I don’t normally do this, but I see this from time to time, so just so you know:

wary: feeling or showing caution about possible dangers or problems.

leery: cautious or wary due to realistic suspicions

weary: feeling or showing tiredness, especially as a result of excessive exertion or lack of sleep

I’m sorry if this was annoying rather than helpful!

Some tips:

• Unless the code is very small, or your feature is very big, try to put blinders on, and focus only on the code you absolutely need to to get your feature built. Use search tools to comb through the code to find the relevant methods while reading as little surrounding code as possible, tweak those methods to be different, and call that a first draft. If the maintainer wants the code refactored or differently arranged, they can help with that as part of the review process
• Being unable to build sucks, it really does. But if the software is released for your platform, it means someone out there is able to build it. And these days that someone is often an automated build tool that runs per release. See if you can figure out how this tool works. What build steps it uses, what environment it runs in, etc. If you can’t figure that out, try contacting the person who releases the builds
• If the software is in apt (if you’re on a Debian-based system), you can use apt build-dep, apt source, and debuild to try and recreate the native apt build process. These tools will give you the source that built the system package, and its dependencies, and allow you to build a deb yourself out of it. Test the build to make sure it’s working as-is. If it is, and if the software’s dependencies haven’t changed too much, you can even use apt to fetch the old version that’s in the repos, update the code to reflect the upstream release, and then test the build there to see if it still builds. If so, now you have something you can start working off.
• If you aren’t on an apt system, but do have a package manager, I assume there’s an equivalent to the workflow mentioned above
• If your change is subtle enough that you think it’s pretty low-risk, you could just edit the code even though you can’t build it. This might be sufficient for bug-fixes where you just need to check something is greater than zero, or features where you pass a true instead of a false in certain conditions or something. You should probably mention this in your PR / MR / Patch so the reviewer knows to test building it before merging.
• This one is a bit wild, but let’s say you’re on a Mac or Windows machine, and the build instructions only work for Linux. You can just run a virtual machine that’s got Ubuntu or something running on it, and use it as your build environment. These days you can probably be in a simpler situation with Docker or something more lightweight, but as a worst-case scenario, a full virtual machine is there for you if you need it
• And finally, if the tool isn’t a crazy popular or busy tool, it’s possible the maintainer or other people in the community are more approachable than you think. If they are looking for contributions, then getting a willing contributor’s build environment setup is a benefit to the project. Improving their build docs helps not just you, but potential future contributors as well. A project will usually be more helpful towards someone who says “I’m trying to build this feature, but I’m running into trouble” compared to someone saying “why doesn’t your tool do X”. You may need to be a bit patient, they’re probably doing this on volunteer hours, but they might be happy to help you get your stuff sorted out

Good luck out there, and try not to be discouraged!

Canada (or at least Ontario): The Barenaked Ladies.

I recently learned Americans consider them a One Hit Wonder for “One Week”, but I could probably name like 9 hits just based off the radio, I never bought any of their albums or anything.

1. If I had a million dollars
2. Lovers in a dangerous time
3. Pinch me
4. Old apartment
5. Call and answer
6. Brian Wilson (only a live version for some reason)
7. Jane
8. It’s all been done
9. Falling for the first time

Oh wow, it was actually nine! I swear I didn’t go back and edit that, and also that I didn’t look up a list online. There may even be others I forgot. That was just from me trying to remember songs or music videos of theirs!

To be fair, we don’t see like reverse engineered printing. Printing is reverse engineered seeing. If we saw like this post is claiming shrimp see, and blue was blue and green was green and yellow was yellow, we wouldn’t be able to print by mixing three colours. We’d need one pigment per photoreceptor, same as we do now.

Small extra rant:

I read it a while ago, let’s see if I remember…

Hopefully I’ve hidden this behind a spoiler tag properly, but if not, please don’t read this unless you’ve read the books!

I loved the first one. I liked 7/8th of the second one. It was a tricky puzzle, trying to figure out what is real and what isn’t, and what’s truly going on. But I trusted the author because of how much I liked the first one.

Then the ending of the book was terrible and made me angry at the entire second book as a result.

