the fediverse is the nickname given to [instances using] the pubg protocol

Haha I’m guessing that was meant to say ActivityPub

the original instances of lemmy all have a strong leftist bent

[Bonus info]

Reddit has a history of big events when a clump of subreddits get banned all at once when a newspaper reports on them. A lot of right-wing ones went to Voat and later *.win, and some socialist ones (notably /r/GenZedong) went to Lemmygrad, which became the largest federated instance at the time. /r/chapotraphouse also made their own fork, Hexbear, although while it was the largest, it wasn’t federated with the rest for years. Most instances were either hard-left (e.g. Lemmygrad, Lemmy.ml, SLRPNK) or a slight left, but tge third most populous for a while was Wolfballs, a ‘free speech’ instance, de facto alt-right (US right-Libertarian style instance), which ended up defederated from almost all the others due to constant bigotry and rule breaking when posting on other instances. Wolfballs admin eventually shut it down before the Reddit API exodus because, among other reasons, they realized the neo-Nazis among their users were serious and not just trolling.

Overall, the few right-leaning instances are alienated from the bulk of federation and become islands or vaporize, but most just dismiss Lemmy or even the Fediverse at large as a left wing commie thing.

I don’t understand why it would be acceptable to submit generated code in the first place. I’d say it’s functionally asking others to complete your assignment. Sampling code excessively and without attribution is plagiarism.

And seconding that concern about people not even learning how code works. This was an issue even before chatGPT, when people would by-default look up stack overflow snippets or existing algorithms instead of thinking and training their mind to be able to solve actual real problems, but now it’s probably much more widespread as an easier way out. If the school is able to do a code exam in an offline environment, even with manual docs available, it should weed out the ones who didn’t learn pretty quickly.

fwiw, I suspect Hexbear users expect snark more. It’s basically the default mode in a bunch of comms.

From the name, I expected a Hannah Montana Linux type distro.

I’m not sure why subs would be so weird and verbose. Maybe the translator is afraid the implication (rather than literal meaning) will be lost somehow, but really, ‘ja’ isn’t some loaded enigma.

On a side note, fan works (anything from subs to software to upscales and remasters) tend to be better, done out of passion rather than just an industrial chore.

I believe sometimes it’s done because there’s a lot to read and it might be (considered) too hard to read in real time. Which I understand, but it also annoys me too. It’s not what they said, and sometimes the way someone phrases something is important even if they don’t cut out important information, it can hint at their character or their emotion.

An interesting example I saw was in Archer. During an agitated rant, Archer finally interjects demanding someone answer the phone. The next shot is a plain still shot of the telephone, which the captions helpfully emphasise [PHONE NOT RINGING]; a recurring joke is Archer’s constant ear-ringing due to careless gun use.

Having seen other, more careless translations, I can easily see jokes (or in other contexts, important clues) like this being missed and it made me think about how film techniques can imply audio silently. If there’s a plain shot of a phone, a hearing impaired person might reasonably assume it’s a visual implication that the phone is ringing.

One trend which annoys me is having meaningful non-English simply listed as ‘[speaking language]’

Even worse is when, despite being another language, a common word (whether homophonic or loan words) would by understood regardless, just isn’t present in the captions.

Do you think things will get better?

Yes.

A lot of the problems we face are systematic, to do with how our society is organised rather than any human limit. They are solvable problems, and many have already been solved already in some countries. The reason they’re aren’t solved isn’t because we can’t, but because the few most powerful people are powerful because of this rigged system, and have a self-interest in keeping it that way by any means necessary.

History has shown us clearly that even kings, dictators and other broken systems can be overthrown AND stopped from coming back, provided the people doing it are politically educated and organized. That’s the key. If we just get angry without a plan, we will end up like the pitiful Jan 6 riot. But if we educate ourselves with lessons from history and work to create a mass movement, we can finally move forward beyond this frightening present situation.

Privacy-focused isn’t a term I’d choose, but it certainly allows privacy-concerned people to use it, and like you said, avoiding the capitalist surveillance crap that for-profit companies are pulling.

Ones like Lemmy fit in fine to my threat model. They enable me to use privacy tools up-to-and-including Tor routing, without a phone number or other personally identifying info (you can’t do those with many other social media platforms). I can use the Fediverse pseudonymously, and if I ever want to, anonymously.

I’m not hiding this conversation from you, but I am hiding my identity from companies.

