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NateNate60 @lemmy.world
Posts 11
Comments 825
What would you like to change about Lemmy culture?
  • Oh, I understand they are usually human. I just don't think their viewpoints are worthy of discussion. And you make this judgement every day as well, even if you refuse to admit it. And perhaps you make it on grounds that are less sound.

  • What would you like to change about Lemmy culture?
  • No, of course, I cannot. I do not judge what category someone likely falls into based on whether what they say matches nearly word for word a "promoted" viewpoint. In some cases, I mostly agree with what they said but it's painfully obvious that person didn't come to that conclusion through their own thinking but is rather just parroting a screenshot of a post on the site formerly known as Twitter.

    You have missed the entire point of my comment. If someone is likely to be in categories 2 or 3, I dismiss them if the viewpoint is otherwise not worthy of discussion, which it usually is not. I don't care if this causes me to misjudge the intentions of some people, because that is inevitable in any probability-based judgement system. What matters is picking what is most likely correct.

    I don't feel that you have the ability to grasp this point and you're just going to come up with another argument I didn't make to attack.

  • What would you like to change about Lemmy culture?
  • No, I am not. I wouldn't say it if it were made up. Who have I got to convince by making shit up? I am not pushing any viewpoint at all.

    I base my assertion on interactions with people on this platform. Whenever someone parrots a point that is promoted this way, they're almost universally just repeating what some wisecrack said on X that sounds correct enough to not investigate further or think critically about and is agreeable to their worldview.

    I will not argue over this. You either accept what I am saying or you don't, but I don't give enough of a shit either way to get into an argument.

  • What would you like to change about Lemmy culture?
  • This is just simplistic and un-nuanced thinking.

    The use of bots is not to generate new opinions, it is to make fringe opinions seem more popular than they are. Most (but not all) opinions propagated this way are already worthy of dismissal for other reasons, but when it's clear that someone is repeating word-for-word a line of dismissable or unsound rhetoric which is also being propagated by those bots, it lends itself to three reasonable conclusions:

    1. This person genuinely believes that and was not influenced by the bots to do so, i.e. it is a coincidence
    2. This person genuinely believes that but only because they were stupid enough to get absorbed by the bots
    3. This person does not genuinely believe that and is acting in bad faith

    Only in case 1 is such an opinion worth discussing, but the vast majority of cases will be case 2 or case 3.

    That is why it is reasonable to dismiss such opinions despite the possibility that they are genuine, in good faith, and not the product of propaganda. Because the odds that they're not are vastly greater. Nobody can be certain of anyone's intentions on the Internet, so rational actors can only play a game of "What is the most likely scenario?".

  • Recommended operating system for self-hosting on a VPS?
  • Ubuntu Server, Debian, or Rocky Linux will save you a lot of headaches.

    Most software is designed with these major distros in mind and using something more obscure will just cause problems later on when you realise that there are no guides written for it by the software vendor. Fixing broken software gets old really fast especially when it causes your stuff to break when you're actually trying to use it.

  • China talks of mending fractured relations but says it won’t tolerate Canadian criticism of its human-rights record
  • The funny thing is that the Belt and Road initiative as a way of buying friends has utterly failed. For example, China built a billion-dollar bridge in the Maldives connecting Malé with its airport on another island but public opinion of China in the Maldives is still low. That's despite the fact that the entrance to the bridge has "China-Maldives Friendship Bridge" written in large letters on an arch over the carriageway.

  • Thoughts on Hong Kong urbanism?

    This image is from Google Maps and depicts Maritime Square on Tsing Yi, the island where my grandmother lives. I chose it because I think it is the embodiment of the new millennium Hong Kong urban development.

    The entire development is built by the MTR Corporation, a Government-owned publicly traded company that is primarily known for running the Hong Kong metro system of the same name.

    The primary attraction of this development is the eponymous Maritime Square Mall, a large five-storey indoor shopping arcade. It is attached to Tsing Yi Station, a metro station on the overground Tung Chung Line and there is a small bus interchange on the ground floor.

    The mall has shops including a grocery store, around a dozen restaurants, a Marks & Spencer, bakeries, clothing retailers, electronics stores, a few banks, and some miscellaneous other stores. Notably NOT in the building is a school, otherwise, you might even be able to spend your whole life without leaving it.

    There are several towers extending out of the main mall complex which contain hundreds of units of (unaffordable) housing. I think there is a botanical garden on the roof, too. The entrance to these towers is inside the mall, where there's just a lift lobby where you'd expect a shop to be. The lift lobby is closed to the public; a keycard or code is required to enter.

    I think it's a similar concept to a 15-minute city, but more like a 15-minute building.

