Captain Aggravated

I wonder how much of that has to do wtih chromebooks.

Another woodworker:

Huge +1 for a bench plane and a shooting board. Even in a mainly power tool shop, you can make things much more precisely square or mitered if you shoot them.

For marking cuts, use a knife not a pencil. When you use a pencil to mark your cuts, you limit yourself to guiding your tools with only your vision, not unlike a Tesla. When you score the line with a knife, you create a reference surface (one of the two sides of the cut, hopefully the one against your square) that has no thickness, and you can feel when a knife or chisel clicks against that surface. For saw cuts, you can use a chisel to pare away a little bit from the waste side to form a knife wall, which forms a little ramp that will guide a saw against your reference surface.

Wax literally everything. Wax your work surfaces, tablesaw top, jointer beds, planer bed, fences, plane soles, bikini lines, saw plates, screw threads…wax literally everything.

Learn how to do most common operations by hand. Square some rough lumber by hand with a bench plane. Chop a mortise with a chisel. Cut a tenon with a backsaw. Make dovetails by hand. Even if you’re a power tool woodworker and you’ve got a jointer and a thickness planer and a table saw and a rapidly growing number of routers, knowing how to do things by hand will help you understand just what it is you’re doing.

Do not suffer a dull tool to live. If your tool is getting dull, sharpen it. Sharpening is kinda personal, I think if cilantro tastes like soap to you you’ll prefer oilstones, if you have that tendon in your wrist you’ll like waterstones, if you can roll your tongue you’ll prefer diamond plates and if you have more money than god you’ll buy a Tormach. They’ll all sharpen a blade. Find the system you like and use it. If your tool is dull, sharpen it. Put it away sharp, don’t put it away dull.

Use your ears. You can tell a lot about what’s going on with a tool by listening to it.

Vine only lasted like 6 seconds.

It can, but is it likely to? To get my passwords, you’d need my KeePass database itself, which is only stored on computers I own. To unlock my password database, you need my password, which I have not stored digitally anywhere, and you’d need to have the keyfile. Oh which of the hundreds of thousands of files on my system is the keyfile?

So you’ve gotten my password database open. Critical things like my lynchpin email address and banking accounts just aren’t in there. Those I memorize only. All of the “This would be bad if this got compromised” accounts have 2-factor authentication.

Compared to breaking into a retailer or bank’s servers and getting hundreds of thousands if not millions of credentials, that’s a lot of effort to get one guy’s Lemmy account deets.

There’s a couple youtubers that mirror their content on PeerTube. The Giddy Stitcher for example uploads to Makertube.net

Ah the “We didn’t build a better world for our children for the benefit of the goddamn kids” attitude. My country is currently dying of that.

No, it drives duplicated effort on the basics, asterisks in compatibility and confusion among new adopters. We’re not innovating here; we’re talking about three parallel Reddit clones.

There’s a #10 for you: A lot of the commercial sites were new and exciting because they let you interact in ways you couldn’t before. Facebook facilitated interactions with people you knew in person, Twitter let you briefly shout at everyone in the world, Youtube became your own personal television show, Tiktok destroyed attention spans…every single Fediverse platform is a clone of one of those (plus Pixelfed is Instagram, whatever Instagram is for). To my knowledge there is no ActivityPub-based project that has a unique or innovative concept behind it, just store brand copies of pre-existing ones.

Or I would have had hoops to jump through to get the lemmy.world link where that comment is (nominally) hosted. There’s a chainlink icon and a technicolor pentagram icon, neither of those do it. I either have to manually go to lemmy.world’s website, find the comment there, copy the link from there, come back to my account at sh.itjust.works and post it, or I post a sh.itjust.works link and send everyone on an indirect path. It’s…not good.

I keep saying that the choice should be meaningful; like I had no trouble picking the Peertube instance I should join because my content would fit their theme.

I’ve picked on Pixelfed’s join page in detail before at length. I think you’d be on board with my suggestions.

“To use your new iPhone, create an iCloud account.”

Gmail advertised superior features before also becoming required for using an Android device.

sure, any service gets you sneding and receiving email, but most people these days end up with an email address as a consequence of some other decision they’ve made.

There are going to be layers to this.

1. There are lots of people who are just downright too stupid. They wouldn’t be on the internet at all if Tim Apple didn’t put it in a baby baba for them to suck it out of. They use Facebook because their iPhone came with the Facebook app pre-installed.

2. There are lots of people for whom popularity is the only thing that exists. Their brain cannot function beyond “Everyone uses Twitter.” They’ll adopt this platform only after everyone else in the world does.

3. There are lots of people who have bought the propaganda. The dark web is for drug traffickers and hitmen, torrenting is for pirates, end-to-end encryption is for traitors, and Mastodon is for Linux neckbeards. You shouldn’t associate with those people.

4. There’s this weird trend where the commercial platforms are becoming hives for conservatives, so they’re probably going to stay put in their echo chambers. I have observed little to no presence of actual conservatives on this platform; beyond the horseshoe effect with the tankie crowd.

5. The culture of content consumption is not supported by the Fediverse. We don’t do algorithmic slop troughs here, and the amount of content on Peertube and Loops rounds down to zero, so it doesn’t fulfill the role of mesmerizing colors and sounds for staring at and drooling like Tiktok does or linear television did.

