Indie iOS app developer with a passion for SwiftUI

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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • lazyvar@programming.devtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 year ago

    You’re right that a lot of Terms of Service documents and similar agreement documents have language that reserves the right to modify those terms.

    At the same time just because something is in the terms doesn’t mean it can stand the test of adjudication and terms as well as changes are often challenged in court with success.

    Unity is in a particular tricky situation because the clause that governed modifications in their last ToS explicitly gives the user the option to pass on modifications that adversely affects them and stick with the old terms:

    Unity may update these Unity Software Additional Terms at any time for any reason and without notice (the “Updated Terms”) and those Updated Terms will apply to the most recent current-year version of the Unity Software, provided that, if the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights, you may elect to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity Software (e.g., 2018.x and 2018.y and any Long Term Supported (LTS) versions for that current-year release) according to the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms (the “Prior Terms”). The Updated Terms will then not apply to your use of those current-year versions unless and until you update to a subsequent year version of the Unity Software (e.g. from 2019.4 to 2020.1). If material modifications are made to these Terms, Unity will endeavor to notify you of the modification. If a modification is required to comply with applicable law, the modification will apply notwithstanding this section. Except as explicitly set forth in this paragraph, your use of any new version or release of the Unity Software will be subject to the Updated Terms applicable to that release or version. You understand that it is your responsibility to maintain complete records establishing your entitlement to Prior Terms.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20201111183311/https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService/blob/master/Unity Software Additional Terms.md



  • Cue the nuclear shills that will handwave away any legitimate concern with wishful thinking and frame the discussion as solely pro/anti fossil, conveniently pretending that renewables don’t exist.

    ETA:

    Let’s look at some great examples of handwaving and other nonsense to further the nuclear agenda.

    Here @danielbln@lemmy.world brings up a legitimate concern about companies not adhering to regulation and regulators being corrupt/bought *cough… Three Mile Island cough*, and how to deal with that:

    So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?

    So of course the answer to that by @Carighan@lemmy.world is a slippery slope argument and equating a hypothetical disaster with thousands if not millions of victims and areas being uninhabitable for years to come, with the death of a family member due to faulty wiring in your home:

    Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, “It’s not as bad as a nuclear disaster” isn’t exactly going to console them much.

    At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It’s not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.

    Then there’s the matter of misleading statistics and graphs.
    Never mind the fact that the amount of victims of nuclear disasters is underreported, under-attributed and research is hampered if not outright blocked to further a nuclear agenda, also never mind that the risks are consistently underreported, lets leave those contentious points behind and look at what’s at hand.

    Here @JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works shows a graph from Our World in Data that is often thrown around and claims to show “Death rates by unit of electricity production”:

    Seems shocking enough and I’m sure in rough lines, the proportions respective to one another make sense to some degree or another.
    The problem however is that the source data is thrown together in such a way that it completely undermines the message the graph is trying to portray.

    According to Our World in Data this is the source of the data used in the graph:

    Death rates from energy production is measured as the number of deaths by energy source per terawatt-hour (TWh) of electricity production.

    Data on death rates from fossil fuels is sourced from Markandya, A., & Wilkinson, P. (2007).

    Data on death rates from solar and wind is sourced from Sovacool et al. (2016) based on a database of accidents from these sources.

    We estimate deaths rates for nuclear energy based on the latest death toll figures from Chernobyl and Fukushima as described in our article here: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima

    We estimate death rates from hydropower based on an updated list of historical hydropower accidents, dating back to 1965, sourced primarily from the underlying database included in Sovacool et al. (2016). For more information, see our article: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

    Fossil fuel numbers are based on this paper which starts out by described a pro-nuclear stance, but more importantly, does a lot of educated guesstimating on the air-pollution related death numbers that is straight up copied into the graph.

    Sovacool is used for solar and wind, but doesn’t have those estimates and is mainly limited to direct victims.

    Nuclear based deaths is based on Our World in Data’s own nuclear propaganda piece that mainly focuses on direct deaths and severely underplays non-direct deaths.

