No prob, fellow-home-instancer!
tal
joined 1 year ago
Well, some of them just don't have enough population to get much activity. In some cases, it might be that nobody has made a community, or that people who are interested haven't found the community.
If you aren't already doing it, I'd use lemmyverse.net. When you search on a lemmy instance for a community, it only searches through the communities that that lemmy instance knows about. Instances without a large user population tend to have a limited view of the Threadiverse. The lemmyverse.net guys have a bot that keeps re-indexing the whole Threadiverse.
Your home instance is...hey, another lemmy.today user! So, lemmy.today is a small instance, and it could easily not know about other communities out there.
If you're not already, hit:
https://lemmyverse.net/communities
Can click to copy the community name (e.g. !fishing@lemmy.ca). Then search for that in the Lemmy Web UI. It may tell you that your instance doesn't know about it, and ask if you want to trigger a search. Click "yes" and your home instance (in this case, lemmy.today) will go to talk to the remote one (in this case, lemmy.ca), and pick up information about the community.
Once
if
you subscribe to a remote community, your home instance will start to get posts from it. Have to have at least one user on your home instance subscribed for that to happen.
EDIT: If you are subscribed to a community that doesn't have activity, posting helps -- a lot of people are willing to comment, but won't go out and submit posts. And there's a community used to help promote communities, !communitypromo@lemmy.ca, which is aimed at helping encourage people to find communities, if you think that you've got a good one and want to encourage other people to head over there.
Ehhh. I mean, technically yes, but a proxy for search engine requests is probably functionally equivalent to the end user.
Also, if users don't know that such a thing exists and goes looking for a "search engine", they likely also want this.
One of my personal pet peeves is power stations
a big lithium-ion battery pack hooked up to a charge controller and inverter and USB power supply and with points to attach solar panels
being called a "solar generator". It's not a generator, doesn't use mechanical energy. But...a lot of people who think "I need electricity in an outage" just go searching for "generator". I don't like the practice, but I think that the aim is less to deceive users and more to try to deal with the fact that they functionally act in much the same role and people might not otherwise think of them.
I am less sympathetic to vendors who do the same with calling evaporative coolers "air conditioners". Those have some level of overlap in use, but are substantially different devices in price and capability.
Mods have a finite amount of time.
There are two things that you can do:
-
If a post violates community rules, you can report it, which will help bring it to their attention more-quickly.
-
You could volunteer to moderate a community that you feel is undermoderated, which will help decrease the load on the existing moderators.
I'm going to use Kant's categorical imperative, because I think that it's written a little more-rigorously than most forms of the Golden Rule, so it's easier to reason about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
— Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
The problem here is that I'm pretty sure that you can always rewrite a rule that doesn't conform to the categorical imperative to a form such that it does.
For example, take gay marriage. Some people who are upset about it have argued that not allowing gay marriage does treat everyone in the same way: anyone, homosexual or not, can marry someone of the other sex.
You could have a law "Someone who wants to do so can marry an adult that they are attracted to. This law does not apply to homosexuals." That won't pass the categorical imperative; it doesn't apply to homosexuals. You can rewrite that to be "Anyone may marry someone of the other sex", and now it does, though the effect is the same.
Maybe it's not legal to prevent blacks from voting, but for a while, under Jim Crow laws, literacy tests were used -- exploiting the fact that literacy among blacks was lower -- to partially disenfranchise blacks in the US.
That is, I get the idea behind the Golden Rule. But I have a hard time seeing how you can come up with some kind of a legalistic, mechanical test that can't be gamed. I can always make the conditions for some rule that contains no group-specific restrictions sufficiently restrictive in other ways that in effect, they apply only to that group.
Speaking as a consumer of news sources, it doesn't really help me whether a news publication includes some kind of automated analysis, because I'm really concerned about bias originating from the news source, not the specific writer. Even if it actually works, the news publication is the one that selects the systems used to conduct that analysis. It's maybe useful for the news publication in identifying bias from the writers working there, but they don't need to publish that.
