Russ

According to another user in here, blocking on Mastodon actually works. So seems like it is possible to do in the Fediverse.

I was not aware of this, but their implementation of how they do this does bring up the limitation I mentioned. The other user cannot see your posts only if you are on the same server:

If you and the blocked user are on the same server, the blocked user will not be able to view your posts on your profile while logged in.

I actually thought blocks were public already.

They’re not, well - the operator of your instance could go into the database and view it that way in the same way that they can see your email address. But aside from someone who has database access to your instance, blocks are not public. What is public is the list of defederated (“blocked” so to speak) instances for an entire instance (this can be viewed by going to /instances of any instance), which might be what you were thinking of?

And personally I don’t see how it would be an issue if people that I haven’t blocked can see who I’ve blocked.

How exactly would you enforce that, though? If your blocks were public, all the person who you’ve blocked would need to do is open a private browsing window and look at your profile to see that they’ve been blocked.

If we’re looking at blocks as being a safety feature, I would think that having your blocks broadcasted to every single instance would be classified as harmful and a breach of your privacy. This is why although an instance that you register with has to have your email address that you signed up with, they don’t broadcast it to all other instances (same with the encrypted value of your password) - because otherwise it would effectively be public.

Perhaps I’ve just got the wrong stance, but considering that you can never block someone from viewing your content with an absolute guarantee (if the blocks were broadcasted, you still couldn’t prevent someone from just simply logging out, or standing up their own instance and collecting the data anyways) I would not consider that tradeoff to be worthwhile. Not that my stance has any weight since I’m not a maintainer for Lemmy (or any of the Fediverse software), but I wouldn’t be surprised if that has at least come up to those who are developing the various Fediverse software.

Aside from the rest of the discussion that has already occurred here, I’m not actually sure how this would work from a technical perspective.

You and I are on two completely different instances, if I were to block you, how is your instance supposed to know this in order to stop you from reading my comment?

The only way I could see that working is if the list of users you blocked were federated too, and effectively made public (like votes currently are) - which seems counterproductive to the problem at hand.

Then what happens if you post in a community where someone you’ve blocked is a moderator? Or if you block the admin of another instance? If you can “cloak” yourself from being moderated by just blocking them, that seems like an exploit waiting to happen. As far as I’m aware, on Reddit blocking a user doesn’t hide your comments from them - but they can no longer reply to them, and I assume this is why that is the case. Unless that has very recently changed.

The biggest difference between Lemmy (and all software within the Fediverse - for example, I’m pretty sure Mastodon is this way as well), is that there is not one singular authoritative server. Actions like this need to be handled on all instances, and that’s impossible to guarantee. A bad actor running an instance could just rip out the function that handles this, and then it’s moot. I mean, they wouldn’t even need to do that - they’d have the data anyways.

You could enforce it if both users are on the same instance I suppose, but this just seems like it would only land with the blocking feature being even more inconsistent.

I definitely don’t doubt their utility, despite my facetious comment regarding them - however it’s not likely I’ll ever be able to actually appreciate them (in this lifetime at least) due to my struggles with understanding far “simpler” areas of math haha.

I can only speak for myself, but honestly I’ve never been able to figure out that root of why it’s so complex to me and difficult to keep track of / understand. The only thing that seems to have a “rational” explanation to me is… Selective memory. It has been a burning question to myself for so long.

For a while I just said “It’s too arbitrary and not logical” except math is built upon logic - 1 + 1 is clearly 2 because if I hold one finger on one hand then bring another finger from my other hand I have two fingers held.

(Imaginary numbers though can fuck off)

I got into programming long ago because it is logical - there’s (almost) always a reason why a computer does $THING even if I can’t tell you, someone surely can. Though generally the answer is “someone told it to do the wrong thing”. If I dig deep enough, I can usually find the answer. My life is full of so many questions that I’ll probably never have the answer to, and I found refuge in the fact that I can get the answers here.

However… computers follow a set of rules, just like mathematicians do. So for me to call it arbitrary would just be wrong. I mean sure, a lot of the rules and formulas certainly seem arbitrary to me, there’s a reason why they are the way they are and it can be tracked down just like you can track down why a computer does $THING.

When it comes to numbers though, my brain just doesn’t seem to hold on to it properly. I can randomly recall weird functions and quirks in libraries that I use - even remember plenty of arbitrary “things” like Vim motions… Yet ask me what nine times seven is and I can’t tell you what the answer is without doing the weird finger trick.