    And hydropower bases deaths is based on accidents.

    So they mix and match all kinds of different forms of data to make this graph, which is a no-no. Either you stick to only accidents, only direct deaths or do all possible deaths that is possibly caused by an energy source, like they do for fossil fuels.

    Not doing so makes the graph seem like some kind of joke.






  • The proposal is bad enough as it is, but it’s the duplicitous gaslighting BS that really pisses people off.

    If they came out and said “We came up with this thing to prevent loss of revenue on ads and prevent LLMs from capturing data” then people would still be against it, but at least it would feel like an honest discussion.

    Instead it’s just another page out of Google’s playbook we’ve seen many times already.

    1. Make up some thinly veiled use cases that supposedly highlight how this would benefit users, while significantly stretching the definition of “users”
    2. Gaslight every one by pretending that people simply misunderstand what you’re proposing and what you’re trying to achieve
    3. Pretend that nobody provides reasonable feedback because everyone is telling you not to commit murder in the first place instead of giving you tips on how to hide the body
    4. Latch onto the few, inevitable, cases of people going too far to paint everyone opposing it in a negative light
    5. Use that premise to explain why you had to unilaterally shut down any and all avenues for people to provide comment
    6. Make the announcement that you hear people and that you’re working on it and that all will be well
    7. Just do what you want anyways with minimal concessions if any and rinse repeat

    For what it’s worth I blame W3C as well.
    Their relatively young “Anti-Fraud Community Group” has essentially green lit this thing during meetings as can be seen here:

    https://github.com/antifraudcg/meetings/blob/main/2023/05-26.md

    https://github.com/antifraudcg/meetings/blob/main/2023/07-07-wei-side-meeting.md




  • Most of these services are US-centric because a lot of the necessary records to provide the information isn’t public in many countries outside of the US.

    Birth records, death records, marriage records, divorce records, voting records, criminal records, etc. is considered public information in much of the US. Even address information can be found publicly and immigration records become available to the public after a certain time.

    In a lot of countries, especially in many European countries, these are hard to access for people that aren’t the subject of these records, if accessible at all.

    For example while court records are public in much of Europe, often times the names of private persons are censored because it’s not deemed necessary to know who the parties are to be able to check if the courts make fair decisions.
    This automatically excludes criminal and divorce information from disseminating into the public.

    Some countries will make some records public once the subject of those records have passed for X amount of years, but that’s still pretty rare.

    As such services like these have limited use outside the United States.


  • @mrmanager@lemmy.today was talking about European companies doing fine despite strong unions in Europe and there being a lack of companies toppling over due to the strong unions.

    They actually undersold it, because in many Western-European countries everyone benefits from union negotiations, even people that aren’t members of a union because the collective bargaining agreements unions manage to negotiate will affect everyone working in the relevant industry by virtue of laws deferring to those collective bargaining agreements.

    You in turn decided to reframe the discussion at hand from companies doing well to unemployment numbers and not just general unemployment numbers, but youth unemployment numbers because you felt it would serve your argument best.

    But if you look at the trends for unemployment then the story isn’t as bleak as you’d make it out to be. For starters general unemployment averages under 6% with only two countries being above 10% (and below 15%).
    Average youth unemployment sits at 13.9% with a hand full over 20%.

    However, both general and youth unemployment are on a steady downwards trend since 2013.
    One exception to this trend for general unemployment is during the pandemic, where it shows a bump and for youth unemployment there’s an additional minor bump in 2022, which suggests a correlation with the influx of refugees from Ukraine. This is the European source on these statistics.

    There will always be a higher unemployment rate in the EU compared to the US, especially when it comes to youth unemployment.

    This lies mainly in the fact that most European countries have a civil registry system that automatically keeps track of certain data, unemployment being one of them, whereas in the US this data is collected by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics by conducting a survey of roughly 60,000 households.
    Another factor is a difference in definitions. A good example is the one from the website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

    Garrett is 16 years old, and he has no job from which he receives any pay or profit. However, Garrett does help with the regular chores around his parents’ farm and spends about 20 hours each week doing so.

