A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 19th, 2023

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  • Woah woah … this is legit awesome! Just tested (on lemmy.ml) and yep … seems to be working like a charm!

    Give up to matc-pub for the PR (and maybe a new core dev for lemmy too?).

    I figure this makes live megathread style posts/chats more viable … which is certainly cool!

    I’ve mentioned this before, but an interesting possibility might be to enable selected posts to be “live chats” through a websocket like process as lemmy used to be, just for selected posts for certain windows of time, whenever a live chat dynamic is sort.

    It’s the sort of thing that could be scheduled and subject to admin approval or something if resources are a concern.

    Otherwise … awesome to see!


  • Despite not being in contact with GenAlpha or the education system ATM, this generally resonates. From what I’ve gathered the education system has been transformed into a production line with KPIs to hit and large bureaucracies rather than solid foundations in their purposes and ideals. And this is a trend, AFAICT, beyond just Gen Alpha. The other dimension is the continued rat-race-ification and capitalism gamification of education and its continuation into professional life. Either the world is going to shit and there isn’t a point to anything or it’s all about being born into wealth or hacking the system in which case nothing means anything again. That world view has leaked into the education system itself and its operators and so what should we expect children to do?

    As for millennials being bad parents … I’m not a parent … but as a millennial I tend to be critical of my generation, not in a blameworthiness sense but in terms of there not being too much to celebrate … IMO we’re the “we just did what we were supposed to” generation and we’re sad because we want a world better than what we understand how to make. So, whether it’s true or not, that such a generation would raise children that are directionless and dumb wouldn’t surprise me.

    my two cents anyway.



  • We can already create private instances that don’t federate for those niche communities;

    That being said, creating a private instance is a relatively difficult hurdle. By providing private communities, an admin can take care of the hosting, along with all of the other communities, while those who want something more controlled and closed can have an easily accessible option. Plenty of people want their social media to have options for being relatively closed or relatively open, and I think it’s healthy to provide those options.

    I hear you though on the lemmy-world community closing possibility (and similar) … that would easily be an abuse IMO and it’s not entirely clear what would or could happen.

    To be fair though, the whole lemmy-world instance (or any other for that matter) could simply turn federation off at any point to the same effect you fear, so it’s arguably just part of the federation flexibility. In this case, any community mod has their hand on the switch for their community, which means we’ll probably see it get used in controversial circumstances at least once. But for any given community, going either private or local-only is sure to drop user engagement or be a PITA regarding managing the “approved users” list, so I can’t see it being a popular action TBH.



  • I think it’s a good option to have. Most who start communities want reach and engagement. But for those situations where you want a more in-group vibe, something like this is essential.

    It’s sorely missing in the fediverse and a rather good form of social media TBH that the fediverse, until now, has ignored (while it has kinda taken off on discord etc).

    Private communities though are intended to federate, just with gated membership. And they could be useful for particularly niche communities that don’t want to be disturbed by those who mainly use the All feed.

    It will be interesting to see how it interacts with federation/defederation dynamics though. Lemmy-world for instance, could easily start going local only because they kinda already think they’re the whole of the threadiverse and are certainly big enough to sustain themselves.


  • Ha … it seems like it at least.

    I think I was being dumb in asking the question actually.

    It’s really just about the circle of users to whom the community is visible.

    Local-only … visible only to users of the instance. I’d presumed that it could be writable only to users of the instance such that only users of the instance could post/comment there. But double checking, no, it’s only visible if you’re logged on with an account on that instance … so pretty private in the end actually.

    private communities … which are apparently coming … are visible only to approved users, whether on the local instance or not.

    And presumably, these will be stackable, so that a local-only + private community will be visible only to approved users from the local instance. So getting pretty closed.




  • the notion that Europe “may be bad at migration” and being “shit” to others whilst protecting their culture comes of as uninformed at best and holier than thou preachy at worst.

    So Europeans and/or Germans can’t be bad at something?

    But they should be competent enough to function in order to integrate into the society.

    For refugees, this seems like a hard ask.

    … Those people rely on friends and family when it comes to simple tasks as doctor appointments.

    Maybe then it’s fine? This sort of thing is perfectly common for first generation migrants. And in the age of decent AI translation, I’m really not sure stringency on this makes too much sense anymore.


  • If people want to migrate to a specific country long term, the spoken language has to be learned to become a member of society and prevent the forming of parallel societies.

