Honestly, no. People are pretty bad at filtering for Unicode alternative characters. It can be worked around when the site admins understand what’s going on, but…have fun skimming all of the Unicode code pages for every possible lookalike character.

The title of that article does not support its conclusion. Lazy pasting what I commented the last time I saw this.

Nothing has changed for LTS at all. Scroll down to the pretty graphs on https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle, and pay particular attention to how the ratio of orange to purple on the LTS graphs has changed over time. (it hasn’t) The base LTS support window has always been 5 years, and the extended window has always been another 5 years.

What they did add was additional security updates for Universe packages, which are represented by the black line. Note that this black line is independent of the LTS coverage. From https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-pro-faq/34042:

Your Ubuntu LTS is still secured in exactly the same way it has always been, with five years of free security updates for the ‘main’ packages in the distribution, and best-effort security coverage for everything else. This has been the promise of Ubuntu since our first LTS in 2006, and remains exactly the same. In fact, thanks to our expanded security team, your LTS is better secured today than ever before, even without Ubuntu Pro.

Ubuntu Pro is an additional stream of security updates and packages that meet compliance requirements such as FIPS or HIPAA, on top of an Ubuntu LTS. Ubuntu Pro was launched in public beta on 5 October, 2022, and moved to general availability on 26 January, 2023. Ubuntu Pro provides an SLA for security fixes for the entire distribution (‘main and universe’ packages) for ten years, with extensions for industrial use cases.

You can also dig into this AskUbuntu answer for even more details, but the long and short of it is this has no impact on Ubuntu LTS whatsoever. Keep using it if that is your thing. Keep using something else if it is not.

This old news will become newsworthy if Canonical starts shifting packages out of the main repo and into universe, which would in fact reduce the security update coverage of LTS releases. That said, the article has not asserted any evidence of this. Nothing to see here…for now.

Supervillain is giving him too much credit. I’ll grant you that he’s a cartoon character, but cartoon supervillains have more complexity than him.

Kanye and Musk embody a nearly identical archetype and we’d have the exact same problem if they ran for president and succeeded. The cult of personality that follows shitty celebrities is a self-perpetuating one. It’s rooted in nasty people admiring how important people can be nasty like them but without tangible social consequences. They form a mob around their cult heroes for that exact reason, strength in numbers. A safe space for the trash of humanity.

People in politics and business find Trump useful because he’ll open doors for them in exchange for attention. They get cozy with leading him around by the nose with that attention until they forget that he will backstab them when they stop giving him that attention or there is more value in betraying them. Musk does the exact same shit, so again, I don’t think that Trump himself is worthy of being viewed in the light you’re giving him. Similarly shitty celebrities are drop in replacements for him, and worse, they might be more intelligent in their cruelty.

I’m also here to expose bad excuses.

Not being able to help someone who is refusing to provide technical detail is a pretty damn good excuse in this industry.

If your goal is to expose the bad excuses of others, step one is to put in as much effort as you’re expecting from others. :P

Edit for good measure: (links fixed, forgot about direct linking comments from outside of a lemmy instance)

• Your instance was not federating with lemmy.world. [1]
• You assumed that the blame had to rest on lemmy.world because you had “eliminate[d] all the possibilities [you] had at hand”. [2]
• You made this post to vent about a bunch of unrelated nonsense and refused to provide technical detail that would assist the admins in troubleshooting. It’s a given fact that your privacy is your choice, but it’s also a given that you shouldn’t be a dick about it if you choose to withhold details, even from PM. For the record, the information being requested was the bare minimum for an instance administrator to troubleshoot network interactions with a remote instance.
• A random (but cool) third party identified the issue with your instance not federating. [3]
• Instead of apologizing, you proceeded to act like you were entitled to that solution from the admins you wrongly accused. [4] You are not god’s gift to the internet and they are not technical support for your instance.

There’s no room for niceties here, you are either an asshole in denial or some brat who is too young to know any better. Sleep on it. Come to terms with that fact and make good on it, or don’t. You aren’t worth anyone’s energy, and I’m only bothering with this summary for everyone else’s sake. Your problem is fixed, it was never on lemmy.world’s side to begin with, and somehow you are still acting like the failure of the admins to figure out what was busted with your shit is some Sherlock gotcha moment.

