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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • There are two tensions here:

    1. Community building
    2. Code production

    Community building can be done without any coding, coding can be done without any community. However, to build a large project you need them both.

    In a large volunteer project like this, not everything can be worked on. You become selective. We are going to major on this thing, or specifically talk about that project to get community engagement and get the thing done. This drives the project, she helps it to stop chasing hairs. Someone has to decide what feature is going in this release to make it ready to be a release candidate.

    That group of people, ultimately making and influencing those decisions, is the CoC.

    Let’s take a for-instance: Sign up boxes.

    For years, Linux sign up allows you to record random data into your profile, office, phone number, etc. These are text, and can be anything. Now, what if there’s a rising need to add a minicom number(minix, used to be used by the deaf to send messages to an organisation, before email). As a hearing person, this is going to be a low priority for me, so I work on something else. I’ve got spare capacity, so if the project leaders are calling for help on this thing, I can go and help.

    This, ultimately, builds a better over-all product, but it’s not something I’d have noticed by myself, because I’m not part of the deaf community.

    In our example with NixOS, asking for someone from the community to be a representative on it is not about code quality, but about the issue of visibility. Is there some need that that section of the community needs? Is there a way that the community can do y thing to make the os as a whole more accessible? I don’t know the answer, because I’m not a member of that community, just as I’m not a member of the deaf community.

    In this case, the merit, the qualification, for being on the CoC is being a member of a section of the community. It brings valuable a viewpoint, and adds a voice at the table that can make a real difference. Most coders know that having a wish list of features at the start can make it infinitely easier to add them, than having to go back an rewrite to make them happen. Having a voice that might need that feature makes a difference

    The debate for CoC is about merit, but merit isn’t just stubbornly focused on a single talent, it can also be about life experience.


  • Choose an unclear gender (other, agender, etc) and your data becomes less useful. Marketing campaigns are based on broad categories, like male or female, so choosing neither lowers your data’s value.

    Similarly, lie about your education and your employment. Pick a made up job, be a wizard, or a spaceman. Jobs, again, are wide categories, so nonsense jobs, the more niche the better, the less they have to market things to you.

    In theory you can do the same with hobbies, but three points of data, even made up data, is sellable somewhere.

    Lie, of course, if you can. I’m sure there are more denizens of Hell on Facebook than the real place.

    Where possible, choose other.



  • In the modern world, I’m not sure a blog without advertising is going to work - especially hosted on your own domain.

    You will have better luck with substack or koffi, who’s search algorithms will at least suggest related sites - and increase your visibility.

    For decent views you are going to need a way of generating audience - that used to be Facebook and Twitter, but Twitter is dead, and Facebook is showing reduced returns of a saturated market. However, reduced is but 0, so it’s still worth throwing up a page.

    After that, a public Mastodon profile will help in audience creation, but that’s very much a slow burn, and you’ll have to make sure you #tag properly.


  • I would be very interested in the list of banned books, and how it would be curated.

    For 64gb, you might have to extend the years to be: banned books ever, and then break down that list by reason. Just to fill space you’d end up including dubious books, and you’d need to be clear on where/who/why a book got banned.

    A book being ‘banned’ from a pre-school for being ‘not age appropriate’ by some pointless helicopter parent wouldn’t count unless the book was actually age appropriate.

    Then you would need a category of ‘banned by author banned’(or similar). Books that were considered age appropriate at the time, but now definitely aren’t. I’m thinking here of the recent removal/editing of Dr Seuss books to remove problematic racial stereotype. Not necessarily banned in their original form, perhaps, but still censored (perhaps, rightly so for the target age).

    64GB is a lot of books. You would end up even including ‘The tale of (Darth) Pelagius’

    (Pelagius was considered a heretic in the early years of the church, and his writings were banned)




  • I don’t know if there is, but it feels like the email protocol problem.

    Like, while the protocol sucks in many, many ways, it would take something revolutionary to replace it because it’s everywhere.

    It’s been around so long that everything talks the protocol, the binaries that handle it are mature and stable.

    Then you have to ask: what would you replace it with? It does the job it’s designed to do very well. There’s nothing the matter with the protocol, and it’s still fit-for-purpose.

    That doesn’t mean there aren’t problems - spam, bad actors, and so on, but ultimately that’s not the fault of the protocol (though, maybe, for email, people have been arguing about protocol-level ways of dealing with spam for years).

    I don’t have an answer, but I feel like there should be one, but I doubt the is.


  • However, unlike Reddit, there’s alternatives. You might not like the community on @lemmy.world, but you might like the community on @anotherlemmythatmight.exist.

    Because of the federated nature, communities will naturally fracture and focus. Here, a bad faith mod will just kill a community on instance a, and people will move to instance b.

    We’ve already seen things happen like this under the banner of ‘free speech’, where people believe that free speech means free from consequences. If you think that, there are plenty of instances out there. Lemmy.world isn’t one of them.

