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CombatWombat

@ CombatWombat @feddit.online

Posts
13
Comments
395
Joined
12 mo. ago

In the fediverse since 2017. I mostly talk sports. If something on the internet doesn't spark joy, mute it.

Do not yell at me simply because I am in front of you and the people responsible for the problems are not. It is extremely unpleasant.

  • What is the process of becoming a father minus a partner?

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  • I am not a parent, I am a soccer account on the fediverse, so this is the best I’ve got:

    If you’re looking for a gentle on-ramp into having a kid around the house, maybe starting small with something like a home stay program is easier? My local usl 2 team and my local mls side are always looking for people to host young adults who come to the city to train, and there are a lot of foreign exchange programs (by way of example -- maybe your area has something similar?). It might be easier to assess how you feel about being a single parent with a teen for a summer than an infant from a surrogate, and as much as I hate to say this, building a bit of a resume as a single man may be required for you, and something like that might help.

  • Elon Musk Is Charging Starlink Customers Gigantic Bogus Fees Because Its Network Is Being Crushed by “High Demand”

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  • If you’re on a fedi service that allows you to follow individual accounts, like mastodon or piefed, you can follow my favorite astronomy professor in the fediverse who talks about this @sundogplanets@mastodon.social

  • Almost Half of US Data Centers That Were Supposed to Open This Year Slated to Be Canceled or Delayed

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  • Note that this article is from 2 April 2026, so by now the number could be even higher.

  • Elon Musk Is Charging Starlink Customers Gigantic Bogus Fees Because Its Network Is Being Crushed by “High Demand”

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  • I hate everything about this. We're ruining our astronomical observations and risking Kessler Syndrome so a trillionaire can price gouge rural internet subscribers because he wants to get the high score on net worth because he can't get a high score on twitter likes (despite owning it) or any video game (despite having paid help). Who the hell told the United States that we have regulatory authority over our shared sky anyway?

  • I just like the game I swear [Frencore]

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  • The verge of greatness

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  • I invite you to take even the briefest of glances at the communities that I moderate and consider whether you may have misjudged me here.

  • The verge of greatness

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  • It is not, because I am from the United States

  • Do you think you are dogmatic?

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  • Absolutely. There are things that I believe that I know in my very heart of hearts are incorrect, and I simply have to believe them to continue operating as a human being. For me, it is much more important that an idea is useful than that it is correct. You can tell me as many times as you want that as one human of 8 billion on a tiny planet on the outskirts of an unremarkable galaxy that I simply do not matter, but I'll never stop believing that I do.

  • The verge of greatness

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  • Getting out of the group is a huge accomplishment for a World Cup debutant, and taking this Argentina side to extra time and coming out to play like you mean it is truly incredible. I've never seen anything like it, and lemme tell you I watch a lot of soccer.

  • What are the platforms on the Fediverse doing to prevent data scraping and prevent bots?

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  • I dunno, we had 1.8 billion posts and 50 million comments from 1.1 million MAUs in June according to the fediverse observer. It's not nothing.

  • You are given the notebook from Death Note and are time travelled to a time of your choosing, as long as it is more than 150 years ago. What do you do/who do you kill?

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  • I'm going back to the like 1780s and going full John Brown.

  • What are the platforms on the Fediverse doing to prevent data scraping and prevent bots?

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  • I feel pretty confident, despite a complete lack of evidence, that at least one state actor has had a listener running on the fediverse continuously since the w3c started publishing specs, and I would be surprised if the big llm providers like Anthropic and OpenAI don't run them as well -- they certainly have the resources and motivation to develop them. You're certainly correct that the vast majority of scrapers are attempting to harvest historical data using the web frontend, but those are the scrapers I am least afraid of and I think as a mental model for the average user "assume every post is scraped" is the best stance.

  • What are the platforms on the Fediverse doing to prevent data scraping and prevent bots?

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  • Hi Jerry! Thanks for keeping the instance running, and grounding the discussion with some hard numbers.

  • What, to the Immigrant, Is Your Fourth of July?

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  • It's hardly a revelation, but no-one should stop you to ask if you're a citizen either because of the other 4th, the 4th amendment:

    The Fourth of July 4 means independence. You have your freedom to do whatever you like, unlike many others under occupation in the Middle East. So what you feel here, you feel free and proud. You can start your car in New York, end up in San Diego or San Francisco, and nobody will ask you, “Where the hell are you going?” or “What’s your name?” I have seen [inland U.S. Border Patrol checkpoints] in California and Arizona. You just stand by, really. You get stopped, they ask, “Are you a U.S. citizen?" and then you keep on going. It’s not even a line for two minutes, unlike military posts in the Middle East.

  • What are the platforms on the Fediverse doing to prevent data scraping and prevent bots?

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  • Prevent data scraping? Nothing, really. Some instances use Anubis to prevent scrapers from using the UI intended for end users, but fundamentally, federation is indistinguishable from scraping. You should assume there are listeners from state and corporate agents collecting as much of the social graph as they can discover.

    Prevent bots? Varies by instance. Some instances are strictly bots, like relays, some ban bots as they are detected, and most lie somewhere in between. Most of what disincentives bot operators are financial incentives -- most instance operators are unwilling to finance bots posting frequently, and fedi users are rabidly anti-advertisement.

  • Lemmy community sidebars need more "related communities" links

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  • I'm not sure what about my comment made you feel that "fuck you" was an appropriate response, but I assure you it was not.

  • Lemmy community sidebars need more "related communities" links

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  • If someone messages me with a suggested addition to the sidebar for one of my communities, it makes my day. This is fedi, not reddit -- be friendly with your local mod.

  • AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

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  • With each of these studies, I am coming to believe more and more strongly that there is a large body of work being done that simply does not need to be done, and that all work that LLMs can do is a subset of that unnecessary work.

  • What kind of things do you think movies are most dishonest about?

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  • I was trusting this same mutual understanding that sometimes you say things you don't really mean to guide people to understand that I did not mean what I said literally. All movie tropes, like romance tropes and hacking shenanigans, rely on this same contract.