xkcd #1987: Python Environment
A lot of people don't really understand computers. We mostly know how to manipulate the user interface (UI) to get the computer to do what we want, but if you switch up the icons or install a new desktop environment, I guarantee you that 99% of users will be completely lost.
This is because the UI abstracts the complex process of running a computer so that the user can just think about getting things done. The user doesn't need to know what it means to "go to the start menu and click the Notepad app." Practically, this is Windows-speak for "open the default text editor". However, if you take a Windows user and drop them into a Linux and ask them to open up the default text editor, they probably won't know how to do that unless a Windows-like desktop environment is chosen.
Basically, a lot of people don't "know how to use Reddit" so much as that they know how to get the Reddit website to do what they want it to. Lemmy is even slightly different than Reddit, cosmetically different. Although we usually use the phrase "cosmetically different" to imply that the difference is not important, because we rely on GUIs to understand computers, cosmetic differences are really important in UIs.
Go look for posts on Lemmy discussing Jerboa and the other apps. The apps mostly differ in how the user is able to interact with the site. They should all have the full functionality of Lemmy (or are working towards it), but the ways of presenting that functionality to the user are different.
One of the most important groups that moved to the Threadiverse were the blind community. It is because of the inaccessible user interface in the Reddit app that they decided to move over.
And let me be very clear that the fact that computers abstract away their complexity is very much a good thing. That's why we have computers: to do tedious, complex work automatically and simply. Not everyone needs to be a computer expert, but I do think that developers need to resist the urge to make cosmetic changes that don't improve functionality. I realize that this is an ill-defined tall order. Regardless, we need to be aware that most people don't know how computers work.
I think that, in order to get people joining our communities, we should try to be compassionate and helpful when it comes to users learning how to use site. Actually, this is a special case of my more general position that we should try to be compassionate and helpful in the face of people who are confused and trying to learn, whatever the subject. I know it can be hard; if I'm being honest, I have a bad habit of getting annoyed at people who don't look like their listening. But we need to unlearn that.
It will never be a safe space
as long as spez is around
period. Centralized systems like Reddit are inherently beholden to the views of the people who own the central hub. Even if the people at Reddit now were "cool", eventually a piece of shit would end up in a position of power and compromise the site. As we have seen time and time again, both recently and throughout history, we cannot allow our systems to be contingent on the assumed goodwill of the people who run it. Said differently, we need to assume that bastards will take control at some point in the future, and intentionally design our systems to be robust in the face of disturbances caused by bad actors.
It seems there's a lot of discussion about getting rid of tipping, but I don't know how much has changed in this regard.
Nothing has changed, and it never will, as it concerns poor and "therefore" "deserving" people. Americans' talk is cheap.
The system seems ridiculously unfair, and that extra expense in a country where everything is already so expensive really makes a difference.
Agreed. So when you go to a restaurant and you have a maximum amount you can spend, divide the amount of money you have by (100% + local sales tax), then divide by (100% + the menu price), and subtract any surcharges added by the restaurant (assume $5.00 if you cannot look it up), often masquerading as a tip. I know it's a lot of math, but you have a computer in your pocket. You'll manage.
In my view, the US is a fractal scam. At every level, everything is an attempt to extract money from ill-informed "suckers", from the running of the government, to the prices of supermarket groceries, to the tipping culture at restaurants, to even finding a place to put your car [1]. Every single thing is someone's grift. In order to function in America, you need to be willing to be suckered to some extent. There's no way around it. Unfairness is baked into every transaction, and increasingly more social interactions.
Everything in America is ridiculously unfair. We wear this on our sleeves, and for many Americans this fact defines their personality. Unfortunately, you will have to deal with it in the short term at least.
Now if you would like to be the one to lead the charge against the tipping culture and the foisting of responsibility for servers' compensation onto the customer, then be my guest. Refuse to tip and make a big scene about it. Make plans for how to take the inertia of your big struggle and turn it into a mass movement. I would thrilled to join you. However, I somehow doubt that you're ready to go that far; none of the customers who stiffed me ever went on to start anti-tipping movements.
So will AITA if I don't tip?
Yes. You are expected by all members of the public here to tip. That is our culture, something we're proud of for some reason, and our expectation. For some servers, tips are the primary source of income at work.
