Python is the only programming language that has forced me to question what the difference is between an egg and a wheel.

The two apps are identical and built from the same codebase anyway. K-9 is just a branding asset swap.

I’ve seen conflicting info from Thunderbird devs on how long they actually intend to keep both branding packages active. I’ve heard no longer than a year. I’ve heard only as long as it takes to get Thunderbird out of beta. I’ve heard they have some sort of agreement with FDroid that obligates them to keep it listed for some minimum duration of time (???). I’ve most recently heard indefinitely, because their build script is just a toggle now and it costs them nothing. Which one do I believe? I have no idea. I doubt K-9 will be kept around in perpetuity, though.

I’d be more than happy to sacrifice a distro I don’t care about like Ubuntu to the mainstream if it means Microsoft’s market cap gets a sizeable chunk taken out of it.

Nah. The real cancer is the quiet plurality of users who just scroll through the post feed and only voting, not even reading comments. The ones who are responsible for the occasional thread that has entirely negative comments but gets upvoted to the stratosphere anyways.

Rule of thumb: if it sits between you and the ground for an extended period, don’t cheap out on it or settle if you have the choice.

Shoes, desk chair, mattress, pillow, car seat.

Life is too short to be uncomfortable.

There’s actually no digital audio involved anywhere in this process. It’s all analog.

A magnetic tape cassette holds raw wave data of the sounds it records. Just like a vinyl record, except the groove is in the magnetic field instead of physically etched into the surface of the tape, and the needle is an electromagnet instead of, well, a needle.

An audio cable using a standard 3.5mm jack also transmits raw wave data. It has to, because the electromagnetic pulses in the cable are what directly drive the electromagnets in whatever speakers they’re hooked up to. If it’s coming out of a digital player, the player has to convert the signal on its own using an onboard digital-to-analog converter (a DAC).

The neat part is that since a tape deck read head is looking for an analog wave signal, and an analog wave signal is what an aux cable carries, the two are directly compatible with one another. If you actually crack one of these tape deck hacks open, you’ll find the whole thing is completely empty, save for the audio cable wires going directly to the write head that mimics the tape. Beyond that, there’s no conversion equipment, no circuit board, nothing. It’s a direct pass-through.

The body of the thing is nothing more than an elaborate way to trip all the mechanisms in the tape deck to trick it into thinking it’s holding a valid cassette, while simply holding the write head fixed in the proper spot.

I’m sure you already know all of this. I just think it’s really cool and I enjoy talking about it. Analog tech is amazing.

Votes on Lemmy are public, fyi.

You have to host your own Lemmy instance to see them for yourself, but you can check if you were so inclined.

My true hell would be instances only federating explicitly through whitelist. If what the other reply I received about Mastodon is correct, and if Lemmy behaves similary, then they operate on an implicit auto-federation with every other instance. Actual transaction of data needs to be triggered by some user on that instance reaching out to the other instance, but there’s no need for the instances involved to whitelist one another first. They just do it. To stop the transfer, they have to explicitly defed, which effectively makes it an opt-out system.

The root comment I initially replied to made it sound, to me, like Mastodon instances choose not to federate with one another. Obviously they aren’t preemptively banning one another, so, I interpreted that to mean Mastodon instances must whitelist one another to connect. But apparently what they actually meant was, “users of Mastodon instances rarely explore outward”? The instances would auto-federate, but in practice, the “crawlers” (the users) aren’t leaving their bubbles often enough to create a critical mass of interconnectedness across the Fediverse?

The fact we have to have this discussion at all is more proof to my original point regardless. Federation is pure faffery to people who just want a platform that has everything in one place.

That sounds worse than I thought it was. I just assumed Mastodon was like Lemmy, where every instance federates with every other instance basically by default and there’s only some high-profile defed exceptions.

A Fediverse where federations are opt-in instead of opt-out sounds like actual hell. Yeah, more control to instances, hooray, but far less seamless usability for people. The only people you will attract with that model are the ones who think having upwards of seven alts for being in seven different communities isn’t remotely strange or cumbersome. That, and/or self-hosting your own individual instances. Neither of these describe the behavior of the vast majority of Internet users who want to sign up on a platform that just works with one account that can see and interact with everything.

Season’s the reason!

