Today’s Special Offah!

I don’t think it does much for gaming, as the video and article also point out, but even if it turns out to just be placebo - my old and creaking PC here feels more responsive than it did with Manjaro, Vanilla Arch and Garuda respectively.

Thank you!

Interesting! Thank you for the explanation - the time gap had always felt a bit strange to me, but I had hand-wavingly assumed that was time the displaced youths had needed to grow up.

Do you have additional sources to dive into? I must admit, I had been under the impression so far, that the Taliban had been composed mostly of Pashtuns originally from Afghanistan, and not Pakistani Pashtuns at all.

I knew that part, but it seemed improbable to me that none of the armaments provided to what later became the Taliban weren’t at least indirectly provided by the US.

My understanding - which granted is not an expert one and could be rooted in a myth - was that they handed weapons out relatively indiscriminately, to any displaced Afghans in Pakistan presenting as able and willing to fight the Soviets. I always assumed a lot of them ended up in their hands as well.

Not impossible, although, sadly - any system where anonymity is the prime focus will also invite fucked up shit in addition to legitimate use, without any complicated motives behind it. There’s just a relevant fraction of humanity who are, sometimes essentially, sometimes temporarily, messed up fucks. Which is why I think providing ways to combat abuse has to be a high priority for the underlying development of any project like it, unless it explicitly doesn’t aim for mainstream adoption.

I had a wild ride with matrix, originally wanting to run a node on my server. That did not turn out well, because I was a bit stupid and just assumed there would be more admin/mod tools out of the box. As it turned out, I had inadvertently allowed spam/abuse accounts on my node without even noticing, because naive as I was, I assumed my admin-level account would get informed of stuff like user registrations and abuse reports in the standard Element frontend. As a bonus, when I checked what was supposedly the official matrix support channel, it was repeatedly getting spammed with CSAM and gore at the time. That was when I realised, that it definitely was not the ecosystem for me, and running a node without experience had been a pretty stupid idea on my end.

A mere 0.1% of users share 80% of fake news. Twelve accounts – known as the “disinformation dozen” – created most of the vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the pandemic. These few hyperactive users produced enough content to create the false perceptions that many people were vaccine hesitant.

So, this is super anecdotal, but through the father of a friend I learned about a guy who was just downright a walking stereotype in that regard. Said father is a rather conservative guy (ex-cop, actually), got lucky and rather rich, and he lived in a suburban village here in Germany. Said neighbour, as described by him: Also an ex-cop, old acquaintance, wife and kids left him because he was violent, living financially comfortably in a large house in that suburban German village on his own, but miserable. And he, unironically, sent said father of my friend far-right propaganda articles, images, messages just… all day long. Every 10 minutes or so. Presumably as mass messages to about anyone who still had a semblance of contact with him. Anecdotal, hearsay with 2 degrees of separation, but - it was the first time I realised those people existed as actual people just casually living their lives around us all.

It’s definitely not the same, but I am somewhat reminded of Robert Sapolski’s Baboon stress study

Some key paragraphs:

Robert Sapolsky and Lisa Share report evidence of a higher order cultural tradition in wild baboons in Kenya. Rooted in field observations of a group of olive baboons (called the Forest Troop) since 1978, Sapolsky and Share document the emergence of a unique culture affecting the “overall structure and social atmosphere” of the troop.

Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.

After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors.

The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that’s decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.

But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there’s hope for us as well.

No sad onions allowed!

Ah, I am sad to hear that. And sorry that has been your experience.

As only an amateur coder, I can’t weigh in how serious the issue is, but I’m gonna take your word for it, without any other person involved adding input. I hope it’ll end up in a state, where the project can still sustain its growth in both features and users.

Congratulations Ruud & Rest - everyone at the foundation really, it’s just fun to say Ruud & Rest! I’m excited to see how this will develop. PieFed does have a lot of features already, that I do miss for Lemmy, and the communication from the main dev has been great so far. (An opportunity to post links to his PeerTube channel, as well as his Liberapay profile).

A great addition to the “Threadiverse” in particular, and the larger Fediverse!

You actually make a great point. Really, for me it was mostly a quick idea because I had been musing about PeerTube’s streaming capabilities in a different comment thread, and about how it leverages the P2P mechanism, so it was fresh on my mind that I wanted to stress-test my own server somehow (and I wanted to learn how to set-up OBS with chat and stuff for PeerTube). Then, while “working” on the canvas, I had the sudden: “Hey, I’d love to set my pixels while zoomed in, while also watching the whole field zoomed out”-thought … but of course that would just as easily be possible by just having two browser windows open 🤷

If nothing else, I got some promising data showing my server can handle several people tuning in to live streams at the same time - and I am also using this to test how my server handles someone wanting to encode a 24h+ VOD from a stream, so that will be there, too - probably for another time-lapse in addition to the official ones.

Oh no, my tastes tell me I am all four on the bottom right, so, basically chaotic evil and neighbours 🤔

Could that be the common ground for the India-Pakistan conflict to come to an end?

This made me check on how pixelfed has been faring, since I remember them going through a huge boom recently - and to my joy, they still have a very large (for fediverse standards) community, they even rebounded a bit from the initial drop of people leaving after trying it out!

As just a personal thing, the original mute watching was so surreal and unique, I enjoyed it more - solving the mystery of what is happening from what’s shown visually alone (and some subdued music) - but that is a deeply subjective thing.

you should also get back together with that girlfriend and be on the phone with her while you watch it.

Oh no, I couldn’t do that to her, she definitely deserved better.

That is a possible explanation, although I think it was weirder than that, because I remember checking some “obvious” settings like that afterwards. I also re-encoded the file with VLC media player out of curiosity, where it should have just re-encoded whatever audio track it had, without adjusting it to a specific output device, and the resulting file then also had the same issue when played in SMPLayer (whereas the original worked in SMPlayer).

I might still have both files laying around on my NAS, but I myself at least don’t really have the energy right now to go into a rabbit hole again years after the fact, and sharing them would be non-trivial.

So, I once watched The Lighthouse together with my then girlfriend remotely, being in a long distance relationship at the time. We used the same file, started at the same time and were in chat together.

The audio codec of this (of course 100% legal) file for some reason did not work with my VLC player properly. There were no voices. But it also wasn’t just complete silence, some music and subtle, surreal sound effects came through. None of this was happening for my ex, btw, even though we had the same file.

Talking about the movie in chat and afterwards was fascinating, I only then realised it was, in fact, not a masterful, purposeful, stylistic choice: A major production not just in black and white, but as a silent movie. I also was able to get the essential things that happened and the important plot points, so that is also another point very much in favour of the film.

That has been my impression of present dynamics and historical data, too - boom-bust-cycles of either some other platform fucking up or there being curiosity from some synergetic effect, then the initial wave breaking over time - but usually also leaving behind at least more (genuinely active) users than before the wave. For Lemmy, one can definitely see some reduction in activity, I think - not dramatically, but I do think it’s noticeable if you spend a lot of time here. E.g. unlike during the last Exodus, I see more of “the same users” than before. There’s still enough content, it does not feel dead by a long shot, and who knows when the next wave may hit.

That wave-like character makes it hard to estimate organic growth too, at times. The mass influx of users dying off over weeks will give shrinking numbers there, even if some users from organic growth who are more likely to stay and be active than “mass exodus users” may still join there. Also, users moving in between MBin/PieFed/Lemmy will fudge numbers, but they are essentially in the same ecosystem.