So the only explanation that I can come up for that is just selective memory. I like computers and as such my brain is willing to actually memorize these things. Whereas I’ve never liked math and so my brain doesn’t see a reason to “memorize math”.

It really frustrates me because math and computer science intersect in a lot of ways, and I’ll always be held back by this. Games for example, they run really well on your GPU because GPUs happen to be excellent at math, specifically in parallel. Encryption? Fancy math equations! Almost everything at a low level comes down to math.

Similarly, for as much as I love logical things, I could never hold the concepts of logic gates in my head. I mean, logic is literally in the name! Even when I was heavily into Minecraft I couldn’t pick it up through Redstone.

As such, I think for me, the “logic” argument doesn’t hold up as much as I like to think it does. The analyst in me says that I want it to be something as logical as “math is illogical” because that’s easier to admit and sounds better than “I just don’t like math”. Even worse, perhaps that subconsciously stops me liking it, thus blocking myself from ever being able to excel at it… And yet, here we are (or rather, “here I am”).

That’s a tough one. While I do think AI can be fun to play around with (though I personally prefer the ones I can run locally), there’s always a sort of “monkey’s paw” element to it. Text generation? Hallucinations. Image generation? All sorts of weird artifacts, and are heavily influenced by the training data (yes of course they all are, but what I mean is, if you pick a model that is heavily inspired by NSFW content for example, then you’re very likely to get NSFW content - sounds “common sense”, but nonetheless).

So I suppose in a world where it’s “perfect” then I’d want it to make some form of media that can make everyone happy. If everyone on the planet were happy, then it’d be a much better place.

Or if we’re talking less altruistic desires, probably a continuation of some TV series that I enjoyed which ended on a cliffhanger.

Hmm, I always have a hard time picking favorites, but I’ve always enjoyed Halestorm! Pretty sure “can u see me in the dark?” has been pinned in the number one spot of my On Repeat playlist on Spotify for a couple of months now… Lzzy’s vocals are fantastic in it!

Also, a couple of years ago Alex Reade joined Make Them Suffer, and I’ve been enjoying their latest album (also called Make Them Suffer), a few of the tracks from that album (Epitaph, Oscillator, Weaponized, and Small Town Syndrome) have also coincidentally been stuck in my On Repeat playlist for a while.

I’m not sure if this counts because it wasn’t intentional on my part, but… When I was a kid, my mom had a digital camera. The lense on it would extend when it was powered on, and then retract when it was powered off.

At some point the lense got stuck, which caused the camera to not turn on properly and made it useless so she ended up getting a new one. I had gone to take the old/broken one to mess around with it and accidentally dropped it.

Apparently the angle that it fell at was just enough to “lodge” the lense back into place yet the fall wasn’t high enough to cause it to shatter or break. It worked perfectly after that, and while my parents were a bit upset they needlessly bought a new camera, they ended up letting me keep the old one.

(Later on I figured that was their way of justifying not returning the new camera that probably had nice new features or something)

I also vaguely remembering them saying something along the lines of “That’s probably the only time in your life dropping a piece of equipment will actually fix it and was just luck - don’t go trying that on other things randomly”.

Isn’t hardware acceleration for GPUs?

Not necessarily, in this case they’re referring to Intel’s QuickSync (Video) - or QSV for short, which is Intel’s way of doing video encoding/decoding on dedicated hardware in the CPU. On the AMD side, there is Video Core Next although I’m not very well versed with the video encode/decode side of things so I’m not sure how it stacks up with QSV.

I can only speak for myself here but… A lot of things are taught in school. Most of them weren’t something that I use everyday and thus have forgotten about it (some more than others, of course).

Ohm’s Law would’ve been taught to me sometime during highschool (as the other commenter mentioned, I can tell you it relates to electricity but without looking it up I couldn’t tell you the actual principle behind it) - I graduated from highschool 10 years ago, and have not had a reason to “flex” that memory ever since then.

This is fantastic, congratulations!

This hit me like a truck. I lost my father at the beginning of the month due to some tragedy that occurred.

We weren’t on speaking terms (a decision I made), but I’d always planned to one day see if I could turn things around, which will never happen now. Never in a million years would I ever have expected it to come down to this.

I’m not the original person you replied to, but I also have a similar setup. I’m using a 6700XT, with both InvokeAI and stable-diffusion-webui-forge setup to run without any issues. While I’m running Arch Linux, I have it setup in Distrobox so its agnostic to the distro I’m running (since I’ve hopped between quite a few distros) - the container is actually an Ubuntu based container.