That’s a great point. While not the same, I think this relates to the bullshit assymetry principle (aka. Brandolini’s law), where as a result of the time it takes to respond to basic repetitive questions, especially those which are pretty easy to search around for existing answers, then entire communities can get tired of tolerating them. In some cases people just become rude and dismissive and in other cases staff actually just ban the person asking the question, which is already the case in some Lemmy instances.

One potential way around it I’ve seen is having a decent FAQ available and well-known within the community, so one literally just reply with little more than a link to a page with the answer already written. In fact, one site used to (not anymore) have a culture where people would just attach a whole book as a PDF and simply reply ‘read this’, maybe listing a chapter if you’re lucky, which isn’t very tactful but it’s pretty funny and still provides a low-effort, high-detail answer (albeit maybe too high-detail for the kind of person who asks such a common question to reddit instead of trying to find the answer themselves).

If we consider that phenomenon you described to be a problem, the solution is being able to make it extremely quick and easy to give a canned response and politely tell them to RTFM.

I would take the job just to make sure we can sabotage it. And I’m not even affected by their adblocker detection; I just yt-dlp and NewPipe the videos.

Classical liberalism (just to give a concrete political term for those old school liberals) is admirable. I broadly agree with its values and I support all those points you mentioned. The progressive and conservative variants we often see in US politics are blatantly hypocritical and broken.

Unfortunately, liberalism’s core issue is that it’s an ideology based on an abstract concept rather than our physical conditions - it starts with the abstract, fair idea of freedom and attempts to apply it onto material reality. For example, the liberal approach to free speech, which theoretically creates a marketplace of ideas where the best prevail, just turns into a propaganda echo chamber when huge media organisation are owned by business tycoons with political agendas, and when social media companies are financially punished by their advertisers for allowing controversial expression. The utopian marketplace of ideas never really manifests at scale when that marketplace is collectively dominated by the like-minded owning class.

Without adding restrictions (a contradiction of liberty), the huge wealth of some people turns their freedoms into their political power. If the rich owning class can control the economy through a monopoly or similar, they have the freedom to control what news you can find, what products you can buy (if you can’t DIY it, like a computer) and their quality and how safe they are, what jobs they will give you, and so much more.

There are also plenty of other contradictions which we see play out, such as:

• How can we balance freedom of religion with giving people rights that a religion rejects? (e.g. abortion, homosexuality)
• How can we balance someone’s individual rights with someone else’s right to private property? (e.g. trespassing, restriction of the commons)
• How can we balance someone’s individual rights with community safety needs and expectations? (e.g. weapon rights, industrial and environmental restrictions, speech laws)
• Should liberalism be allowed to defend itself against a democratically-approved transition to dictatorship, or does this contradict political freedom?

In these situations, we have to resolve them somehow, so we end up with liberalism variants like conservative liberalism and progressive liberalism, straying further from the pure old-school liberalism they necessarily contradict. Even without corruption, liberalism decays, distancing itself from its ideals, and ultimately turns into a playground for the powerful who have far far far far far more ability to realize liberty than almost everyone else.

You make a good point about the primaries. In the previous elections, Bernie Sanders getting shafted definitely shifted a lot of their supporters away from the Democrap Party and Bernie’s social democracy towards socialism (like, working class seizing means of production). It had a real radicalising effect on people. They were being disenfranchised by federal politics so they looked towards unions and direct democratic organising away from the broken electoral system.

Whoever is making the controlling decisions behind the party facade

Money talks - you can’t dominate a US election without it. And most people don’t have the kind of money that talks, so both parties inevitably end up representing the owner class rather than popular opinion of their supporters. Democrat donors don’t want radical changes which would threaten their wealth, so no matter how popular a Bernie is, they’re going to do all they can to block them. On the other hand, while Trump is similarly unorthodox and controversial like Bernie, they’re not really a threat to the owner class’s wealth (Trump himself is a business owner!). So even while many Republican donors did object and push hard for alternatives, they didn’t do a Democrat and obstruct him.

Republicans like Trump are also liberals. [wiki]

For what it’s worth, I’ve personally never found it controversial to talk about in person. And this includes in countries where it’s a prosecuted crime.

Copying is not theft, artificial scarcity in the digital world is a tragedy, and I intentionally avoid paying middle-men distributors (like streaming services and record companies) for art.

I don’t see irony there. I think calling this FOSS community ‘filled with Linux-crazed people’ is a stretch, but even then, it’s very different to:

or even just hating a niche product whatsoever. It’s not like Linux is EEE’ing or being invasive, so it’s hard to equivocate being a passionate fan to being a passionate hater.