𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

What are you coding? Despite what everyone is saying, if it’s .NET you’ll be better off in Windows. You can do C# development in Linux, but C# and .NET are Microsoft products, and Linux is the ugly stepchild.

For all other coding purposes, Linux is vastly and measurably superior. You have a nearly endless array of tooling options and a wide variety approaches to nearly any language. VSCode is popular, but so is EMACS and EMACS is useful for so much else - it’s practically an OS, and there exist people who essentially boot directly into EMACS and never leave it. You have a half dozen different implementations of vi, NeoVIM being among the most popular and having an ecosystem of plugins that would make a sex toy store blush. You have The New Kids like Helix and Kakoune, which explore new modalities and change the way you edit text. You have vertical solutions - most programming languages have an IDE written in the language and optimized for coding in that language.

You can run most of these on Windows, but now Windows is the ugly stepchild: nearly all of this tooling was written on Linux, and works best on Linux, and doesn’t require fussing and working in a modality that is just different enough from idiomatic Windows use to feel jarring.

Linux simply has more software, and while there’s a bunch of rough programs, many tools are - IMHO - better than their commercial counterparts on Windows. And by and large, you won’t have to pay for them.

I also believe (and this is more my opinion than anything demonstrable) that for software developers, Linux gives you a better understanding of how computers work. This is a valuable thing for developers, understanding how things function. Windows hides, obfuscates, and conflates so much of how the system functions; and there’s often only one way of doing something so that you don’t even consider, “what if?” What if we used a different init system? What if we did scheduled jobs differently? What if my window manager were different, my boot loader was different, I stored attributes for my program somewhere other than the Registry? While you could use KDE your whole life and never consider that things, you don’t have to step down very far and suddenly be in a domain where you see all of what goes into a modern OS. Windows locks that door to the basement, and sure, people do jimmy it and get in there, but it’s much harder; and Windows integrates so much of the OS that no matter how much ditzing you do, you’re never going to replace the Windows window manager with a different one.

I can’t emphasize enough just how important I feel understanding the fundamentals of how computers function is for software developers, even if you aren’t doing systems programming. Windows obfuscates and hinders that grokking process.

Sometimes it can be difficult to separate the art from the artist, particularly when the artist in question is especially vile.

I often bring up Death of the Artist, but with books and music I have an especially hard time. Authors, in particular, struggle to keep their works views and politics out of their books; the same is true with musicians, perhaps to a lesser extent.

It does make me worry about the subconscious influences of listening or reading them.

Ah, you’re clearly not objectifying women enough!

Do I need to qualify that so people know it’s a joke? I feel as if I need to qualify that.

Sold. I’ll watch it.

Over Mandalorian?

Megan Fox came across as an absolute bore

Well, I wasn’t looking at her for her acting. Some people are just nice to look at.

Man, I love a good nitpicking.

Lemmy is decentralized, but it’s not distributed. It’s decentralized because the source of truth for a community isn’t your instance

It’s a source of truth for you. It’s locally centralized. Your admins have complete control over your account; they can log in as you, post as you, remove your content.

Compare this to git. Github may provide public hosting for you, but you can take your marbles and go somewhere else if you like, and there’s nothing they can do about it. But midwest.social owns my Lemmy identity, and everything that’s on it. If they propagate a “delete” on all my messages, any cooperating servers will delete those messages. For each and every one of us, Lemmy is effectively centralized to the Lemmy instance our account is on.

Now, I agree, this is different than, say, Reddit, where if the Brown Shirts shut out down, they shut out all down, and this can’t happen with Lemmy.

But it’s also not git, or bitcoin, out Nostr, where all they can do is squash nodes which has no impact on user accounts (or wallets, or whatever your identity is) or content.

Those can be updated asynchronously, so if data is cached locally, latency shouldn’t be an issue.

They day they’re not using DHT ¯\(ツ)/¯

I don’t know. This post was the first I’ve heard of it, but since then I’ve seen a couple more “organic” posts asking if anyone thinks it’s good. It smells a tiny bit of astroturfing, but not a lot, so maybe it’s genuine interest. I’ll wait a bit and see, personally.

I think I’m really unusual in that I dislike almost everything after IV. I think the first film was brilliant, back when Lucas was fighting for money and had to rely on vision and had Campbell to advise with. After that it was all introducing cutesy characters strictly for marketing, they all lacked the charm of the original.

I know I’m an exception. Nearly everyone liked V and/or VI more. Everyone dunks on Jar Jar, but I could not stand the Ewoks. It was so disgustingly blatant.

At the time I was dying for sequels, and when they finally came I was so disappointed. You know, I think I just realized that it was the Vader/Luke connection that sunk it for me. That all of the major characters had to be related somehow made the universe smaller, and more petty. They only got worse after that; I think I watched all of I-III, but I actively hated those.

