I used to be @ambitiousslab@lemmy.ml. I also have the backup account @ambitiousslab@reddthat.com.
I love that somehow Ben and Adam's challenges are all involving massive hills now.
I also like the classic Sam + Mike "let's play it safe" vs Ben and Adam's trademark optimism of "how hard could it be to spot so many monkeys?" I feel like there's got to be a catch with the monkeys challenge, surely it must be harder than they think.
I didn't notice anything personally. Watching via the Nebula app on an LG TV.
New addition to the Monty Hall solution: if you just spent 25 minutes walking up a steep hill, and find yourself inside a giant Buddha, make sure to stick with your existing door!
Will you be allowed to lie about the age? If yes, then it's a pointless law. If no, then whoever is checking needs to have more control over your device than you do, DRM style. That's gives them an entry point through which they can put whatever they want without you being able to control it.
I'm quite crazy:
- Marginalia with the no JavaScript filter, then with that filter turned off
- Good for finding technical stuff, and sometimes recipes! I often find cool blogs this way.
- SearxNG via farside.link
- Unfortunately (and understandably) many of these sites use Anubis now, so I have to turn on JavaScript, and thanks to Google's ratelimits the results are either fantastic or not helpful at all
- But, the public instances can work, so I try with 3 instances before moving on
Depending on the thing I'm searching for, I have search shortcuts set up. These shortcuts are really handy. It seems much easier to get good results on dedicated search engines for each task, than finding another general purpose search engine that's as good:
- Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikidata
- Some other wikis
- Lemmy (of course!)
- Peertube and podcast indexes
- Websites of grocery shops near me
Finally, if all else has failed, I use Google (which still unfortunately happens at least a couple of times per day 🙁). Although, reading the posts now, I should switch this stage to DuckDuckGo instead.
I'd quite like to set up my own instance of SearxNG + YaCy at some point. It'd be nice to configure SearxNG to basically do all of these steps at once that I'm doing manually, prioritise my YaCy index, but use other engines to fill in the gaps, and then gradually fill in the gaps in my YaCy index.
Many very small services will just not bother with compliance. And the risk of enforcement on them might be low.
If you use a federated alternative, you can switch to a server that doesn't bother with compliance without losing your contacts.
Many of the laws don't specify how the age check should be done. There are more privacy-friendly ways to comply, like running a server for your friends or family and already knowing they're over 18.
Ben: "I had a bacon sandwich, and it wasn't very good"
Tom: "If you'd have gone to a better restaurant, it would've been great!"
Ben: "The one I had on the train was bad"
Tom: parries "I had a bacon egg and cheese in New York which was so bland!"
Adam: "Ok, you must've gone to the wrong place, I'll show you a good one"
I very much appreciated the symmetry in this interaction 🤣
Ooooo, someone's getting worried!
I agree with you, and I think there's a tension between the technical solution (meeting users where they are) and political solution (persuading the users to come to our way of thinking).
The technical solution is an unequal fight. We have to provide a familiar and equally good experience - integrating everything into these easy-to-use everything apps, on a shoestring budget compared to the proprietary apps. And, without the "education", users will converge on particular instances because that's what's most convenient, giving a lot of power to particular players in the network.
If we can persuade people to prioritise freedom over convenience, then we end up with a much more resilient userbase who will go help with the existing networks.
I don't know how we can make people care, though. The free software movement has been trying for 40 years to make regular users care, but the message only really lands with developers. There's certainly more interest in taking down big tech nowadays, but convenience still seems to come first.
Searching for a single Discord alternative may be asking the wrong question however. Discord itself is an extensive bundle of functions smashed together: real-time chat, persistent forums and documentation, voice chats, events and even games. Rather than replicating that bundle in a single app, the open social web may be converging on a different model entirely, where specialised services handle specific functions while sharing identity and social connections across protocol boundaries. These individual services themselves do not have to share the same protocol underneath, and may actually work better if they don’t, with each protocol handling the part it is best designed for.
This is the most interesting part to me. Can users be persuaded to have different expectations from the proprietary apps they're used to?
Whenever these sudden migrations happen, the alternatives that win seem to be the ones that look and behave as similarly to the proprietary app as possible, as the people switching don't care about decentralisation, and are much more sensitive to any changes in experience.
I think we need to create separate experiences, backed by the same protocol, for people who care about decentralisation and freedom (and discover the fediverse naturally, outside of these big migrations), and those that show up during the big migrations.
For the first group, we want software that's easy to self-host, customisable, spreads users between instances, ultimately empowers them to have the exact experience they want. For the second group, we should just copy the exact experience of the proprietary networks as much as the protocol allows.
Of course, the risk is that we get even larger influxes of people who never had to learn the community norms. Is that worth it? - I'm not sure.
Zulip has a big jump, but worth pointing out that this is part of a wider trend, and other software has seen bigger jumps.
The export function doesn't include the legend, so the order from top to bottom by the final day of the graph is:
- Matrix
- Signal
- XMPP
- Zulip
- Stoat
- Rocket.Chat
- Mattermost
- Discourse
Thanks for introducing me to this tool. I hadn't come across it before and it's pretty nifty!
Thanks for the reply! It's good to know that it's working in a similar community.
I'll give it a few more days to make sure there's a chance for people to object, and I can always stop if it causes problems once I start doing it, but so far it's looking like it might be a good thing to try.