But I read the third anyway, just in case. I didn’t much care for it. It was okay enough to keep reading. But it was very different in tone from the first two, for plot reasons. I dunno, maybe 6 out of 10?

I know I have to read the 4th for sunk cost reasons, but I’m not excited about it…

Nah, I mean, I was around when George Bush was the guy. I didn’t like him, I didn’t feel he was a good leader, or fit for the office. I would try to convince people not to support him or the war(s) in the middle east. But he was not a threat to democracy. Except maybe through The Patriot Act…

There was a lot of things I didn’t agree with that Mitt Romney believes. I think voting him in would have been regressive and bad for gay people, etc, who I care about. I think he is wrong about things. But he’s not a threat to democracy. I belive that he believes the things he claims to believe, and that he believes in his heart that he’s doing the right thing. I just disagree with him.

John McCain seemed like an honorable man. Again, I felt that his priorities and mine didn’t line up, but he was nowhere near a threat to democracy.

The reason this dude is a threat to democracy is because he has openly and repeatedly disregarded voting and the function of government, which is kinda democracy’s whole thing. If the votes don’t count, and the results don’t follow the will of the voters, then it’s not a democratic system. If you systematically choose to make it so some segment of your citizens cannot vote, or their voices are not heard, then it’s not a democratic system.

I agree with OP. If there’s a puzzle in a game that’s clearly some kind of water puzzle, but I can make a boat to solve it in 15 seconds and bypass the obvious intent of the puzzle, maybe I feel a bit clever. But if I can solve every puzzle with effectively the same boat… what’s the point of doing the puzzles? I guess because I wanted puzzles? But on the other hand, if I know I can solve every puzzle with a 15 second boat, it feels kinda weird to pretend I don’t have an answer and struggle through anyway. Like, the victory is hollow when I know I could have solved it faster the dumb way.

The number of times in that game I thought “oh, maybe I have to jump up through the floor here to get through this door” and then I peeked through the floor and was like “oh, nope. It’s the damn final boss room again. Not supposed to be here yet, better go back through the floor and try another way to open this door” felt like I was babysitting the game so as to not entirely ruin the experience… and it kinda ruined the experience…

Okay, I trust that you’ll all respect that I’m entering a Judgment Free Zone.

There was a period in my life where I would buy grocery store potato salad and use it as a dip for Cool Ranch Doritos, and it was actually pretty good!

I don’t do that anymore, but all I can say is that it’s possible. Thank you for respecting my experiences.

Well… That’s actually probably fair as stated.

BestBuy etc don’t sell Apple’s products on commission, they bought them from Apple for a wholesale price, they’ve got them in a warehouse and on shelves right now on their dime, and the only way they make that money back is by selling them.

And the only way Apple makes money from a product being sold at Best Buy is that Best Buy will likely buy more stock to replace the stuff they sold, and they’ll buy that from Apple.

So if it was banned everywhere it would be unfair to the retailers that already paid Apple for a product they now can’t recoup, and it wouldn’t impact Apple at all because they already made their money from Best Buy.

This way the retailers can get their money back, but can’t get any more, which means only Apple is impacted.

The only other way that’s semi-fair (but would be extreme) would be for Apple to be forced to do a recall or something and reimburse all the retailers the money they had already spent. Doable, and definitely more of a punishment for Apple, but a lot of extra work for everyone if the outcome of this is that Apple settles and then everyone can just go back to ordering more again.

100% you can do it with some good instructional content and a smidge of patience!

A standard lock is disturbingly easy to pick… We used to run a booth at a maker event where we taught members of the public passing by including, like, 5 year olds to pick padlocks.

Unrelated, but BTW there are some jurisdictions if I’m not mistaken where having lock picking tools found on you is considered “criminal intent” or something, but on the other hand if you’re already at the point where your bag is being searched you may already be boned…

I’ve never been a Twitter/microblog user, but here’s how I gather it worked, presented in the order in which it was developed.

