See I’ve never had a problem understanding the basics of multiple programming languages (though I do need to get more general experience with some of them, such as Rust) - but spoken languages? I had a hell of a hard time with even Spanish in high school. My teacher had recommended me for AP Spanish 2, because I was “far better than everyone else in the class” but in reality I just actually turned in my assignments and put in effort, whereas most of the others didn’t… that didn’t mean I was actually good at Spanish though.

I’ve always loved the idea of learning other languages, but its just never worked out for me. That being said, learning ASL has been on my todo list for a very long time. I was in my middle school’s sign language club, but it was sadly cancelled after a few weeks due to lack of participation, and never opened up again which was a shame. I feel I have some chance of learning sign language, and I can still sign the alphabet pretty fluently. I think I even remember a few words!

Have a good night!

In my personal theory having a blockchain adress book of domain names sounds realistic. Is the problem that it would only work for those connected to it (so completely seperate from the current internet) or is there another technical challenge.

Well, while I normally tend to have a kneejerk visceral reaction to blockchain tech these days, this looks to be something that would actually make sense/benefit from a blockchain based system. I’m certainly intrigued by it, but a couple of issues I can already think of:

• From a user perspective: As you’d mentioned, it would rely on people being connected to it already, and people already have a very difficult time with the onboarding process of Lemmy

• From a developer perspective: You’d most likely need some sort of library to handle communicating over this protocol, since none of the major (or at this point, I’d assume any of the) operating systems won’t support this natively. This means that not only does the server side of Lemmy need something to handle this, but any client-side apps (whether on PC or mobile) would also need a way to handle speaking over this protocol

• From a server admin perspective: I’m not too sure about this one, but I wonder what the resource usage would look like for a protocol like this? Right now, its very easy for instance admins to just pickup say a $5/very cheap VPS from <insert provider here> and get up and running. I feel like the resource overhead of the protocol alone would make this a bit more difficult to get started. That’s just my guess though.

So handshake definitely looks interesting in general, but unless it really takes off and becomes incredibly mainstream (which I’d love to see - I’m all for decentralized tech) I think it would only result in more negatives than positives.

I know for sure that there’s a Matrix community, which is where a good amount of discussion takes place.

Oh for sure. It definitely seems like people are more level-headed over here, and are less likely to find the most nitpick-y thing to jump into an argument with you over.

(Which, to clarify, I don’t mean someone correcting information I’ve posted - of course, if I’ve posted something incorrect I’d like to know - but even then, there is always a tactful way to go about doing so)

Decentralized DNS (DNS servers that is) as a concept doesn’t really work, we have centralized DNS and Certificate Authorities in order to establish a chain of trust, for better or for worse. Otherwise, there is no way for me to say, claim that I’m google.com or some other big domain.

And really that’s just from a security standpoint. DNS also serves as a glorified phone book for the internet - but if everyone tries to make their own phone book and there was no centralized copy to refer to, you (or rather your computers/devices/etc) wouldn’t even begin to know where to begin looking up google.com . Even if I wanted to advertise myself as google.com, without some sort of centralized solution there is no one to “advertise” to in the first place, if that makes sense.

I think at least for the foreseeable future we’re going to be always tied to centralized DNS, unless we want to have something like key signing parties for domain names - and even then, I still don’t even think that’d work unless every device on the planet goes to the “same party” and everyone promises to have a unique domain name somehow… and a way to trust that the first “person” we find to be “advertising” their domain is actually the proper owner of the domain, in which case we’re pretty much right back to centralized DNS.

Hopefully that all makes at least a bit of sense, I’ve just woken up so I’m not 100% here yet haha.

Do you mean a domain name? If so, I am 99% sure that federation (so your instance communicating with other instances) requires https, which would require you to use a domain name.

If you just wanted to run an isolated/private instance, then a domain name wouldn’t be required.

We hear you loud and clear over here at the outpost!