Ok, I know this is crazy, but I've had one phrase go round in my head for at least the last 15 years:
No thanks, I really would not like that please, thank you very much.
When I was a child, some intrusive thoughts would pop into my head that bad things would happen in random situations, unless I did certain things. E.g., if I didn't breath in at least 15 times before the end of a song, or take an even number of steps before someone said something, then I would suddenly die.
My brain developed the lore that, when these thoughts popped into my head, they would be binding unless I repeated the above phrase in my mind over and over again. I think it started off as "no thanks", and gradually got expanded to its current crazy form.
Although I don't believe that anymore, the phrase is firmly implanted in my mind and pops up several times a day. It's probably one of the few things I've remembered verbatim for so long, and it's completely useless :D
I was rooting for Ben and so sad that he lost! Kinda funny that the clouds once again contributed to his downfall.
I liked that we were able to see Adam and Sam strategising how to cut up the map before they arrived - followed by what they did in reality. And the endgame was really exciting throughout. It's not often that the stakes are so high and the editing was great!
When it cut away from Ben's final cardpull, I wrongly assumed it must be a mega curse that won him the game and got really excited. it didn't cross my mind that they would also cut away for a time bonus.
I use mythic beasts. They are not the very cheapest, but they offer predictable pricing and just charge a fixed increase compared to the price they pay their supplier. You can trust that they won't mess around with the renewal price or arbitrary extra fees.
For my .org domains I pay ~£15 per year, but if you don't care about the tld, you can get some for ~£6 per year (the costs on the website exclude VAT, but if you buy multiple years at a time, the amortised cost including VAT ~= the price excluding VAT).
I personally prefer browsing the web with JavaScript disabled, and using search engines like Marginalia to find simple websites. I don't see a big difference in experience between browsing these websites in lynx or edbrowse, vs using Gemini.
I get the appeal of having everyone on the network share the same culture and values, but I prefer to just find the people doing that in the wider network of the web.
Still, I'm happy it exists and that people enjoy using it. To each their own!
- JumpDeleted
Permanently Deleted
I worked at a bank at the time. We were moving to a new system and running recons against the old system to check the behaviour was the same. I had to run a manual recon of the old system vs the new 4 times per day. There was a lot of focus from management and users on the new system.
The week leading up to Christmas, I was the one person not on holiday yet, and also the most junior person on the project. I found that week so stressful, as I had to run these recons and quickly decide whether each break was real or not before reporting to the users. Despite having worked on that system, I had very little confidence and didn't have the same intuitive mental model of the system my colleagues had. I had to dig into each break case-by-case, but they seemed much more able to understand what was going on via a few simple queries.
Anyway, I get through the week and left for the holidays on Thursday evening. I'm just grateful that I've gotten through it. Then, around 3pm on the Friday, I see a missed call from the tech lead. I log in, and everything's on fire. I join the incident call, and it turns out that we hadn't processed a single trade in the new system that whole week. I discover that it was thanks to a config change I'd made several weeks before, that had just made it to production. No-one (neither the users, nor I) had realised! But we missed several hundred million pounds worth of payments in that week as a result.
It was so jarring, having been relieved that I made it to the holiday, then joining the incident call and struggling to work out what to do. I completely dissociated and my mind was blank. I remember being on the call and really passively and calmly walking around my room. I kept thinking "I need to do x, I need to do y" but my mind couldn't focus and I was just staring at the screen. At some point I just lay in bed with my laptop while on the call.
There had been a total failure of process: my change had been approved by two people, the nonprod environment was configured differently in a way that didn't expose the bug, the recon failures looked very similar to the false positives, and there were so many false positives that it was impossible to dig into all of them. Meanwhile, we didn't have basic queries monitoring that trades were flowing in, and the users weren't paying much attention either, until they realised that it was broken.
Still, I made a lot of mistakes. I should have just escalated that there were breaks instead of trying to figure it out myself. I shouldn't have been afraid to call the tech lead and bring them out of their holiday. And I shouldn't have been afraid of the confrontation with the users.
Anyway, that experience really messed me up mentally for a long time. I lost so much confidence and became so much more scared of production (not in a healthy way). It really was not the right environment for me.
Was the curse playble in the end game?
I don't think so, since you have to be in a queue when you cast it (and therefore not in your hiding spot). I guess he could have played it while they were on the line to him, but I reckon the hiding zone is built up enough that they could've cleared it relatively quickly.
I though the final monologue was very funny, made all the better by him getting increasingly pixelated as the camera zoomed in :D
I would have liked to see the queue curse, but I think it's fair enough that he didn't take it, especially since they're on their way straight to him.
He was probably right to play it safe, but I was shouting at the TV to choose the hand expansion + draw one card! I know Sam's run got messed up for not having enough time bonuses, but it was so early in the round that the risk seemed worth it to me.
The first section where Adam just pestered Sam to give him Edinburgh facts was awesome. Could tell he'd had enough of hearing that Sam spent 4 years there 😂
I'd quit my job, buy a small house for my partner and I and give enough to my family that they wouldn't have to worry about money again.
With the rest, I'd set up a trust that donates 1% per year in microgrants to free software maintainers who apply to it. Similar to NLnet, but with no strings attached beyond continuing to maintain the project.
Then, with all my free time, I'd also work on free software.