    Lisa spends most of her time taking care of her home and children, but she helps in her husband’s computer software business all day Friday and Saturday.

    Both Garrett and Lisa are considered employed.

    Neither of them would be considered employed in most European countries. There are other such discrepancies, for example the US doesn’t include people under 16, whereas Europe looks at 15-24 for youth unemployment.

    And then there’s the cultural difference between the two markets about when people are expected to start working and subsequently the jobs that will be available.

    Which makes sense. Companies still need people, but if it’s more expensive to get low-end workers you just won’t hire entry level workers unless they’ve proven themselves beyond a shadow of a doubt.

    Your hypothesis is quite lacking.
    As stated, the trends have been going down for a decade now, if your hypothesis was true we’d see an upwards trend.
    Additionally, these labor protections, including protections against being laid off, have been around for decades, your hypothesis doesn’t offer an explanation why, despite these protections, unemployment is going down.
    Also, minimum wage, as is often paid for these kinds of jobs, is lower in most EU countries than in many US states, making it comparably cheaper to hire those kind of jobs in Europe than it is in the US, your hypothesis doesn’t explain why, despite this, the unemployment rate is higher in Europe than it is in the US.

    In short, your hypothesis nor the unemployment rate is relevant to what @mrmanager@lemmy.today was positing, so lets refocus to the topic at hand: the lack of companies toppling over like domino bricks despite the copious amounts of employee protection facilitated by strong unions.

    Perhaps afterwards, we can talk about the lack of landlords, corporate or otherwise, going bankrupt despite the strong tenant protections as well as the lack of companies selling merchandise to consumers pulling out of the market despite the strong consumer protections, and so and so forth.

    And then, maybe, just maybe, we can afterwards all come to the conclusion that these QoL improvements are attainable without some kind of economic doom scenario.


  • ts obvious you have some strong feelings about this and it sounds like they come from you wanting Mastodon and the fedivserse to thrive. I respect that. I’ve enjoyed my time here so far. It would be a shame if it got torpedo’d by a big corp (especially a shitty one like Facebook).

    Of course, I wanted Mastodon and the fediverse to thrive, if only because it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to dethrone corporations that have a complete disregard of people’s wellbeing as long as it turn them a profit.

    Mastodon’s figurehead in particular has squandered the opportunity and if not outright self-sabotaged himself.

    My main focus thus far has been Mastodon as oppose to the fediverse as a whole, because Mastodon has a unique challenge that other fediverse projects don’t have, namely the social graph.

    People visiting Lemmy don’t care and don’t know who the person above and below them is, at most they might care that they’re not straight up Nazi schmucks and preferably they’re someone who has an interest in the topic of the community they’re posting in, but that’s about it.

    On a “twitterlike” the identity of the people present is of more importance. Which is why I think in particular Mastodon will suffer the most, without knowing exactly if and how the other fediverse projects will be affected by Threads.

    That said, I don’t think anyone has rolled out the red carpet.

    I fail to see how this is the case.

    Even if we ignore everything else, ignore the severe lack of transparency from the side of Rochko, his refusal to deny that he has received funds from Meta and his refusal to pledge not to accept funds in the future, ignore what could’ve transpired during the meeting with Meta, literally pretend like we are in a vacuum and the only thing related to Meta from his hand is the blog, then the blog alone is a perfect top of the line red carpet that has been rolled out.

    I mean he hails it as a victory and ends with a tacit invitation for other corporations to do the same.

    Just this quote alone is enough of a red carpet being rolled out:

    This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.

    How much more does someone need to be inviting to be considered to have rolled out a red carpet?

    I’ve also seen a lot of jumping to conclusions and fantastical strawmen at the bottom of everyone’s slippery slope arguments. A few of your numbered points would fall into that conclusion jumping bucket, and some of your other points are based on an, imo, misunderstanding of the users of the fediverse.

