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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Sometimes people will say “That person’s name!” or “Those group of people!” in anger. “That Donald Trump! How dare he claim immigrants are eating pets?” to give you a current example.

    When spoken of a family member or mutual acquaintance with a chuckle, it means more like “That person has some strange quirk but what can you do? We still love him.”

    For example, you might hear “That dog! Always chasing his own tail.” So I think this is likely what you were getting from that conversation? It’s certainly not a criticism of your use of the word “people”.




  • Yeah. My wife is always wanting to go on a cruise and I’m having none of it.

    One thing I will add regarding the nature of this curse is that it only manifests when I am the sole occupant of the bedroom. For example, I used to share a bedroom with my older sister, but within a week of her moving out and rejoicing at having the whole place to myself, the ceiling opened up.

    So I suppose I would be safe on the ship as long as my wife is there with me? In our current home, she was my sole protection, but has recently taken to sleeping on the basement cot due to hot flashes. This leaves me staring nervously at the ceiling. It’s now or never, curse!










  • You raise a good point that it would be nice to have more control over which group of communities you are drawing from at a given time. (Is there a way to group subscriptions and switch between them?) It’s a bit disconcerting to see 5 tech headlines and then suddenly something about the war in Ukraine or whatever. It jars my train of thought. With an RSS client, you can group feeds however you want.

    That said, my experience with RSS readers is not quite so idyllic. In the end, rather than having nicely partitioned feed groups by topic, I wind up having to separate the ones that produce content frequently but with a poor signal-to-noise from those that post once in awhile but are generally worth your time. With something like lemmy, people are helping you do the work of finding the more interesting content from that site that posts every 10 minutes.



  • Anyways, did I miss anything?

    I think the big problem in link aggregation is how to sort/prioritize content for the end user. RSS does not provide a way to do this, nor should it as far as I’m concerned. It should simply be about public content being tagged in a standardized way for any app to come along and organize it using whatever algorithm.

    A simple RSS reader has the problem that the more prolific sites will tend to flood your feed and make it tedious to scroll through miles of links. Commercial news portals try to learn your tastes through some sort of machine learning algorithm and direct content accordingly. This sounds like a good idea in theory, but tends to build echo chambers around people that reinforce their biases, and that hasn’t done a lot of good for the world to put it mildly.

    The lemmy approach is to use one of a number of sorting algorithms built atop a crowd-sourced voting model. It may not be perfect, but I prefer it to being psychoanalyzed by an AI.

    Btw there was a post from about a month ago where someone was offering to make any RSS feed into a community. I’ve subscribed to a few of them and it’s actually pretty awesome.


  • Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if they made a version that just stays in one age indefinitely and lets you explore it in an open world sort of way?

    Like take Minecraft. I played that for years without even knowing there is an end game, and it came as something of a shock when someone told me. You can finish Minecraft?!?

    But then I was like meh, leave me alone. I’m trying to build Noah’s Ark with a functioning village on top and a crystal waterfall down to the animal sanctuary below. And I still haven’t completed the Mars colony. Wonder how the pandas are doing over there?


  • I’m a musician. I can’t afford top tier sound!

    Tbh I can live with what I’ve got at home. A garden variety setup today still sounds better than something high-end did when I was growing up. Just give me some decent channel separation and I can zone out.

    Where there is still significant room for improvement is in stage sound. Why do monitors always have to sound like sh*t? It’s like bands spend all their budget on amps and PAs and whatever dregs are left over go to the monitors. And house sound. Don’t even get me started. Maybe their gear was good once (probably not) but it’s invariably seen one beer spill too many.