Is it really my personal responsibility to make sure my server is paid enough?
No, it is the responsibility of the employer. However, when no employer takes their responsibility and you sit yourself down at a restaurant, the logical conclusion is that either you pay that part of the server's wages, or they get stiffed. You know that this is the conclusion. (Or if not, now you do.)
If you want to participate in our unique restaurant scam, you gotta accept that you're going to get suckered into paying the server's wages. Otherwise, don't go to restaurants. When you go to a restaurant, you waste the employees' finite time on this planet doing tedious, physically and mentally demanding bullshit that no sane person would choose to engage with, if not faced with the threats of homelessness and starvation. [2] At least make it worth their while.
Sorry if I come off as having a chip on my shoulder, but that's only because I totally do. So many customers used to concern-troll me as a pizza delivery person and give me shit like "sorry, couldn't afford to tip, they should really pay you more." Yeah, they should, but you absolutely could have tipped; all you had to do was order one less topping. I'd love to see some actual solidarity with food service employees, but that would require challenging deep-rooted assumptions about our culture and we're too shit-for-brains to do that. Americans are so compassionate and empathetic until the moment they actually have to lift a finger.
So when someone brings up "unfairness" or "it's X's responsibility to pay the workers" in response to tipping, I just kinda die a little inside from all the times those sentiments have been used against me and my colleagues.
[1] And don't even get me started on the process of buying a car, or how the public was scammed into accepting a car-centric infrastructure.
[2] This is really a special case of the logic behind the antiwork movement: nobody actually wants to go to work. We only go to work under the threats of starvation and homelessness imposed by capitalism.
I'm more or less a milquetoast anarcho-communist.
I was playing Fallout NV with a shitload of mind-wrecking mods a while back (e.g., all the randomizers, cheat weapons, infinite companions, meme VATS, quest mods, etc). Game was absolutely destroyed, so it was crashing several times a day for about a few weeks. Apparently, my sister was getting spammed with Steam notifications every time I restarted the game. Thanks Steam.
Thanks for providing receipts. Hope we can get the community to come here.
I get lines like "children in africa are starving", I have heard that one alot
Yeah that's super manipulative. It shows that they aren't actually trying to help you, and just want you to act more like them.
Just because someone is starving doesn't mean that they'll eat absolutely anything, nor should they be expected to.
That being said...bread with butter isn't that nutritious. You might want to start trying new foods to round out your diet. I for one am a lot more likely to like a new food if it isn't forced upon me, more so if I make it myself.
Reddit's drawcard was finding THE sub for a topic
IMO Reddit's drawcard was containing the sub, and therefore the community, for a topic. Reddit is where the discussion was, and for many communities still is. Rather than hosting a dedicated forum, people interested in starting a community can just start it and begin moderating and discussing without setting up a backend; it allows users to get to the "socializing" step of building a community in less steps. Lemmy also does this, albeit with a smaller community likely distributed over several instances and earlier in the system's lifecycle.
Hopefully, Lemmy will implement a "multi-community" option like the multireddit concept so that users can group multiple related communities into one feed.
That being said, I think that similar communities ought to find each other and work together to best serve the people of their communities. Some communities will benefit from collaborative non-competition (for example, a community for discussion about how to use a specific complex product) while some have no need to be centralized (for example, a community for sharing dank memes). However, even in communities that would benefit from non-competition in good times, users should always be free to form their own communities in case the parent community (or their moderation) becomes too odious to bear. This process was much more difficult on Reddit because sub names had to be unique, so new communities would need to pick a weird name.
If you need to use VS Code, download VS Codium instead. The product offered by Microsoft is licensed under a not-FOSS license, even though the vscode source is FOSS. More importantly, VS Code sends tracking and telemetry data to Microsoft!
Apparently you can make a blank comment with Lemmy. Fat-fingered the send button. Anyways...
That's one reason why we need not centralize on any one instance, so that the whole set of communities isn't lost if a big instance goes rogue. However, in the nightmare scenario where an instance goes rogue and it happens to contain huge communities, we can simply [1] pick up house and move somewhere else, specifically to a new instance, your own in the worst case.