The “why” for me is “Why not?” - I wanted to give Lemmy a try, and I enjoy self hosting stuff! I also felt that opening an instance was the best way I could contribute, since my Rust skills are nowhere near good enough to work on Lemmy’s backend and frontend was never my cup of tea.

As for how I pay for it, well regardless of whether I ended up running Lemmy or not I already rent two dedicated servers as a way of “keeping up to date” with knowledge that comes in handy for where I work, so I have no intent on dropping them, and certainly not while I work here.

Bard however, does not seem to get the answer right:

The answer to the trick question is indeterminate.

The box is both yellow and red, so it is both good and happy. However, the box is not blue, so it is not unhappy. Therefore, the box could be awesome, but it could also not be awesome.

The trick question relies on the ambiguity of the word “awesome.” In some contexts, “awesome” means “extremely good.” In other contexts, “awesome” means “inspiring awe.” The box could be either of these things, or it could be neither.

Without more information, it is impossible to say definitively whether or not the box is awesome.

Seems like it got kind of close, with the “The box is both yellow and red, so it is both good and happy”… but then falls apart afterwards.

Edit: I tried to debate with it:

Me:

To me, the answer is “Yes, the box is awesome” because the box is yellow thus it is “good” and it is also red, thus it is “happy”. Because the box is “good” and “happy”, the question defines the box as “awesome” - if that all makes sense!

Bard:

Yes, your interpretation makes sense. The box is yellow, so it is good. The box is red, so it is happy. Therefore, the box is both good and happy, which means that the box is awesome.

However, as I mentioned before, the word “awesome” is ambiguous. It could mean “extremely good” or “inspiring awe.” In the context of this trick question, it is not clear which definition of “awesome” is intended. Therefore, the answer to the question is still indeterminate.

Ultimately, the interpretation of the trick question is up to the individual. If you believe that the box is awesome because it is both good and happy, then that is a valid interpretation. However, if you believe that the word “awesome” has a more specific meaning, then you may interpret the question differently.

Which is interesting to say the least, its almost like its looking a bit too deeply into the question lol.

Among what the others have mentioned, there is also sub.rehab - some results include communities that are not on Lemmy/Kbin however.

Google Pixel 6a for me, just running the stock ROM/OS. I used to be into trying out custom ROMs but over the years I ended up falling in the “I don’t want my phone to randomly stop working while I’m out and need to make a call” stage.

Plus, I actually enjoy quite a few features from the stock OS such as call screening (which reduces spam calls a ton), direct my call, and whichever feature is the one that provides an estimate on the wait time when calling into a toll free line. There’s also “Hold for me” which I haven’t tried yet but it seems like an interesting idea, but I’d only use it if there were going to be a fairly long wait.

I don’t know if those features work on the custom OS options (as I don’t keep up with that realm anymore), plus potential stability issues which I’ve always had on other devices (including previous Pixels) makes me just stick with the default.

Although, on my Pixel 3a XL since I no longer use it as my daily driver, I slapped Ubuntu Touch on it and it seems interesting, though definitely has a long way to go.

Well, for me the weekend is the start of my (very weird) weekly work schedule so my weekend is pretty much just ending.

However, thanks to a recommendation at the Star Trek community I picked up one of the Star Trek books for my Kindle since they’re on sale so I’ll definitely be reading that!

Additionally, I updated my Minecraft server to 1.20.1 and nuked the world since I hadn’t really progressed at all (the TL;DR of that situation is that I’ve been “working” on that server since 2021 - it was intended to be a new public server that my ex and I were going to create, but I just haven’t had a lot of time or motivation to do so after we split up) so I’ll probably be giving that a go!

I finally got a refill for an important medication I’m on, it was three weeks late and has been stressing me out so I’m relieved over that. There are plenty of other stressors going on as of lately, but that was a pretty big one.

Other than that, for better or for worse I’ll just be going wherever the days take me!

