Just gonna name-drop the tool I made to do this :) https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim

It's only been out a few days, let me know if you have any issues!

I'll also throw out: aging infrastructure, build systems, coding practices, etc.

I looked into contributing to the kernel - it's already an uphill battle to understand such a large, complex piece of software written almost entirely in C - but then you also need to subscribe to busy mailing lists and contribute code via email, something I've never done at 30 and I'm betting most of the younger generation doesn't even know is possible. I know it "works" but I'm really doubting it's the most efficient way to be doing things in 2024 - there's a reason so many infrastructure tools have been developed over the years.

The barriers to entry for a lot of projects is way too high, and IMO a lot of existing "grey" maintainers, somewhat understandably, have no interest in changing their processes after so much time. But if you make it too hard to contribute, no one will bother.

Well in 2015 Jimmy Carter said that the United States is "just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. "

That same year The Economist's Democracy Index downgraded the United States to a "flawed democracy" and it has continued to trend downwards since then.

If you're looking for something more recent, Bernie Sanders is saying the same thing: "We are moving rapidly into an oligarchic form of society. Never before in American history have so few billionaires, so few people, have so much wealth and so much power".

So between the massive (and growing) income inequality in the country, and rulings like Citizen's United it's hard not to believe it's not at least on the trajectory towards an oligarchy. Now throw in the blatantly corrupt picks of the Trump administration, where cabinet positions are favors to rich friends, or being given to billionaires with a direct interest in killing the government agency they are running - not to mention all the things he's routinely done / will do to enrich himself / friends with tax payer dollars and it certainly seems like an oligarchy to me.

And just on a personal vibes level, living here, it feels like legislation to help normal people or solve normal people's problems is almost non-existent. And when it does happen, it also conveniently throws a ton of money at the rich at the same time (see recent tax cuts, pandemic relief funds, etc.). Even something like the Affordable Care Act, which did a ton of net good things for this country, enriched a whole lot of private healthcare companies along the way rather than creating an actual public option with negotiated prices to keep government costs down.

Look, I'd love for that to be true, but it just isn't. Biden will win by being a boring centrist, because that's who he is and that's who will win a general election (generally speaking).

With the GOP going completely off the rails the easiest path to victory is to simply go middle of the road and pick up all those independents/centrists and conservatives with brains. Progressives will vote Biden regardless because Trump (or any Trump wannabe) is too terrifying of a reality.

This country has never shown it has some giant progressive silent majority - Bernie would know, he bet and lost on that materializing in his own presidential runs.

I don't see Democrats running hard on progressive policies until either the GOP starts running moderates again (forcing Democrats to pickup votes elsewhere) or young people prove they can be a force at the ballot box.

All this is not to shit on what Biden has achieved, because he has done things for progressives, but I don't see him suddenly switching to anything resembling a "strong progressive agenda" because it will just give his GOP opponent ammo to claim "see he's radical too". Biden will be the most boring, normal politician he can, while highlighting how bad things will get if his extreme opponent gets into office, and that's probably the smartest thing to do.

For all the people cheering or indifferent to this:

1. This would affect more than social media - this would affect ANYWHERE that has user accounts that can post content - blogs, wikis, website builders, hell, even email.

2. The summary states this is so it can be "renegotiated". Considering the current authoritarian direction of the United States, now would be absolutely the worst time to rewrite online content policing laws - it will absolutely be used to silence dissent.

Really incredible that the thrusters still function at all after all this time - and that it has any fuel left / usable fuel after all this time.

You offered a lot of suggestions, and I'm sure people will disagree over the specifics, but I think your overall point is excellent and not talked about enough. I wonder if anyone has ever even attempted a survey on the ages of maintainers/contributors? I bet it's skewing older fast.

Nothing wrong with that of course, especially given the project's age, complexity, and being written in C - but you're right, at some point you have to attract new talent - people can't maintain forever.

I'm a 29 year old developer - I didn't even know you could do git patches via email until recently. And while it's super cool, it also sounds kinda terrible, especially at the volume they must be receiving? Their own docs are saying the mailing lists receive some 500 emails per day and I can't imagine the merge process is fun.

