Today’s Special Offah!

Zoomer Twitterbrain word for Avatar.

Well, I am surprised they are that into retro gaming! But who can blame them, that is one handsome fella to play as

And the games were early trans representation!

(Just to ruin the joke: That is short for transportation, I know. But Ultima actually was pretty “woke” for its time, I guess.)

My first account was on .ml roughly 5 years back, when it was basically the only instance. I had heard about there being a FOSS alternative to Reddit - but I quickly lost interest because the community was just too small back then. Re-activated my account when the API exodus happened, because there was finally a community large enough to provide a lived-in feeling. Have only gotten more dedicated to the Fediverse ever since.

Thank you!

Interesting! Thank you for the explanation - the time gap had always felt a bit strange to me, but I had hand-wavingly assumed that was time the displaced youths had needed to grow up.

Do you have additional sources to dive into? I must admit, I had been under the impression so far, that the Taliban had been composed mostly of Pashtuns originally from Afghanistan, and not Pakistani Pashtuns at all.

I knew that part, but it seemed improbable to me that none of the armaments provided to what later became the Taliban weren’t at least indirectly provided by the US.

My understanding - which granted is not an expert one and could be rooted in a myth - was that they handed weapons out relatively indiscriminately, to any displaced Afghans in Pakistan presenting as able and willing to fight the Soviets. I always assumed a lot of them ended up in their hands as well.

Not impossible, although, sadly - any system where anonymity is the prime focus will also invite fucked up shit in addition to legitimate use, without any complicated motives behind it. There’s just a relevant fraction of humanity who are, sometimes essentially, sometimes temporarily, messed up fucks. Which is why I think providing ways to combat abuse has to be a high priority for the underlying development of any project like it, unless it explicitly doesn’t aim for mainstream adoption.

I had a wild ride with matrix, originally wanting to run a node on my server. That did not turn out well, because I was a bit stupid and just assumed there would be more admin/mod tools out of the box. As it turned out, I had inadvertently allowed spam/abuse accounts on my node without even noticing, because naive as I was, I assumed my admin-level account would get informed of stuff like user registrations and abuse reports in the standard Element frontend. As a bonus, when I checked what was supposedly the official matrix support channel, it was repeatedly getting spammed with CSAM and gore at the time. That was when I realised, that it definitely was not the ecosystem for me, and running a node without experience had been a pretty stupid idea on my end.

I have the same phenomenon, and sometimes really weird intrusions, like - a few days ago I had a dream of working in an office building, and out of nowhere during work, there would be a drawer just filled with piss to pee into for the employees - but of course it never works.

A mere 0.1% of users share 80% of fake news. Twelve accounts – known as the “disinformation dozen” – created most of the vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the pandemic. These few hyperactive users produced enough content to create the false perceptions that many people were vaccine hesitant.

So, this is super anecdotal, but through the father of a friend I learned about a guy who was just downright a walking stereotype in that regard. Said father is a rather conservative guy (ex-cop, actually), got lucky and rather rich, and he lived in a suburban village here in Germany. Said neighbour, as described by him: Also an ex-cop, old acquaintance, wife and kids left him because he was violent, living financially comfortably in a large house in that suburban German village on his own, but miserable. And he, unironically, sent said father of my friend far-right propaganda articles, images, messages just… all day long. Every 10 minutes or so. Presumably as mass messages to about anyone who still had a semblance of contact with him. Anecdotal, hearsay with 2 degrees of separation, but - it was the first time I realised those people existed as actual people just casually living their lives around us all.

It’s definitely not the same, but I am somewhat reminded of Robert Sapolski’s Baboon stress study

Some key paragraphs:

Robert Sapolsky and Lisa Share report evidence of a higher order cultural tradition in wild baboons in Kenya. Rooted in field observations of a group of olive baboons (called the Forest Troop) since 1978, Sapolsky and Share document the emergence of a unique culture affecting the “overall structure and social atmosphere” of the troop.

Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.

After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors.

The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that’s decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.

But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there’s hope for us as well.

They do link to the actual study, which does not throw up any immediately obvious signs to be cautious for me, but I also couldn’t do the detailed work of deeper research myself. They reference a hypothesis that preceded the study, which they were trying to test with this. I don’t know if this is a case of bias or even manipulation at work, but at least at a superficial glance, it doesn’t immediately scream “total hacks doing unscientific things.”

Always reminds me of the classic Brecht piece “Saint Joan of the Stockyards” whenever I see celebrations of “charity” like this.

No sad onions allowed!

Ah, I am sad to hear that. And sorry that has been your experience.

As only an amateur coder, I can’t weigh in how serious the issue is, but I’m gonna take your word for it, without any other person involved adding input. I hope it’ll end up in a state, where the project can still sustain its growth in both features and users.

Congratulations Ruud & Rest - everyone at the foundation really, it’s just fun to say Ruud & Rest! I’m excited to see how this will develop. PieFed does have a lot of features already, that I do miss for Lemmy, and the communication from the main dev has been great so far. (An opportunity to post links to his PeerTube channel, as well as his Liberapay profile).

A great addition to the “Threadiverse” in particular, and the larger Fediverse!

OI! DAT PYUNEE HUMEE’Z NO PROPAH KRORK IT IZN’T!

You actually make a great point. Really, for me it was mostly a quick idea because I had been musing about PeerTube’s streaming capabilities in a different comment thread, and about how it leverages the P2P mechanism, so it was fresh on my mind that I wanted to stress-test my own server somehow (and I wanted to learn how to set-up OBS with chat and stuff for PeerTube). Then, while “working” on the canvas, I had the sudden: “Hey, I’d love to set my pixels while zoomed in, while also watching the whole field zoomed out”-thought … but of course that would just as easily be possible by just having two browser windows open 🤷

If nothing else, I got some promising data showing my server can handle several people tuning in to live streams at the same time - and I am also using this to test how my server handles someone wanting to encode a 24h+ VOD from a stream, so that will be there, too - probably for another time-lapse in addition to the official ones.

Oooh…

It’s meant to be “Go on”. That took me way too long, truly embarrassing amounts of onlineness. I was about to ask here what they were thinking “[to] goon” was supposed to mean. Or if this was in the henchmen lounge of the local BBEG’s lair.

The way I understand it, the whole “paradox” is more: If we aren’t the first culture-producing life, and if technological life is not an exceptionally rare occurence, and if technological life is persistent and not (almost) always fleeting - going by the age of other stars and their exoplanets in the galaxy, we would expect there to be signs of life visible in abundance (e.g. electromagnetic waves of clearly artificial origin as “background chatter”).

The fact that this isn’t so, indicates that something about that assumption has to be wrong. What exactly, we cannot easily say, and theories go all the way from “Life like humanity really is exceedingly rare and needs very special circumstances and ‘luck’” to “technological life quickly evolves to a point, where it doesn’t produce any signs like that” to “there is a great filter still ahead of us, which extinguishes life wherever it arises” to “life behaves according to Dark Forest rules and actively tries to stay hidden”.

But all of those are currently just wild speculation. The only thing certain is, that we have found none of the abundance of chatter we would expect from many worlds having had more time than our Earth to theoretically develop life akin to our own. And the most we so far have noticed are some sporadic signs that may hint at basic life, e.g. on K2-18b, but it is all in the “very fuzzy and uncertain” ballpark.