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Is it possible to have a "free speech" platform that simultaneously stops "hate speech"?
  • This thread alone is showing me how divisive this question is for a lot of reasons. Just the meta-question of "what's the definition of 'free speech' in this context?" on its own makes it a shitshow to answer, let alone the rest of it.

    It says in the name. 'Free', 'speech'. If I can say it, you can't silence it. Anything more restricted is not 'free'.

    If that's what it means to you, then no, "hate speech", whatever it may be, is included by definition. There is no ambiguity. But that's a pretty inflexible answer that doesn't satisfy.

    Well that's a stupid and useless definition of "free speech". Obviously some things that can be spoken aren't 'free speech', because they aren't constructive, they're not good-faith conversational, they are a form of harm, etc."

    Sure. Under that definition, it's totally possible.

    But congratulations, by restricting what 'free speech' is in any way whatsoever, you've invented an implicit judge who rules what is and is not free speech. (And, likely as well, rules what is and is not "hate speech".) That only kicks the can down the road to the question of, "Is this a fair judge?" And now we are back in the shitshow where we began, we just painted the walls a new color.

    "Free speech" as Americans in particular are so worked up about is a nickname given to one of the amendments of their constitution, which is a clause about disallowing the government from punishing anyone for their speech. Any implication of rights relating to speech outside of this context is a gross misunderstanding.

    If that's the definition you're going with, then yes, obviously it's possible, because that's where many of us are at right now and have been at for ages. That makes it a rather nothingburger of an answer because it dodges the implicit question of whether we should uphold "free speech" as a principle outside of this context, whatever that may mean.

    The way I see it, the two answers on the extreme ends are cop-outs that don't actually help anyone, and any answer that exists in the middle just becomes politics. Is it possible to allow "free speech" and simultaneously stop "hate speech"? Yes, with adequate definitions of both. Will any solution that does so be satisfactory to a critical mass of people, randomly selected from all people? Haha no.

  • Save 2 seconds boot time, to spend countless hours tweaking and repairing
  • My shortlist, off the top of my head:

    • Trying to solve screen tearing with Nvidia drivers.
    • Trying to get LightDM to show me my god damned profile photo on login (still have not succeeded)
    • Debugging a problem where my DE fails to come up on login unless I manually hop to TTY7 myself
    • Endlessly forgetting which of the two or three different directories my .desktop files actually live in, and navigating the poorly-documented format for modifying them
    • Fixing apps in my taskbar showing generic Wayland icons
    • Trying to have any consistent success at all with Bluetooth
    • Trying to figure out which fucking audio stack my distro actually uses so I can know for sure whether the magic incantation on StackExchange will fail because it's for the wrong stack or fail because it's the correct stack and the stack is garbage
    • python2 and python3 symlink hell
    • Faffing around with WINE settings

    I thrive in the pain. But yes, there is plenty of pain.

  • For Bluer Skies: Bluesky as a Viable Alternative to X
  • Doesn't necessarily mean it's what users crave, just why they keep coming back for more.

    Yes. And they do come back for more. A lot more. More than "genuine content" ever made them do. It is very much the intended effect, and it is demonstrably working as intended.

    So why is it that when a platform like Bluesky does gangbusters while Mastodon languishes looking to pick up table scraps, people here treat it like a wild mystery?

    The Fediverse is a cure to an addiction very few people actually want cured; at least, based on their actions taken to solve it. That's how addictions work. Even people who recognize the harm and say they want out actively choose to not get out when presented an exit.

    The Fediverse would succeed if it was the only choice. But in a head-to-head competition with a competently-built centralized platform that dabbles in all the trapping features its predecessor did, it's severely outmoded.

  • For Bluer Skies: Bluesky as a Viable Alternative to X
  • and don't say algorithms. the general public constantly laments about how algorithms have ruined everything.

    Right, right. Much the same way the American public complains that fast food has ruined their health and yet 2/3 of the nation is overweight. Or how chain smokers know full well their lungs are fucked six ways to Sunday but they keep reaching for those nicotine hits. It's almost like people say they hate the things they continue to reach for all the time. Funny, that.

