Formerly /u/Zalack on Reddit.

  • 0 Posts
  • 35 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle
  • Precision for what? Knowing their cron job will fire? Knowing what was wrong with the commands they sent? Neither of those are crazy precise or ambiguous statements?

    The only highly precise thing that needs to happen is the alignment of the antenna but that system has been working for decades already and has been thoroughly tested.

    NASA tends to be pretty straightforward when talking about risks, and if they feel like all the systems are in working order and there’s a good chance we’ll be back in contact with it, I think it’s worth talking them at their word.

    Like yeah, it’s impressive they can aim an antenna that precisely, but using stars to orient an object is a very very well understood geometry problem. NASA has been using that technique at least as far back as Apollo






  • IMO, it’s always better to try. Worst case scenario is that nothing changes, so no worse than if you didn’t. The only sane choice in that kind of situation is to pick the one with a chance for improvement.

    In my experience, giving a shit about what you’re doing has a bunch of positing knock-on affects as well. You just end up feeling better about yourself. In your specific scenario it sounds like trying would also afford you the opportunity to live a happier life, and that’s worth chasing. The world is fucked, but scientists keep saying they if we act soon it’s not so fucked they we’re past the inflection point to un-fuck it.


  • It’s not that strange. A timeout occurs on several servers overnight, and maybe a bunch of Lemmy instances are all run in the same timezone, so all their admins wake up around the same time and fix it.

    Well it’s a timeout, so by fixing it at the same time the admins have “synchronized” when timeouts across their servers are likely to occur again since it’s tangentially related to time. They’re likely to all fail again around the same moment.

    It’s kind of similar to the thundering herd where a bunch of things getting errors will synchronize their retries in a giant herd and strain the server. It’s why good clients will add exponential backoff AND jitter (a little bit of randomness to when the retry is done, not just every x^2 seconds). That way if you have a million clients, it’s less likely that all 1,000,000 of them will attempt a retry at the extract same time, because they all got an error from your server at the same time when it failed.

    Edit: looked at the ticket and it’s not exactly the kind of timeout I was thinking of.

    This timeout might be caused by something that’s loosely a function of time or resources usage. If it’s resource usage, because the servers are federated, those spikes might happen across servers as everything is pushing events to subscribers. So, failure gets synchronized.

    Or it could just be a coincidence. We as humans like to look for patterns in random events.


  • Apex Legends: Been playing since Season 0 with my SO and brother and I think it’s honestly the longest I’ve ever played a single game. The gunplay just feels so good.

    Tears of the Kingdom: Still working my way through it, taking my time exploring. Honestly it’s such a great game, but I have to say the resource gathering is getting a little tedious. I like the weapon durability mechanic from the angle of being forced to switch up your fighting style, but I wish there was a way to repair weapons between fights.


  • I posted a version of this in another thread:

    I really think Lemmy, Kbin, and Mastodon need to figure out a way to have a default terms of service that ships with their product which forbids using the API to collect data for anything outside of user-facing social network interfaces, including account association heuristics and similar processes.

    A way for users to set licenses on individual posts would be huge as well, with a default license instance admins can set.

    That way for-profit instances could be forced to filter out posts with licenses that do not allow for-profit use. Honestly, even just a simple check mark “[ ] allow for-profit republication”, and have two licenses that can be attached: one that allows for-profit use and one that does not.

    The fediverse should start baking in data control into it’s legal framework. Want to federate with Mastodon? You need to follow the ToS for what you can do with its posts. If we wanted to get really extreme we could even say the license should be copy-left. Any instance that wants to federate with a non-profit instances needs to also be non-profit.

    That could block for-profit companies from becoming part of the network in the first place, even by use of stealth relay instances.

    #threads



  • I really think Lemmy, Kbin, and Mastodon need to figure out a way to have a default terms of service that ship with their product which forbids using the API to collect data for commercial purposes.

    Additionally, there should be a way for users to indicate licensing for individual posts, with a default license instance admins can set.

    That way for-profit instances could be forced to filter out posts with licenses that do not allow for-profit use. Honestly, even just a simple check mark “[ ] allow for-profit republication”, and have two licenses that can be attached: one that allows for-profit use and one that does not.



  • The thing is that this can happen even without active malice.

    If the product owners or engineers decide “hey, we want to add this cool feature, but it’s not supported by activity pub” the path of least resistance – bypassing the long process of changing the activity pub spec and getting everyone else on board – can be super tempting, and come from a place of wanting to make your product better.

    Those ostensibly good intentions can lead to E/E/E without actively meaning to.




  • First off, cool your jets; you’re being kinda rude for no reason here. Just because we disagree doesn’t mean either of us is an idiot.

    My point is just that you still develop features specifically for your admin-privileged users right? That’s the only thing I’m trying to say by calling admins users, that they still belong to the bucket of people you consider when adding features to your software, even if they are only admin-facing features. You’re right that it’s just a semantic difference, so let me rephrase using your terminology then;

    Admins of the software may want to create and promote their own private sites using the lemmy software that federate with only a subset of other lemmy instances. For instance, a network of ‘academic’ lemmy instances run by universities – with high moderation requirements – that do not federate with the ‘popular’ fedeverse.

    In that sense federation is a feature, to admins.

    I’m also not 100% sold on it not mattering to end-users. Like I’m a user by your metric, and I like that Kbin can de-federate from extremist instances or instances run by corporations like Meta, and will likely move homes if it doesn’t and I start seeing too much content from those instances. It’s a feature I specifically appreciate about this platform.


  • First off, cool your jets; you’re being kinda rude for no reason here. Just because we disagree doesn’t mean either of us is an idiot.

    My point is just that you still develop features specifically for your admin-privileged users right? That’s the only thing I’m trying to say by calling admins users, that they still belong to the bucket of people you consider when adding features to your software, even if they are only admin-facing features. You’re right that it’s just a semantic difference, so let me rephrase using your terminology then;

    Admins may want to create and promote their own private sites – using the lemmy software – that federate with only a subset of other lemmy instances. For instance, a network of ‘academic’ lemmy instances run by universities – with high moderation requirements – that do not federate with the ‘popular’ fedeverse.

    In that sense federation is a feature, to admins.

    I’m also not 100% sold on it not mattering to end-users. Like I’m a user by your metric, and I like that Kbin can de-federate from extremist instances or instances run by corporations like Meta, and will likely move homes if it doesn’t and I start seeing too much content from those instances. It’s a feature I specifically appreciate about this platform.