However, the idea of running some kind of text classifier to grade an article automatically on metrics like that from a party who isn't the news source itself is maybe more interesting. Like, I can imagine having a coterie of bots that run here on the Threadiverse, run an automated classification of an article and post it on said article, for example, and then one could block bots that one isn't interested in seeing.
I think that if one wants to change this, it probably involves some kind of regulation that affects how people shop, or at least a shift in social norms, so that some kind of metric of over-time cost is prominently featured next to the up-front price on goods.
We've seen shifts like that before.
There was a point in time where it was normal, in the United States, to haggle over the prices of goods. It really wasn't all that long ago. Today, that virtually doesn't exist at all, except for over a very few big-ticket items, like cars and houses.
The change started when some people...I think Quakers...decided to start selling their goods with a no-haggle policy. NPR Planet Money did an episode on it some time back...lemme see if I can go dig it up.
Yeah, here we are:
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/415287577
Relevant snippet
Episode 633: The Birth And Death Of The Price Tag
JIANG: The whole world I've known is in this price-tag world. Everything has a price, one price.
GOLDSTEIN: But when you take the long view of the historical world, this price-tag world is like a bizarre aberration. You know, for almost all of the history of human commerce - for thousands of years - you walk into a store, and you point to something. And you say, how much does that cost? The guy at the store is going to say, how much you got? You know, everything was a negotiation. And there were good reasons the world was this way.
JIANG: Say I have a store and - I don't know - I'm selling eggs. And a guy walks in, and he looks like he has all day to haggle. And he's really been scouting out the best place to buy eggs. So I sell him a dozen eggs for a buck 50.
GOLDSTEIN: So then, a few minutes later, somebody else comes in. This guy's wearing fancy shoes, clearly does not have a lot of time to haggle. So you sell him eggs for twice as much. You sell him eggs for 3 bucks.
JIANG: Each customer pays what they think is a fair price. I make a profit. We all win.
GOLDSTEIN: This was just the way things were, and almost everybody accepted it, everybody except this one religious group, the Quakers. Robert Phillips, the consultant we talked about the Coke thing, he said the Quakers did this really fringy, radical thing.
PHILLIPS: They would have a fixed price. The Quaker would - the merchant would say what the price is, and that price would be the same for everybody.
GOLDSTEIN: That's it. Having one price for each item, that was the Quakers' radical thing. They thought haggling was just fundamentally unfair. They thought charging different people different prices for the same thing was morally wrong.
JIANG: You can imagine walking into a store and pointing to a dozen eggs and getting all fired up to do an egg haggle.
GOLDSTEIN: Let's go. Let's do this.
JIANG: And then your friend, like, kind of elbows you and says, no, no, this is a Quaker store.
GOLDSTEIN: No haggling. No haggling here.
JIANG: What are you doing?
GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, the Quakers were definitely, definitely in a real minority with this no-haggle thing.
JIANG: But as the modern economy got going in the 1800s and businesses starting getting bigger and bigger, haggle worlds got to be a hassle.
GOLDSTEIN: You know, if you are running a store, if you're working at a store, you need to know a lot to haggle. You need to know how much you paid for the stuff, how much your competitors are selling it for. You need to know how much different customers are willing to pay. Robert Phillips says you couldn't just hire some kid on summer vacation to come and sell stuff at your store.
PHILLIPS: Clerks usually had long apprenticeships before they could actually be allowed behind the counter. So they had to spend a couple of years learning the business.
GOLDSTEIN: Years?
PHILLIPS: Yeah, typically. Learning how to haggle before you would let them be left alone.
JIANG: Haggling is a pain for customers, too. Imagine you're at some store and there are five people in front of you in line. And you have to wait for them to all go through that haggling process before you can buy your shirts or whatever.
GOLDSTEIN: So finally around 1870, a few people decided to take a big risk. They decided to break with haggle world. They invented the price tag, this actual piece of paper stuck on each thing that tells you the price - not some starting offer subject to negotiation, but the price. And inventing the price tag was not just about fairness or what was morally right; it was about building really big stores.
PHILLIPS: Two stores here in New York, Macy's. And Macy was a Quaker. And he featured fixed prices. The most famous one was Wanamaker's in Philadelphia.
