• 2 Posts
  • 74 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2023

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  • Are you just talking about dynamic DNS services for one or a few home servers?

    There’s always DynDNS, but that’s a paid service. I actually discovered that dynamic IP address service was provided free by Google when using Google Domains as the registrar, so I moved a few of my private domains over to Google several years ago to save myself $55 a year.

    Unfortunately, Google Domains is shutting down and all registrar services and existing customer domains are getting moved to squarespace and I’ve not yet been able to determine if squarespace is going to be offering the free dynamic DNS service or not.







  • If our eyes had the concept of shutter speed, then there would be shutter speed amount of delay before our brains could process the collected image (keeping the analogy of how a camera works). The penalty of a delay before the brain can process the image would be way worse than what we currently experience, which is degraded night vision.

    Perceiving and reacting to motion quickly is way more advantageous than perceiving a high quality image (for survival).



  • If you think the only topics of conversation we need are Politics, World News, & Technology, then we don’t need more people here.

    Personally, I don’t like having to keep going back to Reddit for everything else. For other communities to be successful on Lemmy, we need about 2 orders of magnitude more users.

    Are you content to have meaningful activity in just a small handful of generic topics? I’m not.

    So, yes, we really do need more people here. A LOT more.





  • Anonymous tips are less than worthless.

    The first problem is that anyone who is anonymously tipped on is just going to deny it. And now its the word of a named person vs an anonymous tip. That isn’t going to fly.

    The next problem is that people will quickly learn to weaponize the anonymous tip process to persecute the people they dislike - regardless of whether the target was even involved in the vandalism.

    Policies like these are dumb. They don’t discourage the bad behavior (the opposite, actually, perpetrators know that the damage they do will impact far more people, which is the entire point of doing it in the first place, so this policy actually works as an incentive to do more vandalism).


  • When Jerboa was having their version number problems, all of Lemmy was having version numbering problems

    Well, not really. This was JUST a problem for Jerboa. There were some other 3rd party apps available for Lemmy and they didn’t suffer from the same problems. In fact, it wasn’t even a technical limitation of Jerboa itself… if you had previously installed and configured Jerboa when the instance version and the jerboa version matched, and then upgraded your jerboa app when your instance didn’t upgrade their version, it magically worked. The problem was when you installed Jerboa fresh and tried connecting it to a slightly outdated instance version - or if you wrecked yourself by clearing your jerboa cache/data folder without realizing that it would behave like it was starting fresh and break. The problem was solely in over-aggressive version checking during Jerboa startup…a total rookie mistake.

    That’s about the time that half of all Lemmy users suddenly learned about the availability of some competing apps that didn’t have the same problems.


  • It may have been rock-solid in the last few months since, but back when they were having their version numbering issues, I was a very new lemmy user and didn’t understand what the problem was (not that I should have had to)- the only thing I knew at the time was that other clients that I’d just learned about somehow didn’t have the same finicky version number problems as jerboa. It kind of wrecked my entire new-lemmy-user experience - especially since (as far as I know) Jerboa is kind of the semi-official client for Lemmy - it doesn’t need to have all the bells and whistles baked into more robust 3rd party clients - it just needs to be rock solid and run reliably as its only job, and it failed.



  • I can understand part of the motivation for doing this, but does this not immediately make it significantly harder for users to evaluate an instance and make decisions about whether or not to join an instance based on what other instances it allows/blocks?

    If I’m understanding this change correctly, it would hinder user’s ability to find an instance that’s well-aligned to them because no one (including potential new users) will be able to see one of the most important metrics governing how an instance chooses to operate (what it federates and defederates with).


  • On April Fools Day 2006, I woke up to what I later found out was a spontaneously collapsed lung.

    Anyone who’s experienced a collapsed lung can assure you the treatment is brutal. They basically cut open your chest between two of your ribs (on the affected side), insert a tube and sew it in place, then apply a light vacuum on that tube to suck out the air and fluid between your chest cavity and lung, causing your lung to re-inflate. You also go through a powerful round of antibiotics and are put on oxygen to make up for your 50% reduced lung function. The suction process takes about a week, and the pain is excruciating and immune to powerful pain killers.

    I would have died from this without the emergency surgery and treatment, and if it had been just 60 years earlier, a collapsed lung would have been a death sentence.