    For instance, #3 and #5 don’t give this community enough credit. The bulk of the people on the fediverse are big proponents of free and open internet, privacy, foss, etc. Most are refugees of Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook to begin with–they aren’t just hopping back in bed with Facebook.

    And to that point, why would they all of the sudden care about the social media all of their friends are on? I can almost guarantee that their “normie” friends aren’t on the fediverse. The core crowd on Mastodon aren’t going anywhere. The crowd that Threads will attract were never coming to Mastodon to begin with.

    Respectfully, this is difficult to read with a straight face after having experienced first hand the effects the Threads launch have had on my Mastodon timeline.

    I follow close to 2k people on Mastodon and it used to be that at any given time I could open my timeline and 400+ posts were waiting on me to peruse.

    It’s completely dead now, no more than 20 or so posts showed up in total for the entire day, this after a day where there was a sea of people posting a link to their Threads profile.

    Safe for a few holdouts I can count on one hand, nearly everyone created a Threads account and they’re more active there than I’ve ever seen them on Mastodon.

    If anything, it seems like I gave the people on Mastodon too much credit and I’ve underestimated how strong the network effect is, since I thought it would at least take until the actual “embrace” phase of it all i.e. until Meta would be ActivityPub compatible.

    And it’s not like the vast majority of people I follow are normies or anything.
    About 90% of them are software engineers like myself not afraid to tinker with things and deal with the “difficulty” of making a Mastodon account.

    Hell, about a 100 of them run their own instance, one of which is the one I’m on and a good chunk of them are very active in the FOSS community themselves.

    Sure, some of it might be because of the hype and novelty, so some might come back, but if anything that proves my point that they’ll happily jump ship if Meta does decide to nix the compatibility in the future.

    And this is me being generous, like I said activity by people that moved to Threads has skyrocketed, not only did entire social graphs migrate to Threads, they were made whole again.
    People that weren’t seen for ages since leaving Twitter popped up there much to many people’s delight.

    Most people that migrated to Mastodon wanted a 1:1 Twitter replacement first and foremost and took the ideology as a nice bonus.

    These are people that built a support network on Twitter, people that built a professional network on Twitter, people that built a network of peers, in short, a network that was important if not essential to them.

    If I take myself as an example, an indie iOS dev, before I left Twitter I used it to stay in touch with friends I had in my industry, other indie devs, engineers at Apple, journalists covering and reviewing apps, local organizations and affiliated people working towards social justice, national organizations and affiliated people working towards social justice and then the rest was purely to ingest information and news.

    The purpose of being in touch with these people varied, from comparing notes on how to best do my work, socializing with friends, arranging collaborations on projects, keeping track of what others were working on, promoting my own work, getting help from Apple engineers when I hit a snag, helping people get a job at places that were looking for someone, staying in the loop in case I wanted/needed a job, staying in the loop about local organizing and coordinating with organizers, etc. etc.

    I was lucky that I happened to work in a field that is tech savvy and so most of my social graph, but not all, transitioned to Mastodon.

    Many people weren’t this lucky and even the people in my social graph that transitioned had a considerable chunk of people that wasn’t entirely enamored by Mastodon.
    Personally I welcomed the change of pace, but I couldn’t deny that their gripes were valid.

    So to circle back to your comments about the core crowd and the crowd that Threads attracts:

    The core crowd on Mastodon aren’t going anywhere. The crowd that Threads will attract were never coming to Mastodon to begin with.

    Unless you by “core crowd” you refer to what Rochko called “nerd circles”, then I’m afraid you’re wrong on this.
    Just as you’re wrong on the crowd that Threads attracts, because not only “were” they coming on Mastodon, they literally were on Mastodon until recently.

    Somehow this statement by Rochko is now even more laughable in hindsight:

    Well, even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now. XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.

    Not only was Mastodon already heavily slanted towards “nerd circles” at the time these words were published, but it will only become more of a “nerd circle” from here on out.
    ActivityPub hasn’t even been enabled on Threads and Mastodon isn’t “where we are now”.

    edit: Oh for what its worth: https://jogblog.substack.com/p/facebooks-threads-is-so-depressing Thats a hilarious read about Threads and why its already pretty lame.

