vaguerant

Our country’s gonna boom.

How did you get my nudes?

It really whips the Lemmy’s ass.

This article sucks horrendously. The Japanese PM was asked about Assassin’s Creed Shadows by a member of the House of Councillors, which from a quick search is roughly like the Senate in many western governments.

Prime Minister Ishiba responded to the questions by Kada, saying that if such actions were carried out at real-life landmarks in Japan, he would oppose them. He said that acts such as shrines being graffitied are completely out of the question, which was in reference to a real life act from November 2024.

Holy fuck, the PM doesn’t want people to vandalise shrines in real life. He’s so mad about Assassin’s Creed Shadows, everybody point. Also, the writer doesn’t know how to spell feudal (“fueduel”) and that’s probably the worst part.

Reddit probably closed down their existing community.

The big headline is understandably that it crashes into a fake painted wall like a cartoon, but that’s not something that most drivers are likely to encounter on the road. The other two comparisons where lidar succeeded and cameras failed were the fog and rain tests, where the Tesla ran over a mannequin that was concealed from standard optical cameras by extreme weather conditions. Human eyes are obviously susceptible to the same conditions, but if the option is there, why not do better than human eyes?

“We’re getting these babies now–strong, American babies–these babies are at temperatures, big numbers, numbers we haven’t seen for 60 years here. Yesterday I had… a baby came to me, tears in his eyes, he said ‘Sir’–these tough babies call me sir, have you noticed that?–he said ‘Sir, you’re giving us something in this country that we haven’t had in generations.’ People are saying they’ve never seen this before. We brought it back.”

Everyone else took all the good critiques of this article, so here’s mine.

We’re still bullish on the fediverse, and on Bluesky, if it manages to become a truly federated platform.

Bluesky appears to have reached their goal as far as federation. Users can self-host a personal data server (PDS) which federates with Bluesky. If you want an analogy from somebody extremely unqualified to offer it, it’s sort of like bringing a bucket of water to a swimming pool. You can’t go swimming in the bucket, but you can pour it into Bluesky’s pool and swim in there. If the pool closes down or implements segregation and if somebody else opens a swimming pool, you can take your bucket to their pool instead. However, if nobody else wants to open another swimming pool, your bucket is useless. In this analogy, buckets are only useful to very slightly fill somebody else’s swimming pool and for no other purpose. It’s a very good analogy.

Bryan Newbold, the protocol engineer at Bluesky, said the following about PDSes and federation:

Overall, I think federation isn’t the best term for Bluesky to emphasize going forward, though I also don’t think it was misleading or factually incorrect to use it to date. An early version of what became atproto actually was peer-to-peer, with data and signing keys on end devices (mobile phones). When that architecture was abandoned and PDS instances were introduced, “federation” was the clearest term to describe the new architecture.

i.e. In Bluesky’s terminology, federation is not a future goal they’re hoping to achieve, it’s what they’re already doing right now.

The (ActivityPub) fediverse is different, because … damn, I really screwed myself with this swimming pool thing … it’s like a bunch of boats in the ocean. There’s one-person dinghies and giant cruise ships, all with different owners. You can bring your own boat, or you can hitch a ride with a friend or a generous stranger. If you want to hang out in a different boat from the one you arrived in, that’s fine too. Ultimately, we all float on the same ocean which we all have to share. Crucially, nobody is in charge of the water. There’s rules on the boats, but the ocean is just the ocean. If your boat crashes into an iceberg and sinks, the ocean will still be there. You might lose some of your stuff, but there’s plenty of other boats to pick you up.

The failure state in both cases is better than nothing. With Bluesky, you lose the swimming pool, but keep the bucket. With ActivityPub, you lose the boat, but keep the ocean. If Bluesky dies, ideally you can take your federated identity with you to an alternative service that exists in the future, but you no longer have access to Bluesky, because it’s gone. When a Lemmy instance dies, you pretty much have to start over: register a new account, subscribe to all your communities again, etc. But the whole fediverse is still there: all the communities you were subscribed to, the people you followed, all your old comments, they’re still out there floating on the ocean.

Just for reference, while it has been edited, the comic is by Stan Kelly, The Onion’s resident cartoonist. Kelly is fictional, a satirical stereotype of a right-wing newspaper cartoonist. His signatures are over-labelling everything, gratuitous self-inserts, and framing the wealthy/other advantaged groups as morally upstanding patriots unfairly victimized by their inferiors. The latter is usually accompanied by them crying a single tear.

All that to say, in the context of a Kelly comic, “Honest Tesla Salesman” is definitely meant ironically.

In positive news, the title database has expanded their Unicode coverage.

In this case, the goose didn’t even need numbers. The eagle eventually gave up the fight and flew away. Something something, don’t start a fight you can’t finish.

The Leta FAQ confirms this:

Did you make your own search engine from scratch? We did not, we made a front end to the Google and Brave Search APIs.

Our search engine performs the searches on behalf of our users. This means that rather than using Google or Brave Search directly, our Leta server makes the requests.

Searching by proxy in other words.

Yeah, I keep seeing that phrasing used everywhere and it bothers me, too. I’m pretty sure it’s not accurate to the UK system either: they have a standard parliamentary setup like most of Europe where the party or coalition of parties who earn a majority of the seats is able to form government, which most people would consider to be what winning an election means. I’m not well-versed in the history of UK parliament, but it may just be that the situation has never occurred there, so they’re unfamiliar with it?

It strikes me that if you’re trying to be a stooge for a foreign government, you probably shouldn’t tell your superiors about it…

And specifically, a reference to It’s the Sun Wot Won It, a headline in the Murdoch press, not-good-enough-to-be-toilet-paper tabloid rag The Sun, crowing that they had enough influence in the 1992 general election to secure a win for the Conservatives.

Best I can find officially is “not the US”.

Lemm.ee servers are not hosted in the US and therefore not subject to US jurisdiction.

“Better” doesn’t always mean “smaller”, especially in this example. LZMA’s strength is that it compresses very small but its weakness is that it’s extremely CPU-intensive to decompress. Switching to ZSTD will actually result in larger downloads, but the massively reduced CPU load of decompressing ZSTD will mean it’s faster for most users. Instead of just counting the time it takes for the data to transfer, this is factoring in download time + decompression time. Even though ZSTD is somewhat less efficient in terms of compression ratio, it’s far more efficient computationally.

I feel like Google would tell you the same thing if asked.

Maybe this is a me problem, but especially on the threadiverse side (Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed), how much are we really in tight-knit communities based on our servers? I’m from Fedia, but I don’t really interact with Fedia people any more than I do anybody else, or even bother to take notice of where other people are from, unless they say something especially goofy. Communities in the “subreddit” sense are more likely to feel tight-knit than servers

I definitely get how allowing people to skip choosing a server is good for some types of potential fediverse users, I just don’t think Gmail works as an analogy for that. When Gmail was in its invite-only era, people weren’t paralyzed by choices of providers, they specifically wanted the one that was the best, and that was Gmail.

The difference there is that Gmail was offering something (for free) that nobody else was at the time: the linear, conversation-based display of back-and-forth emails which we’re all used to now, and a whole gigabyte of storage. Everybody already had an email address when Gmail arrived on the scene, but Gmail was, from a pure usability perspective, better than the rest. People wanted access to that.

For an invite-only Fediverse server to be especially attractive, it needs to have some reason why access to that server specifically is more desirable than going to any of the tens (hundreds?) of alternative servers that offer literally exactly the same thing. Unless they start adding features the others can’t provide (which is close to impossible in an open-source project), what’s the benefit?