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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • The problem is that lemmy.ml hosts too many popular communities. There are people who want them gone from their feeds but also don’t want their Lemmy experience to become empty and boring.

    The solution is to build up more attractive alternatives of those communities elsewhere, not endlessly campaign the existing users to just drop them. I understand that awareness of why people want alternatives is important for those alternatives to have a chance at attracting users, and being discovered in the first place. I just have yet to actually see these alternatives receive the care they (imo) require to justify switching to them.

    The current fedidb stats, to me, state that 488 people is, colloquially speaking, nobody. a screenshot of the first page of stats for lemmy on fedidb.org. The collective stats across all servers is 391,326 total users and 45,189 monthly users. The individual servers shown are (in order): lemmy.world, lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, hexbear.net, lemmy.dbzer0.com, feddit.de, lemmygrad.ml, programming.dev, lemmyblahaj.zone, and lemmy.ca. The user and "status" counts approximately follow a pareto distribution.  lemmy.world has almost half of the total user count and monthly active user count on its own. The notable outlier is hexbear.net, which has 10% more statuses than lemmy.world made by 10% as many montly active users.

    Maybe it’s too soon to make such a judgement call, we’ll see over the next few days as people get the chance to see this post.








  • It’s such a destructive mindset, and it seems to me like indie games are hopefully on the cusp of re-demonstrating to the rest of the industry why it is so.

    Art/luxury products depend on catering to subjective tastes to turn a profit. You need to speak to someone’s perspective or interests, and are competing for their disposable income against all other forms of entertainment. Thus the wider the targeted audience, the harder it is to outcompete the rest of the market on “consumer interest” (no idea if that’s the proper use of the term but it sounds correct for the context), the harder it is to even turn a profit.

    Simultaneously, these corporations want an ever-greater magnitude of profit (aka growth). So they decide to target the widest audience possible, while investing as much capital as they can.

    That’s already an unstable balance of priorities. As soon as you start conceiving yourself as competing with almost every single other market on the basis of shareholder speculation, in terms of ROI, it’s doomed.

    You’re not just shooting yourself in the foot, you’re trying to do a Paul Muad’hib Atreides except because this is reality, not sci-fi, instead of drinking the Water of Life you mixed 10 grams of ketamine, 5 tabs of acid, and a fistful of meth into a blue Gatorade and chugged it in one go. All you end up doing is vibrating in place so hard you begin to slough off flesh and erratically disintegrate, like some sort of sad eldritch horror.

    God do I hate corpos sick with capitalism.

    To continue the Dune analogy, they really could use some ecology-derived thinking: specialize and find your niche (or help it emerge), and give back to the rest of the ecosystem so that it continues to flourish with you. Monoculture has a negative correlation between scale and sustainability, let alone ROI.


  • Armchair geopolitics explanation: it’s a culture/societal difference between a thousand year old monarchy and a federalist state that lost 2 world wars on their own land. Not to mention the federalist state had a “communist” power structure in control of about half of their lands for half a century while the other half birthed a regional free trade juggernaut. Meanwhile, the monarchy has a landed elite class/aristocracy that persists to this day.

    What I’m getting at is that the wealth in the UK could be much more heavily tied up in individual fortunes and estates than the wealth in Germany. That kind of wealth seems easier to “protect” by offshoring (and/or the UK has evolved to prefer/rely on it).

    In contrast, I expect the wealth in Germany to be more tied up in corporations, stocks, etc. This in turn would lend itself to corporate forms of tax evasion that can happen domestically.


  • Late to this thread, but this is disturbingly similar to the media-bashing a French-Palestinian politician has received recently.

    She tweeted something along the lines of “time for an uprising” before attending a conference. The following week+ of interviews with her party colleagues were filled with “did you know uprising in Arabic is intifada?! Why is your colleague calling for violence?!?!?!”

    Her name is Rima Hassan if you’re interested.



  • In light of the recent forays by AI projects/products into the reason of coding assistants, from copilot to Devin, this reads to me as a sign that they’ve finally accepted that you can’t make an ai assistant that provides actual value from an LLM purely trained on text.

    This is Microsoft copying Google’s captcha homework. We trained their OCR for gBooks, we trained their image recognition on traffic lights and buses and so signs.

    Now we get to train their ai assistant on how to click around a windows OS.


  • I think the point is to scold Google for the harm they cause or fail to prevent. When the law is written so as to genuinely prevent harm (data protection, for ex) then I will scold those who don’t follow it. When the law is written so as to be ineffective at best and harmful at worst, I will scold those who do follow it.

    The point isn’t to be consistent with regards to the law, as the law itself is not always either consistent nor “good”.

    … unless it is me that isn’t understanding your own comment?




  • In case you’re unaware, the “deep inhale” is because that phrasing is historically tied to the WINE project, as per their website (winehq.org):

    Wine (originally an acronym for “Wine Is Not an Emulator”)

    And at this point it’s like a 10-year old meme (if not 20) to bring it up when someone may seem unaware of the distinction between emulation and what Wine does.

    It is a bit tired of a reference, and I imagine somewhat off-putting of a response to receive when you don’t know the reference yourself. The acronym is in the spirit of the GNU one (“GNU’s Not Unix”), and as the other commenters have explained the fact that wine does something different than emulation is very relevant when you get into the nitty-gritty details, so it has extra sticking power in terms of memes in linux/foss communities.