I suppose one of the losses from Reddit is not being able to link to the "Swamps of Dagobah"...

That's right! Put dollars in the chicken recipe!

Anyway that's my two cents.

I wonder if it's possible ...and not overly undesirable... to have your instance essentially put an import tax on other instances' votes. On the one hand, it's a dangerous direction for a free and equal internet; but on the other, it's a way of allowing access to dubious communities/instances, without giving them the power to overwhelm your users' feeds. Essentially, the user gets the content of the fediverse, primarily curated by the community of their own instance.

Happy to have more of the y'all in English English, but personally I'd like an uptake in youse.

I think opinionated is different from being for a non-power-user.

Click 'brave' is not opinionated, because I could click chromium instead. "There is a web browser (and it is Firefox)" is more opinionated, and easier at first, then harder if you happen to need a chromium-based browser.

Why would you include your hostname in the hash? That just sounds like an invitations for a mistake to leak semi-private telemetry data.

Come to think of it.... Isn't obscured telemetry exactly what your suggestion is doing? If they get or guess your hostname by other means, then they have a nice timestamped request from you, signed with your hostname, every second

I count with my thumb on my finger sections (what do you call them?) rather than my fingertips. So one hand comfortably counts to 12. (You can do a similar version, with a little more stretching, to count to 16... but I can't be bothered, and besides, I like 12.)

See, I always find it funny when people say Linux is rubbish for desktop. I main Linux and boot Windows for some games, and Windows continues to find ways to bug me while my Linux desktop feels great.

I guess YMMV

the animosity between the vim and neovim subs

I mean, can we really be truly human without pointless flame wars?

WHATEVER SOFTWARE YOU USE SUCKS! ONLY THE SOFTWARE I USE MAKES A PERSON A VALUABLE HUMAN! AAARRRGGGHHHhhhh...

P.S. https://xkcd.com/378

P.P.S. I object to the characterisation of vim as a small community. In my mind, which is obviously correct, vim is basically the ubiquitous text editor, and a few niche users use other editors.

P.P.P.S. thanks for the cheat sheet

what would happen to distribution X if Canonical suddeny made Ubuntu closed-source?

I believe Linux Mint has done some planning for if Ubuntu does something like that - probably to rebase off Debian in that case

I feel that should be balanced with: this is appropriate here so I won't downvote it, even if it's irrelevant to me.

... I suppose for big communities that averages out so it's okay, but maybe not for small

I think someone else mentioned the same here, but as I've browsed down the opinions, I wonder if it's good for different communities to have their own subculture on what votes mean.

For sure, outsiders dropping by might vote 'counter-culturally' and unhelpfully, but you can get a general sense of understanding in a community.

For r/all-alike stuff I'm sure things are different.

https://www.reddit.com/...

Some of the human-alignment projects

And some look like "I flip shit bigger, align with me or I will flip your shit"

Come to think of it, when is someone going to mod one game into the other's engine

:-)

Yes. How have you played so little Skyrim?

Ever since this rusty Delorean got abandoned outside my cul-de-sac, I've enjoyed regular visits to ancient Babylonia.

You treat bots like humans and humans like bots. It's all about logic and good/bad faith.

Part of the thing with chatgpt is it's particularly good at sounding like it knows what is saying, while spewing linguistically-coherent nonsense.

For many (most? Even all to some degree?) of us, we have some idea ingrained in our culture of saying what we think to be true, and refraining from what we don't. That's heavily diluted on the internet, but the converse tends to be saying what we think will make people support/agree with us. We've grown up (some of us have!) with some feel of how to tell the difference.

GPT (and I guess most human-like chat bots will be similar for now) is more an amoral, or a-scient, attempt to say something coherent based on the training data. It's different again, but sounds uncannily like what we're used to from good-faith truth-speakers. I also think it's like the extreme-end of some cultures that prioritise saying what will make the other person happy, more than what is true.

((Why does Firefox crash on me?!!!!!))

((Maybe even Firefox knows I typed too long and rambly.))

So, where does that leave us? There's always been unreliable knowledge from people. Joe in the next village tells tall tales about Martha from Sweden who catches fish with peeled strawberries. Scientific standardisation has helped a lot, and allowed for a sort of globalised reliable knowledge, but its cracks are showing. We trust 'the experts', but then find Wikipedia has trolls and WHO is influenced by Chinese diplomacy. So we trust 'the community' and find Amazon reviews are bought. So we trust our moderated sublemmits, and find out the content-to-user matching algorithms breed echo chambers. So we trust the government to moderate, but the American Left admit the Democrats are bad, and the Right admit the Republicans are liars. (And I've never even been to America!) So at last we go back to Aunt Jenny, who's deeply afraid that black people will take over the country, and the local sysadmin whose network security is based on the book he read in the '90s.

Maybe we need to relearn tricks from the old irl days, even if that loses us some of what we could gain from globalised knowledge and friendship. Perhaps we can find new ways to apply these to our internet communities. I don't think I'm saying anything new here, but I guess fostering a culture of thinking about truth and trust is good: maybe I'm helping that.

Almost as an aside (so I don't ramble twice as long like my crashed-firefox answer!): The best philosophical one-liner I've found for first-principleing trust, is, does this person show love? (Kindness, compassion, selflessness.) To me, and/or to others. Then that imparts some assumed value to their worldview and life understanding. Doesn't make them an expert on any topic, but makes a foundation.

And finally,

Do you really believe that the average persons sapience is really that noteworthy?

Yes. If you mean, is their comment more noteable than most others, in a public debate, then no. But if you're pointing towards, are their experience, understanding and internal processes valuable, then yes, and that's important to me. (Though I'm not great enough to hear, consider or interact with everyone!)

The average person on the internet is being fake the same way chatGPT based bots would be!

Do you reckon so? I think fake internet usually talks different to chatGPT, though of course propaganda (national or individual level) tries to mimic which or whatever will be most effective. My point was largely that chatGPT mimics the experts we've previously learnt to trust, better than most of fake internet was able to do before, whilst being less sapient (than fake internet) and at the same time being yet more and yet much less trustworthy.

I saw what I think was a plugin for osmand that would share your location in real time via telegram. Took a look, it looked okay, but people I know don't use telegram (or osmand - not necessary but helpful) so forgot it. Sorry, I can't find it now within osmand or fdroid!

There's a few location sharing apps in fdroid, maybe one of them could be an option? Dunno about iOS support, but the way the telegram/osm one worked is the receiver could have it link through to osmand or just click the link in telegram to see the map location online.

Osmand does have a generic facility for location uploads: within the track recording plugin. You can self-host a custom solution that takes a URL input to log a location point. Sorry, that's probably more work than you want! I certainly gave up on it!