I think that’s a very strong argument and a great metaphor, but you forget relativity.

All reference frames are valid - you could say the Earth and the people are moving and the train is stationary, you could say the train is moving and the earth and people are stationary, or you could say they each have a vector moving around the sun or anything else

But when you travel through a portal, the only valid reference frames are you and the entry portal. Your momentum relative to the Earth doesn’t matter - why would it? You can open a portal to the moon and jump through, and we see momentum is preserved. The Earth isn’t a special reference frame, it’s just the most noticeable one.

So let’s pick the reference frame of someone on the track. Let’s look through the portal and say there’s a sign on the other side - as it approaches, you’d see a sign approaching you through the portal. Relative to you, through the portal the sign is moving at 30mph. The portal passes over you - you haven’t moved, but you enter a new reference frame, a frame in which the Earth and everything on it is moving at 30mph

This actually gets me thinking… Is anyone actually working on an aids vaccine? Maybe mRNA could do something there, theoretically it should be able to grant pretty much any type of immunity you can have naturally

Have you ever had coca tea? It’s amazing - way better than caffeine. It’s more gentle, but stronger - like it gives you more energy, but you don’t get a hard crash, it’s less likely to make it hard to sleep, plus it has all sorts of health benefits - being able to adjust to high altitude for one

Cocaine probably shouldn’t be sold at the drug stores, but it would be amazing if we treated it like caffeine - you need a license to buy it, but you can get the leaves or products made for it

Plus we could make a path to legitimize cartels and stop getting people killed over the the war on drugs, which would be nice

Not a feat of engineering, a feat of marketing

Oh, the global economy is going to break regardless. China is physically and economically collapsing right now, and it’s going to have huge knock-on effects

Meanwhile, we still don’t even have a consensus that long COVID is a thing. I definitely feel slightly foggier long after the fact, it seems to me that it might be less about COVID doing something special - maybe all illnesses chip away at long-term health, and COVID put a lot of people in a state much worse than the flu and got us thinking about it.

Or maybe COVID has unique mechanisms, but it seems to me there’s an assumption - why do we assume that once we recover, we get all the way better? If anything, I think it might be the opposite - there’s plenty of people in my life who never felt the same after getting an illness, but no one talks about it in a unified enough way to give it a name

They didn’t sell it at auction, they sold it at an auction for charity. Entirely different

Which is really strange to me, I mean we’ve got early adopters and lots of technical people. It seems like science should be big here

I think it’s a combination of less presence/engagement in niche content, sorting methods not quite being there, and not enough discovery without going out of band to find things

One thing I really miss is the science groups, askscience always had great debate that I haven’t yet found here

Because immunity varies by disease.

Chicken pox? Pretty much one and done. COVID? Falls off rapidly after 3 months, whether you catch it or get the vaccine

Plus, every mutation is a dice roll on how much existing immunity will apply. It could be exactly the same as the last strain, or the old immunity might not help at all

After tech Jesus posted that, a former employee came out about all sorts of stuff about the work environment were pretty horrible

Yeah, except they federate. They keep lists about who they federate, defederate, and know of in machine readable format

So what’s going on is the adversaries continuously hitting the lemmy.world server. On its own, a DDOS like that would be manageable - they’re much more defeatable these days

But they found request paths that run expensive db functions, giving them enough bang for their buck to make an impact, even tucked behind cloudflare.

As for mitigation, cloudflare and a larger server help, but ultimately lemmy needs some refactoring - right now it’s very liberal with the database calls. It needs to divide those up and get more granular with API calls, look at what can be optimized on the DB side, maybe do some caching/memoization… Basically, it needs to become a more mature piece of software in a hurry

Going further, there’s things like horizontal scaling - there’s even thoughts of how we could leverage the nature of the fediverse to share the load through federation.

I’m a dev, I don’t know much about administration so I’m not sure how you could help, but there’s plenty of work to go around. I think a database expert would be the most useful right now.

There’s messing with configs to tune everything for better performance - that’s out of my expertise, but I’m under the impression that there’s some significant gains to be had there

If it’s in your wheelhouse, you could look at different technologies that might give better performance - the current stack seems like it was chosen mostly with ease of development in mind, if you could make a strong argument for changing some of it out it might get traction.

As far as cyber security in general, if you want to get started - step 1 is basically locking things down, and then setting up monitoring tools and getting experience with them. Basically reading logs taken to the next level. I’m pretty sure they have that handled here, but this problem will never go away

That’s how she goes. Things get worse bit by bit, then all at once

It’s how systems fail

On one hand yeah, I’d look at us pretty dimly from the outside

On the other, we’ve been kinda fucked. Our mental health is in the gutter, we’re unable to make connections the way every other generation could, we’re missing all these milestones like buying a house and having kids and older generations keep telling us it’s our fault.