JIANG: Wanamaker and Macy's, they're building these new things, these department stores. And they're trying to hire all of these clerks, but they don't want to train them for years and have them become master hagglers. So the price tag solves this problem. It makes it easy for them to hire the clerks.
PHILLIPS: All they had to do was be essentially what clerks are today, you know, knowledgeable about the fabric. Oh, madam, this would look wonderful on you. They didn't have to do pricing. They didn't have to haggle. They didn't have to know the cost of items.
JIANG: Wanamaker becomes this kind of evangelist for the price tag. He says, look, the price tag, it means you, the customer, you don't have to arm wrestle with the clerk anymore when you buy things.
PHILLIPS: There's no longer a war between the seller and the buyer, which is what he called the higgling and the haggling. Everyone can come into Wanamaker's and know they will be treated the same.
JIANG: Customers loved it. The price tag spread. It was everywhere.
That wasn't driven by regulation, but by consumer preference. Consumers (usually, outside maybe upscale restaurants) demand to see the up-front cost of something they buy before buying it. So it's possible that if costs keep shifting from the up-front cost that we can readily see at the time of purchase into over-time costs that we cannot as readily see, we might see consumers just refuse to buy items from retailers that don't also show some kind of a reasonable over-time cost also visible.
Or maybe the government could require some level of disclosure of over-time costs to be shown when selling an item, they way they standardized display of credit card interest rates.
MAGA isn't really a cohesive movement with a specific set of concerns. It's a trademarked Trump political slogan based on a Reagan political slogan.
If MAGA means "anyone who supports Trump", then probably when Trump stops being politically relevant. If Trump can rile people up for one reason or another and does so under a MAGA banner, then it's still around.
You could choose some particular subset of Trump supporters -- the group that he drew his initial strong support from were people who wanted labor protectionism, limitations on international trade, restrictions on immigration, feelings of political irrelevance, upset at distribution of money... I suppose that you could argue that if they had all that, that would address major concerns.
I should qualify that -- I don't know for sure whether and which distros enable updates to run non-interactively. fwupd has the ability to do so and it's billed as doing so on its github page, but that doesn't mean that a distro has to actually take advantage of that. Could be that in a default configuration on a given distro, it only updates stuff next time you invoke it.
The only reason I'd guess that it might not run automatically is that some devices do not deal well with power loss during firmware updates, and I can imagine that a distro -- which has no way of knowing when a user might start flipping power switches -- might want more-conservative settings. Might be something like the last bit of distro installation, but they might not want to run during normal operation.
But yeah, I bet that Louis Rossman didn't think of that either when he was talking about using USB connectivity to prevent firmware updates.
EDIT: I also vaguely remember reading something claiming that smart TVs from some manufacturer that are not connected to the Internet were using nearby smart TVs of the same brand and within WiFI range that can reach the Internet for Internet connectivity. Ordinarily, I'd say that that's not generally an issue for most devices, but printers often do have wireless networking capability, so probably one more at least theoretical vector via which a printer might potentially reach the Internet. I have not read any claims of a printer doing this, though. I also don't know whether-or-not those claims for the smart TVs were legitimate, but they are technically-possible to do, so...shrugs
If we reach a point where an AI can summarize a video to that degree and provide background summaries, I'd happily use it. I mean, I'd mark the origin, but nah, this is just me.
[continued from parent]
Kendall-Taylor: Remind listeners too who was president in Riyadh. It was the head of the Russian Direct Investment Bank, which is a clear signal of the way that the Russians are approaching the administration.
