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Joined 6 days ago
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Cake day: April 10th, 2025

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  • My experience as a person who has a lot of experience working with computer is basically thus:

    When you solve a problem for someone, you are a magician.

    When you can’t, you are completely full of shit and know nothing about tech and your entire life is a lie.

    When you tell someone ‘hey I wouldn’t do that’, your experience and expertise means nothing if what you are suggesting would mildly inconvenience them for 10 minutes, or takes more than 30 seconds to explain why it is a bad idea.

    When you tell them ‘hey have you tried this?’ your experience and expertise also means nothing if you cannot do it for them and also make it so it never breaks again, and also they will keep doing the thing that makes it break even though you explained to them how to not do that thing that makes it break.

    … I may as well just start an IT flavored Rodney Dangerfield comedy routine, it would be much more fun and less stressful than always being a db admin/data analyst/backend dev/frontend dev/whatever else my job title now apparently includes.


  • Assuming you are serious:

    Bluesky is … arguably ‘federated’, but it is centralized, not decentralized.

    https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20241128-bluesky-decentralization

    Their model (AT Protocol) relies on a central, authoritative … ‘Relay’, that all ‘federated’ users and posts on federated PDS (personal data servers) must go through, to actually reach the ‘AppView’, ie, what all other people/users can actually see.

    So, this is not a many to many, tangled spider web of connections, the way lemmy, and other parts of the actual fediverse are.

    It is a top down hierarchy, a pyramid.

    And Bluesky runs the Relay, the chokepoint.

    If Bluesky cuts off the PDS your account is on, everyone on it is now gone.

    The actual fediverse, Mastadon, Lemmy, etc, runs on ActivityPub.

    In that model… every instance is essentially self contained, and every instance that is federated communicates with every other instance that is federated.

    Each instance can decide what other instances they want to federate with… and users on each instance can personally block even more other users, communities, or entire instances if they choose to, but that only effects what that particular user sees.

    That is what you call decentralized, approaching, or also having elements of being ‘distributed’.

    To bring up an example without getting into the drama that led to it:

    The ‘Tankie Triad’ of ml, lemmygrad and hexbear have had a number of other instances defederate from them.

    But, there are also a good number of instances that have not done so.

    So that means if your account is on hexbear… you can’t see or post on an instamce that has blocked your instance.

    But, if you (a hexbear…ian?), post on a neutral instance… users on that neutral instance will see the post.

    But but, if a user from an instance that has defederated from hexbear goes to to the neutral instance… they will not see the hexbearian’s post.

    This sounds complicated, and it is, but … thats the whole point of a decentralized system. It is more complex in the abstract… but the entire system ends up being more robust, more adaptable, more customizable… without a central authority in direct control of the entire system.


  • Technically, its complicated, but basically, NHTSA both sets the standards by which a manufacturer should assess whether or not to do a recall… and they also issue recalls themselves.

    They do investigations, compile data, and if it looks like a certain make and or model has a serious flaw, they’ll issue a recall if the manufacturer hasn’t.

    If they are gutted, specifically as they have been by Musk, well then there are no more people actually investigating self driving capabilities and onboard computers, there are no more updates to any of those policies, and nobody issues a recall for such a category of defective vehicle.


  • Yep, my first thought on seeing this was … ‘and who will be enforcing this?’

    No one, the answer is no one.

    While the information about Elon’s history of making false claims, hardware and software details are accurate… there is no official body that has ruled as the title of the article suggests.

    A more accurate headline would be ‘should’ not ‘has to’.

    There is basically zero chance that this guy’s desire would be effectuated in the US … as the US agency that regulates cars… was recently gutted by Musk’s DOGE idiots.

    https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/04/car-safety-experts-at-nhtsa-which-regulates-tesla-axed-by-doge/

    Maybe the EU or China or other governments could… legally agree with the author, and order a similar command…

    But uh yeah, the Trump admin is currently blatantly telling the Supreme Court to go fuck themselves, the law will soon be whatever the hell Trump and his orbiters want it to be, has already told the entire world to go fuck themselves and also beg and grovel at the same time.

