Would you like to provide those receipts?

set up shop on an instance

Don’t do that. You probably should have multiple accounts on different instances. If you really need a continuous, single identity, post links to all your usernames in each.

This is why the move from Reddit was so difficult for Redditors: because we put all our eggs into Reddit Inc’s basket. All our content is under Reddit’s control. This analysis can be applied to any centralized social media service. If your instance shits the bed or bans itself from everyone else, you can move somewhere else. You can start your own in the worst case. It’s annoying, but at least there is a real path to move on.

We shouldn’t be putting our eggs in any one basket. We shouldn’t have been doing it before the Fediverse, and we shouldn’t be doing it here either. Your social media access should not be dependent on the goodwill of one person or entity. Eventually, that entity will corrupt.

Also, I’m on vlemmy.net. Right now, they haven’t defederated from anyone, and I believe we’re still not banned from Beehaw or anyone else. If you really want the whole Fediverse (and you probably don’t), make an account on vlemmy or one of the top three instances on this page.

Why don’t you have a second account?

Lazy. Don’t care if my shit gets fucked. But if you do care if your shit gets fucked, then you shouldn’t rely on centralized social media.

Feels very validating to see that everyone else’s Python is held together by a thread too.

If you need to use VS Code, download VS Codium instead. The product offered by Microsoft is licensed under a not-FOSS license, even though the vscode source is FOSS. More importantly, VS Code sends tracking and telemetry data to Microsoft!

I most regularly use Python, followed by MATLAB C++. Python has been practically mandatory for writing code for my undergrad research. My classmates usually know “a little” Python, and it’s pretty easy to pick up on the fly. I’m trying to phase out MATLAB for Python seeing as I’ll be graduating soon and my student license will run out. I know about Octave, but work done in Python is probably easier to integrate.

My favorite is C++. It’s the first language I learned and it feels like home. It gives me enough abstractions to get actual work done, but it also has the low-level tools I need to shoot myself in the foot for working with Arduino or other microcontrollers.

I’m looking into Rust for audio programming. Although audio programming is done almost exclusively in C++ these days, Rust’s safety features without performance penalties look like a promising language to write fast and reliable code suitable for real-time operation. Joining Lemmy and seeing how it compared to Kbin has cemented my interest in the language because so far, despite the bugs I’ve run into, Lemmy and Jerboa has been fast above all.

Yeah that stuff is a bit obnoxious, but once you get browsing it doesn’t come up, at least for me. Well worth it for no YouTube ads and making tracking more difficult.

These two are now the first apps I install on any new device:

• Kiss launcher (simple and fast)
• Articons icon pack

Basically, my approach is to (mostly) prioritize text over icons, and reduce the colors I need to process.

Other apps:

• Brave browser (for YouTube and built-in anti-tracking features.)
• Librera (ebook/PDF reader with lots of features)
• Odyssey (local music player optimized for speed. My library is so large that all the other players were having trouble finding songs.)
• Graph 89 (TI graphing calculator emulator)
• Feeder (RSS feed aggregator)

No, I’ll install VSCodium for you. Fuck Microsoft’s telemetry.

Other historical artefacts like pottery, vellum writing, or stone tablets

I mean I could just smash or burn those things, and lots of important physical artifacts were smashed and burned over the years. I don’t think that easy destructability is unique to data. As far as archaeology is concerned (and I’m no expert on the matter!), the fact that the artefacts are fragile is not an unprecedented challenge. What’s scary IMO is the public perception that data, especially data on the cloud, is somehow immune from eventual destruction. This is the impulse that guides people (myself included) to be sloppy with archiving our data, specifically by placing trust in the corporations that administer cloud services to keep our data as if our of the kindness of their hearts.

Could it? Yeah, sure it could, and in some cases it will, but only if someone up the chain thinks it’s profitable. Profit motive should never dictate how archaeology is practiced.