So many doc pages are dedicated to how to submit a patch - which is great that it's documented, and I'm sure it will always be somewhat complicated for a large project - but it also feels like things that are all automatically handled by newer tools / bots which can automatically enforce style checks, etc.

I guess they could argue that the complicated process acts as a filter to people submitting PRs who don't know what they are doing, but I'd argue it also shuts out talented engineers who don't have 40 hours to learn how to submit a patch to a project on top of also learning the kernel and also fixing the bug in question.

From what little I read of their git process, does anyone know if there's anything preventing the maintainer of a subsystem from setting up a more modern method for receiving patches? As long as the upstream artifact to the kernel has the expected format?

Hey, author of LASIM here if people have any questions!

Just so people know it does save everything to a JSON file when you click "download" so you can absolutely upload to multiple accounts or keep it as a backup.

I feel like BestOfModLog could be a very funny community.

Artist is apparently Bruce MacKinnon.

Obviously you should just get rid of the CDC and FDA then. No recalls, no problem!

Maybe I'm completely misremembering things, but at some point wasn't there a hotfix to Lemmy that hard-limited how many comments a thread could have? Does anyone know if there's a maximum and if so how many?

Just wondering, cause uh, I could see this one having a lot of comments.

FYI I have made a tool that can backup / copy your account settings, subscriptions, and blocks to a new account: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim

There are others out there as well if you look.

Obviously the loss of .ml communities would still be catastrophic to Lemmy, but at least your new account won't start from ground-zero, and you can be less effected by downtime by having 2 accounts with the same subscriptions.

Dude just can't help himself:

https://twitter.com/...

I watched this video awhile ago about 3 Yale professors leaving the U.S. because of the rise in fascism.

From that video, Marci Shore, Historian of Totalitarianism:

There's an expression in Polish: "I found myself at the very bottom. And then I heard knocking from below." In Russian that gets abbreviated to "dna ne sushchestvuet" - "there is no bottom". What starts to matter, is not what is concealed, but what has been normalized. There's no limit to the depravity, and the sadism, and the cruelty that we are watching now play out in real time.

I saw this complaint in another post online (paraphrased):

The screen and use of a Pi seem at odds with each other. The screen is ultra-low power, but there are of course huge drawbacks for usability. Meanwhile the CPU is very powerful, but chews through, comparatively, a lot of power quickly.

They argued that it would be better to either pair the Pi with a better screen for a more powerful/usable handheld, or go all in on longevity and use some kind of low-power chip to pair with the screen for a terminal that could last for days.

... I've got to say, it's a fair point. A low power hand-held that could run Linux and run for days would be pretty cool, even if it was underpowered compared to a Pi. No idea what you could use for such a thing though.

In fairness, LASIM has only been out for 5 days :)

The worst part of the debt is that nothing good was done with it.

If you use that money to implement a national healthcare system, or fix the national infrastructure, or stabilize social security, or figure out child care, or work on affordable housing, or fix the cost of education, or invest in renewable energy, etc. then maybe it's worth it. Hell, you might even end up net positive in the end with all the good done to society in the long run.

Instead, all of these things are even worse than before while most of the money was spent on a bunch of useless wars and tax cuts for the rich.

And now, there's no more easy money to be borrowed to fix anything.

I would kindly redirect any kind comments you have, or suggests for items to add, to @Madbrad200@lemmy.world, the original creator of the list.

I am but a humble cross-poster.

So maybe you've heard something I haven't, according to this timeline, there was only 2-3 minutes between when the ship issued a mayday and the bridge collapsed: https://www.cbsnews.com/...

It sounded like there was 1 police officer already stationed on either end of the bridge, so thats the only reason they were even able to close the bridge before the collapse.

In the time it took them to do that, I can't see how there would have been time to warn them physically (it's like a 2 mile bridge). From the article, it sounded like there was confusion about if a crew was even on the bridge. I also don't know how often / what mechanism police can use to directly contact crews, if there even is one.