It's not that we'll never lose communities or that the problem of power-tripping mods is completely solved. [2] It's that, because the system is distributed and decentralized by design, the whole system won't die if one big node goes down.
Eventually, all these instances are going to die because all things end. However, the Fediverse should be able to continue as long as users are interested in using the service.
The success of centralization as an organizational principle hinges on the success of its central hub. If that one hub is corrupted (and it will be), the whole system has to deal with the consequences. To recreate this situation on the decentralized system, you need to corrupt a large enough set of the entire network, which is possible but much harder to accomplish.
Additionally, I imagine that the Internet Archive or someone else will start archiving our content, although we shouldn't rely on that.
[1] The Reddit exodus so far has shown that transplanting an entire community, e.g. a subreddit, is not at all simple. However, it should be easier once people learn how to use a Threadiverse app, because Kbin and Lemmy are quite similar.
[2] The problem of "power-tripping mods" is really a special case of the problem of "power-tripping people" in social organization. In my view, anarchism and similar decentralized social movements have laid a ton of groundwork and theory for robust federated social systems that are not contingent on having perfect actors, although the problem is of course not fully solved.
It's not in the fediverse
Not good. I can understand individual users or communities not wanting to be a part of the Fediverse or certain parts of it, but federation is a necessary condition for me to adopt a social media platform at this point.
For example, I've seen a few users discussing Kbin vs Lemmy. Now I prefer Lemmy, but I also want to see Kbin succeed. Despite that I think Lemmy is technically better, the fact that they use the same protocol means that we can talk to each other. We can agree to disagree in this new system.
We have seen what will happen if we allow social media to be owned by one company. Time and time again, the platform kills itself and those communities fragment. Sure Wikipedia is a company with a great deal of public trust, but so was Reddit. The issue is that the success of the system hinges on the benevolence of a single company or person. This is the main issue with centralized control in any instances: compromising the central controller kills the whole system.
If it gets popular, it's an indication that users have not learned that lesson, and eventually that platform will too "enshittify" itself into oblivion. Hopefully, they'll change course and federate.
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Jump
Winter. I like my spaces very cold.
Well...it is a bit like us-vs-them. I'm all for modifying my behavior to make people comfortable around me, I'm willing to change, but it often feels like (1) nothing is ever enough, and (2) they're often unwilling to make any similar changes to accommodate us. And I do think that we need to organize based on our shared experience as neurodiverse people to defend ourselves from the weird expectations that NT people often expect from us.
That being said, NT people are not a monolith, and obviously there are lots of cool and reasonable NT people. But there are some things that they just can't intuitively understand because they're not in our skins. I don't think there's anything wrong with informing them of that, just as there's nothing wrong with NT people informing us about things we might be unable to intuitively understand.
I think mambabasa is more correct here, and I'll change my comment in a minute. The point I was really trying to make was that the term "libertarian" "belonged" to the left instead of the right as is typically assumed.
That being said, I still think that libertarian leftism is a superset of anarchism.
The way I read it is as follows:
We believe that the state usurps the natural "safety and freedom" of "individuals and communities" to "impose its own order."
E.g., not that the safety is a property of nature, or that we need to go back to a "natural" state. My view is that people are social creatures, and that without a state bearing down on us all time, we are likely to organize into groups and conduct our lives relatively peacefully.
I cannot guarantee that there would be absolutely no conflict in a stateless society and that all people will be entirely peaceful always, but any ideology that promises that is lying to you. Furthermore, the idea that people are always peaceful or even mostly rational is not necessarily a fundamental assumption in formulating our views, as it often claimed by those who scoff at our "idealism".
Lastly, it is my view that the state and its enforcers are the biggest impediments to safety in most communities. What genocide ever occurred without the blessing and help of the government of the victims? How much violence do police inflict upon our communities by enforcing the law as it is written, harassing and killing minorities and the poor, breaking up protests and movements? How much ill-will has your country's military generated on your behalf destroying other communities and plundering them for resources? The state gives an illusion of safety because that's what it is designed to do. I suppose that for some people that look is enough, but I am a practical, results-driven person and I'm not willing to pretend that the state materially keeps us safe from anything.
Classical liberalism, libertarianism, and anarchism are absolutely not interchangeable.