I am unaffiliated with lemmy.world and my toxicity does not represent the opinions of the admins. (but they’re probably thinking it)

In my work, when someone comes to me and assumes I or my team is screwing up because they “eliminated all possibilities at hand” 90% of the time, they screwed up and didn’t realize it.

Yeah, at that point the onus is on the person putting forth the problem to show their work. Start listing off possibilities that you’ve eliminated. You can have thirty years of technical experience and still be completely useless by assuming that you’re just as smart as the person you’re explaining the problem to.

“I did eliminate all the possibilities I had at hand”? Naw man, anyone dropping that line has only eliminated all possibilities that they can think of, and all of that supposed thinking about “all the possibilities” is worthless if they aren’t going to offer it up as a starting point.

The cycle of social tech becoming mainstream and conversational norms being dragged down to a least common denominator predates modern social media. The earliest example I can think of is Usenet (newsgroups):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Usenet and the Internet were generally the domain of dedicated computer professionals and hobbyists; new users joined slowly, in small numbers, and observed and learned the social conventions of online interaction without having much of an impact on the experienced users. The only exception to this was September of every year, when large numbers of first-year college students gained access to the Internet and Usenet through their universities. These large groups of new users who had not yet learned online etiquette created a nuisance for the experienced users, who came to dread September every year. Once ISPs like AOL made Internet access widely available for home users, a continuous influx of new users began, which continued through to 2015 according to Jason Koebler, making it feel like it is always “September” to the more experienced users.

It’s the same cycle. Social tech starts off being used by a smaller number of technically inclined people. Communities are smaller and normalized civility is more commonplace. Peer pressure holds people to those norms. Once a social tech balloons from mainstream interest, the norms (or zeitgeist if you prefer) shift toward the incoming population because they outnumber the early population and exert more peer pressure. The new norms become a compromise between the norms of the incoming mob and what the community moderators are willing/able to enforce.

It’s tempting to put a label on the incoming demographic and use it in a derogatory way, but removing the label from the equation doesn’t change the source of unhappiness; the memory of what once was and the knowledge that it can’t last when cultural dilution sets in.

(no, I’m not providing any solutions to the problem, this is just rambling that might provide more insightful people with a starting point)

It is possible, but a major US election requires a massive burst of popularity to avoid splitting the vote of the majority candidate having “less shitty than the other guy” policy positions. Failure to breach that threshold hands the victory to the majority candidate with the shittiest position on policies.

The simple test is this: has your third-party candidate achieved a realistically high margin of popular opinion behind them? I’m not saying be a slave to polling, but it isn’t rocket science either. You will know if a third-party candidate has momentum behind them. They have charisma that sucks people in. They are somehow getting attention regularly driven to them despite the majority candidates pumping much more money into the news media.

If the third-party candidate doesn’t have something bordering on a revolutionary ideological movement backing them, they aren’t going to make that cut in a nationwide race.

Edit: I’m not saying give up. Donate to causes you honestly believe in. Volunteer. Do what you can to make a difference. Support local government efforts to implement ranked choice voting in your state, which can and will break this system. (look at Alaska) But when it comes to casting that final vote, be realistic, even if it means voting against all the hard work you just put in. Sunk cost fallacy at the expense of giving away victory doesn’t help anyone.

Because it’s what we’ve come to expect from large corporations suddenly joining the table of any FOSS project that is adjacent to their financial stakes. Coexistence is possible if they can profit from the software without assimilating it, but it also stands to reason that they will be pushing for new interoperability standards that benefit their own business model at the expense of users in some way.

The lowest hanging fruit would be something that allows them to associate Fediverse accounts with users whose marketing data already exists in their database, or providing a service to third parties that helps them tie their own databases back to Fediverse users. This would require some sort of hook that encourages the users to either associate their Fediverse accounts to an existing Meta service, or otherwise volunteer common PII such as email address that can be cross referenced. Maybe some kind of tracking cookie that accomplishes the same.

