I haven’t really seen anything since the exodus but I think he’s just not the kind of guy who cares too much about niche decentralized internet communities.

He’s very much in the Applesphere of polished premium apps that do specific things. Which is fine. He’s frankly the only dev I knew of who did that without being a total ghoul and even then I was seeing a lot of complaints about people being begged for subscriptions, which I never found excessive (he claimed those people were experiencing a bug).

I don’t really know what to make of his opinion, I don’t know if he saw the UI as a threat or a liability to him or anything like that.

I would love Voyager (mine is still called Wefwef) as a native iOS app because I run into some quirks of the web app backend (especially when editing text), but what we have now is excellent and has made the transition much more bearable. I do still feel like something is missing and I miss how much more connected with the world I felt as a longtime Reddit user, but it’s okay, people’s primary platforms used to change all the time (and as yet another wave of Twitter users are finding out, it can be a hard first few months).

I remember the first time we jumped into the complex domain in an electronics course to calculate something that we couldn’t reach with the equations we had so far.

… and then popping out the other side with a simple (and experimentally verified) scalar, after performing some calculation in the complex domain, using, bafflingly, real world inputs.

I suddenly felt like someone from the future barged into my Plato’s cave and proceeded to perform some ritual.

Like I know what’s happening, I’ve done these calculations before, but seeing them used as an intermediate step in something real in the real world was pretty cool!

Did not prepare me for all the Laplace et al shenanigans later. Did I test well in those courses? No. Did I have the most fun building the circuits regardless? You bet.

Oh to be a student again. Why are real world jobs so boring.

I have written a few comments about day to day life in Lebanon as we’re being bombed and now invaded by an indiscriminate killing machine. This war has more surreal than anything I’ve lived through: more surreal than the post-blast week, more surreal than peak lockdown season, more surreal than any of the waves of civil conflict throughout my life. I have never felt more guilty for every breath of air I take and every hug I give my family. People, normal civilian people like me, are losing everything, often their lives.

More surreal: an Arabic sweet shop I go to very often (it’s on a main highway) got damaged by an attack this week. It’s in the middle of a very safe city. Like imagine your favorite something just had to close from war damage. Good thing the indiscriminate killing machine didn’t suspect that terrorists were hiding in the baklawa. Maybe next week they’ll find them and finish the job.

Would you fucking believe it if I told you I get DMs from people “sympathizing with my hardships” but asking me if I could kindly remove my post because of some US election shenanigans.

Some people will just never understand that there is a whole world outside the Global North full of complex people and situations. I like not being bombed for the crime of not being a European colonist. But writing about it in English online? Must be a psyop huh. At least this isn’t Reddit where a few years back someone actually questioned whether I could really be Lebanese if I was writing so much in decent English. Truly le euphoric intellectual site.

And hey if I was an American voter I’d probably still cast an unenthusiastic ballot for the cop if I was in a battleground state. I get it, I hate the other guy, it would be morally gray, but no grayer than the options we get to vote for here. But that doesn’t mean this absurd defense of the indiscriminate killing machine, spewing forth from every corner of the woodwork, hasn’t really highlighted how the US just has two right wing parties. You guys (Americans) should be reframing the Vietnam protests as a cute little Sunday picnic compared to what you should be doing now. Which they were.

You have to hold these ghouls accountable and the “nice democratic countries’” fetish for pretend civility has never been more exhausting. You think in the annals of history they’re going to say “good thing they didn’t whip out the nooses, that would have been so beneath our perfect empire”? Of course not. It would just be correctly understood as appeasement. When the indiscriminate killing machine is properly listed next to Rhodesia and Nazi Germany, the fervent support the world showed them will be a rightful, eternal humiliation for every country that has been rewarding them for tearing our families and limbs apart.

Or hey, maybe we get wiped off the map and get all our towns renamed to someone else’s language. And we are removed from the history books. Clearly our lives are just acceptable collateral for people playing what should ostensibly be a very important political game. If that’s what our lives are worth, what is our memory worth?

Relevant, from a comment I wrote below that is buried under too many other comments:

If going to jail is the penalty for not joining the IDF, it is the moral thing to do and should be worn like a badge of honor. It’s not complicated at all unless you literally have a death penalty for not joining. I don’t care how controversial this is: if as an IDF terrorist you don’t commit a mutiny, desert, or off yourself, congratulations, you’ve net increased the evil in the world.

Sympathizing with the IDF is 1:1 the exact same as sympathizing with the SS and anyone who says otherwise has both fingers in their ears and yelling nanananana until the crunching noises under their bulldozers stop.

