Go! To! Therapy!

World records set for highest human catapults

https://news.sky.com/share/13610363

Stephen Miller diary entry ahhh reply

CLOSE THE DOOR we’re hot boxing the place

One can take this lightly (I usually do), but in reality these people are a danger to the entire fediverse.

Yeah, it’s an embarrassing shit stain that .ml is the “main” instance. Every other instance admin is forced to play nice if they want a place to get support, which sucks. Lemmy needs to be forked hard, but those devs are sucking in funding from about a half-dozen or more sources, so they have more incentive than most to do the foot work.

cross-posted from: feddit.org/post/37870004

reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).

the reason why this happened is because reddit is a for-profit company and tries to extract money out of the userbase, at the expense of the users.

another example of a bad decision that reddit made was to push a lot of ragebait (“Am I The Asshole?”) because company shareholders want to see “engagement numbers” go up, and if somebody writes an angry reply to a post, that’s “engagement”. but it makes you angry at the stupidity of the “Asshole”, so it makes your day worse. that is another example how reddit makes money at the expense of the users.

size (number of monthly active users) is not what made reddit bad. commercialization is.

we should probably get rid of the “don’t make lemmy grow, it will ruin the platform if we grow” idea.

@goowose meownya

(b) this is totally anecdotal, but as someone who has been teaching computer programming to adults for ~20yrs or so, the biggest obstacle that students face is not that the material is difficult (even when it *is* difficult), but that students are *culturally predisposed to a belief that they're not smart enough to program*, which acts as a permission structure for giving up. (this is peculiar, because no one having trouble in a knitting class thinks "i guess i'm not smart enough to knit")

here's a take that'll please no one: the belief that computers are difficult to use—especially foss and tools related to programming—is mostly constructed by politics and marketing, not by any inherent characteristics of the software. reasoning: (a) people master very complicated and user-hostile processes *all the time*. knitting, driving a car on the interstate, playing a musical instrument, being a baseball fan, using the subway—all just as complicated imo as (e.g.) learning the command line

(c) programmers are predisposed to convincing others that programming is too complicated for "normal people" as a means of job security and achieving social status; computer manufacturers and their software-making friends are predisposed to a marketing message that states: computers are too difficult for normal people, so buy this new machine/software, which is finally the computer/software that normal people can use! together both sides form a kind of mutual ratchet imo

Getting a ban from lemmy.ml is a badge of honour that many like to collect.

Cochrun_xyz wasn’t even the largest spammer. rabotaem_app was, and if you go there (I’d suggest not), it is a Russian language Lemmy site…

The site they were spamming for is based in China.

gm fedi

@Luanti
I love what Luanti is trying to do, but the changelog every release continues to be an exercise of "What do you mean, this wasn't already a thing?"

@aparrish I think we could do a lot to:

1) Make programming feel more accessible and less hostile
2) Make it actually more accessible (through simpler languages, better documentation, higher-level abstractions, nicer interfaces)
3) Educate people to increase their skill

Simultaneously lower the floor, extend a ladder, and encourage people to increase their confidence.

gonna be unproductive until the end of the year probably

Lemmy.ml and even more so lemmygrad.ml (the latter is defederated from by most sane instances across the Threadiverse) are tankie platforms. Tankies believe in alternative facts, such as the fact that nobody died in the Tiannamen Square Massacre. Or if they did then they deserved it. Or if they did not then it was necessary. Or if it wasn’t then… - I am saying that you should expect arguments to shift goals moment to moment, based on the personal biases and need to appear right on the Internet, regardless of any need to actually be thus.

And don’t even get me started on hexbear.net, which has no real beliefs at all beyond the raw need to troll people incessantly (this one is also defederated from by nearly all sane instances across the Threadiverse).

So, you are missing out on nothing important whatsoever. Consider yourself fortunate that you discovered this early on.

Russia is worse in every regard and their complete lack of government is quite literally the exact blueprint being used to fuel rightwing extremist media in just about every major country (but hell, they’re literally doing it in just about EVERY country).

They don’t have as many weapons, but who needs that when you can just install your own president over the Americans who pick to be couped?