Kofman: Yeah, they're pitching them business deals. They're trying to, in their mind, outbid Ukraine. Offering greater opportunities. And they're trying to position sanctions against Russia as a big opportunity cost for us, which it isn't. Even before those sanctions...if I were to show you the net volume of trade between US and Russia, it was tiny. Even though it had some critical material categories in there, like titanium and whatnot, things that are important to certain industries. But nonetheless, it was incredibly small. It was Europe that the principal balance of trade with Russia, not us. There isn't a rush to the door of companies trying to get back into Russia -- I'm sorry, you're not going to see this. To me, Trump's approach is much more looking for wins right now, and things that can be declared as wins rather than big-picture strategy. I also think that your question about Russia and China...isn't really the way they're thinking about it and wouldn't work anyway. I don't think that they're trying to pull Russia away from China, and I've been very public in the past that I don't think that that would work; I think that this is a magical misreading of Cold War history and I'm happy to get into why, but it's...the sort of thing that briefs well and policy wonks can talk about but doesn't work in practice. I don't think that they're trying to do that, though. From what I've seen, Trump does have some guiding views and preferences. If I may summarize them, and I'm no expert on the Trump administration, but it's great-power politics over alliance bloc politics. It's trying to end wars that he thinks are bad for everyone economically. Even if he doesn't have the correct perception of who started the war, why the war took place, or what the consequences are of ending it, he's prioritizing ending it in some shape or form. It's pursuing naked-self interest over allies or traditional values. Kind of the old Lord Palmerston quote of "there are no permanent enemies and no permanent friends, only permanent interests". A lot of conversations I have about the Trump administration seem to be people observing that someone has put a hole in the wall and trying to draw a target around it after the fact. It's like post-hoc rationalizing of what's taken place. I'm wary of that approach.
Last point. On my last comment about casualties, keep in mind that this is just a dart thrown at a wall by me, not statistics that you should take to the bank. Please don't take that as "Mike Kofman gave a hard estimate" -- there's a pretty big cone of uncertainty on that.
Kofinas: Thanks for that. Next hour, want to talk about nuclear doctrine. Are we looking at a new approach to foreign policy that will transcend administrations, and what sort of world order will that create? Like, more realpolitik. Also want to talk about future of security in Europe. One thing that we can all agree on right now is that Europe has a lot of problems. [Kofinas then promotes a premium subscription for additional content.]
Honestly, I'd kind of like to read some serious analysis on Trump on agricultural policy. I've pointed out that farmers are politically-important in red states, but many of Trump's policies look pretty bad for farmers to me.
Tariffs don't benefit them -- the US is globally competitive agriculturally. The people who want tariffs are in labor-intensive manufacturing. Tariffs just bring up the prices farmers pay, and counter-tariffs hurt them by keeping them from competing in foreign markets. Trump did have some relief funds sent farmers impacted by Chinese tariffs in his first term to mitigate the hit they took, but I'm pretty sure that they'd rather not have their business mucked up.
Trump may not actually do as much on illegal immigration as he tries to promote in his image, but he sure doesn't help, and US agriculture depends heavily on labor from illegal immigrants.
Trump going after SNAP, subsidized food for the poor, doesn't help. My understanding was that for a long time, farmers benefited primarily from federal crop insurance subsidies, but that due to a decline in influence, they basically teamed up with advocates for the poor to get food stamp subsidies in place, and that's now the primary form of federal farm subsidy.
When I look at the NFU
the big farming industry association
website, it doesn't sound very happy with Trump:
https://nfu.org/2025/03/04/american-farmers-and-ranchers-bear-the-brunt-of-tariffs/
In the US political system, strongly-red or strongly-blue areas aren't as politically important, so you don't really need to worry about pissing them off -- they're gonna tend to vote for or against you regardless. That's especially true for the President, and true for a lesser degree for legislators.
But if I'm a legislator for an area, I do care about the industries in my area, and seeing the party that mostly represents rural areas producing a lot of what looks like disadvantageous-to-farmers policy going through kind of surprises me.
This is one of the big things that I don't really feel like I have a handle on regarding Trump administration policy.
EDIT: And I also see websites commenting on Trump policy not being good for farmers, so it's not just me making some kind of huge error in assessing this.
EDIT2: One issue for some farmers has been the EPA taking issue with farm runoff -- fertilizer causing algae blooms, like in the Great Lakes. If Trump weakens regulation on that, that might be popular with farmers. Farm runoff is a very big political issue in the Netherlands, and I know that that caused enormous political waves in the past few years.
kagis
Ah. Okay, apparently yes:
https://apnews.com/article/2386f9f4af34d81ae32629dead464af3
So I guess that might be one selling point he has for farmers.