Anyway, I think there might have been a path, and I’m no story teller so I couldn’t fix it, but I think the while thing went off the rails after IV.

Good friends have told me the Mandelorian was good, but “Baby Yoda” represents everything I loathed about the series and I refuse to watch it.

Anyway, what were you saying about the Hero’s Journey? Maybe I should watch The Last Jedi, because while the Campbell formula worked for the first film, it didn’t improve any of the sequels, so maybe I’d like it. As long as there are no obviously pandering character designs that exist clearly because they can easily be marketed as toys. Looking at you, BB-8.

I watched it until the Megan Fox car breakdown scene and figured it wouldn’t get better than that and stopped there. I don’t remember anything else from the movie.

I admit that it surprised me it did well enough for sequels, when better films didn’t, but I guess that’s The Public for you.

So, Geodad… Geodad, right? So Geodad, today’s your first day with us and what you’re going to be doing is changing a lightbulb. Nope, that’s it, just the lightbulb, then you get to go home. Cushy? I guess.

Ok, I’m going to drive you over to the tower- what? Yeah, the KRDK-TV tower. Light’s at the top. Just climb to top there and swap out the bulb.

Just a couple of things: There’s no caging once you get up a ways so you’re just climbing on the outside. This being your first time, you should clip in. It gets gusty up there. Second if you hear a helicopter locate its direction. If it’s above you, climb down. If it’s below, hang on tight and say your hail Marys - you signed the waiver, right? Good, good.

Just a lightbulb, today. I’ll be back to pick you up later this afternoon when you get back down. Have fun!

I don’t take issue with your points, but you’re conflating issues. I think it’s worth clarifying some terms up front.

Being utterly independent isn’t necessary for decentralization. Decentralization very specifically means there’s no single holder of the data; it does not have any implication for dependencies.

Lemmy is not decentralized; it’s federated. “Decentralized” and “federated” are not synonyms, and as long as you doing don’t run your own server, you’re effectively on a centralized platform. This is to your point about being “always dependent on something, somewhere in some way.” It’s true for Lemmy; it is not true for all systems, not unless you’re being pedantic, which wouldn’t be helpful: you being dependent on electricity from your electric company doesn’t mean an information network can’t be “truly” decentralized.

A distributed ledger can be truly decentralized. Blockchains aren’t always distributed ledgers, and not all distributed ledgers are blockchains, but whether or not a specific blockchain is resource intensive has no bearing on whether or not it’s centralized. This is the part I take issue with: it’s irrelevant to the decentralization discussion.

Bitcoin is decentralized: no single person or group of people control it, and there is no central server that serves as an authoritative source of information. If there were, it wouldn’t be nearly so ecologically expensive. Its very nature as something that exists on equally on every single full node is part of the cost. You can take out any node, or group of nodes, and as long as there’s one full node left in the world, bitcoin exists (you then have a consensus verification problem, but that’s a different issue).

But let’s look at a second, less controversial, example: git, or rather, git repositories. This is, again, fully decentralized, and depends on no single resource. Microsoft would like you to believe that github is the center of git, and indeed github is the main reason git is as popular as it is despite its many shortcomings, but many people don’t use github for their projects, and any full clone of any repository is a independent and fully decentralized copy, isolated and uncontrolled by anyone but the person on whose computer it exists. Everything else is just convention.

Nostr is yet another fully decentralized ecosystem. It is, unfortunately, colonized almost entirely by cryptobros, and that’s the majority of its content, but there’s nothing “blockchain” or crypto in the core design. Nodes are simple key/value stores, and when you publish something to Nostr you submit it to (usually) a half-dozen different nodes, and it propagates out from there to other nodes. If you run your own node, even if your node dies, you still have your account and can publish content to other nodes, because your identity - your private key - is stored on your computer. Or, if you’re smart, on your phone, and maybe your laptop too, with backups. Your identity need not even be centralized to one device. No single group can stop you from publishing - individual nodes can choose to reject your posts, and there are public block lists, but not every node uses those. It is truly decentralized.

I’m not familiar with Plebbit, but it seems to me they’re trying to establish a cryptographically verifiable distributed ledger - a distributed blockchain. There’s no proof-of-work in this, because the blocks are content, so the energy cost people associate with bitcoin is missing.

DHTs and distributed ledgers are notoriously difficult to design well, often suffering from syncing lags and block delivery failures. Jami is a good example of a project plagued by DHT sync issues. I’m not surprised they’re taking a long time to get stable, because this is a hard problem to solve - a deceptively simple problem to describe, but syncing hides issues like conflict resolution, updating published content, and all the administrative tools necessary in a world full of absolute shitheads who just want to cause chaos. It does look to me as it it would be fully decentralized, in a way Lemmy isn’t, if they can get it working reliably.