That is certainly strange! I can’t seem to find much online about the issue, though I saw a couple of recommendations about disabling Secure Boot. I’m not sure why that would make a difference (especially given Microsoft’s involvement with OEMs and Secure Boot…) and it probably wouldn’t be the best thing to keep turned off permanently (or rather, as a “disclaimer”: if you haven’t already, do a bit of light researching on secure boot and why it exists) but it wouldn’t hurt to try turning it off temporarily (if its not already off) to see if that gets past the error.

I did get a chuckle out of this bit from Microsoft’s docs on the error:

Cause: This problem occurs because the boot firmware on the computer generates lots of memory fragmentation.

Workaround: We recommend that you do not let boot firmware create large amounts of fragmentation. Large memory fragmentation degrades the overall startup performance and causes problems.

Ah that’s real helpful Microsoft, thank you!

I’m not 100% sure, but I think the reputation thing is a Kbin feature, at least everyone I’ve seen mention it so far has been on a Kbin instance.

I do not think Lemmy has the same thing, but don’t quote me on that!

Oh I definitely feel that. In my case, I did a pretty good job of taking care of my teeth when I was young - never had even a cavity…

Then I was on some medication for too long, which had a million side effects, one of which basically destroys the enamel in your teeth, and now I’m suffering because of that. I’ve been off the medication for a few years now, but the damage is already done.

I feel like I’m going to completely lose all of my teeth before I’m 40 at this point…

I think it would be nice for the people who want the option.

However, Lemmy and other “message board” types of applications/services don’t really register to me as something that needs immediate acting upon. If someone replies to a comment of mine, I don’t think (or hope, at least) they would expect me to reply back in say five minutes. I do get an email notification, which my email app is set to check for new emails every 45 minutes.

The exception I could see to this is for moderation actions - if someone reports a comment/post for example, or someone signs up for my instance (though I could see that being a bit annoying on larger instances where someone could be signing up say every 5 minutes), that would be nice to get instantly.

That is something that I really like Android’s “Notification Channels” for. If an app implements it properly, you’d be able to receive push notifications for just moderation actions, and leave it turned off for comment replies.

I (personally) do not find push notifications to be addicting so-to-speak, but I do use a wearable so that the things I do find important to have push notifications on for (such as messages from family) I can see/“feel” those come in instantly.

Not bad, but very very busy - I had like 5 different appointments to attend from various doctors! Though, one of them was a dentist appointment to correct a tooth filling that had come undone and was preventing me from enjoying eating anything so I’m glad to have that resolved! First thing I had was some pizza :)

I’ve got two appointments upcoming this week, but those should be fairly quick, and one of them is telehealth too which makes it a bit more convenient for me as well. I’m expecting this week should be less stressful!

Yeah, there is a huge difference between level-headed differentiating of opinions versus those who basically push their opinions as facts.

For example, in the dev world there’s always “language wars” of which programming language is “better” - I’m okay with people advocating for a language and giving their reasons why they believe this to be the case. Sometimes in those instances I learn something new about a language and it motivates me to learn more about it and consider using it in a new project.

What I’m not okay with is if I say “I like to use Java, as its one of the first languages I started with” and am just told “Why would you ever consider such a thing! Java is horrible!” and then provide either no reason why, or its just complete nonsense.

Or, I personally do not like pineapple pizza - but that is just my preference. I don’t go around telling people that pineapple pizza is awful, and I surely do not condemn those who do like it.

Nuance is usually the missing thing when it comes to this sort of thing.

That being said, there are some topics where I do not think there could ever be anyone who can (and its very rare that I see things as absolutes) convince me there will be a genuine opposing opinion for, such as trans rights. There’s not a single force that exists in our universe that would have me believe in anything but the rights of others. If there are bigots who want to believe that I’m evil because of this, oh well, I won’t lose any sleep over that. Those topics are just not up for debate, and never will be.

Hello from The Outpost! 👋

Kind of like building a very large/tall building vs having multiple buildings!