Do you ever think “oh, that’s a funny/interesting thought I had”, but there’s no one around to tell? Or not enough people and you think it had more potential than that? Microblog. Unlike a forum, you just dump in out into the void as-is. It’s a broadcast. Like if every account was a personal /r/showerthoughts.

From there we make it so I can subscribe to my friends. Now when they post their funny thoughts, or even just being like “I feel like tacos tonight, anyone in SF down?” I’ll get their post. Now it’s kinda like open group texting. Except I don’t choose who sees my random thoughts, they self-select. I just broadcast things out there and whoever might be interested might be interested.

That was basically all that microblogs were, at the beginning. A stream of non-topic’d stuff I said, and you can follow me if you want to hear more like it.

But sometimes I’m surrounded by strangers, like at a conference. At these points I want to know what random people I don’t follow are all saying about FooCamp. Search already exists so I can see all tweets with the word “cat” in it, but I can’t find a way to fit FooCamp organically into every post, so hashtags get invented as a social convention to say “that was my message, but here are some other keywords for search purposes”. Later they got linkified and so people started putting them inline, but originally they were just at the end and just for extra categorization.

So now the tool does two things. I can just broadcast out any thought I have without having to care about where to put it, etc. It all goes on my feed and anyone who has chosen to care about me will see it. And I choose who I care to receive broadcasts from because they’re cool, and it doesn’t matter what they’re talking about. But also I can tag a particular message with some categories, and that will allow strangers to see my messages if they happen to be looking for messages in that category, but obviously a single message can be in multiple categories.

Then later famous people and governments showed up, and people followed them because they love go hear what famous people talk about. But if you don’t follow them, then you don’t hear from them.

That’s basically it! So it’s kinda like the opposite of a reddit/lemmy/forum/usenet model. Rather than topics that have content posted by people, it’s people who post content that sometimes has a topic. Like a large group-chat (among friends or colleagues) where you’re not really sure who is in the chat, but you don’t have to care. You can prefer one over the other (I know I do), but fundamentally they’re not trying to solve the same problem as lemmy, they’re just a totally different model for communication. More like a friend group than a discussion group.

Yes, I do have a soft spot for Netscape Navigator. It will always be my first…

I used to use Firefox before Chrome came out, because it was better than IE. When Chrome came out it was a breath of fresh air. A real third option! (konqueror didn’t really count). And it was faster, cleaner, lighter than Firefox. Just better at everything. So I installed it on all of my family’s computers, which they allowed me to do because IE by then was so bad it was an obvious improvement even for the layman.

Then in the intervening years Firefox dwindled to basically no market share and IE died, so now Chrome isn’t a third option, it’s the only option. And so I switched back to Firefox basically as a political sacrifice, but there’s no way I’m going to be able to convince any of my family to switch because Firefox isn’t better for them in any perceivable way. It’s just different and they don’t care. If Firefox had 30% market share I’d almost definitely be using Chromium still myself.

So probably that, but a million times. There was a period where every nerd moved all their associated people to Chrome because it was new, great, and non-dominant. It was hip and indie. And now they’re still there and there’s no reason for them to move that they care about.

Ok, let me rephrase your rephrase to be what question I think you’re trying to ask.

At some point we had decided on a seven day week with week names. That’s fine. But we must also have decided at some point that today was Wednesday in this system.

So I think you’re asking “what is the first day we all agree was definitely a Sunday, such that all Sundays after were based on that”. Or put another way, at what point did the days of the week get locked to the days of our year.

I don’t have that answer, but your question confused me, so I’ve reworded it.

I don’t know the answer to the title, so I’ll answer the body. The answer is “it depends”.

If you’re talking to someone in a technical setting, then servers are the physical machines. The computers themselves, sitting in a room somewhere. Or maybe a virtual server that pretends to be a physical machine, but runs on a real server that sits in a room somewhere. Whereas a website is some location you can put into a web browser and get content that “feels” like it’s all one thing.

The reason this distinction matters is because you can host multiple small websites on a single server. For example there’s no reason a particular machine couldn’t host 10 different lemmy instances, if it’s got enough processing power.