    This means that you can find your favourite community in places with different server rules. Which means it will be the community - the people, the mods, the knowledge, that grows one, not just the fact the names taken.



  • The last time I saw this was on a slow-failing HDD.

    Check a quick fsck might get you a few answers. You can find more info in the Linux manual. It could just be one or two bad blocks that you can recover and fix the problem (though, ofc, it’s time to backup your data).

    The other, slightly unusual time I’ve seen it is with mixed RAM. 16gb made of 2x6g and then 2x4gb did some real odd things to the system. If it’s not the disk, and your box will boot with one stick of ram, try it to see if it fixes the issue. It could be that your RAM speeds are off (or your like me and just put two sticks you had lying around, and it basically worked until it didn’t).

    An outlier, that I’ve not seen on modern machines is io/wait for a CD-ROM to spin up, even if your not accessing the CD-ROM. Normally caused by bad cabling. Based on the age of your machine, this is unlikely, but it might be worth unplugging devices to see if one is bad and not reporting properly.

    This is, if course, assuming dmsg is empty

    Final thought: see if your running SELinux. If you are, turn it off and try again. Those policies are complex, and something installed in a non-standard place could be causing SELinux to slow IO as it fills your logs with warnings.

    Hope that helps,





  • It’s interesting that the sharp fall in traffic mimics the fall of Twitter and Reddit.

    Anecdotally, I would find code answrs on Reddit or Twitter, that would direct to Stack to view the full answer, or a more complete explanation of why X should be done that way.

    Considering the (relatively) small decline, I’m surprised that Stack think the answer is ChatGPT(or similar), and not the loss of semantic details added by a Reddit/Twitter thread.




  • Black Xanthus@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 year ago

    This is definately a problem with an unlicensed sector. Take 30 second with your favourite search engine and see how much snake oil is out there, most of it American.

    There are good coaches out there, and a good one will have some form of qualification. However, finding them amongst the snake-oil salespeople can be tough. The number of ‘life coaches’ selling courses for stupid money is bananas. What’s maddening, to me, is people pay it.

    There are things you can do to help find a good life coach.

    1. Check out their socials. If they are selling the ‘work harder, get benefit’ model, that are likely snake-oil. Life Coaching is about taking a client where they are, and to help them article their goals, and work towards them. Not everyone’s goal is to be rich
    2. Life Coaches that say they can make your rich. It’s a lie. You can’t ‘coach’ your way out of poverty
    3. They have developed a ‘guranteed course’ that all one-to-one clients follow. That’s not life coaching, that’s reading from a book. Life Coaching is bespoke, and works with where the client is at. You’d be better off buying a self-help book and using what sticks.
    4. They offer a quick fix.
    5. They market themselves as some form of Therapist. Life Coaching is not therapy. Similar skills, different game.
    6. A life coach won’t sell ‘woo-woo’. They won’t suddenly suggest ‘taint sunning’ as a cure for depression.
    7. A good life coach will offer a free first session, and no tie-in. While you can often get discount prices for block booking, they are not required to access the service.

    Life coaches in my country mostly operate as part of the mental-health and wellness movement. With clear lines, and clear limitations. They have clear ethical Frameworks, and work within them.

    The people above saying a ‘life coach is a therapist that doesn’t listen’ are people who’ve met the bad life coaches. A good life coach is interested in their work, shares their knowledge, and is genuinely working from a place of care.

    I believe in what I do. I’ve seen the changes it has made in people. It has not worked for everyone.

    I believe so much in what I do, that I offer my services with a minimum cost of minim wage in my country, but with an option to pay as you feel. If you think I’ve made a difference, great. But there’s no pressure too it. I’ve felt the the high cost of life coaching was a barrier to those who need it - those often lacking a way to articulate their goals in life, much less with towards them.

    A good life coach is not a scam. Sadly, not all life coaches are good.




  • I have to say this is quite a worrying abuse. Both of software, and of privacy.

    It’s being deployed for something it’s not meant for, and being used to remove liberties for it. Of course, much of this will be lost to media circles as in CSA cases, the presumption is guilt in the public’s mind.

    Whatever the truth of the original conviction, the use of this software as a condition of bail should be banned, and abhorrent to anyone who values justice.

    That is not to say the software doesn’t have it’s uses - especially in cases of porn addiction. However, the software is nowhere near good enough to be used in legal cases. It says so itself. It errs, intentionally, on gathering more data, on being more conservative, simply because it’s not good enough to make the judgement on its own.

    That’s before we look at the unintentional consequences of impinging on the freedom of an innocent person (‘Hannah’), and the way in which the software is not ‘intelligent’ enough to make judgements on whether or not it should take a photo of emails. It also led to fear of accessing help (and an inability to access help).

    Use of this software in this way is an abuse.