Being out in the open when debris is flying increases your risk though.

I heard that early childhood (first weeks, months, maybe years) are vital for development of emotional intelligence. Neglect could lead to life-long struggles. So I’m happy to hear you favor the idea to stay and care. Good for you, you both, and all of us.

Offering a slight damper / correction:

This is about two things (design and ownership), which are correlated, but not identical.

Malicious design can be things like:

• Algorithms to keep people engaged
• UIs to confuse users (luring them to purchases, or making ‘cancel’ hard to access)
• Using intermediate currencies to make it harder to assert value
• …

Obviously, these patterns and practices can also be applied to a FOSS instance you own. There is less incentive to do so if the profit motive is removed - which makes a huge difference.

These design patterns are fundamentally about making user numbers go up. Attract more users, keep them on your platform longer, make them leave less. And a portion of user guidance mixed in. None of that is inherently evil, to some degree even desireable, and to some extent unavoidable to offer a functional service.

Some users may expect a feed like lemmy to browse indefinitely, since they find it inconvenient to have to click to go to the ‘next page’. And because they got used to this feature elsewhere. Others already see this as a dark pattern.

I just wanted to highlight how some of the malicious stuff may still be present in the fediverse, without any company involved. Here, we’re kind of in charge on both sides: Each is responsible for their own user agency (like controlling your online hours, or what sites you visit), and collectively to decide what user experience we want to shape (which might include controverse patterns).

I spent way too many words on this. Mostly I agree with you! And overall, users will encounter far less malicious patterns on FOSS.

[Edit: Formatting]

Same here. My max is about 5.5’’ and 160g. Otherwise I feel it’s too hard to carry and handle, or even just hold. I also want to be able to reach the opposing screen corner with my thumb.

Weigh on Earth or on Moon?

Glorious.

Makes me happy to hear this important feature is about to become reality! <3

Hehe, good point.

people need to read more code, play around with it, break it and fix it to become better programmers.

I think AI bots can help with that. It’s easier now to play around with code which you could not write by yourself, and quickly explore different approaches. And while you might shy away from asking your colleagues a noob question, ChatGPT will happily elaborate.

In the end, it’s just one more tool in the box. We need to learn when and how to use it wisely.

Much like that comment. Can you give a better example, or express why it’s a bad example? That would bring some quality in.

FYI you can self-host GitLab, for example in a Docker container.

Nice summary. Yes, turnout. It will probably increase for Republicans. But since everybody can guess that, it will just as likely increase Democrats turnout. We should expect many effects to affect both sides, like Democrats voters now also have a higher attention that there is an election coming up. I think the effect on swing voters, if there are any left, is marginal.

Hehe, right! (technically). Context matters! When talking about fruit, people usually don’t include stellar objects when weighing their options. Still true when taking in consideration that “apples to oranges” is usually metaphorical and not really about fruit.

I like that, especially this insight:

when two things have very few attributes in common or the attributes they can be compared on are very broad, general or abstract, it is harder to compare them.

A melon and a pogo stick are harder to compare, for their defining attributes hardly overlap except on a very abstract way.

Good on you to say “harder to compare” :D

it’s all semantic subjectivity. Poetry compares dissimilar things and equates unequal concepts all the time.

Another thing worthwhile to point out; subjectivity. I guess that part bothered me too. “cannot be compared” attempts to establish some kind of objective truth, whereas it only can be a subjective opinion.

The reference to poetry was nice, too.

My point works just as well with an arbitrary amount of options. Someone could say “These quintillion things cannot be compared”.

The number of options is irrelevant to what I tried to address. Though my examples were only pairs, so sorry for causing confusion.

Thanks for taking the time to write this detailed reply. I guess you’re right about the equivocation and I can see the irony :D

Though I have not fully understood yet. Following your example, the two different concepts are …

• in case A, we compare the value of a property (different top speed)
• in case B, we compare the purpose or context-dependend usefulness of an attribute (different types of liquid container holders)

What blocks me from fully agreeing is that still, both are comparisons. And they don’t feel so different to me that I would call them different concepts. When I look up examples for equivocations, those do feel very different to me.

I still guess you’re right. If you (or someone else) could help me see the fallacy, I’d appreciate.

Agreed, yeah. Guess I was taking the word too literally.

Because religion evolved to thrive in us.

It’s like a parasite, and our mind is the host. It competes with other mind-parasites like other religions, or even scientific ideas. They compete for explanatory niches, for feeling relevant and important, and maybe most of all for attention.

Religions evolved traits which support their survival. Because all the other variants which didn’t have these beneficial traits went extinct.

Like religions who have the idea of being super-important, and that it’s necessary to spread your belief to others, are ‘somehow’ more spread out than religions who don’t convey that need.

This thread is a nice collection of traits and techniques which religions have collected to support their survival.

This perspective is based on what Dawkins called memetics. It’s funny that this idea is reciprocally just another mind-parasite, which attempted to replicate in this comment.

An (intuitively) working search would be a great step ahead. It should find and show things if they exist, and only show no results if they do not. That a plethora of external tools exist to meet these basic needs shows both how much this is needed, and how much it is broken.

I also feel I have more luck finding communities if searching for ‘all’, instead of ‘communities’. Don’t make me add cryptic chars to my search to make it work. Do that for me in the background if necessary.

It’s been long since I’ve been using it, but iirc, it’s impossible or painful to search for a specific community in your subscribed list.

One is multiple parallel goals. Makes it hard to stop playing, since there’s always something you just want to finish or do “quickly”.

Say you want to build a house. Chop some trees, make some walls. Oh, need glass for windows. Shovel some sand, make more furnaces, dig a room to put them in - oh, there’s a cave with shiny stuff! Quickly explore a bit. Misstep, fall, zombies, dead. You had not placed a bed yet, so gotta run. Night falls. Dodge spiders and skeletons. Trouble finding new house. There it is! Venture into the cave again to recover your lost equipment. As you come up, a creeper awaitsssss you …

Another mechanism is luck. The world is procedurally generated, and you can craft and create almost anything anywhere. Except for a few things, like spawners. I once was lucky to have two skeleton spawners right next to each other, not far from the surface. In total, I probably spent hours in later worlds to find a similar thing.

The social aspect can also support that you play the game longer or more than you actually would like. Do I lose my “friends” when I stop playing their game?

I don’t think Minecraft does these things in any way maliciously, it’s just a great game. But nevertheless, it has a couple of mechanics which can make it addictive and problematic.

You can use more debug outputs (log(…)) to narrow it down. Challenge your assumptions! If necessary, check line by line if all the variables still behave as expected. Or use a debugger if available/familiar.

This takes a few minutes tops and guarantees you to find at which line the actual behaviour diverts from your expectations. Then, you can make a more precise search. But usually the solution is obvious once you have found the precise cause.