But on the other hand a popular website may have its work spread across multiple servers. Maybe I’ve got a database server, which is a machine that only runs the database. And then maybe I have a few different web servers that actually serve “the webpage”, but I’ve also got a cache server that stores part of the webpage and serves that when it can, etc. Websites like Facebook or Twitter are considered one website but have thousands and thousands of servers.

But if you’re talking to someone in a non-technical setting, yeah they’re basically the same.

I have two criticisms of this view.

The first is the distinction between “replacing humans” and “making humans more productive”. I feel like there’s a misunderstanding on why companies hire people. I don’t hire 15 people to do one job because 15 is a magic number of people I have to hit. I hire 15 people because 14 people weren’t keeping up and it was worth more to my business to hire another expensive human to get more work done. So if suddenly 5 people could do the work of 15, because people became 3x more efficient, I’d probably fire 10 people. I no longer need them, because these 5 get the job done. I made the humans more effective, but given that humans are a replacement for humans, I now don’t need as many of those because I’ve replaced them with superhumans instead.

If I’m lucky as a company I could possibly keep the same number of people and do 3x as much business overall, but this assumes all parts of my business, or at least the core part, increases at the same time. If my accounting department becomes 3x as efficient but I still have the same amount of work for them to do because accounting isn’t the purpose of my business, then I’m probably going to let go some accountants because they’re all sitting around idle most of the time.

It used to be that a gang of 20 people would dig up a hold in the road, but now it’s one dude with an excavator.

The second thing is the assumption that AI art is being evaluated as art. We have this notion in our culture that artists all produce only the best novels and screenplays, and all art hangs in a gallery and people look at it and think about what the artist could have meant by this expression, etc. But that’s virtually no one in the grand scheme of things. The fact that most people know the names of a handful of “the most famous artists of all time”, and it’s like 30 people on the whole earth and some of them are dead should mean something.

Most writers write stuff like the text on an ad in a fishing magazine. Or fully internal corporate documents that are only seen by employees of that one company. Most visual artists draw icons for apps that never launch. Or the swoopy background for an article. Or did the book jacket for a book that sells 8 copies at a local tradeshow. If there’s a commercial for chips, someone had to write it, someone had to direct it, someone had to storyboard it. And no one put it in a museum and pondered its expression of the human experience. Some people make their whole living on those terrible stock photographs of a diverse set of people all laughing and putting their hands into the middle to show they’re a team.

Even if every artist with a name that anyone knows is unaffected by this, that can still represent a massive loss of work for basically all creative professionals.

You touched on some of these things but I think glossed over them too much. AI art may not replace “Art”, but virtually no one makes money from “Art”, and so it doesn’t have to replace it for people to have no job left.

If you’re talking about a community instance that strangers can join, it’s mostly about volunteering and feeling like you’re contributing to something.

If you’re talking about running one for you alone, or you and friends or family, then it’s mostly about controlling your experience. You control when there are updates, you control what version you run, you know who has your data, it’s you. You know no one’s doing anything bad with it, because it’s you. If there’s something bugging you and someone else wrote a patch to fix it, you can deploy that. Or if there’s some setting to enable or disable a feature for the whole instance, you can set it to your preference.

The cons are that it’s you. If it goes down because something broke or got corrupted, it doesn’t come back later on its own. You do it. If your database poops the bed and eats all your data, then did you have backups? Were they kept on a different disk than the corrupted one? Because if not then your data is now gone. A new version came out! When does the upgrade happen? When you make time to do it. Maybe there’s manual migration steps you need to do, maybe you need to change some new settings, you should probably make a backup in case you have to roll back… How did you know there was a new version out? How do you know if there’s some critical bug or security flaw you need to fix? You have to subscribe to the community, essentially.

Maybe you subscribe to a lot of busy photo communities and then one day lemmy is down for you. Weird… the box won’t turn on. Oh, the disk is at 100%. Shit, did you not have a monitor that checks disk usage and emails you when it’s getting full? Oops…

Also, while we’re at it, there are some individuals who are friendly and flexible and could probably make a relationship work with many people. And some people are stubborn grouches that couldn’t even mesh with themselves if there was an exact copy.