Just some Internet guy

He/him/them 🏳️‍🌈

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  • 236 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Cable infrastructure is built different, with multicast streams. All the channels are broadcast on their network at all times to relays all the way up to your neighbourhood, if not your cable box. It’s got dedicated, guaranteed bandwidth. It can’t get overloaded.

    With streaming, each user is one connection using one stream worth of bandwidth, so it doesn’t scale too well to millions of viewers. Technically there’s multicast stuff but it only works locally, and I’m sure all those cable companies that are also ISPs aren’t all that interested in making it work either. So for now we have thousands of identical streams crossing the country at the same time hogging bandwidth and competing with everything else using bandwidth.


  • Sometimes it’s also, is it really important to know? A lot of things I have complicated opinions of because things are nuanced and complicated in the real world, so for example even if you ask me it’s not like I can just be for or against Israel or whatever. And I certainly don’t feel like going over it again and again and again as people keep asking about random topics.

    I swear americans have this weird thing where everyone needs to have a strong opinion on every topic all the time, and talk about it all the time so they can sus out if you’re leaning democrat or republican. It’s so weird. I’m not even american, I can’t do anything about it! I’ll keep my opinions where they belong, in my head, thank you.

    It’s important to be educated about those topics but I don’t feel the need to make it my entire personnality, unlike some people. I have better things to do that actually brings me joy rather than doom and gloom over things I can’t do anything about.




  • A lot of them got sucked into the whole “the government is forcing it on you to control the population”, and they simply can’t comprehend that anyone would voluntarily wear what they now consider being the symbol of submission to the government. In their mind it doesn’t work and never worked and you’re just virtue signalling your support of the government. It’s wild and a lost cause.

    I’d expect it to get much worse now.


  • One thing to be careful with allowing some bending of the rules, is some are going to start testing how far they can bend the rules. Everytime you bend a rule you create a precedent for it as well, and you get into nasty fights of why was I banned but not them and have your clemency hit you right back in the face.

    If it’s okay to bend some rules, then that should explicitly be the rule instead. Offtopic discussions for example, you can have a rule be “all top level comments should be on topic” as a balance, so offtopic discussions can happen, just not take over the whole comment section. If you allow something, make a mod comment explaining why for transparency and set the right expectations: “This post is off-topic but is generating on-topic discussion so we’re keeping it.”

    Similarly, well designed punishments goes a long way. For example, automatic ban after N warnings can be unfair. What you’re really after is, you don’t want to be warning that user every day to stay on topic. So the punishment can be more like “more than 3 warnings within 10 days results in a 7 day ban”. But sometimes the situation is such, you can rack in 10 warnings in the same threads. So you can make the punishment account for that: “If you get warned more than 3 times during a 14 day period, you will be banned for 7 days”. Or per thread, whatever makes sense. Understand common mistakes community members do and how you can steer them in the right direction without being unnecessarily harsh.

    With those two combined, it shouldn’t matter if you moderate like a robot or not. The expectations are clear, forgiving and fair while enforcing some order for repeat offenders. The rules have the flexibility you need baked in so you don’t have to bend the rules.



  • The logins aren’t federated, the content is. Each instance receives a copy of everything, and normally you browse other instance’s content from your home instance. In your case you’d access lemmy.one’s content from your home instance, lemmy.world. If the logins were federated we wouldn’t need those domains after our usernames!

    The email analogy still works for this: if you’re on Gmail, you don’t go log in to Outlook to send an email to your friend: from gmail directly, you send an email to your friend and Gmail’s server takes care of sending it out to Outlook.

    There’s browser extensions to help go back to your home instance, as the linking on Lemmy is sometimes a bit weird and you do end up on other instances every now and then.






  • Yeah, I used to not block ads but they’re so invasive these days. If 2 banner ads pop on at the top and bottom of the screen with a full screen app on top with ads between every paragraph and a PIP video ad on top, yeah, I don’t even bother reading the article.

    And I sure as hell am not subscribing to a $10/mo subscription because someone linked to a paywalled article either. It’s so crazy those sites just assume every visitor is a recurring visitor that might subscribe. Definitely wish there was some sort of micropayment thing, like pay 25 cents to view it or something.


  • My point was really that data can’t be that exensive even with including transit fees like Cogent and Level3, because I can use TBs of bandwidth every month and OVH doesn’t even bother measuring it.

    If my home ISP gives me a gigabit link, yes I pay for all the cabling and equipment to carry that traffic. But that’s it, I already pay for infrastructure capable of providing me with gigabit connectivity. So why is it that they also want me to pay per the GB?

    In Europe they can provide gigabit connectivity for dirt cheap with no caps, they don’t even bother with tiered speed plans there, how come my $120+/mo Internet in the US isn’t sufficient to cover the bandwidth costs? It’s ridiculous, even StarLink doesn’t have data caps.

    But somehow communities with crappy DSL that can barely do 10 Mbps still have ridiculously low data caps. It’s somehow not a problem for most ISPs in the world, except US ISPs, the supposedly richest and most advanced country in the world.







  • I used to write my papers in HTML and a custom print CSS file I made so it fits the school’s formatting requirements. It worked surprisingly well. Just write HTML, and then just print it, as basic as it gets. That was easier than bending LaTeX to the school’s template which was in MS Office format.

    Converting HTML to LaTeX sounds like a completely unnecessary nightmare!