Even as far as voting, we’ve been fucked. Previous generations had a choice - we get an ultimatum

They just keep gaslighting us.

We don’t have the money, we don’t have the power, but we do have the numbers and as a group we’re not ok… Frankly, there’s no way this ends well. It’s hard to comprehend how the powers that be haven’t realized that and thrown us a bone now and again

Huh… I’m a huge proponent of brushing your tongue (it doesn’t take much, just a brush with a scraper on the back makes a big difference). I’ve never really tried washcloths, but now I’m going to give them a shot

On the flip side, my skin is weird. I get hives for literally no reason, I tried one of those plastic poofs and it makes me itch like crazy.

🤞

IDK if you can convince it to run on Linux, but I’ve been pretty happy with paint.net lately

It’s basically a newer project like gimp. It’s got the core abilities and appearance of Photoshop. Feature wise, it’s less than gimp or Photoshop, but what it has works decently well

Most importantly for me, the UX is much better than gimp… Not as good as Photoshop, but I find stuff is usually where I’d expect it to be

Obviously it’s built on .net, so theoretically it could run native on Linux… Not sure if anyone has done the work to make that actually happen

Biden was old in 2020, he was old in 2016 too. So was Trump.

Nominating younger options would be great… Except we have 2 parties who have special rights and few restrictions - they can straight up throw out nominations if they want, and they’ve convinced the public at large that 3rd parties aren’t an option

We need ranked choice voting desperately.

Personally, I also think all votes should be write-in. If you don’t know which office they’re running for and can’t spell your candidates name correctly, you haven’t met a very low bar of education on the topic. Maybe your vote shouldn’t count

More than that - it would strain the nascent communities

Already we’ve started to see it with defederation - admins don’t truly grasp the level of seriousness it represents, and are using it as a mod tool. It’s one thing to use it against bots and malicious nodes, it’s another to use it like a ban hammer

Plus, if you go on different servers, the experience is like a different site. Sh.itjust.works feels like shitpost central (not a criticism), lemmy.world feels like Reddit from a decade ago, lemmynsfw.com feels like a porn site built for tens of thousands and used by dozens.

I think it’s great - half the draw of the fediverse is finding a new home, soon I’m going to start trying out some small servers and hopefully get to know some people alongside my accounts replacing the endless posts of Reddit (but with better quality IMO)

If a big wave comes all at once, it’ll change the culture overnight. Small servers might close registration to preserve what they have, bigger ones might grow into it, but it also might be enough people to give the entire fediverse the feel of Reddit refugees

Once the culture becomes more stable, we’re more likely to teach them the Lemmy way rather than rebuilding Reddit… It’ll change no matter what as it grows, but the more gradual and organic the growth the healthier the community

I have an interesting protocol for this.

Moonlight rituals. The idea is, you get a bunch of people together, say 20-50, in the same place at the same time. Everyone opens an app, and it takes control of the screens and gives semi-random actions - like hold up your phone to the user to the left of you, get everyone in a circle with phone screens on your chest and walk forward, enter the middle of the circle and slowly spin around, hold it up to take a picture of the moon…

The idea is, you constantly change the screen, take synchronized pictures, record audio, get flickers in gps signals, record fluctuations in the magnomiter.

The idea is to synchronize everything with millisecond precision, randomly take snapshots both across the group and between groups, and use all this to corroborate the fact that there was one user per phone present at this point in space and time. By using reality to generate enormously complex data sets, you can make it arbitrarily difficult to simulate, and doing it in real time could use cheap hardware and require processing orders of magnitude faster to spoof.

Doesn’t matter how much processing you throw at it - a system like this would theoretically be able to measure gravity waves and stellar radiation - no way you to measure that and adjust your data before you time out the recording window

On top of nodes doing all this, you’d build a web of trust with random nodes spot-checking each other.

It’s crazy and impractical, but I love the idea just because it’s turning technology to magic - making group rituals to authenticate is just such a fun concept to me

My big thought is this: one bot-infested instance could get anyone up to infinite “karma”. So, direct “karma” doesn’t work.

Now, you could do some simple stats, and be like “how many lemming’s worth of karma do you have, taking an instance’s active population divided by your share of ‘karma’”.

IDK - I like stupid internet points. I never cared how much other people had of them, but it’s fun to watch mine go up. It’s gamification in the most pure state - quantifying something to make it more pleasurable

I think it’s best they remain pointless, and someone’s ‘karma’ only appear when you click on their profile… but it’d be a shame if there was no way to earn them. Even if you received a total per-server, it’s just fun