You cannot be systematically eradicating a people you consider inferior and also pretend you have any moral high ground. You cannot bomb hospitals and ambulances and homes and schools and pretend like you are the good guy. You cannot set up viewing platforms to have your kids watch the destruction with your own eyes and claim to be the good guy.

Not to make this about me but I’ve been running myself ragged volunteering at the shelters here in a safer part Lebanon and I’m still fucked up over feeling like I’m not doing enough. Rotting at home will make me feel even worse. I went outside for a walk and wanted to throw up, feeling guilty over being able to go outside and walk to destress as people’s homes get carpet bombed more intensely than legitimate military targets. I know damn well that if I lost my own home these shelters are full and I would have literally nowhere to go. And more people are losing their homes every hour. People are fleeing to Syria and Iraq for safety, even as the border crossings are getting hit as well.

This is beyond ”normal” human evil. If any other army was doing this we would have rows of criminals hanging from cranes in The Hague, instead we have to watch them smugly tell us we’re next in a speech from the UN. For the unforgivable crime of being born on land that apparently exists only for colonization.

Do not let anyone lie to you. A Holocaust is happening right now and it is exactly as evil as the one the Nazis committed.

If going to jail is the penalty for not joining the IDF, it is the moral thing to do and should be worn like a badge of honor. It’s not complicated at all unless you literally have a death penalty for not joining. I don’t care how controversial this is: if as an IDF terrorist you don’t commit a mutiny, desert, or off yourself, congratulations, you’ve net increased the evil in the world.

Sympathizing with the IDF is 1:1 the exact same as sympathizing with the SS and anyone who says otherwise has both fingers in their ears and yelling nanananana until the crunching noises under their bulldozers stop.

You cannot be systematically eradicating a people you consider inferior and also pretend you have any moral high ground. You cannot bomb hospitals and ambulances and homes and schools and pretend like you are the good guy. You cannot set up viewing platforms to have your kids watch the destruction with your own eyes and claim to be the good guy.

Not to make this about me but I’ve been running myself ragged volunteering at the shelters here in a safer part Lebanon and I’m still fucked up over feeling like I’m not doing enough. Rotting at home will make me feel even worse. I went outside for a walk and wanted to throw up, feeling guilty over being able to go outside and walk to destress as people’s homes get carpet bombed more intensely than legitimate military targets. I know damn well that if I lost my own home these shelters are full and I would have literally nowhere to go. And more people are losing their homes every hour. People are fleeing to Syria and Iraq for safety, even as the border crossings are getting hit as well.

This is beyond ”normal” human evil. If any other army was doing this we would have rows of criminals hanging from cranes in The Hague, instead we have to watch them smugly tell us we’re next in a speech from the UN. For the unforgivable crime of being born on land that apparently exists only for colonization.

Do not let anyone lie to you. A Holocaust is happening right now and it is exactly as evil as the one the Nazis committed.

The port blast was divine mercy compared to this waking nightmare. It was a sign of immense incompetence and the culmination of decades of neglectful systems failing to do the bare minimum and we got months of genuine solidarity among everyone in the months afterward. People, even if it was mostly naive and performative among some communities, found purpose in moving forward from a crime together.

Now it’s an apocalypse. So much of the city is gone. Tens of thousands of totally normal people have been robbed of their homes and possessions, and hundreds of thousands don’t know if their homes are next. This is ignoring all the deaths. Most people affected were already pretty poor. It’s so fucked. I live in a safe area and can no longer function as a human being. The bombing has been less and less muffled lately. I don’t know if I’m within a month or week or rounding error of losing my home, and this being a safe area, I have nowhere to flee to. I live where people flee to. This is the destination. I’m not rich enough to have foreign passport or a visa that will let me fly out and stay somewhere else.

I literally wake up, read a list of places and number of casualties, and throw up before my day even begins. I’m shaking 24 hours and sleeping maybe 4 per night. This morning the footage is many residential buildings crumbling with hoarse voices desperately thanking God for the missile not hitting them / screaming for God to not make them the next victims (in case you were wondering why you hear Allahu Akbar by bystanders in war videos. That’s what that ”oh my God” equivalent means in that context. Imagine hearing them in your own dialect… Yeah real comforting)

Consider this: my favorite confectionary shop, bang in the middle of a safe area with zero militant activity (or support!), got damaged in a series of strikes yesterday. Because the wrong person (allegedly a cash mule, the horror) was driving past it. If the point was only to hit paramilitary things, we wouldn’t be here.