Liberalism is a group of related ideologies that descend from (or claim to draw from) Western Enlightenment thinkers. Classical liberals are people who claim to represent the views of those thinkers, in contrast with the modern generation of liberals who will pay lip service to modern notions of social welfare. Classical liberals typically advocate for free markets, low/no taxes especially for the wealthy, and "limited" government in the sense that it is only limited in their authority to help the poor and downtrodden [1].
Libertarianism is a term used for several movements and ideologies. Without qualification, I feel like it has little use. The original usage of the word was in relation to early libertarian leftism [4]. However, the current usage of the word is for """libertarian""" capitalists. Their ideology retains private property, but calls for the nominal abolition or reduction of government power.
Anarchism is, in my view, the label applying to those ideologies and movements that oppose all forms of authority and hierarchy. In my opinion, a consistent anarchist ought to oppose liberal democracy and liberal political systems in general. Liberals are creatures of the right because they don't oppose capitalism and usually don't oppose hierarchy on principle. Liberals have a historical tendency to betray movements that are too hostile towards their status quo, even if that means siding with obvious bigots who would kill them if given the chance. "Scratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds." [2]
Some people use the term "libertarian socialist" (or "communist" depending on their economic beliefs) to denote those socialists (or communists) who believe in opposing authority and hierarchy, but believe that full abolition of the state is impractical. We otherwise draw from the same thinkers. Basically, all anarchist socialists [3] are libertarian socialists, but some libertarian socialists may not strictly be anarchists (but many are).
In my view, the error that "rank and file" liberals make is in taking the words of Enlightenment philosophers out of context (assuming they're arguing in good faith, which is usually a generous assumption). This causes them to inherit the biases of those philosophers, and this is especially true about classical liberals who distinctly seek out an outdated liberal perspective that doesn't challenge their bigotry. This "useful idiot" property of liberals is exploited by capitalists to create ideologues who apologize for capitalism, and by fascists who exploit liberals' aversion to change to oppose socialist movements.
Make no mistake: liberalism is the ideology of capital, and liberal writings from at least the previous century onward should be regarded as obvious capitalist propaganda. That being said, I'm not of the opinion that we need to dispose of all Enlightenment thought, but we must read into these ideals with a great deal of skepticism and context.
[1] This is not meant to imply that the State is even designed to help the poor, or that state welfare is the be-all end-all solution to poverty. However, as a stopgap measure, government welfare is better than literally nothing, although not equivalent to genuine mutual aid or building communities.
[2] I don't mean that liberals are all outright fascists. What that expression really says is that in times of distress, liberals will side with fascists before liberation movements. However, even in comfort, liberal perspectives are...kinda wack, because they're so obviously trying to justify oppression.
[3] For various reasons, including historical atrocities committed by self-identified socialists and arguments that socialist frameworks, even those that guarantee freedom, are themselves hierarchies that need to be dismantled, not every anarchist identifies as a socialist or even a leftist. Personally, I don't think that socialist frameworks are inherently hierarchical, but I understand that even supposedly "anarchist" societies have the possibility to develop hierarchies and injustice if we become complacent, and that we should be continuously re-evaluating our relationship with the rest of the Left.
[4] EDIT: replaced "communism" with "leftism", removed "e.g. direct transition to stateless, classless, moneyless society".
I most regularly use Python, followed by MATLAB C++. Python has been practically mandatory for writing code for my undergrad research. My classmates usually know "a little" Python, and it's pretty easy to pick up on the fly. I'm trying to phase out MATLAB for Python seeing as I'll be graduating soon and my student license will run out. I know about Octave, but work done in Python is probably easier to integrate.
My favorite is C++. It's the first language I learned and it feels like home. It gives me enough abstractions to get actual work done, but it also has the low-level tools I need to shoot myself in the foot for working with Arduino or other microcontrollers.
I'm looking into Rust for audio programming. Although audio programming is done almost exclusively in C++ these days, Rust's safety features without performance penalties look like a promising language to write fast and reliable code suitable for real-time operation. Joining Lemmy and seeing how it compared to Kbin has cemented my interest in the language because so far, despite the bugs I've run into, Lemmy and Jerboa has been fast above all.
Feels very validating to see that everyone else's Python is held together by a thread too.