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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • The problem is, if one company dominates search, you have no way to evaluate whether they are doing it well.

    You could just go to other search engines and run the same queries and compare results.

    For example, I did a search on 6 different search engines earlier today looking for a specific Reddit thread related to an update to a certain Skyrim mod without quite naming the mod (because I couldn’t remember the exact name of the mod, and was hoping to find the Reddit thread to get the mod name or Nexus link). All 6 had the Nexus page for the mod itself within the top 3 results, and all of them but Google and Yandex had the Reddit thread in question on the first page.



  • There’s an argument to make that digital data is by default a post-scarcity sort of thing and that in a post-scarcity environment communism is the only reasonable system. But we don’t operate in a post scarcity environment for physical goods and services, and there’s really not anything we can point to historically that suggests a communist takeover doesn’t do terrible things to availability, quality and variety of food available.



  • The Constitution didn’t establish a right to vote for men in general or any men in particular. It left the question of which citizens were allowed to vote fully up to the states.

    Or to go deeper: The Declaration of Independence limited voting to landowners. The Constitution set no regulations whatsoever for which citizens could vote, leaving it wholly up to the states. There are various trends in state laws over time but nothing federal regarding who can vote (other than various immigration laws about who can be naturalized). Until the 15th Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

    Technically, men did not have a federally protected right to vote until women did, the 19th amendment. Though state laws had expanded to give essentially all free white men the vote in every state shortly before the Civil War, but that’s not from that federal point of view you’re so worried about.


  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgtoMemes@lemmy.mlAR15's are not Hunting Rifles.
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    4 months ago

    While you can hunt with an AR-15, it’s not the best rifle for the task.

    It’s not the best rifle for any task. But it’s a good enough rifle for most tasks, and between real AR-15s and the various clones they are cheap, in common calibers, and have accessories widely available.

    Which is why it’s the most common rifle in the US by a fair margin.

    It being the most common rifle in the US by a fair margin is in turn why it’s so often used in public mass shootings, as those are usually done with weapons of convenience rather than something bought for purpose. Likely also why the guy who shot Trump used one.

    If a public mass shooter wanted the best gun for the job, they’d get something closer to a PS-90 (the civilian version of the P-90 which is a military rifle designed for urban combat).


  • In fact, women were not even considered full citizens then since they did not possess the right to vote.

    Like most things, this was up to the individual states. Like anything up to the individual states, it was all over the place depending on exactly where you were. For example, at the founding women in New Jersey could vote, presuming they owned 50 British pounds worth of wealth because the wealth requirement was the only requirement New Jersey had for who could vote. Ironically, the spread of Jacksonian democracy (aka universal male suffrage) actually cost women in New Jersey the right to vote in the 19th century.







  • and suggestions that ‘any instance is fine’, although true in a technical sense - is a little misleading

    I’d say more than a little. I always suggest they look at the instance rules and also who the instance blocks to make sure they’re OK following those rules and being blocked from that content before picking. Part of why I picked SDF was that they block no other servers.

    I think the blurring of the lines between developers of the Lemmy open source project, and admins of the lemmy.ml instance is a self-sabotaging and tone-deaf reflection on the site, and hurts chances of wider adoption.

    Why? They explicitly haven’t baked any of their moderation/administration preferences into the code and have rejected suggestions that they should bake things along those lines into the code. If they decide to, that sounds like an awfully good reason for a fork. You don’t have to love the devs and their politics to use the software they developed, though you should probably be on board if you want to use the instance that they run.


  • The easiest way to explain it is to compare it to email.

    You know how you might have a gmail address, your friend might have a protonmail address and your parents might still have their old aol email address? But you can all still freely talk to each other anyways?

    Lemmy is like doing that, but for something like Reddit. If you notice, usernames have an @servername on the end and just like an email address that’s the server that person is connecting through. For example, I’m Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org.

    Which means I log in to lemmy.sdf.org and use their servers to read Lemmy, but I can read, post and comment on communities on any other Lemmy server that is federated with lemmy.sdf.org just like they’re on lemmy.sdf.org just like you can send an email to someone using a different email service and it makes no difference on your end.

    Communities work the same way - so for example politics@lemmy.ml, politics@beehaw.org and politics@lemmy.world are all different communities hosted on different servers with their own separate posts, subscribers, mods etc. And users on any Lemmy server federated with the server that community is on can read, comment, post, etc (mod action notwithstanding).

    This federation thing I keep mentioning is just which servers are willing to talk to which other servers - again you can compare to email. Sometimes email servers pop up to send massive amounts of spam, and when they do mail providers blacklist them and simply ignore all messages from that source. Defederating is the same idea. You use lemmy.world according to your username, so if lemmy.world defederates lemmy.ml then you will no longer be able to see any communities @lemmy.ml or read any posts or comments posted by someone @lemmy.ml - to you it will be like lemmy.ml just doesn’t exist.

    If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a link labeled “Instances”, which will give you a list of which servers lemmy.world talks to and which ones they’ve specifically blocked. Lemmy.world has a pretty long list of blocked instances.

    One of the reasons I picked SDF’s lemmy instance was because they don’t block **any **instances - as far as SDF is concerned it’s up to the end user what they want to see. Also SDF is kinda a cool entity - they’re a non-profit best known for maintaining public access unix servers and a bunch of retrocomputing stuff (like dial up internet and a gopher server) that has been around since 1987 (the name is literally an old anime reference because they started out as an anime BBS).


  • I don’t know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there’s no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in “raids” on other instances.

    This is essentially the same problem Reddit has (mods/admins can control what is discussed on their boards), stems from the same place (mods/admins have essentially unlimited power over their boards/instances), and has the same basic solution - let the echo chamber echo chamber and create alternative communities that don’t have that problem. And on the upside, since this is a federated space you can just have whatever@otherserver.net instead of r/truewhatever7alpha.

    It’s just more noticeable here because the censorious leftward fringe is both more extreme and more aggressive about it.

    At least we haven’t started getting mods running bots to auto-ban anyone who has ever interacted with other specific communities yet.