The cruelty, as ever, is the point. We are being Lebensraumed while the world either watches in horror or claps fervently. But no real will to stop the crimes

Oh I was just going off of my first impressions of different places that I’ll have to pick from sooner or later.

The getting kicked out of the house thing is mainly an American stereotype but it’s there in many western countries I think. I remember a podcast where an American journalist who was in Iraq during the past decade talked about how the Iraqis didn’t understand where all the homeless Americans come from. Like don’t they have families? Communities? Do people just kick out the mentally ill instead of keeping them safe? Etc. It’s about the structure of society and people’s bonds together, not just the economics.

Kids getting murdered at school is 100% an America only stereotype

Stabbing and robbing we associate a bit more with Europe.

Quite a few people here (waning majority I think) also think of the west as an unlivable hotbed of sexual decadence and LGBT “delinquency” but we both know that’s not in the bad column.

I wasn’t trying to bash the US in particular. I feel like I’d like to live there someday. It’s more of the dilemma of finding a place to go. The real dream is for things to work here but that’s not happening anytime soon and sadly we have more incentive to leave and save our skin than to stay and build for the future.

And oh boy do we shit on each other here. It’s not even minority vs majority, it’s pluralities with localized minorities, it’s retaliatory violence echoing centuries of small conflicts. You have to pay mobs for basic services. And no, doesn’t need to be richer, discrimination is alive and well in even the poorest areas. And of course, the militia that protects your town one year can shake it down the next (but that’s on us to deal with, not on the western armchair generals online). It’s not as simple as good guy bad guy. In many ways, probably almost every way, we are a failed society. But on good days, it’s chill. When things line up, Lebanon just works, even if it’s just for a short time.

I don’t envy your current election situation and won’t comment on it.

Lebanon has been spiraling for some time, but I wouldn’t say it’s a dystopia. Or a utopia, of course. But it’s genuine. People don’t kick their kids out on the street at 18 like they apparently do in the US, kids don’t get shot in school either. People don’t get stabbed or mugged, sometimes harassed by beggars but there’s usually not violent crime. More positively, there’s a lot to do that isn’t centered around making you pay for experiences. I feel like that might not be the case everywhere. At least when we’re not being terrorized, Lebanon is… very chill. Chill with a side of feudalism, but that’s not today’s topic.

Most of us pull together, we have relatively tough social bonds from years of facing difficulties together. On paper everything is fucked: currency is worthless, terrible infrastructure, literal terrorist state looking to Lebensraum us with impunity, mob-run essential services. But I don’t know how to leave this behind. I know how to live on 8 hours of electricity per day, I know how to ration bathing water and fuel. I don’t know how to deal with the more complex shit I see people dealing with elsewhere online.

Like a ton of people move to Canada. Sure, I speak both English and French decently well. But isn’t a house anywhere worth living prohibitively expensive? Our Canadian-Palestinian friends have been discriminated against for the past twenty years, am I going to have to live as a second class citizen? etc etc. Sure as a Lebanese Christian I think I’d get a pass where others won’t, but I don’t want a pass, I want a safe place to home. All I write here is from a place of relative privilege though. I don’t deal with extra shit for being poor or from a religion whose followers tend to be poor, I’m not LGBT, I don’t come from a border town, I wasn’t born into a town or family that has tribalish skirmishes. It’s easy for me to sit and wonder about immigration at my leisure.

There’s also analysis paralysis, right. I can theoretically move to many countries. In practice, every place has pros and cons, and it looks like the cons keep piling up pretty much everywhere while the pros drop one by one. Although that applies to Lebanon as well. If I’m going to be struggling, where better to struggle than among friends and family, in the land I call home?

You see, when football is mentioned online, the collective intelligence of any comment section is cut by at least 90%. This stacks with another 90% if it’s women’s football or any token LGBT acknowledgement in football. The joke is Muslim Bad.

Which is a shame. I used to make fun of le sportsball amirite until it clicked that there was immense entertainment value in these matches, which could be super tense and exciting even when an individual match doesn’t have super high stakes. There’s storylines with each of the players and managers, there’s a lot of diverging personalities among them and they all handle the same game in their own way. And unlike scripted shows, when something unexpected happens it is so much more interesting. Like the story is real in a way that scripted entertainment isn’t.

My reading is that it’s not necessarily a problem with the platforms but society at large.

One example you mentioned: yes, html5 games (and just downloadable itch/steam games) exist and they fill the gap left by Flash games from a gameplay perspective maybe.

