My true hell would be instances only federating explicitly through whitelist. If what the other reply I received about Mastodon is correct, and if Lemmy behaves similary, then they operate on an implicit auto-federation with every other instance. Actual transaction of data needs to be triggered by some user on that instance reaching out to the other instance, but there’s no need for the instances involved to whitelist one another first. They just do it. To stop the transfer, they have to explicitly defed, which effectively makes it an opt-out system.

The root comment I initially replied to made it sound, to me, like Mastodon instances choose not to federate with one another. Obviously they aren’t preemptively banning one another, so, I interpreted that to mean Mastodon instances must whitelist one another to connect. But apparently what they actually meant was, “users of Mastodon instances rarely explore outward”? The instances would auto-federate, but in practice, the “crawlers” (the users) aren’t leaving their bubbles often enough to create a critical mass of interconnectedness across the Fediverse?

The fact we have to have this discussion at all is more proof to my original point regardless. Federation is pure faffery to people who just want a platform that has everything in one place.

That sounds worse than I thought it was. I just assumed Mastodon was like Lemmy, where every instance federates with every other instance basically by default and there’s only some high-profile defed exceptions.

A Fediverse where federations are opt-in instead of opt-out sounds like actual hell. Yeah, more control to instances, hooray, but far less seamless usability for people. The only people you will attract with that model are the ones who think having upwards of seven alts for being in seven different communities isn’t remotely strange or cumbersome. That, and/or self-hosting your own individual instances. Neither of these describe the behavior of the vast majority of Internet users who want to sign up on a platform that just works with one account that can see and interact with everything.

Season’s the reason!

This is basically asking why anyone would live in or near a city like Los Angeles or New York City when Minot exists and has everything you could possibly need.

If you had to look up where Minot even is, you’ve proven my point.

Say what you will about whether living near the proverbial big city is worth it or not. But it cannot be denied, there is a world of experiences on offer at larger platforms that a smaller platform simply cannot provide. Network effect can be a cruel mistress.

I’m pretty sure they’re referring to the concept of defederation and how that can splinter the platform.

Bluesky is ““federated”” in largely the same ways as Mastodon, but there’s basically one and only one instance anyone cares about. The federation capability is just lip service to the minority of dorks like us who care.

To the vast majority of Twitter refugees, federation as a concept is not a feature, it’s an irritation.

Happy Debian daily driver here. I would never ever recommend raw Debian to a garden variety would-be Linux convert.

If you think something like Debian is something a Linux illiterate can just pick up and start using proficiently, you’re severely out of touch with how most computer users actually think about their machines. If you even so much as know the name of your file explorer program, you’re in a completely different league.

Debian prides itself on being a lean, no bloat, and stable environment made only of truly free software (with the ability to opt-in to nonfree software). To people like us, that’s a clean, blank canvas on a rock-solid, reliable foundation that won’t enshittify. But to most people, it’s an austere, outdated, and unfashionable wasteland full of flaky, ugly tooling.

Debian can be polished to any standard one likes, but you’re expected to do it yourself. Most people just aren’t in the game to play it like that. Debian saddles questions of choice almost no one is asking, or frankly, even knew was a question that was ask*-able*. Mandatory customizeability is a flaw, not a feature.

I am absolutely team “just steer them to Mint”. All the goodness of Debian snuck into their OS like medicine in a kid’s dessert, wrapped up in something they might actually find palatable. Debian itself can be saved for when, or shall I say if, the user eventually goes poking under the hood to discover how the machine actually ticks.

Everything works the same, times of website incompatibility are long gone.

Not completely true. It’s mostly true. I’ve daily driven Firefox for years, and the number of websites I’ve crossed that wouldn’t function in it correctly but would work just fine in Chrome was very slim… but not zero. Definitely not comparable to the complete shitshow of the 90’s and 00’s. That’s true. But it’s not a completely solved problem.

And with Mozilla’s leadership practically looking for footguns to play with combined with the threat of Google’s sugar daddy checks drying up soon due to the antitrust suit (how utterly ironic that busting up the monopoly would actually harm the only competition…), that gap can get much worse in very little time if resources to keep full time devs paid disappear.

I recently had a rather baffling experience trying to preemptively avoid this by downloading the stupid app right away, only to discover I needed the website version anyway.

I was attempting to add my Known Traveler Number to an already booked trip with Southwest Airlines, booked by someone else. I was able to link the trip to my account right away in the app, no issue. And I could see the KTN field for my ticket sitting there, empty, greyed-out, and not interactible. I opened up the moble version of their website, completely unsurprised to find it was identical to the app, except for the detail that the KTN field there was functional. Put in the information, changes reflected in the app instantly, and I was in the TAS-pre line that afternoon.

Why did the two versions obviously built from the same codebase have two different sets of capabilities? Why was the website the more capable of the two this time? I have no clue. All I know is I never want to be a developer at a corporation where I’d have to be responsible for this flavor of trash.