    Elon would just… continue doing whatever the fuck he wants, even if another country mandated a recall/replacement.

    Sorry, but uh yeah, we have a fascist government now, the rule of law is dead, the law is now whatever the fuck the Trump admin says it is.


  • Do you know if there are significant differences between the Korean language of North Korea, and the Korean language of South Korea?

    Or are they still very similar?

    I only really know one word in Korean… I would sound it out as ’ gam zeh hah mee da '.

    I asked some local, older aged, shop owners of South Korean descent how to say ‘thank you’ in Korean so I could thank them with more respect when I shop at their stores… I may be pronouncing or spelling my pronunciation wrong.

    Apoarently it is 감사합니다 in Korean… but that is likely South Korean, and it seems that South Korean and North Korean use different words, or pronounciations, for at least some terms…

    It would be interesting to learn if there are more differences between the two forms of Korean. :D




  • I agree with all of that.

    Maybe … 5 to 10% of Dems, like Federal Congresspeople, State governors… are willing to meaningfully go against pro corporate policies… at least more than half of the time.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some kind of psyop used to induce or intensify infighting among younger leftists, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if … there really wasn’t something specifically aimed at doing exactly that.

    I know Russia has been very successfully employing the uh, hyperreality tactic, just fund or assist or influence enough people who are bombastic enough in any political persuasion, publish and spread baseless nonsense all across the spectrum to just sow general chaos…

    But I do also think a lot of it really is people just adopting a vocabulary generally shared by leftists and then using it to their own, individual ends.

    The thing with the CIA’s Simple Sabotage model is that it describes basically every social circle or work environment I’ve ever been in, or hear about from a friend.

    General incompetence and … wasting time over petty stupid bullshit … just sounds like the norm in America generally, for pretty much my whole life… but maybe I have just had particularly bad luck with that.


  • Yep.

    It is mostly just revisiting older news from decades before that… as would be reasonable when a newcomer to politics now seems to stand a reasonable chance of becoming President, might want to do a more thorough journalistic background check on the guy.

    Leftists critical of Trump, back then, before even his first term, were … you know, kind of worried about Trump having Hitler in his nightstand table, very, very obviously seeing him as a role model and source of inspiration…

    And then they said things like … is Trump a Nazi? Is Trump a fascist? This stuff is … quite concerning, along with his bombastic rhetoric and extremely nebulous and fluid ‘policies’, that all seem to converge on a return to past greatness, hypermasculinity, racism, sexism… all very much in line with … a populist, which historically very often leads to fascism…

    And then almost every one else in the country dismissed that as hyperbolic nonsense, and ‘everything/one you don’t like is fascist’ was born.

    … And now here we are, evidently in the bizzaro clownworld timeline, where Trump is ‘the joker, baby’ all the Republicans are his brainwashed cult of goons, the Democrats almost all as well sane-washed the shit out of Trump untill way after it was too late… and, as is also predictable broadly by history, the leftists, with few exceptions, fought each other over idpol, purity tests and tone policing, effectively negating any coherent opposition.






  • i apparently cannot figure out ascii shrugs, nvm

    I don’t know exactly how that post counter … actually, technically counts posts, but:

    1:

    Zip going down could have uncounted all posts anywhere made by zip accounts.

    2:

    There could have been some kind of… propogating post count negation effect, as various other instances reacted differently to zip users posts on their instances could not pull them anymore, on different time scales.

    3:

    If a zip user had a … top level comment, on another instance, its possible all lower level comments responding to that comment may also have poofed out of existence, in some respect.

    I may be misusing some terminology here, and this is just spitballing, but yeah.

    Almost all of my .zip account’s posts/comments… are not on zip itself, and its possible that that is fairly common amongst .zip users.