    7

    U.S. sends Ukraine seized Iranian-made weapons

    The Pentagon has provided Ukraine with thousands of Iranian-made weapons seized before they could reach Houthi militants in Yemen, U.S. officials said Tuesday. It’s the Biden administration’s latest infusion of emergency military support for Kyiv while a multibillion-dollar aid package remains stalled in the Republican-led House.

    The weapons include 5,000 Kalashnikov rifles, machine guns, sniper rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, along with a half-million rounds of ammunition. They were seized from four “stateless vessels” between 2021 and 2023 and made available for transfer to Ukraine through a Justice Department civil forfeiture program targeting Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East.

    Officials said Iran intended to supply the weapons to the Houthis, who have staged a months-long assault on commercial and military vessels transiting off the Arabian Peninsula. Central Command said the cache is enough to supply rifles to an entire Ukrainian brigade, which vary in size but typically include a few thousand soldiers.

    4

    U.S. sends Ukraine seized Iranian-made weapons

    The Pentagon has provided Ukraine with thousands of Iranian-made weapons seized before they could reach Houthi militants in Yemen, U.S. officials said Tuesday. It’s the Biden administration’s latest infusion of emergency military support for Kyiv while a multibillion-dollar aid package remains stalled in the Republican-led House.

    The weapons include 5,000 Kalashnikov rifles, machine guns, sniper rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, along with a half-million rounds of ammunition. They were seized from four “stateless vessels” between 2021 and 2023 and made available for transfer to Ukraine through a Justice Department civil forfeiture program targeting Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East.

    Officials said Iran intended to supply the weapons to the Houthis, who have staged a months-long assault on commercial and military vessels transiting off the Arabian Peninsula. Central Command said the cache is enough to supply rifles to an entire Ukrainian brigade, which vary in size but typically include a few thousand soldiers.

    2

    Is there a way to donate outside of Google Play?

    Google eats 30% of in-app purchases so I'd like to donate directly if possible.

    If there is a way to do this, perhaps add it to the community's sidebar?

    3

    Expelled congressman George Santos plans another House bid

    5

    Tally marks are just a base-1 numbering system

    and every fifth digit is just put in an odd place

    9
    abc7news.com Tesla repays San Jose pie shop owner after last-minute cancellation

    "I'm so super grateful": More than an hour after Rasetarinera's Monday interview with ABC7 News, she confirmed that Tesla had officially repaid the $2,000 that she was out for the purchase of the ingredients.

    Tesla repays San Jose pie shop owner after last-minute cancellation

    tl;dr After local news aired the story, Tesla has paid the pie shop $2,000, the cost of ingredients for the cancelled order.

    44

    Capital One-Discover merger may face stiff antitrust review in Washington

    34

    It is a huge failure in communication to pretend that distro upgrades are entirely different versions of the operating system. It does nothing but make Linux seem more complex than it actually is.

    The jump in distro versions, say, from Fedora 38 to Fedora 39, is not the same as the jump from Windows 10 to Windows 11. It's more like the jump from version 23H2 to 24H2.

    Now, I'm sure even most Windows users among those reading will ask "wtf are 23H2 and 24H2"? The answer is that those version numbers are the Windows analogue to the "23.10" at the end of "Ubuntu 23.10". But the difference is that this distinction is invisible to Windows users.

    Why?

    Linux distros present these as "operating system upgrades", which makes it seem like you're moving from two different and incompatible operating systems. Windows calls them "feature updates". They're presented as a big deal in Linux, whereas on Windows, it's just an unusually large update.

    This has the effect of making it seem like Linux is constantly breaking software and that you need to move to a completely different OS every six to nine months, which is completely false. While that might've been true in the past, it is increasingly true today that anything that will run on, say, Ubuntu 22.04 can also run without modification (except maybe for hardcoded version checks/repository names) on Ubuntu 23.10, and will still probably work on Ubuntu 24.04. It's not guaranteed, but neither is it on Windows, and the odds are very good either way.

    I will end on the remark that for many distros, a version upgrade is implemented as nothing more than changing the repositories and then downloading the new versions of all the packages present and running a few scripts. The only relevant changes (from the user's perspective) is usually the implementation of new features and maybe a few changes to the UI. In other words, "feature update" describes it perfectly.

    41

    Wasn't there a project a while back to add local highway shield symbols to OpenStreetMap? What happened to that?

    Still just plain rectangles with text.

    4

    Banks in Hong Kong can print their own money. There are 8 different designs in circulation.

    Before someone asks why there isn't insane inflation from banks printing an infinite amount of money for themselves, the Hong Kong dollar is pegged to the US dollar. In order to be allowed to print HKD, banks must have an equivalent amount of USD on deposit.

    11