    Two points:

    • There’s learning a language to a basic level to be functional in every day activity and then there’s learning it well/fluently. Reality is that first generation migrants rarely learn the native language well and it isn’t until the second/third generations that the native language becomes a first language amongst the migrants’ families.
    • Given the above, your hard statement about “parallel societies” being inevitable without sufficient language education is false over a long enough time period (~25yrs), as children of migrants will inevitably learn their country’s language and culture … because that’s how children and language and culture work.

    All up, presuming that you’re German, it feels like you and your culture might not know how immigration works. Which I say not just to be argumentative but because the one thing that is likely to prevent the above is an entrenched anti-immigration culture that forces the migrants to feel alienated and form more insular cultures rather than integrate with an accepting culture.

    Reality is that migration seems to have worked plenty well in many other places. Europe may just be bad at this. And while there may be something to the issue of “protecting the culture” … I’m just not convinced the finer details of any culture are worth protecting at the expense of being shit to others and conservative about how things have to be.


  • “More than half of young people feel severely mentally stressed. A quarter of young people feel very lonely,” Prof Dr Joachim Bauer, a psychotherapist and brain researcher, told Euronews, adding that he observed this every day in his practice, especially with young people who are depressed and lonely due to their intense use of social media and video games.

    Dr Bauer pointed out that the AfD tries to give the impression that if societies reduce immigration or flaunt their national pride again, all problems would be solved.

    Seems to be the situation here. Neoliberal hyped capitalism is a gateway drug to fascism because at some point the stress needs an outlet and minorities and “golden age myth” style trad values are just sugar for “solving” political problems.


    One dynamic I’m curious about here is the whole thing about new migrants not learning German well enough.

    On one hand I wonder if this is just Germans (and perhaps many other European nations) not knowing what immigration looks like, compared to other nations like the US, India and maybe England and other English colonies.

    On the other hand, I wonder if there’s some tension between what makes sense for migrants and what makes sense for Europeans who natively speak a language that is ultimately globally niche, such as German. Why would a migrant care about being fluent in German when they probably feel like they have to know English and/or French (or some other more global language) to be employable in the long run?








  • maegul@lemmy.mltoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlremoved
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    1 month ago

    I’m scared of cults and not ever being truly enlightened is a risk I’m willing to take. Maybe one day.

    Seriously though, in terms of longevity, where I want the dependencies of my system to last for the rest of my life and to be easily installed on as many machines throughout the rest of my life, SQLite (and pure Python for the wrapper, using only the std lib) seem like good bets. Better bets than emacs and org-mode, perhaps not, but certainly without the baggage of being bound to a text editor.

    EDIT: just clicked the link, lol.




  • Yea it’s pretty popular and generally I like that, especially compared to the whole discord thing (though real time chat is also a valuable platform).

    Ideally, I’m with you and IMO this would be something where the fediverse could shine.

    It feels to me like many pieces are already in place for some people to come together and create a fediverse space for filling that SO function. Lemmy, NodeBB and discourse (when they get federation stable, however close/far that is) are all there.

    What’s likely needed is for the right pieces and modifications to be put together, the right instance, some basic branding and commitments, donations, sponsorships (and even ads would be appropriate here IMO if done tastefully).

    But, in reality the devs on the fediverse are spread pretty thin and many developers generally are in a bit of a squeeze at the moment. Financial support hasn’t reached a healthy equilibrium on the fediverse, culturally and probably quantitatively, in that further growth, creativity and adaptation at any decent rate doesn’t really seem viable.

    Back in the heyday of the twitter migration to mastodon or reddit migration to lemmy, there likely would have been some dev ready to go out on a limb and try to scramble something together (however healthy that is). That energy has passed and there doesn’t seem to be a more stable substitute set of incentives for new devs to build new things here (though there are of course devs building on the fediverse, lemmy and newer projects like SL, piefed and bonfire included). Instead it seems like the dev community on the fediverse has settled and they all have their work set.

    So the best bet would probably be for some eager volunteers to take the best platform for the job (possibly NodeBB ATM) and put up an instance and see what happens. I think there’s been enough interest, including this post, to make it interesting.

    And what’s especially interesting is that the SO archive, AFAICT, is open and available for download, so there’s a real possibility of having a live archive of SO for search coupled with new content, right here on the fediverse.


  • Yea, US, can you just fucking not be a petulant child.

    Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar said the court’s allegations are “significant” and the US must support its work as it has done on past occasions, including in the case of Libya.

    “The application for arrest warrants is merely the beginning of a judicial process,” she wrote in a statement on Monday.

    “The ICC has been a functioning court – it has seen convictions, acquittals, and dismissals, as we would expect from an impartial and non-political judicial body.”

    Only clear headed response in the article.