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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • flatpaks are all updated at once, just like distro packages, so yeah you might need to commands, but that’s still very different to having each application update itself (and the security hell implied by that)

    Also I think pkcon can manage your updates across various backends (unless you are on Arch, where I think there are both technical & ideological objections to having a simple tool that just works)




  • Part of it is the standard crisis of capitalism, the profit you get from doing the same thing always declines, so over time you have to push up revenue (increasing prices, forcing people to pay, showing more ads, gathering more data, etc) & push down costs (fire engineers, run on less hardware, etc)

    Part of it is capitalisms natural tendency to create monopolies, and the lack of competition in a given field causing the company to then lose sight of what it’s good at to compete in a bigger field.

    Part is that interest rates mean loans are no longer cheap, so taking on debt to get customer, to at some point down the line make money, is a less viable plan. Twitter is a special case where the bad loans are because that was the original deal not interested rate related, and Musk is trying to pull all of the enshitification levers at the same time.

    Part is that CEOs generally don’t have a fucking clue about their products or what they are doing (it’s a circuit job about who you know/blow, not what you know), so once one CEO starts firing/enshitifying, the rest just copy them so as to not be left out.




  • Without AA, racism in admissions is illegal.

    No positive measure to counteract systemic biases are illegal.

    Hereditary admissions when 80% of previous students were not black, is pretty explicitly racist and still very much legal

    All the implicit systemic biases in the admission system are very much legal

    The only thing you can’t do is ensure black kids get admitted.

    If you have a system and you know its giving you biases results you can compensate for the bias, without understanding every single component bias, that’s what AA was, banning it, is sticking your head in the sand and going back to faux/real Naïvity about how system racism works.

    We might as well start asking “why do black people prefer renting?”, because as a nation we are commited to pretending to not understand that there are systemic reasons for things.



  • Fine the mental gymnastics is to justify why hereditary admission criteria are more acceptable to you not “good”

    Yes the white kid does.

    • The racial biases of whoever runs the admission system
    • The racial biases of teachers at the school
    • The white kid is still more likely to benefit from hereditary admission and insider information on how to do well in admission tests/letter.

    To pretend a white kid in a predominantly black school doesn’t have an advantage in “colorblind” admissions is to deny the existence of systemic racism.


  • You can never change who your parents are, that’s some real mental gymnastics to justify how hereditary acceptance criteria is good actually, but using race to identify those underservered by k-12 education, lacking in family connections, not having knowledge of college specific tricks to getting accepted & generally having less resources available to do the extra-ciricular activity to get in, and compensate for that bias is bad.

    Affirmative action is only silly if you don’t accept that systemic racism exists.



  • Respectfully: Fuck that.

    If you want to find the best instant rice recommendations on Lemmy, Lemmy should have a functional post search function, rather than me relying on a malevolent corporate entity like google to index all the content.

    Search has gone to shit as the Internet has embraced social media sites, an upside of this is that wikipedia+Lemmy+key word search, mayas accurate as asking Google Bard or bing, and they can be built on entirety open tech.


  • Not really sure what you think is wrong with karma? most of reddit’s problem IMO come down to bad moderation.

    But for comment scoring, there are really just 3 methods I’ve seen:

    • Generic Up/Downvote - Reddit
    • Categorized Up/Downvote - Slashdot - This worked on a technical forum to keep technical knowledge near the top, while still allowing stupid/funny comments further down the page, plus it made ignoring stupid/funny threads easy
    • Personalized Up/Downvote - Facebook/Twitter/etc - basically build a profile of users you agree/interact with, and then weight their interactions accordingly to predict what content you’ll like/hate.
      • I believe Ticktok take this to the next level, because 90% of users don’t up/downvote, ticktok logs the passive act of continuing to watch content as a partial upvote making their algorithms train on the average users likes/dislikes faster.

    You could probably combine Personalized & Categorized, but I’ve AFAIK not seen it done.

    I think the problems with moderation are harder to solve, because you have both bad-faith moderators & good-faith but easily played moderators as problems, and you also want different dynamics as forums grow.

    I think lemmy could really experiment with good moderation & meta-moderation and if the developers are interested anyway, be a far better forum as a result.

    • Peer review of moderator decisions is something Slashdot did that went quite well. Once you’d been an active user with good “karma” for a while you would occasionally be asked to review other users votes, I think a similar thing could be done for moderation decisions
    • Elected mods. For subs above a certain size, having moderation essentially boil down to whatever the guy who created the sub decides, is bad. I don’t know exactly how it would work to prevent abuse, but as subs grow, at some point it would be good if the community chose the mods.
      • even short of full fledged democracy community approval of mod appointments would certainly reduce the amount of mod drama where it 1 bad head mod, will purge the other mods and replace them all with sock puppets.
    • Users-led replacement of bad mods, similar to electing mods, it would be good for users to “recall” a bad mod.
    • Transparency over mod actions, I understand that with the number of Nazis & other assorted trolls online reddit chose to let mods, moderate anonymously, but it really means you have no idea who is doing a good/bad job in many subreddits, some level of transparency for all but the worst content is key.
    • Moving subs, as lemmy instances have some control over the content of the subs that reside on them, it would make sense for there to be some method for the users + mods of a sub to decide to move it to another instances. This not only prevents admin abuse, but also encourages competition between instances for technical administration & content administration.
    • Splitting communities , sometimes subs grow “too big” and have different subcommunities that end up fighting for control of a sub, it would be good if there were a way of these communities splitting into 2 rather than fighting over the original name. not sure how it would work, but thinking about how r/trees & r/cannabis split or something similar. Maybe /r/canabis could become an combo of /r/canabisnews & /r/canabismemes, where users can just ubsub from the 1/2 of the content they don’t want.
    • Letting users weight subs/filter subs how much of subs they see, sometimes I’ve unsubbed from a high-content sub, just because while i liked the content it was overpowering the rest of my feed, it would be nice to have users configure how much of a sub they see (especially if combined with Categorized Up/Downvote), rather than complaining about “bad moderation” I can just personally choose to see less of what I don’t want.

    Anyway thank you for reading/not-reading my ted talk, but I suspect this will come up again so now I can copy/pasta it.


  • I don’t think that many companies have their shit together well enough to mirror the source code, besides the RHEL repos aren’t small, so that’ll cost.

    The companies I’ve helped either had a minimalist mirror to reduce the surface area of what was installable or to save on cost.

    It’s possible that a few enterprises do a full mirror of all RHEL sources, but i doubt it’s many