Art supplies were historically not cheap. If you wanted to do this for a living, you were probably needing to aim for selling your art to the rich upper class. That implicitly meant catering to their fickle tastes and working on commission. You didn’t make art for you and find your audience later, you made art for the customers you had or you starved.

And to put it bluntly, realism wasn’t the fashionable hotness for most of human history. The more “crude” styles you may think of as objectively inferior to and less technically impressive as realism were in fact the styles in demand at their respective times. Fashion existed in ancient and medeival times just like it does today, and those styles were the fashion.

The idea of the independent eccentric artist who lives secluded in their ideas cave producing masterpieces for no one in particular leaving the world in awe at their genius every time they come out with something to show is a very modern concept. If any artist wanted to make a realism painting in an era where it was not popular, they’d be doing it purely for themselves at their own expense. So virtually no one did. Or if they did, their works largely didn’t survive.

This is basically asking why anyone would live in or near a city like Los Angeles or New York City when Minot exists and has everything you could possibly need.

If you had to look up where Minot even is, you’ve proven my point.

Say what you will about whether living near the proverbial big city is worth it or not. But it cannot be denied, there is a world of experiences on offer at larger platforms that a smaller platform simply cannot provide. Network effect can be a cruel mistress.

I’m pretty sure they’re referring to the concept of defederation and how that can splinter the platform.

Bluesky is ““federated”” in largely the same ways as Mastodon, but there’s basically one and only one instance anyone cares about. The federation capability is just lip service to the minority of dorks like us who care.

To the vast majority of Twitter refugees, federation as a concept is not a feature, it’s an irritation.

What else would your mom call you when she’s pissed off?

I don’t think the existence of large instances is in itself strictly antithetical to decentralization. The network effect makes them inevitable.

The power in the fediverse is everyone has a standard toolset to interact with the entire fediverse. Most people won’t, and that’s okay. The important thing is that, should larger communities become too oppresive as they gentrify, replacing them is a cheap decision, as you and everyone like-minded with you can squad up and leave at any time and lose nothing as the standard tooling of the platform facilitates that migration. You have mobility in the fediverse, and that permits choice to those who seek it.

This will stop being true once the larger instances start augmenting their experiences with proprietary nonsense. Features that only work there, that you can invest into and become dependant on, that you’d have to give up if you leave.

The day that happens will be the day that chunk of the Fediverse dies. Or, well, it won’t die, it will probably flourish and do very well. But it won’t be the Fediverse anymore. It will just be another knee-high-fence-gated community, that happens to run on Fediverse tech.

In the microwave of evil?

If you’re not measuring for cooking, why are you measuring? Being that accurate for casual consumption is strange.

Happy Debian daily driver here. I would never ever recommend raw Debian to a garden variety would-be Linux convert.

If you think something like Debian is something a Linux illiterate can just pick up and start using proficiently, you’re severely out of touch with how most computer users actually think about their machines. If you even so much as know the name of your file explorer program, you’re in a completely different league.

Debian prides itself on being a lean, no bloat, and stable environment made only of truly free software (with the ability to opt-in to nonfree software). To people like us, that’s a clean, blank canvas on a rock-solid, reliable foundation that won’t enshittify. But to most people, it’s an austere, outdated, and unfashionable wasteland full of flaky, ugly tooling.

Debian can be polished to any standard one likes, but you’re expected to do it yourself. Most people just aren’t in the game to play it like that. Debian saddles questions of choice almost no one is asking, or frankly, even knew was a question that was ask*-able*. Mandatory customizeability is a flaw, not a feature.

I am absolutely team “just steer them to Mint”. All the goodness of Debian snuck into their OS like medicine in a kid’s dessert, wrapped up in something they might actually find palatable. Debian itself can be saved for when, or shall I say if, the user eventually goes poking under the hood to discover how the machine actually ticks.

The “lonely” part of the name comes from how they’re the only player in the industry trying to do what they do.

I have never been in or adjacent to a situation where I had to measure chocolate packaged and sold to be eaten as-is in a recipe by squares broken off of a bar, at the demarcations pre-scored into the bar. If I needed that much control I’d grate it or use a chocolate that came pre-granulated, like baking kisses.

For chocolate bars meant to be eaten, the score lines are very much for sharability first. Any use of them for culinary measurement is at best a peripheral feature.

This probably doesn’t hold true for baking chocolate. But Tony’s isn’t baking chocolate.