Keep in mind that this is just an example, it is not necessarily the exact angle they are pursuing. I’m not in the automatically defederate camp, but a healthy amount of skepticism is definitely warranted.

——

Edit: Also worth a read: https://kbin.social/m/fediverse@lemmy.ml/t/83284/How-to-Kill-a-Decentralised-Network-such-as-the-Fediverse

He totally would. It is basically an entire book of his own bathroom thoughts, so even when you aren’t in the bathroom you are bathrooming vicariously.

eek, it’s the fuzz! Run away!

More seriously, if anyone likes this sort of material it’s worth giving a translation of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius a read. It’s a very dry but thought-provoking series of observations recorded by a Roman emperor and stoic philosopher. Rather than trying to read it as a traditional book, I recommend stashing a copy of it in your bathroom (or keeping a copy in your phone’s e-reader app) so that you can slowly thumb through it over time without falling asleep. :) You’ll get to the end eventually, and if I had to credit this thinking exercise somewhere I’m inclined to steer people in his direction. It’s great material for reflecting on the pursuit of justice and self-betterment.

I see no major reason to advocate for one translation over another, but if you’re the sort of person who had trouble narrowing down which instance of lemmy to sign up with initially, you can crib off of me and go with The Essential Marcus Aurelius.

This is where the argument for unconditionally providing equal air time to bad faith arguments falls apart, and where paradox of tolerance comes into play. One side demands tolerance for itself but argues in bad faith, and the other is inclined toward tolerance with others because it’s what they would want for themselves. The latter is taken advantage of because the former does not return the favor.

The key to solving for the paradox is recognizing that there is a difference of scale:

1. If one ideology demands tolerance for itself but is intolerant of all ideologies aside from its own, its intolerance is broadly scoped. There is more intolerance in play than tolerance.
2. If one ideology grants tolerance to other ideologies except when their own is denied the same, then the intolerance is narrowly scoped. Intolerance is still in play, but it is a false inference to imply that those who champion equality must unconditionally surrender it to those who do not believe in it.

Pay attention to how many ideologies a school of thought is trying to silence and who their allies are. Unreasonable extremists can be found in all camps and their existence alone does not prove a movement’s bad faith or your own righteousness. Reasonable people should exist, making it more important to focus on the goals of the movement and how its better stewards comport themselves. Remember that people who open their discussions with rudeness and toxicity are compensating for the insecurity of their debating point and already betraying their own intolerance. They aren’t worth engaging with.

• Who are the patient and reasonable people that are standing up for an ideology?
• Does a leader for a movement rely on emotional appeals to unrelenting anger? Are they always angry and rude in a public setting, and primarily trying to appeal to those who behave in a similar way? Ignore their spiel and use someone else as your benchmark. (edit: But if this is the best they can offer and the leaders who are most frequently pushed to the top, this should be seen as a large red flag.)
• What happens when you try to engage in a conversation with the patient ones? Do they keep a level head and respectfully agree to disagree with you while happily trading points, or do they go on the attack with ad-hominems when you patiently poke at the holes in their arguments?

At the end of the day there aren’t any simple solutions and you’re left with a critical thinking exercise that only works for you. Be one of the patient people who is a good advocate for your cause, but do not allow yourself to invest a disproportionate amount of effort engaging with someone who does not return respect. Seek out those who return that respect, regardless of their stated ideology, and you will both be better for it when the conversation is done. And hopefully the result of those conversations will help other people make up their mind about who is truly acting in bad faith.

Yeah this is a memes community, but it’s something that I’ve been thinking about for a while. Feel free to quote/link/whatever.

May freedom follow in your footsteps, fellow citizen. o7

cape spinning intensifies

Would you and your BF enjoy shooting at alien scum while your characters scream DEMOCRACY!! and HAVE A NICE CUP OF LIBERTEA!! at the top of their lungs? Would you be entertained by accidentally killing each other in the heat of battle when you radio for an ammo drop?

Then Helldivers would be for you. Join the forces of Super Earth and spread Managed Democracy throughout the universe!

PROTIP: If you want to assert dominance in your relationship, find a gun with a bayonet attachment. You will mix up the melee and interact buttons on at least one occasion.