The only hiccup I ran into is that while ROCm does support this card, you need to set an environmental variable for it to be picked up correctly. At the start of both sd-webui and invokeai’s launch scripts, I just use:

export HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION=10.3.0

In order to set that up, and it works perfectly. This is the link to the distrobox container file I use to get that up and running.

You’re thinking of install-time permissions, which technically does still exist, but pretty much most of the permissions you’d actually care about are runtime (or special) permissions - the application must request these from the user.

There are three main types of permissions on Android:

• Install-time, these are permissions granted to an application upon installation
  • In this group is also signature-level permissions, which are only granted to applications that are signed by the same party as the OS itself (usually your OEM)
• Runtime permissions (also known as “Dangerous permissions” within Android internally), which are permissions that the application must request from the user. The system draws the permissions dialog, not the application itself. Permission can also be granted one-time only, or permanently (unless the user revokes the permission)
• Special permissions, which also need to be requested by the application - except for these the system will not draw a permissions dialog, instead the application must send the user to the “Special App Access” menu within system settings, and the user must turn on the permission there. The best way I can describe these types of permissions is, “permission that the user really must think about before granting” - such as giving an app the ability to bypass DND rules, drawing over other apps, installing APKs from unknown sources, accessing all device files, etc. IIRC, Google also requires that developers provide justification for requesting these permissions when submitting to the Google Play Store as well.

Runtime permissions were introduced in Android 6.0, which was released in 2015, I am not sure when the special permission system was implemented however.

Hate? No, I do not hate Google. I still use a Pixel phone (and photos/assistant on it), my Gmail is still my primary email (I also self-host a few other domains but those are primarily used for automation and a few other one-off things), I subscribe to YouTube Premium, I still utilize my Stadia controller as my primary game controller, I use a Google TV set top box, etc.

I don’t use Search (I use Kagi instead), I don’t use Chrome (Firefox), I don’t really utilize Gemini all that much (I just run ollama for the few times I want to use an LLM).

Really I just use their products that work well for me, and don’t use the ones that don’t. There’s no love/hate about it.

I have a weird one! The smell of one of the hand sanitizer brands (“Germ X”) always brings me back to Kindergarten when we’d all line up for some hand sanitizer before lunch and after recess, then right before going home for the day. Times were so much simpler back then.

I don’t have a lot of “visual” memories left of those times, but the smell of that specific hand sanitizer brand seems like a memory that will never fade for me.

This looks like a fantastic update! Huge thanks to everyone involved!

They have their own hosting plans, but you can also self host it.

Of course! I don’t know if my ramblings will help at all, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to share regardless :)

Yes, unfortunately. It’s something that I’m working on with multiple doctors and practitioners, and so far we’ve gone through some of the usual suspects (Vitamin D levels, checking thyroid function, making sure I wasn’t diabetic - already had my doubts on that one but I’m not the one with the medical degree I suppose…, etc).

My mental health isn’t always the best, so I’m trying to get that worked on as well because bad mental health can cause lethargy and chronic fatigue (it’s a two-way street though, the reverse applies too)… Unfortunately a lot of mental health meds have fatigue as a side effect which doesn’t help my case. It also doesn’t help that I have Crohn’s disease, and any autoimmune/chronic condition in general can also cause chronic fatigue.

I don’t know, I still feel like the root cause of it is an imbalance of something, but that’s my best “gut instinct” guess - I have nothing concrete to base that off of. It feels like all of the things I’m trying are just attempting to “brute force” the issues away, rather than treating whatever is the root cause, but I digress… All I know is, it feels like the game was rigged against me from the start.

Context switching is the reason why. There’s “downtime” where I work at because of the times I work (night time / I believe its called a “graveyard” shift). However, its never nothing for the whole shift, its intermittent. So lets say I decided to play a game (or work on a personal project, or any other number of things) I’d have to get into the mindset of whatever I’m doing, then see that a ticket has come in, switch my mindset back, answer the ticket and perform the work required for the ticket… and then switch back again.

As @toomanypancackes said in their reply, I honestly just either want to go back to bed, or not have to worry about work and do my own thing (uninterrupted). Those aren’t options unfortunately, so I’m just left to be in that weird purgatory of “There’s not a lot of work to be done, but there’s some every so often… so I can’t completely go away”. I prefer it over it being absolutely slammed with tickets because that’s just exhausting.

Every so often I’ll put on a rerun of a show since it doesn’t matter if I “get into” the show or not, but actually doing something significant isn’t usually an option unless its actually dead during my hours.