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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I’m no dev, so I can’t speak to the codebase or mod tools, but I honestly don’t think it’s going to get much better than this right now. Lemmy has its issues for sure, but the community has been surprisingly stable, with little growth spurts here and there, and more healthy engagement than I expected. I get frustrated every so often, and there are accounts that make me want to scream, but that’s normal in any place where strangers interact.

    I’m curious what other folks have to say, because if there’s a better alternative that I haven’t heard of, then I’m all in, but it’s been pretty hard to keep Lemmy as active as it is. It sounds like you might be a dev? If so, would you be willing to build the tools you want to see for the services you mentioned? It’d be awesome if folks with skills worked to improve existing open source stuff like Lemmy rather than building whole new ones that don’t have any active communities.



  • This is heartbreaking, but in a backwards way it makes me feel a little better about getting these kinds of texts. Now, instead of automatically getting pissed off that some rando is trying to scam me, I’ll feel sympathy knowing that the person sending the texts is more likely a victim themselves. There’s still very little I can personally do about it, but at least now we know, that in some instances like this, someone doing something shitty might only be doing it because they’ve been forced. That makes a difference (selfishly at least), but this whole situation is still just awful.








  • real Jews would never, ever, encourage this sort of behavior.

    I really wish that were true. I’m a Jew, and I am fully against this genocide and Israel’s hypocrisy in general, but Israel is full of real Jews who absolutely encourage this behavior. It’s sad, demoralizing, and shameful, especially for us “normal” Jews who see it for the evil that it is, but I’m not sure enough of the world realizes how normalized this kind of violence is in Israel. I’ve spent a lot of time there, and the vapid, bloodthirsty hatred for Palestinians is absolutely real, and many many more Jews than you or I would like to believe support these atrocities.

    I’m a descendant of Holocaust survivors, with a sizable contingent of family that escaped Europe to Israel, and I frankly won’t be talking to any of them ever again now that I know they happily support genocide.



  • It’s takes real skill to take a concept that has been developed over years of highly technical debate and scholarship and make it understandable with normal language, even if the underlying concepts are actually super simple.

    I think a reason for this is that in highly technical or complex fields, it’s counterintuitively easier to speak in full jargon, since that’s how ideas are developed and how people in the field are convinced of their validity. Using language for the “public” can often mean you lose some of the more subtle meanings, though you’re right that at the end of the day the explanations that we end up with are usually easy for most people to understand.

    So I think it’s actually pretty natural to start with jargon and then refine the ideas by translating them into normal speak.



  • Leaving aside the fact that this is about the UK, I’ll take a crack at this. Many large colleges in the US have what’s called an endowment, which is essentially a massive pot of money that they can’t spend, but can invest. I think they typically can spend the interest that the endowment accrues, so they invest it so it grows. Many of the Ivy League schools have endowments worth multiple billions of dollars. It’s a very strange system.

    I could be wrong on some of the finer points, so folks can feel free to correct me.