Unblended

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I saw the writing on the wall a few years back, it was so painfully obvious. I started switching to KiCAD early, and feel so bad for ever recommending Eagle to people who will now have to learn yet another new tool in order to find something usable.

Fusion360 is so bad, I had to explain why SolidWorks was different earlier today and they were shocked by things like "if I move the case the board I say is attached to the case moves to" and "I don't have to align it by eye, it's a computer".

And I'm definitely not starting VMWare to run Fusion360 with nonsense online components that slow it down to uselessness and integrate it into a tool that doesn't need to be on at all... it's just not possible. It was obvious once they stopped updating the version. It's pathetic nonetheless that they cannot think beyond the one-true-way of integrating a dozen mediocre tools into one extra-mediocre product.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I mean, largely to me this is fine and great as long as the reverse is also true. It's fabulous to have two totally independent systems that are fully interoperable to such an extent.

I don't think there's a meaningful competition in growth or anything, that's just a number. The main downside is reduced development focus...

But -- If Lemmy is like a frontend for kbin and vice versa, isn't that fine? The Lemmy apps will load kbin posts and kbin apps will load lemmy posts.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

TL;DR: I think it is basically impossible to have that much money and claim it was earned ethically. Therefore it is basically impossible to be "good" without giving it away.

I think that it is borderline impossible to ethically accrue that much wealth. Is it possible? Maybe? I'd love to hear more examples of where a company owner made sure all their employees shared in the success when the company is large enough that the owner is that rich. I remember hearing that Google did right by their early employees, but it's been the exception that makes the rule and was also a long time ago in a different world where their ethics were different anyway.

And if you inherit that much wealth, what are the odds that it came to you free and clear of having been generated from exploiting others? Colonizing/"settling" and redlining making property values super high? Using eminent domain to tear down minority major communities for the sake of putting an interstate down the middle instead of risking devaluing the richest people's property more? Because odds are that even if they didn't cause the system they certainly benefited from it.

And unfortunately, "charity" is a horror in the USA because it's used as a very bad and very biased by rich people version of an actual welfare system that worked. The idea that there are food banks operating off donations while billionaires exist is horrific. If billionaires did not exist I frankly think that a lot more things like food banks (and public transit maybe?) would find themselves with funding.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago
 

Been rolling this over in my head for a bit, and am curious what makes sense to other folks.

From a user side, they can choose to add magazines/communities from any instance to a group that they define and give a nickname. This gives an individual user the only say in deciding what magazines should show up in the same place.

Any automated way of doing this is going to be hard and have edge cases, I think this is a small amount to ask and people could share collections from different instances to bootstrap. But if someone really hates the vibe of a particular instance's version of a topic (or doesn't think it's moderated to their liking) they can disconnect from it with one button.

On the posting side, it makes sense that the user would need to select one particular instance to make their "primary" for the purposes of posting.

The mods from the primary instance would be responsible for their posts; the mixing of posts from different instances would be entirely defined by the user so there's no need to think about cross-instance moderation.

The result is that you're able to follow things in a way that is convenient for you, but there's no guarantee that someone else will necessarily see your post unless they follow your primary instance.

That seems like the right balance to me, to make virtual communities large enough to be useful without forcing everyone to join the biggest instance.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think I'm much too old for Prodigy or something because one episode was too much.

But Lower Decks is absolutely amazing, it's really nice to have a legitimate comedy within the honest-to-god Star Trek universe so they can just actually make fun of Riker by name.

I like Strange New Worlds alright. It's better than Discovery, and I liked Discovery fine.

Picard was great until the S1 twist and I refused to watch further. Maybe that's not fair, I found it a bit Disney-ish but wow that ending. I just have to head cannon a more respectful ending and I imagine I'll get around to it.

Though I have somehow never managed to get around to Enterprise...

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

I wonder if China has a favorite.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Can't control when you do it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I've been kind of suggesting the same thing a few times inside of posts. I'm coming at it from the perspective of having had to do a lot of in-person recruiting for voluntary activities, mentoring, and teaching -- you cannot tell people things like "you should just join lemmy/kbin" -- you have to wait for them to ask "how do I join lemmy/kbin?"

That's okay! It just means that the focus when introducing people to it has to be "here's what you're missing", positive about where they could go rather than negative about where they are.

It's an uphill battle trying to argue with people who do have a point about it being harder to use (we shouldn't gaslight people), but they're also saying what the audience is wanting to hear because it gives them permission to do nothing.