But the mainstream appeal of Flash games and animations was different to what we have now. The social phenomenon of people randomly hacking together terrible flash games isn’t the same as the current tiny indie game phenomenon. I feel like the old ones were a bigger piece of the average person’s internet usage than the new one (the average person’s internet usage being 5% LLM 5% web 5% email 25% gaming 30% video and 30% doomscrolling or something like that idk)

I’m struggling to put into words what I mean by this, my comment sounds really vague when I reread it. The specific creative outlet that Flash gave people is not equivalent to what we have now, and the specific entertainment experience of browsing and playing Flash games is different from the experience of scrolling through itch. Am I making more sense?

Like of course the different technologies are different, but it’s where it fits into our lives that it’s really different imo. Hell, we could say this about Flash itself for the last few years before it was discontinued. Just the two thoughts of Newgrounds in 2006 vs Newgrounds in 2016 and how they fit into the internet ecosystem and internet culture are enough to see the difference.

I wonder if there’s a more efficient way to have things sync in blocks or something. I honestly understand very little about server architecture, much less decentralized social network architecture. Maybe having a smaller number of “centralized” (community-run, redundant, independent) nodes distributing blocks of federated data to take load off the actual instance servers that would only need to upload bulk data to fewer places?

Maybe this isn’t very different from how it already operates. Fuck if I know.

Will Wright took one look at this thing in an encyclopedia in 2001 and immediately started planning Spore.

This graphic is a year old! It’s actually seventeen years since that blockade now.

I wonder why some people there might think violence is the only thing their enemy would understand. Really a mystery.

The TS80P is lower wattage, technically, but the heating element is right up at the very tip, instead of having a heating element inside the handle with a long metal piece transmitting the heat. It gets hot way faster than you’d expect, it doesn’t feel like 30W at all.

It punches way, way above its weight. Unless you’re soldering pipes, comparing the wattage to traditional irons is misleading. Love that tiny thing.

Only problem is that this design necessitates proprietary tips that are relatively expensive. Not a fan of that, coming from the no name Global South Especiale 2$ firestarter irons that are the norm where I am. Not the end of the world, but worth keeping in mind.

The one I bought came with a USB-C cable that couldn’t handle the current though. That was the only real red flag. Shame too, that cable seemed like it was silicone coated and would have been ideal.

I genuinely believed (some number of) people would homeschool because regular school is too expensive. Interesting. American schools being free by default is really unexpected, especially given how expensive tertiary education is over there, and especially with the volume of complaints I hear about American school education being low quality. The free drinking water at restaurants thing is also unexpected to me.

It’s just weird that police have that responsibility there. I don’t get it. Getting questioned over being outside? I get that. Getting stopped? Weird.

In my part of the world (Lebanon) homeschooling isn’t really a thing. Public schools are seen as the cheaper, worse alternative, with many students who were kicked out of private schools continuing their education there. Teachers there get paid dirt and the buildings are often crumbling. Very few have a noteworthy reputation.

Most schools are private, not all that expensive, and usually religiously affiliated. That’s the default option. Then you have a very small number of expensive private schools mostly full of more affluent people.

The curriculum was last updated in like 1992 though which isn’t good lol

I was once walking down the street in the middle of the day on a weekday, and I literally had a cop stop me, thinking I was a high school student playing hookie from school.

Wait what? Is it the police’s job to make sure kids go to school in the US? What if they’re from a family that can’t even afford public school tuition? That’s so foreign to me. Cutting class should be frowned upon but not to the point of being harassed by police.

Good lord this makes my blood boil. I’m still in awe of the support being shown by ordinary people around the world these last few months but I don’t think I’ll ever grasp how much hatred is required to keep the machine running.

To think that if history went differently I could just get on a cab and visit the Holy Land like my grandmother did as a kid. Instead I get to watch it get bombed to bits in real time with the excuse that there wasn’t anyone there and if there were any they’re terrorists.

My understanding is that this is a deliberate choice, at least for Mercedes and BMW having their models be letters and numbers instead of memorable names. The idea is that all models seem closer together, kind of elevating them all.

Compared to when you look at an Accord and think this is the nice Honda, unlike the other not nice Honda. The implication is that all of the Mercedes ones should be nice.

But what do I fucking know. I like quirky weird cars, I like shitboxes, I’m one of those simultaneous fuckcars car guys (I hope I don’t need to explain how I can be in both camps at once?). I’m not the person any of these companies are marketing for.

Y axis: Empoisoned or Swumble’s Big Jumble X axis: Menus or Parkour

I think we are moving past the outdated genre system and finally finding a way to classify games properly