6. Open source software is usually a bit shit. Be it lack of budget, opinionated developers, redundant projects…we can never have one of something. Why does Lemmy, Mbin and Piefed exist simultaneously? We always end up with software that mostly works, has a lot less graphical polish, a shitty project name, a few missing key features and a couple workarounds you just have to know about. Or an intentionally godawful UI. That’ll put people off.

7. A few people who show up are going to be put off by the weirdest decision they’ll be asked to make this month: “Choose an instance, your choice doesn’t matter, just pick one.” If it doesn’t matter, why make me pick? I bet if you watched 100 people try to sign up for a Fediverse platform, at least 30 of them will balk at that stage. I’ve sat and stared at that for awhile myself and I’m one of the ones who made it through.

8. They just haven’t heard of us. Ask ten people you know in real life if they’ve heard of Lemmy, or Mastodon, or Pixelfed. I bet they haven’t, or if they have they let it pass in one ear and out the other out of apathy.

9. A few people have looked at the Fediverse, didn’t see what they wanted here, and left. If you play Satisfactory, for example, you’ll find an active subreddit where the majority of the player base and the developers of the game interact, on Lemmy you’ll find one community where exactly one person posts “daily screenshots until I get bored.” It’s easy to wander off, especially if you don’t like left wing politics, Linux and the Fediverse itself.

Lemmy, and I guess mbin and piefed, seem to be their own little island. I’ve used a Pixelfed account to comment on a Peertube video, I tried that from my Lemmy account and it threw an error. That “ActivityPub services even of different formats can interact with each other” thing seems to break down with the Reddit clones. I genuinely can’t tell if I’ve never interacted with an Mbin instance or if they just look exactly like Lemmy from a Lemmy account.

People still use Lemmy exactly like they use Reddit, they fill it with screenshots of or links to other platforms. If there is direct interoperability with Pixelfed or Peertube or Mastodon, no one seems to know how to use it. I’ve heard but not played with Kbin/Mbin’s microblogging capability, so your mbin account is kind of also a Mastodon account in a way your Lemmy account isn’t?

Hell, commenting on that Peertube video from Pixelfed was done ass-first. Go to a Peertube instance’s website not logged into an account there, choose a video, then under that video click in the comment field, a pop-up appears that asks you to sign in or “remote interact” in which you input your [email protected] name, which opens a separate window for you to log into that account on that instance, where you are then given a form to write the comment. It doesn’t feel like a design feature, it feels like a thing that is technically possible.

I have seen this conversation play out a lot:

“We need to do [something] if we want the Fediverse to grow!” “Who says we want the Fediverse to grow?”

There are those who are perfectly fine with this being their little corner of the internet, somewhere they can personally escape to, and there are those who think they’re leading a revolution, overthrowing the oligarchs and creating a new paradigm for the world where we run on solar power and eat vegetables and other “better for you” wholesomeness.

As you say, it’s working fine right now while servers and their admins and moderators can handle the relatively small load. Just the legitimate traffic of Reddit would collapse the infrastructure pretty quickly.

A day or two ago I saw someone in a thread about “What actually stops the Fediverse from going the way of Reddit” acting actually offended at the idea that hosting your own instance would require owning server hardware or paying to rent one.

If the goal is to replace commercial social media with federated systems…where’s the funding going to come from?

The Apollo moon landings have been faked dozens if not hundreds of times and only done for real 6 times.

I might be the only American to have applied for a light sport flight instructor certificate on physical paper, and I believe I caused an update to the IACRA system.

For those unaware, IACRA is the system for applying for airman certificates online. Instead of mailing a paper 8710 to Washington you fill it out on one of the US government’s many shitass fuckchild web 0.8 websites. The FAA isn’t as bad as the FCC on that front but shew buddy.

I was applying for a light sport flight instructor certificate. One of the prerequisites for this is a credential in the Fundamentals of Instruction. Per the FARs, this can be:

• A passing score on an FAA FoI knowledge test (70 or better) within the last 24 months
• Holder of at least a Basic Ground Instructor certificate
• A state issued teacher’s certificate for grade 7 or higher, or
• A job as a college professor

I had taken and passed the FoI test, but the 24 month mark was rapidly approaching before I could arrange the practical test, so I took the BGI test (which is another knowledge test) flew to the FSDO in Greensboro, filled out a form, and one clammy government handshake later I was a ground instructor. Ground instructor certificates don’t expire so that effectively eliminated the time constraint on the FoI test result.

Checkride time approached, it was time to fill out the 8710…IACRA had no way of accepting a BGI certificate number as the FoI prerequisite. It was designed to only accept a LaserGrade test result, there wasn’t a way to use the other legal prerequisite types. So I had to print out a physical 8710 and mail it to Washington. Last I heard of the matter, my DPE let me know she had contacted somebody at the FAA about the matter, so teachers, professors and ground instructors should be able to correctly apply for a flight instructor certificate now.

How?

It is difficult to find conversations on the Fediverse that don’t boil down to “America bad” “Linux good” “is the Fediverse growing?” and if that trend keeps up for terribly much longer people will stop logging in because they’ve experienced all the platform has to offer. Even people who hate America and love Linux are going to wander off if you don’t show them enough cat pictures.

Threads like “ask a question and my guinea pig will type the answer” are way too rare here.

The groom sneezed during the first dance with the bride.

I’ve been to relatively few weddings and they’ve all worked out pretty well I suppose.

Like many things about my cat’s past, I have no idea why she’s called Izzy. I didn’t name her and the person who did has passed away.

And don’t you forget it.