• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Spzi@lemm.eetoxkcd@lemmy.worldxkcd #3097: Bridge Types
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    1 month ago

    I needed this explanation for “L’Engle”:

    References A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle. Characters cross great distances by “tessering”, moving via a tesseract through a higher dimension which essentially brings the two ends of the journey together from the perspective of the traveler. The image shows the two ends of the gap being brought together, with the gap apparently crumpled in between them.




  • Offering a slight damper / correction:

    This is about two things (design and ownership), which are correlated, but not identical.

    Malicious design can be things like:

    • Algorithms to keep people engaged
    • UIs to confuse users (luring them to purchases, or making ‘cancel’ hard to access)
    • Using intermediate currencies to make it harder to assert value

    Obviously, these patterns and practices can also be applied to a FOSS instance you own. There is less incentive to do so if the profit motive is removed - which makes a huge difference.

    These design patterns are fundamentally about making user numbers go up. Attract more users, keep them on your platform longer, make them leave less. And a portion of user guidance mixed in. None of that is inherently evil, to some degree even desireable, and to some extent unavoidable to offer a functional service.

    Some users may expect a feed like lemmy to browse indefinitely, since they find it inconvenient to have to click to go to the ‘next page’. And because they got used to this feature elsewhere. Others already see this as a dark pattern.

    I just wanted to highlight how some of the malicious stuff may still be present in the fediverse, without any company involved. Here, we’re kind of in charge on both sides: Each is responsible for their own user agency (like controlling your online hours, or what sites you visit), and collectively to decide what user experience we want to shape (which might include controverse patterns).

    I spent way too many words on this. Mostly I agree with you! And overall, users will encounter far less malicious patterns on FOSS.

    [Edit: Formatting]




  • That’s already pretty cool! It surely does generate very random numbers. I still think you can take it a step – or a random number of steps, hah! – further by repeating the process a random number of times! Maybe this way we can reach maximum randomness. Probably need to reroll the number until it’s big enough for that.

    I would also check if the result is 4. If it’s 4, it should be discarded. 4 is not an actual random number but a joke random number from a comic.





  • Spzi@lemm.eetoxkcd@lemmy.worldxkcd #2846: Daylight Saving Choice
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    2 years ago

    That causes problems with culture/language/communication.

    Like the saying “from 9 to 5” could not be applied to other timezones anymore. Or when reading direct speech in a book, “Let’s meet at 15:00”, you wouldn’t be able to tell anymore what time of the day that means.

    Since both approaches have pros and cons, I think we would need overwhelmingly good arguments to justify a change.


  • Let’s jump straight to decimal time then.

    1h23m45s is 1 decimal hour, 23 decimal minutes, and 45 decimal seconds, or 1.2345 decimal hours, or 123.45 decimal minutes or 12345 decimal seconds; 3 hours is 300 minutes or 30,000 seconds. This property also makes it straightforward to represent a timestamp as a fractional day, so that 2023-10-26.54321 can be interpreted as five decimal hours and 43 decimal minutes and 21 decimal seconds after the start of that day, or a fraction of 0.54321 (54.321%) through that day (which is shortly after traditional 13:00)






  • I don’t think we were talking about the same thing. You’re talking about restricting your behaviour, “focus on your niche”, “stay away from propaganda media”. My proposal was to use an instance which makes it unecessary for you to restrict yourself to certain areas, if their moderation policy aligns with your default behaviour.

    Of course it ultimately comes down to similar things, since instances which do not care wether you’re nice aren’t allowed in all places which require you to be nice. The key difference is still that you don’t have to be wary yourself. It sounded as if you would not like that.


  • I’ve seen it fairly often by now; many people seem to enjoy posts with moderately long comment sections. I believe this is what contributes to a more wholesome experience.

    Similar to how groups meet a natural breaking point when they grow too big and people cannot know each other anymore, I imagine huge comment sections create a sense of being meaningless and unheard. This discourages sensitive voices, and may appeal more to people who don’t care anyways, which isn’t exactly a great attitude for social encounters.

    I can further imagine large comment sections create FOMO for the reader, and can overall be more stressful, which leads to aggression.

    Just guesses and impressions. No idea if true. Also no clue how to foster that environment in a growing network.


  • Agree to everything but the doom. Yes, most people will only give 1 chance to a platform, but we haven’t churned through most people yet. Most people are yet to honor Lemmy with their first visit, at some point in the future. We will be better prepared than ever. This wil be true for a long while. So I think we should make (reasonable) haste, but nothing is lost yet. In the long run, we’re still growing.


  • This place bans you for “not being nice”, which is an arbitrary metric that changes from mod to mod and let’s all be honest, being nice is exhausting.

    Lemmy is many places (individual instances with individual moderation policies). If it’s important to you, you can find a server which matches your expectations, or host your own.