cecilkorik

On a similar but unrelated note, Lemmy also displays the two-hyphens as an em-dash, but unlike the trailing slashes, it does not encode that into the comment, so on piefed you still see the two-hyphens in both comments.

Fun!

And posting from piefed, is the result the same?

https://piefed.ca/ – has a trailing slash https://piefed.ca/ – does not

That is kind of the UNIX philosophy at work and you’ll find that in a lot of open-source and self-hosted projects. The goal is to do one very specific thing really well in a small and streamlined package that integrates into other processes in a clear, defined and transparent way, not to be one of these super-convenient but bloated “it does everything and the kitchen sink” behemoths. It’s a different style of software development but it’s popular in the open source community for a lot of reasons, for example it’s a lot more maintainable by a single person or small team with limited time. You’ll find most of these large complex open source projects are organized and developed by companies (like Pangolin is), while the smaller UNIX-style projects are often written by individuals or very small teams volunteering their spare time. There are tradeoffs in either direction, but for self-hosting I think following the UNIX philosophy has a lot in common with a typical goal of self-hosting, reducing your dependence on for-profit companies that have a financial incentive to enshittify or otherwise try to squeeze money out of you.

That’s some damn fine work, sir.

Those were the web-techbros. Then came the crypto-techbros, now we have AI-techbros. Very different styles, as you can see.

As a senior developer, my most productive days are genuinely when I remove a lot of code. This might seem like negative productivity to a naive beancounter, but in fact this is my peak contribution to the software and the organization. Simplifying, optimizing, identifying what code is no longer needed, removing technical debt, improving maintainability, this is what requires most of my experience and skill and contextual knowledge to do safely and correctly. AI has no ability to do this in any meaningful way, and code bases filled with mostly AI generated code are bound to become an unmaintainable nightmare (which I will eventually be paid handsomely to fix, I suspect)

That’s definitely a stretch goal. But at least if we can start by stopping them from killing something innocuous like games it shows that we still maybe have some power over them.

Oh I’m basically certain it will be at this point.

The good news is they already fired all the good people, so we can hope those people find their way into creating a wonderful spiritual sequel under a different name, as is tradition.

The French figured out how to solve that particular problem hundreds of years ago. Guillotines are efficient and reusable.

Piefed connects them and shows you comments from other communities on other instances.

This also has big implications for consumer rights and society as a whole in other areas of digital technology and right to repair, it is a foot in the door to start actually holding manufacturers responsible for the full lifecycle of their products (digital and real) that requires them to actually relinquish their control when their product reaches end-of-commercial-life, instead of turning everything into digital garbage out of what basically amounts to apathy and compulsive rights hoarding.

I think we can all agree it’s probably a bad idea.

Does that mean you shouldn’t? Maybe. But maybe not. Sometimes it’s fun to do something “wrong”, because you want to, and maybe you’ll really enjoy it anyway. Maybe you’ll learn a lot about why it’s a bad idea, and maybe you’ll find those learnings enrich your life and give you stories to tell. I’m not trying to recommend this at all, I’m just saying you should consider it from all angles and outcomes before you make a decision, especially if this is something he really wants to do for whatever reason. Life is for living, it’s not for making a series of optimal choices to result in the highest score. Experiences, both good and bad, are their own reward. And as long as nobody’s going to get hurt, and you go into it with your eyes open and an understanding of the risks and potential downfalls, and do what you can to mitigate and protect against them as much as you can, maybe it’s something you can try.

If it’s really something you’re not comfortable with, and he is, well then you two are going to have to have a long and hard talk about it and come to some mutually agreeable compromise. But even if it is objectively a bad idea, you also need to think about whether he’s just naive and is going to hate it, or whether it’s going to make him happy that he tried it, and whether it’s an experience he needs to have in his life. Meanwhile, is it going to cause you resentment if you go there and hate it and he loves it? Will he listen to you if you decide you really do hate it and don’t want to continue?

That’s not something anyone can answer for you, but it has little to do with whether it’s a bad idea and much more to do with what both of you want out of life.

and why they treat their drivers like subhuman robots already.

I am still of the opinion that they aimed too small and focused too narrow. Games are a “luxury” anyone can live without and it’s hard to rally grassroots support behind protecting something that people only use for entertainment. Yeah it’s low stakes to force them to let you continue to play it after servers shut down but the same low stakes also makes the petition itself pretty ignorable to anyone who’s not a very invested “gamer”.

Actual right to repair and right to continue to access to the software and services and devices you buy goes SO far beyond mere games, there are other huge impacts to society from exactly the same problem that leads to game servers being shut down, and this petition ignored them completely to focus exclusively on games. I know that was done purposefully, but I think it was a miscalculation.

I’m convinced it could have got a lot of support if it had broader aims. Yes if you go after the big boys who are locking down tractor parts and integrated electronic modules so they become obsolete and unrepairable and directly impacting farmers and our food supply, you’re going to REALLY piss off some very big business interests who are going to try and kill your petition, but you’re also going to help educate and hopefully get a lot of support from politicians who already know this is a problem and from the general public who doesn’t care about games but does care about society (at least once they’re properly educated about it, which is hard but also a necessary and positive step to even attempt).

I still just can’t respect a rainbow road that has guardrails.

No nobody ever has to admit anything, they just have to be able to be plausibly implicated and plausible deniability is achieved.

I would absolutely and unironically fly this flag, although to be even more inclusive it also needs an alpha layer. Perhaps it should be a cube? Actually even that might not be inclusive enough, we need more dimensions. BRB I need to figure out how to attach a tesseract to my flagpole, I guess I’ll need some kind of gordian knot?

Mathematically right, the best kind of right.

It works: You can tell the real humans because they’ll be the only ones unwilling to do this invasive bullshit. The bots will just come up with something fake to scan and carry on as they always have.

It’s actually low-key brilliant. Start a gold rush, when you realize the gold isn’t actually there, pivot to selling shovels and keep hyping the gold rush. Fools and their money are soon parted, and there seem to be an endless supply of them.