    While a funny writing style, it comes across as uninformed.

    As much as I wish it was the shitshow as depicted in that blog post, I’m sad to say that those were for all intents and purposes just placeholder posts, as soon as you start following people you won’t really see those anymore.

    Call it Chicken Little-ing, call it FUD, call it whatever you want.

    My timeline is dead and pretty much my social graph is happy they’ve found their precious Twitter replacement, so other than a very niche group, I’d say Mastodon is dead.

    I might not like it, but I’m not gonna pretend like the blog you linked is based in reality while I stare out the window at the cool kids having fun like I’m Squidward



  • Aside from the hand-waving comment about XMPP

    “Aside” is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, it reeks of a nauseating amount of hubris and makes one wonder if they’re suitable to maintain the project at all if they’re so oblivious to potential threats to the project.

    I don’t understand what people think should happen here

    Not roll out the red carpet for starters, and not engage with the company under NDA would be a good second.

    Especially for a FOSS project that receives a healthy amount of contributions from others and likes to tout that it’s co-owned by all contributors, it could be argued that it’s highly objectionable for one person to engage, essentially as a representative, in non-transparent dealings that are sealed under NDA.

    It really isn’t rocket science, here’s how the admin of the Fosstodon instance handled it.
    Notice the lack of red carpet, the unwillingness to participate in an “off the record” event and the abundance of transparency towards the people he’s responsible for.

    I’m not saying that Rochko should’ve adopted the same abrasive “lol, get rekt” tone, its up to him if he’s comfortable with that, but the points I’m hammering on about above can be achieved in respectful manner as well.

    There is tons of choice here and the way it’s architected, several layers of protection.

    There is no protection. As I’ve stated in a different comment, t doesn’t take more than 2 seconds of thinking to see how empty the words are that Mastodon is not at risk.

    1. Threads federates with Mastodon instances
    2. Threads uses its massive engineering resources to implement proprietary functionality that’s incompatible with Mastodon instances
    3. A non-trivial number of Mastodon users jump over to Threads, this is the first wave of people that leave Mastodon
    4. Threads drops support for federation and silos itself off
    5. The majority of the remainder of people on Mastodon jump over to Threads because they want to be able to continue to interact with the people that jumped over to Threads and/or because they want to be able to continue to interact with normies now that they’re used to that
    6. Mastodon is effectively dead, safe for a select few that stick to their guns

    3 and 5 will happen in a cascading manner, the more people switch to Threads, the more others will also want to switch.

    At the end of the day, if a large corporation joining the network, kills it, then it was destined to be destroyed from the beginning.

    Perhaps it is destined to be destroyed.

    The concerns and ramifications of a large corporation, or any entity that vastly overshadows the “organic” Mastodon user base in orders of magnitude for that matter, federating with Mastodon have been brought up numerous times by many parties, with the goal of looking for a solutions.

    These concerns weren’t only brought up in light of a possible EEE strategy that lead to the death of Mastodon, but also in light of a more Google-esque play where the market share isn’t necessarily used to outright kill, but instead to exert control1.

    Every single time it fell on deaf ears (i.e. Rochko ignored it, if not outright killing the discussion), often shrugged off matter of factly that it isn’t a risk.

    Also make no mistake, we’re talking about a layered issue here.

    A network that can destroy Mastodon against its will due to its sheer size is bad enough.
    Mastodon, by virtue of Rochko, facilitating this from within, adds an entirely new dimension to this.

    1 Google famously bypasses standardization bodies and simply implements their in-house developed standards, leaving other browser engines to get with the program and implement what Google wants, or become irrelevant


  • lazyvar@programming.devtoTechnology@lemmy.worldhow to block meta from mastodon
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    1 year ago

    Mastodon the non-profit is all but compromised.

    The guy in charge is essentially in cahoots with Meta and is under an NDA from them.

    It doesn’t take more than 2 seconds of thinking to see how empty the words are that Mastodon is not at risk.

