Everything I’ve set in Settings is forgotten: Default Listing reverts to All, Default Post Sort reverts to Hot, and so on.

mlmym (the “old” interface) stores its front-end specific settings in your browser via cookies and local storage. The way it’s implemented works for the most part and probably makes the front-end simpler, but has some downsides like not retaining your choices between logins. There’s an issue open for this in the bug tracker: https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym/issues/104

I’m not sure why it forces a logout periodically even when you’re using it regularly though. (I mean, the cookies are probably not being updated and just expire eventually – but I don’t know if that was a deliberate choice or not.) It might be a good idea to open an issue for this?

kbin.social has been totally down for a while. I don’t think your posts are actually federating when you post into a kbin.social magazine right now; the votes you are getting are probably from other lemmy.world users only.

[…] male-gazey content. I am 2) a woman extremely disinterested in that.

I feel some men might also not want to see content focused on games where a big goal is to romance a man as a woman, presented in a femgazey way or a way tailored to our desires even if not sexualized.

Fair enough. There are a lot of eroge where you play as a women that are absolutely, clearly intended to be played by men though; that part alone isn’t likely to be off-putting, but I can see specific presentation and femgaze heavy works being just as off putting to some guys as malegaze heavy works are to some women. If the audience is mostly straight guys, posting fan art of something like an explicit BL work probably isn’t going to get much positive response, I suppose. :-)

There’s so little content posted regularly in the visualnovels community though that I feel like anyone actively trying to start discussions there on the subject of VNs would likely be welcomed, but I might be wrong about that. The most successful posts I’ve seen are generally notices about sales and some business news with people occasionally posting memes and such as well.

If that doesn’t feel right to you though, I get it, and hopefully reviving the other community works out.

Is the issue that the posts will be frequently inaccessible?

I don’t think your posts are federating out at all when kbin.social is down – basically only people on your own instance can see it, if I understand how federation works correctly. If you check the view of the community from lemmy.world the last post visible is from a month ago, for example – https://lemmy.world/c/Otomegames@kbin.social?dataType=Post&sort=New – even though I can see on your instance that you’ve started several threads since then. I can’t even load the community from reddthat since it was probably never requested and kbin.social is down currently; it just errors out.

Does Lemmy have a way to get inactive mods removed and replaced?

I don’t know. Tagging @Blaze@reddthat.com for suggestions since they’ve been trying to grow the Fediverse for a while and may know how to go about it, if it’s possible.

kbin.social’s been down for a while, and having serious problems for months.

There is a general visual novel community at !visualnovels@lemmy.comfysnug.space which might be a better place to post to. It’s not very active, but I know there are at least a few people around paying attention to it. I might chime in on some threads occasionally if you post there. My tastes are more in line with VNs aimed at the straight-male demographic, but I’m willing to try other VNs beyond that if there is a really good story or novel mechanics or some other non-sexual factor that makes it interesting.

If that community doesn’t fit your needs, I think there is also !otome_games@lemmy.world – but it seemed completely dead the last time I looked. You might be able to revive it though if you want to try.

I was curious, so I did some searches on this topic for you and found these pages:

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18155134
• http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/practical-python-porting/

The second link in particular notes:

The reason that things are much easier with all ASCII data is that practically every Unicode encoding in existence maps bytes 0x00…0x7f to the corresponding code points, so byte strings and Unicode strings that contain the same all-ASCII data are basically equivalent, even semantically. What usually trips people up with non-ASCII data is that the semantic meaning of bytes in the range 0x80…0xff changes from one encoding to another.

But, thinking like a systems programmer again, for many purposes the semantic meaning of bytes 0x80…0xff doesn’t matter. All that matters is that those bytes are preserved unchanged by whatever operations are done. Typical operations like tokenizing strings, looking for markers indicating particular types of data, etc. only need to care about the meaning of bytes in the range 0x00…0x7f; bytes in the range 0x80…0xff are just along for the ride.

So the trick for beating Python 3 strings into submission is to put in encoding and decoding calls where you need to, choosing a single-byte encoding that doesn’t mutate 0x80…0xff. There are many of these; most of the Latin-{1…6} sequence (aka ISO-8859-1…10) is has this property. What you do not want to do is pick utf-8 or any of the multibyte Asian encodings. Latin-1 will do fine; in fact it has an advantage over the others in memory consumption, which we’ll describe below.

Whether depending on this is actually correct or not is beyond me, but it seems like people have actually been using that pass-through behavior in practice and put it into things like Python2 -> 3 migration guides.

The first link suggests that the seemingly undefined ranges are valid as C0 and C1 control codes which may be why it doesn’t throw errors.

Is this for game consoles only, or would stuff like experimenting with similar looking (low-poly) art techniques on modern computers be acceptable there as well?

Now imagine if to buy a car you had to tolerate cameras and other forms of tracking your telemetry just to get to work and feed yourself.

Sorry to be the bearer of depressing news, but that’s basically already happening in new cars.

