance that posts incredibly hateful messages, you can choose to defederate from that instance.

    In other situations it creates complications. For example, if you are on a somewhat popular instance (like Lemmy.world) but then get defederated from an instance you want to participate in (like Beehaw.org), even if the defederation came from justifiable reasons, you will need a Beehaw account in order to view that content as you won’t be able to access new content from Beehaw.org using your Lemmy.world account.

    For the most part, in pragmatic terms what this really means is if one wants to participate in the most active instances, they’ll probably want an account on an instance that federates with the biggest instances.




  • In addition to the Octopath mention, the Xenoblade Chronicles games have some absolutely stellar soundtracks.

    Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has a night theme and day theme for each individual large area, and there are a lot of them, alongside a variety of battle music, insert tracks, and more. Each of the night/day themes share overlapping motifs, alongside motifs reflective of the larger music work as a whole.