    1. Threads federates with Mastodon instances
    2. Threads uses its massive engineering resources to implement proprietary functionality that’s incompatible with Mastodon instances
    3. A non-trivial number of Mastodon users jump over to Threads, this is the first wave of people that leave Mastodon
    4. Threads drops support for federation and silos itself off
    5. The majority of the remainder of people on Mastodon jump over to Threads because they want to be able to continue to interact with the people that jumped over to Threads and/or because they want to be able to continue to interact with normies now that they’re used to that
    6. Mastodon is effectively dead, safe for a select few that stick to their guns

    3 and 5 will happen in a cascading manner, the more people switch to Threads, the more others will also want to switch.


  • lazyvar@programming.devtoTechnology@lemmy.worldMastodon's official stance on Threads
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    1 year ago

    This reads as incredibly condescending, naive and duplicitous, filled with hubris.

    For starters, the whole “yeah sure XMPP got EEE’d but who cares, only nerds cared about that, lol” is not only false (e.g. Jabber), but also does nothing to quell concerns.

    Here’s an account by someone who was in the XMPP trenches when Google started adopting it.

    Notice something? The “omg so cool!”, this is exactly the same as Rochko.

    It’s the hubris when you’re a FOSS maintainer who toiled away for years without recognition and now a $700B+ corporation is flattering him by wanting to use/interact with his work.

    The blog is a far cry from the anti-corporate tone in the informational video from 2018.

    Then there’s the fact that Rochko is extremely tight lipped about the off the record meeting with Meta and consistently refuses to deny having received funds from Meta and refuses to pledge not to accept any funds from Meta.

    There’s also the unsatisfactory answer he gave to people who started questioning some dubious sponsors and the fact that he rushed to lock the thread, killing any further discussion.

    I genuinely think the dude is just so hyped for the perceived recognition, that he lost the thread.

    So much so that he thinks Mastodon is untouchable.

    And it’s extremely naive to think that Meta has benevolent motives here or that Mastodon will survive any schemes Meta might have.
    What’s more realistic is that Mastodon will die because people will flock to Threads if their social graph has moved over.

    Similarly these lofty and naive ideas that people on Threads will make the switch to Mastodon once they get a taste of what it has to offer.

    So now all of a sudden the “difficulty” to get started in Mastodon, that is keeping people who want a polished corporate experience away isn’t going to be an issue?

    Especially when in the “extinguish” phase Meta will have siloed off from Mastodon and its portability function, having to leave their social graph behind?

    It’s all so increasingly naive, one can’t help but wonder if it’s intentional sabotage at this point.

    Mark my words, this’ll be the end of Mastodon especially when Meta can outspend Mastodon all day every day to add proprietary functionality.

    Sure perhaps years from now a few hundred to a few thousand people might still use it, but it will be as irrelevant as XMPP is to most people, and Rochko with it.

    @remindme@mstdn.social in 2 years.



  • Current 2FA implementation in Lemmy is a bit janky with the risk of being locked out.

    First things first: DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES LOG OUT UNTIL YOU’RE 100% SURE YOUR AUTHENTICATOR WORKS AND THAT YOU CAN LOGIN USING ITS GENERATED 2FA CODE

    Now that that’s out of the way, here are some steps to follow:

    1. Ideally clicking on that button will open your authenticator which will then prompt you to select login credentials to attach it to; if it doesn’t and you instead are lead to a URL with a secret key or if you right click and you can copy that URL, then you need to manually copy the URL and paste it in the 2FA section of your authenticator or password manager
    2. Once you’ve figured this out don’t log out, instead open a private browser window and test to see if you can login with your credentials + 2FA

    If you can’t get it to work then you can disable it in the window you’re still logged into.

    If you share which authenticator you use, people might be able to give you more specific instructions to get you through step 1.

    Whatever you do, don’t log out. You will be locked out!
    Unlike most common implementations, there is no built in step to verify if you can successfully generate a TOTP before 2FA is fully enabled.