    Do I think the Fedi is reasonably within the grasp of understanding for most of the general public? Sure. But do I think anything on the Fedi stands a ghost of a chance in competition against centralized services that cater to the dopamine rush people are already conditioned to expect and continue to reach for even when several of them claim to hate it? Oh fuck no, absolutely not.

  • For Bluer Skies: Bluesky as a Viable Alternative to X
  • In all likelihood that experience will be temporary, in one of two ways. Either Lemmy becomes mainstream enough to enshittify beyond your tolerance, or Lemmy atrophies into obscurity and ceases being a platform with any benefit.

    Which will happen, and on what timescale it will happen? Who knows. But I wager one of those outcomes is inevitable before too long. The "chill, somewhat unknown but appreciably active platform" position is long-term an unstable one.

    Until then, we're all just in time to bask in the warm glow of this little experiment for at least a little while.

  • What was the biggest bullet that you have dodged?
  • Realistically, I'd say my worst in recent memory was nearly getting smoked by a red light runner at some stroad intersection. Only thing that saved me was my own incompetence; I believe I was dicking around on my phone waiting for my turn at the light, and that hesitation delayed me just enough to not get wrecked.

    The one I'm more likely to tell people in a casual conversation is nearly accepting a job as a professional Salesforce consultant.

  • A petition has been created by an Austrian EU rep. to replace Windows with GNU/Linux in all Europe
  • Since installing applications on Linux is usually done through some centralized package manager or app store (Flathub), it almost entirely eliminates this attack vector.

    xz moment.

    Yes, I see that weasel word "almost" in that sentence. I expect it's going to be doing increasingly heavy lifting as Linux becomes a more lucrative target to attack over time.

    Your point generally stands, though. Even if they're fallible, at least someone is vetting it at all somewhere in this pipeline.

  • Switch for Christmas
  • It's basically a power strip:

    but specifically for cables that carry Internet traffic instead of electrical power.

    A more direct analogy would be a telephone switchboard (which is why it is called a "switch"), basically a computerized version of those old-timey operator ladies who used to sit in a room waiting for you to make a phone call, and they'd physically move a plug connected to your phone and plug it directly into the phone line of whoever you were trying to call. That, but for computers trying to talk to one another over network cables instead of making telephone calls.

  • Kids do this for some reason...
  • No homework in detention sounds absolutely fucked.

    There were a couple times in high school I actually asked to go to detention after class, just to do homework. Because I knew it was a quiet, distraction-free space where I could concentrate on a time-sensitive task. Baffled the detention supervisor, she probably wondered if I was having a bad situation at home I was trying to avoid, but no, just wanted to protect myself from myself. And it was very effective every time.

  • What is the smallest city in your country that everyone can still instantly recognise the name of? What is it famous for?
  • It is. But that's not saying much.

    I may have had to keep a few of the waypoints of the trail in my head for, oh, a week or so, just long enough to scribble it on a history test. Then that information was immediately cleared out to make way for whatever other junk we had to temporarily memorize next chapter.

    Only a vague, blurry notion that the Oregon Trail A) existed and B) was a trail to (presumably) somewhere in Oregon remains with me today. Oregon City is certainly not a part of that notion.

    Not to shit on the Oregon Trail or Oregon City in particular, of course. I would be truly baffled to meet anyone that retained, in significant detail, even a tenth of what any grade school history class purportedly taught them.

  • Which lessons have you learned since the release of the DLC?
  • Trying to get quality intermediate resources at scale is a phenomenal waste of time, space, headache, and resources.

    In every machine that allows it, use productivity. In every machine that doesn't that isn't your end product, use speed or efficiency. Only do quality on the last step.

    Skim off the best quality you can make off the top, send everything else into recyclers with quality modules in them. They will upcycle all of the ingredients you need to be able to send them back through your crafting machines, where they'll get a second upcycle opportunity. The law of large numbers will help guarantee that you'll always have the ingredient balance you need to never back up, as long as you have some buffer storage to smooth out the fluctuations.

    This is the conclusion after weeks of trying to design a factory on Fulgora that makes quality everything while wasting little as possible, and finding out that it's just not a competitive strategy against only rolling on the last step. It would maybe work in an ultra late game mega factory that is not space or resource constrained, but until you get access to vast amounts of foundation to build wherever you want on any planet you want, my money says don't bother.