FBXL Social

sj_zero | @sj_zero@social.fbxl.net

Author of The Graysonian Ethic (Available on Amazon, pick up a dead tree copy today)

Admin of the FBXL Network including FBXL Search, FBXL Video, FBXL Social, FBXL Lotide, FBXL Translate, and FBXL Maps.

Advocate for freedom and tolerance even if you say things I do not like

Adversary of Fediblock

Accept that I'll probably say something you don't like and I'll give you the same benefit, and maybe we can find some truth about the world.

Ah... Is the Alliteration clever or stupid? Don't answer that, I sort of know the answer already...

Just nuke southern ontario and vancouver island, it'll be fine after that. And give Quebec to France, they'll love that (and immediately surrender it back to the US as is tradition)

Thank you, Mr. President! When are you sending the army to annex the 51st state? I want to prepare a gift basket.

Got the new 'servers' in place. 100% fanless still, but these two guys used to be Intel Atom D2550s (about as powerful as an old netbook), and these guys are AMD Ryzen Embedded R1505G (about as powerful as a new low power laptop, 4-5 times faster).

I really need to find my label maker for obvious reasons haha
Parts scavenged from roadside signs and stolen from banks (I hope)

Reincarnated – The Hero Marries the Sage ~After Becoming Engaged to a Former Rival, We Became the Strongest Couple~

In case anyone else was wondering.

Don't panic about losing your guns, he's going to take away your ability to use money long before that matters!

It's kind of sad, 2024 saw the meltdown of a lot of folks I respected online, or at least the final chapters of ongoing meltdowns.

In the end I guess, wisdom isn't something that a particular individual can own, it possess you for a while, and perhaps you can help spread it, but it can just as easily disappear into the ether, and you end up going on at 12-hour Ayahuasca Bender online for the world to see... Or the world can find out that you were having a massive cocaine Bender with your kids in the house. You can find that just as quickly as wisdom possessed you, it leaves you, and in your arrogance you will go off and do something really stupid. So if you believe that you have a time you should nurture your wisdom by following it's advice rather than listen to the luciferian impulse to think that your intellect can outsmart your wisdom.

And I guess equally importantly, be careful not to idolize human beings, because every one of them is fallible. Especially yourself.

There's a saying that has changed a lot over the years due to inflation, but only in becoming more and more true:

"It's possible to become a millionaire through honesty and hard work. But not a billionaire."

When that was first said, a millionaire was worth the equivalent of 19 million dollars today. Today, someone working a fairly normal job and saving consistently will become a millionaire in their lifetimes.

His wife is at Walmart. That's a coat rack.

It seems to me that most people are focused on the two official Matrix homeservers, but I ran Matrix Conduit on an Intel Atom D2550 for years and it was surprisingly usable. Meanwhile, Matrix Synapse and Matrix Dendrite were essentially useless, pegging the CPU at 100% for days on end.

So is the problem the protocol, or the implementation?

For probably 10 years I've been very vocal about the problem that companies want fully formed professionals but aren't willing to put the time or effort into training entry level people.

One thing that enrages me about the skilled trades is that governments put on ad campaigns trying to get kids to want to do skilled trades, but in reality when an apprenticeship job is actually advertised, hundreds of people including people who are fully qualified to do the job through education they paid for themselves apply. "Oh, we need more grants for apprentices!" no, we need more apprenticeships.

I don't want to go back to the bad old days of being forced to do horrifically dangerous things, but man sometimes safety people are pants on head retarded...

There's one thing that's not really right in your analysis: bluesky is difficult to host because of its size because everything is everywhere making it mostly centralized even when you host another instance. Fedi is easier to host because it's a la carte, instances pull what they need from who they need them from, making it highly decentralized when you host another instance.

If you had to host every fedi post everywhere from everyone then it'd be difficult to host because of its size too, and that's how it can scale, by only having each instance pull what it needs. Bluesky added 10 million accounts during its twitter exodus, but so did the fediverse. It is a big thing if you were to try to have everyone have everything. In fact, it'd probably be way bigger, because the fediverse has been around longer, and has been posting for many additional years across many platforms.

Most of the problems of fedi are baked into decentralization -- you're fragmented because instances are islands that connect to each other to send or receive data as required. Moderation and federation issues? Baked into decentralization because everyone gets to make whatever platform they want. Data portability? baked into decentralization because not everyone knows about your account or all your posts, and nobody but your home instance can verify it's you.

For some people, that decentralization is a feature not a bug, but for a lot of people they want a centralized platform with decentralized elements and they're not wrong to want that. One downside of decentralization is your reach is what you find for yourself. In some ways it leads to more centralization because you'll find lots of people who ought to be running their own instance instead just hopping onto mastodon.social and sharing the one server with a million other people instead of building a network from one server that won't see the rest of the fediverse without tracking down other users.

Nostr is a different beast, but it's got a lot of issues with putting the tech too front and center -- npubs and nsecs, this isn't how normal people use computers, even techies. If Alex succeeds with ditto, he might be able to use the technology as a backend to at least be usable on a day to day basis by normal people.

They used to name some months after numbers in Europe, which is why there's names like September, October, November December, which is 7 ember, 8 ember, 9 ember, 10 ember -- this dates back to ancient Rome. The first few months were named after gods or other things(March for example being named after the God of War Mars), But it turns out you need more than 10 months, and people messed with it changing words and such, and here we are.

They didn't used to consider 2 of the months months, just dead time where nothing got done because it was the middle of winter. Two more months were added at a time near the end of the Zhou dynasty that Confucianism is based on -- January named after Janus the god of beginnings, and February, based on a festival that occurred in that month.

There were two other numerically named months, Quintilis and Sextilus (fifth month, sixth month).

The first emperor of Rome changed those months to reflect Julius Caesar and Emperor Augustus.

Overall though, the big thing to keep in mind is that the Romans weren't really big into Math. They let the Greeks handle that sort of thing. So of course the 12th month is december... the 10th month.

The admin of that instance, ActionRetro, has a fantastic youtube channel where he plays with old tech.

That's the other side of "I'm not your dad". I'm not your dad, I'm not going to carry water for you if you post stuff that's going to get me in trouble.

I don't talk about it much, but as an example I strip media from several woodchipper themed instances (though I don't fully block anything)

Sometimes I see what my users post and it's like "Guys, take your valium and mellow out" but my TOS is that I'm not their dad and I don't have the bandwidth in my life to be their dad even if I wanted to.

People dumb enough to mindlessly follow a list they found online that they don't even know where it came from or who contributed to it should probably be avoided anyway.

When people block my instance for being on fediblock, for example, it's because I told them to. I'm too dangerous to listen to, but not too dangerous to follow orders from.

If someone I like wants on the fediverse I'd be like "look for fediblock and pick an instance from there. That's where fun is allowed."

Deciding when reddit fully died is tough. I went there after digg after I stopped going to slashdot, and it was decent for a long while. I know it was already becoming insufferable before Trump was elected, I was already looking for an alternative back in 2015, but after Trump was elected it basically turned into the TDS show.

One thing that's pretty funny is if you tune into lemmy, the same sort of people are there and so 90% of the lemmy instances are equally insufferable (which is a shame, the medium of threaded discussion in groups isn't inherently bad)

Toronto is such a beautiful city.

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