mrmaplebar

I mean, you can make whatever you want. And I get it, to quote The Clash, I’m pretty bored of the USA too.

Of course, an IP block isn’t going to work because an American like myself can just use a VPN in another country to get around it. And yes, the moment you start federating with other instances you’re going to come across American stuff again, so unless you isolate your instance (which you could do… but then people are unlikely to join it) you’re gonna have to deal with Americans.

With that said, I actually think it’s a great idea for people to make regional fediverse servers, not necessarily to block out Americans in an attempt at digital nationalism/isolationalism… But to make sure that the infrastructure of the internet is not so America-centric, and to make it so that there is always a place to talk about local issues and events that matter to you, in your native language.

Even as an American, I feel that right now the internet is far too reliant on American infrastructure, services and communities.

I’d love to see, for example, Japanese lemmy server, an Italian mastodon server, a German peertube server, a Brazilian pixelfed server, a Canadian misskey server, and so on.

I just think that banning Americans and American topics is probably not an effective way to do it, particularly because there are lessons to be learned for us all about what is going on here right now.

I don’t disagree that we need more positive and high quality hobby content. Sure.

But personally I’m so sick of dudes complaining about “political shit and rage bait and virtue signaling”, whatever half of that banal nonsense is even supposed to mean…

In fact, I’d go as far to say that people who whine about everything being “political” is a bright fucking red flag to me. My immediate assumption upon reading that is “this person is a Trump supporter who voted for this exact shit to happen because they want it to happen, and they don’t want to be confronted by the fact that other people don’t.” I know exactly what kind of people don’t want to hear about “politics” anymore now that Trump is elected, trampling our institutions, and fucking everything up. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, right?

Oh, fuck off…

Starting to think, huh?

I think that sounds pretty solid to me. Realistically you should count on having 3x drives for your important data:

1. The main data drive(s)
2. Drive(s) for redundancy, mirroring the data drives. (I use btrfs RAID1 for this.).
3. Offline local hard drive(s) that you keep somewhere relatively safe that you occasionally backup to.
4. (Optionally) Some kind of offsite backup.

So if you plan on having 2TB of data, you’ll ideally want 3x 2TB drives. 2 in the PC mirroring eachother, and 1 in a closet or safe that you plug in and backup to a few times per year. (With bonus points if you can get another 2TB of off site or cloud storage to also backup to, in case of catastrophy.)

As for how you build it, I think it doesn’t matter too much. Its possible to use whatever random spare PC parts you have to make a decent home server, imo. A lot of people on YouTube and Reddit have all kinds of fancy servers in a rack, but an old repurposed desktop can be fine. ( I would probably use new, decent quality drives though.)

If you are willing to abandon your self-proclaimed “principles” at the first convenience you never had any to begin with.

We wants to appear like he believes in checks and balances when in reality he doesn’t give a damn.

Cool! This one is new to me. Nice to see that it has good bluesky integration, too.

Ooof. And it’s only going to get more expensive when the AI industry is no longer able to afford to subsidize it with buttloads of investment money.

To be perfectly honest, I’d still be against it as long as it is trained on the stolen work of regular people.

Not only is it devoid of artistry and creativity, generative AI as it is today is cultural exploitation and plagiarism on an unprecedented industrial scale. It’s incredibly unethical on top of being slop.

We were told that games were “art”, and that this new “creative” medium that we grew up with really mattered. Many of us (gamers and gamedevs alike) happily agreed…

But where is the artistry in outsourcing your assets to the big tech slop machine? What is creative about outsourcing your design, code and storytelling to an LLM?

Is it easy? Sure… Quick? Maybe… Cheap? For now, while big tech is happy to prop it up with other people’s money.

But it’s not cool and it’s not “art”. Like every piss filtered Studio Ghibli knockoff, there’s no artistry or creativity in it whatsoever. (They know that too, which is why companies are trying to hide or understate their use of AI.)

I just hope that they aren’t naively expecting people to pay full price, or even at all, for AI slop games.

I’m totally with you on this.

C is a fantastic language for people who want to develop for existing C projects. But there are very few reasons to develop new software projects in C today. As such, for anyone learning C, the best first project would probably be whatever existing C project you want to work on.

Maybe the main exception to that is probably embedded systems stuff for microcontrollers and the like, but I don’t know enough about that space to say whether that is even still the case or whether you’d be better off with something else.

Yeah. I’m not sure why the AI clipart shit has to be everywhere these days. It’s all very low quality shit.

Well… I’d be curious to know how anyone would argue that AI generated code is GPL safe, especially considering they are often using black box, binary blob models trained on mystery code from all over the internet, with zero attribution or license information, and with some of it almost certainly being proprietary.

Are we going to start ignoring the very licenses that we created.

Having tried Cosmic, I’m not totally convinced it’s good enough to be ready for prime time, but that’s pretty subjective. Overall I think it’s good to have another DE in the scene and at the very least Cosmic is a good start.

It’s still happening in some cases. Like Balder’s Gate 3 getting a recent Linux port, for example.

I’m not sure if they really have standing for that.

But even if they did, Microsoft don’t have the guts because cracking down it would be akin to a direct attack on Valve and Steam. And at this point I think we can all agree that Microsoft needs Steam more than Valve needs Windows.