"Slide" Brombek @brombek@social.privacytools.io

Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, Raddle, or Hacker News: you subscribe to forums you’re interested in, post links and discussions, then vote, and comment on them. Behind the scenes, it is very different; anyone can easily run a server, and all these servers are federated (think email), and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse.

For a link aggregator, this means a user registered on one server can subscribe to forums on any other server, and can have discussions with users registered elsewhere.

The overall goal is to create an easily self-hostable, decentralized alternative to reddit and other link aggregators, outside of their corporate control and meddling.

Each lemmy server can set its own moderation policy; appointing site-wide admins, and community moderators to keep out the trolls, and foster a healthy, non-toxic environment where all can feel comfortable contributing.

Note: Federation is still in active development and the WebSocket, as well as, HTTP API are currently unstable

#fediverse #reddit

I think that with the whole #Mozilla fiasco, we're just witnessing once more the limit of the green/open/fair/inclusive discourse when it is essentially used as a smoke screen for commercial activities. For many years now Mozilla has used the model of running a non-profit org in front of their for-profit company. It's quite well documented and as such is not a surprising model, it is used by corporations to interface with different audiences, contexts, etc. There is however always a risk of cognitive dissonance with these models, and this is clear with Mozilla's PR right now, stuck between financial priorities and the need to maintain their image of social justice endorsers they have been working hard to promote until now.

RSS, or why lack of developer imagination will be the end of the open web http://decafbad.net/2020/08/11/rss-or-why-lack-of-developer-imagination-will-be-the-end-of-the-open-web/ #Adayinthelife #Programming #Computers #Rants #misc

@alcinnz This pretty much sums up my gripes with his position. Like, his analysis is basically right but he's approaching things on the wrong level.

And I mean I have that problem too, to a degree since I too do webstuff, but at least I'm foregoing JS to make things less horrible. The web could be nice, if it wasn't abused as platform for the delivery of untrusted applications…

I agree with this post, and it is a very good argument for the open web for authors and creators.

A mechanical keyboard enthusiast’s descent into madness. Source

@lightweight I know right? Discord and Facebook can change at any time, and businesses might have to leave those platforms if those changes are undesirable. Email is an actual standard, will be around probably forever, and doesn't change nearly as much nor at the behest of one corporation (as much as Google might have you believe otherwise).

@kev Well, I guess we must disagree then, I think all forms of propaganda, including advertising, are terrible.
Advertising in particular is responsible for exacerbating the excesses of consumerism, and thus climate change.

An object can be a blob, tree, commit, or tag. An object is identified by its ID, which is a SHA.

A blob is just some arbitrary data. Files are represented as blobs.

Trees are a list of blob IDs and other tree IDs, and their names. Directories are represented as trees.

A commit has a tree ID, an author, a date, a parent commit ID (or IDs, for a merge commit), and a commit message.

A reference is just a commit ID. Branches are a kind of reference. The only information which is stored to represent "master" is the ID of the latest commit. To get the commit log, you just follow the parent ID in each commit. To get the contents, you look at the tree ID of that commit. To update master, create a new commit and write its ID to .git/refs/heads/master (which is a plaintext file).

A tag has a commit ID, an author, and a message. It just calls out a specific commit as special, like a release number, and adds a message, such as that version's changelog.

All git commands are just a means of manipulating what is ultimately a very simple data store. If you want to know more about how a specific command works and how it relates to this data store, let me know.

One company's plan to build a search engine Google can't beat

https://www.protocol.com/neeva-search

“But safety is only one attraction of in-cabin monitoring. The systems also hold huge potential for harvesting the kind of behavioral data that Google, Facebook, and other surveillance capitalists have exploited to target ads and influence purchasing habits.”

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/m7jpmp/car-companies-want-to-monitor-your-every-move-with-emotion-detecting-ai

As the years go by I am less and less interested in claims about technology’s potential to save us from future tyranny than I am in understanding its failure to have prevented what we see now.

Some days I feel like advertising is just weaponized FOMO.

Other days I feel like advertising is targeted misinformation and disinformation, intended to confuse people and wear down their defenses.

All the time, I feel like advertising as it exists is bad.

I'm extremely wary of ML/AI/statistical automation doing things for me. They're powerful tools, but they should mostly be making explainable recommendations that I can decide to act on or not

Tools helping humans perform better is much better all around than tools taking humans out of the equation entirely, in almost every circumstance