It’s also part of what makes FOSS niche.

That’s the thing, though. I computed from the claimed figure above of 13 billion net income. The costs are already accounted for.

I’ve been told we have state senators who openly claim to only be there to keep speeding tickets low.

If you make $50k/yr after taxes, the equivalent fine would be on the order of about $120.

Where I’m from, that’s a speeding ticket.

why is there no replacement for x11 forwarding over ssh??

There kind of is. The project you’re looking for is waypipe.

Knowing how these things tend to go, I predict you’ll try to use it for your use case and it just won’t work for whatever stupid reason. But I successfully used it to tunnel an app from my Debian machine at home to a Windows machine under WSL.

It’s speculated that the patent in question (or one of) is one that essentially protects the gameplay loop of Pokémon Legends Arceus.

https://ipforce.jp/patent-jp-P_B1-7545191

Running the first claim of the invention through Google Translate yields this massive run-on sentence description:

The computer causes a player character in a virtual space to take a stance to release a capture item when a first category group including a plurality of types of capture items for capturing a field character placed on a field in a virtual space is selected based on an operation input of pressing an operation button, and causes a player character in the virtual space to take a stance to release the capture item when a second category group including a plurality of types of combat characters that engage in combat is selected, and determines an aiming direction in the virtual space based on a directional input, and further selects the capture item included in the first category group when the first category group is selected, and the combat character included in the second category group when the second category group is selected, based on an operation input using an operation button different from the operation button , and causes the player character in the virtual space to take a stance to release the capture item when a first category group including a plurality of types of capture items for capturing a field character placed on a field in a virtual space is selected, and determines an aiming direction in the virtual space based on an operation input using an operation button different from the operation button, A game program which, based on an operation input of releasing the operation button pressed when having the player character perform an action, has the player character perform an action of releasing the selected capture item in the aiming direction if the capture item is selected, and has the player character perform an action of releasing the selected combat character in the aiming direction if the combat character is selected, and when the capture item is released and hits the field character, makes a capture success determination as to whether the capture is successful, and when the capture success determination is judged to be positive, sets the field character hit by the capture item to a state where it is owned by the player, and when the combat character is released to a location where it can fight with the field character, starts a fight on the field between the combat character and the field character.

Essentially, Nintendo has a patent on video games that involve throwing a capsule device at characters in a virtual space to capture them and initiate battle with them. In other words, they have a patent on the concept of Poké Balls (as they appear and function in Legends Arceus, specifically).

Palworld has “Pal Spheres”, which are basically just Poké Balls with barely legally distinct naming.

If this sounds like an unfairly broad thing for Nintendo to have a patent on, I’m not so sure I agree. It’s not like they’re trying to enforce a blanket patent on all creature collectors. Just the concept of characters physically throwing capsule devices at creatures.

If you think about it, that’s kind of the one thing that sets Pokémon apart from others in the genre. If there’s anything to be protected, that’s it. It’s literally what Pokémon is named after–you put the monster in your pocket, using the capsule you threw at it.

Palworld could have easily dodged this bullet. They claim they aren’t inspired by Pokémon, and that they’re instead inspired by Ark: Survival Evolved. Funny, then, that Ark doesn’t have throwable capsules, yet Palworld decided to add them. I’m not sure I buy their statement. And if this is indeed the patent being violated, I don’t think a court will buy it either.

I’m not trying to be a Pokémon apologist here. I want Palworld to succeed and give Pokémon a run for its money. But looking at the evidence, it’s clear to me Pocketpair flew a little too close to the sun here. And they’re kind of idiots for it.

I’m just surprised they aren’t getting nailed for the alleged blatant asset theft.

The other day I learned that you can just grep an unmounted filesystem device. It will read the entire disk sequentially like it’s one huuuuge file. And it will reveal everything on that disk… whether a file inode points to it or not.

Used it to recover data from a file I accidentally clobbered with an errant mv command. It’s not reliable, but when you delete a file, it’s usually not truly gone yet… With a little luck, as long as you know a unique snippet that was in it, you can find it again before the space gets something else written there. Don’t even need special recovery tools to do it, just use dd in a for loop to read the disc in chunks that fit in RAM, and grep -a for your data.

Stop threatening. Commit. Take the leap. A lot of us here are already on the other side and we’ll help you find your footing.

I mean, yeah, kind of. In the same way pilots fly planes out of a stubborn sense of pride for knowing what all the flight deck controls do.

I thought his name was Alec, not Alex.

Well, you know what they say. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it interested in learning about the water cycle to have a deeper understanding of why the river flows in the first place.

“Anymore”? I’ve never met a single soul who knows this is even possible. I myself don’t even know how to do it if I wanted to.

I do use NoScript, which does this on a site-by-site basis, but even that is considered extremely niche. I’ve never met another NoScripter in the wild.