How many are just admin accounts or sock puppets for some agenda or another anyway?

Consider focusing on the positive -- link to specific posts on these systems that are objectively worth going to participate in. They don't need an account to read and enjoy.

Then, if they discover that they wish that they could participate in the thread -- that is the time to explain that they should just join whatever instance the post they really enjoyed was on for starters. They'll realize that they can see magazines from other instances, probably after a week when they realize other instance domain names are showing up on things. Then some nice person explains what's going on.

And now they've convinced themselves it's worth joining...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

While true, people seem to pretty immediately get it once it's clear where to see the source instance. If they care, they're usually surprised, and then the reason magazines on different instances are different makes sense.

I'm not sure what there is to do about it, the impression that there is one magazine is a relic of centralization, all there is to do is explain that it is not the case when people are inevitably confused. I hate simplifying it to "[email protected] and [email protected] are different people" because I know it feels more complicated than that but it seems like it doesn't take that long to click honestly.

Best I figure is to have welcoming communities that don't turn into asshats if someone is confused or asks questions. This doesn't seem like something you can force people to understand before they run into a problem and try to figure out what's going on. Eventually there will be an AI bot that answers questions I'm sure...!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I wonder to what extent the massive imbalance in news coverage was simply super wealthy families handing journalists pre-written pieces so that laziness would dictate this result (rather than the journalists doing this naturally, although laziness is natural enough I guess).

 

I really like that magazines force you to categorize your posts.

This means that instead of having to add a text filter for "reddit" I can just mute "reddit" and "redditmigration" and a very small number of others.

I truly do not mean this ironically, Mastodon is a mess compared to this, the self-categorization means that I can, if I wish, opt out of hearing about Reddit until after people stop being salty and start posting about astronomy and stars instead.

Mastodon does not force self-categorization so you end up with people using "breadit" or "elmo brusk" or whatever they think is cute and it just makes it impossible to apply a text filter.

 

Discovering features in kbin -- can't find "approve follow request".

I can't follow my account here from my Mastodon account, but I found that I can search for famous accounts like @Gargron but not my own on scholar.social doesn't show up in search. Is this the quirk with instances not supporting something? I remember seeing it but am not finding where the explanation on what to do is.

#AskKbin

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Did they initiate the process and ask for help or did you offer?

I've been teaching twenty years. If students get themselves to the point of coming with a question based on experience, odds are excellent that they will listen to what I'm saying. If they do something at my suggestion, they are not engaged and do not retain. Same is surely true for learning to use a new website.

So I dunno if this is a suggestion for you or other people reading this post, but consider directing them to magazines/communities that are an actual draw, since people are the actual draw. When they find they cannot post, then they will have incentive to pay attention.

This is so far true for "what is a photon", "what is consciousness", "how do you do a kick", and "why are most metals thermally conductive" so I suspect this isn't a unique thing. Dangle the incentive, then wait for them to ask how to get involved.

Again, not criticizing especially since I don't know your approach, hopefully this can help others. The draw is the community and posts, so highlight that way before they ever see a signup page. They can browse the site without an account.

 

I think it's worth suggesting that because it gives more diversity in moderation styles it'd be good to have a list of all the kbin servers (public or with approval) so that we can see where else might be good.

Is this an existing thread? I can only easily find the three main ones in the primary website, perhaps this can be a git repository or even a google doc... I personally would prefer smaller niche instances when people make one that fits my interests.

#fediverse

 

I'm trying to understand the reason I can follow this account from @bipolaron, but I cannot figure out how to follow it back and it doesn't show up in my list of followers.

I guess give it a few more days... would be cool to know if I'm doing it right with an example though. I noticed that most profiles from other servers seem to have like a "virtual profile" on this server, and noticed that the one for bipolaron is a 404. Federation should in principle be working or how would I have found this profile from mastodon?

But sending messages as private, unlisted, and global with @unblended tagged don't seem to show up anywhere here, and tagging @bipolaron doesn't seem to cause any kind of notification there.

Would be helpful to figure out if I'm doing it wrong or if I just need to wait a while.

#fediverse

 

huh, I followed this account from my mastodon account and sent it a DM but don't see anything.

is this expected?

#fediverse

 

It's weird that it's so hard to figure out how to donate towards server upkeep costs, I had the same issue with my Mastodon instance.

Is there an about page with a link or is someone hosting this out of their cushion change XD

#fediverse

view more: next ›