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-wheels-every-car-brand-reviewed-by-mozilla-including-ford-volkswagen-and-toyota-flunks-privacy-test/

https://jacobin.com/2024/03/car-spying-insurance-surveillance-data/

I wonder what cuil things it will say if you start asking questions about hamburgers instead…

I ran into an example of the thumbnail issue again today – this time on a post from kbin: https://old.reddthat.com/post/19193476

The thumbnail looks like this in the HTML:

<div class="thumb">
  <a class="url"
     href="https://media.kbin.social/media/60/a4/60a45b8ff88b1b2e3a0f77b701feb323c5bbfb7ceeb75154ea7df5d6eea15ef8.jpg"
     >
    <div  style="background-image: url(https://media.kbin.social/media/60/a4/60a45b8ff88b1b2e3a0f77b701feb323c5bbfb7ceeb75154ea7df5d6eea15ef8.jpg?format=jpg&amp;thumbnail=96)"></div>
  </a>
</div>

Note that it’s making a request to kbin.social with ?format=jpg&thumbnail=96 parameters in the CSS – which results in the full image being loaded since kbin doesn’t run pictrs.

The versions in use on reddthat (according to the settings page) are:

lemmy: 0.19.4-beta.7

mlmym: 0.0.44

That requires turning every read into a write – which is slow/expensive generally. (That might not matter much for Google – who try to record everything you ever do already, basically – but it matters for everyone else.)

Also, it tends to promote spam and offensive niche content. kbin’s got a sidebar that tries to promote random low activity communities and posts, for example, and it’s almost uncanny how much crap it pushes up…

Mrs Bighead?!

…

*hangs up the phone*

Personally, I prefer it when people do one of the following:

• upload the file to catbox.moe and link it here (for clips up to 200MB)
• upload the file directly to their lemmy instance (if their instance allows it)
• self-host it on their own web server (with no bullshit crappy JS interface, please – just give me the file; I’ll play it with VLC if it doesn’t work in my browser)

PeerTube is also a reasonable choice – although I don’t like its UI very much.

I’m having trouble finding an example of the thumbnail issue again right now but I was seeing the pictrs conversion parameters passed to URLs from catbox.moe, i.postimg.cc, and other sources in the CSS for the thumbnail when I reported the issue to Tiff ~3 weeks ago. It’s possible that it got fixed/suppressed by another change since then though. (0.0.44 was deployed a few hours ago and I think there may have also been a beta patch bump for the lemmy backend at some point since I reported the issue originally in our local support community.)

I’ll let you know if I see it pop up again.

For the text handling issue, I was seeing text like “<thread title> by <username> in <community>” (i.e. "<thread title> by <username> in <community>" if it still happens) getting misinterpreted as raw HTML instead of being escaped. (i.e. <!-- raw HTML omitted --> was showing up in the HTML output for the page.)

You may recognize that text as the pattern for a recently fixed bug in the user profiles; I found the text handling issue while trying to explain the other issue to Tiff a few weeks ago.

Will edit this comment immediately after posting to let you know if I still see the text issue.

EDIT: I still see the text issue show up in this comment. https://old.reddthat.com/comment/10370610

Thanks! I’ll go ask Tiff about getting reddthat updated later.

BTW, is there a community for discussion of mlmym itself somewhere on lemmy? I can’t participate on GitHub, but those aren’t the only issues I’ve found. (e.g. there’s also ?format=jpg&thumbnail=96 on non-pictrs links and a text handling issue with angle brackets…)

That’s great to hear!

You can open any profile with multiple pages worth of posts or comments on old.reddthat.com and it’s jumbled. Even my own profile is jumbled: https://old.reddthat.com/u/e0qdk

The first page is mostly comments I made two weeks ago plus a thread from today and some very old threads. The second page has comments I made earlier today and during the past week. The third page starts with my most recent comment and then has a bunch of older comments.

The exact order might change after posting this, but my own recent comments mostly being on page two has been pretty consistent for a while.

If I look at a very active user’s profile (like MentalEdge’s), I see threads from today show up on page three(!) while there are threads from a week or more ago on pages one and two.

I’m not sure what’s going on exactly, but it basically makes user profiles pretty useless right now through mlmym.

Edit: I can’t even find this comment in my profile, but my other reply (regarding the envelope being fixed in 0.0.43) shows up on page 3.

I haven’t had much issue with lag, generally, but I don’t get notifications any more – which is probably the most pressing issue. (I have to remember to manually check once in a while after I post since the envelope doesn’t light up.) That might be an issue with reddthat being on a recent beta version of lemmy – I don’t know.

We do have lemmy-ui-next over here too. Thanks for reminding me about that. I’ve been meaning to poke at it a bit.

Right now I’m mostly using mlmym (the “old” interface on most instances that support it) because it doesn’t require JS for basic viewing.

It’s kind of buggy though, unfortunately – things like user history show up as a complete jumble, for example. :(

One of these days, I’ll probably get fed up enough to go write my own interface and set things up exactly how I want them to work… but I’ve got too many projects already so I’m just living with it for now.

There’s some notable differences with numbering – e.g. lakh, crore, and where to put commas when writing large numbers.