!learningrustandlemmy@lemmy.ml

It’s for learning rust (the programming language) and the lemmy code base itself as a sort of “reading club”. If you’re the type of person who might be interested there’s a good chance you’ve heard of it already. We’re currently working through The Book (conventional learning resource) through a couple of Twitch streams and regular posts/discussions.

More collaborative learning activity is plenty welcome!

This is one of my favourite things!

I’ve walked most of it (though I couldn’t find Saturn for some reason … I suspect it was stolen).

And yea … it’s a ridiculously effective demonstration of how hard it is to comprehend big numbers. I knew these numbers, or had read them before hand, and thought about them … but seeing it all to scale was kinda devastating … like the distances between the outer planets are huuuge … you get tired walking them even though the planets are 5cms wide.

And yea, the proxima centauri thing is a very nice touch!

I believe you … gate-keeping types are all over the place really.

But vegans or the “vegan-curious” aren’t one thing or one kind of person, at least not any more. I personally have only ever had positive conversations with vegan types.

This instance, in being insistent on not entertaining any “harm reduction” or “compromises”, makes sense though … because it’s a space for people to talk about that sort of dedicated approach.

they drive away potential allies because the concept of harm reduction is anathema to their binary thinking. If you’re not ALL in, you’re the enemy.

I can resonate with that. But I come back to … “it’s totally ok for people to create their own spaces, especially on federated social media and especially for minority groups/ideas”.

There are likely plenty of other spaces for “potential allies” to engage and talk about veganism if they want to, or plenty they, or you, could make on their own.

Tacitly admitting that vegans are usually antisocial zealots. “It’s right in the name!”

Well, they’re running their own social media platform, so I’m not sure how anti-social they are.

Right. Well, I think the instance name “vegantheory.org” was doing that already, and I’m betting you drew your conclusion from the public description of the place too (and aren’t in the modlog or anything for challenging their ideas).

And what would a non-vegan want to do in there?

What’s wrong with minority views and practices creating their own spaces?

On which, is there any non-vegan/anti-vegan thought or idea that a vegan is likely to have not heard already? How many haven’t they heard relative to the amount of decent “pro-vegan” ideas they also haven’t heard of?

Maybe a specialised space, echo chamber even, makes sense in order to balance against the gravity of the mainstream?

I suspect the basilisk reveals more about how the human mind is inclined to think up of heaven and hell scenarios.

Some combination of consciousness leading to more imagination than we know what to do with and more awareness than we’re ready to grapple with. And so there are these meme “attractors” where imagination, idealism, dread and motivation all converge to make some basic vibe of a thought irresistible.

Otherwise, just because I’m not on top of this … the whole thing is premised on the idea that we’re likely to be consciousnesses in a simulation? And then there’s the fear that our consciousnesses, now, will be extracted in the future somehow?

1. That’s a massive stretch on the point about our consciousness being extracted into the future somehow. Sounds like pure metaphysical fantasy wrapped in singularity tech-bro.
2. If there are simulated consciousnesses, it is all fair game TBH. There’d be plenty of awful stuff happening. The basilisk seems like just a way to encapsulate the fact in something catchy.

At this point, doesn’t the whole collapse completely into a scary fairy tale you’d tell tech-bro children? Seriously, I don’t get it?

Every browser released since 2020 supports this

It’s a little paranoid of me, but I like the idea that a basic web app I make can be thrown onto any old out of date machine, where ~2015 or younger seems about right for me ATM.

You mean the Html template Element? I’ve never really got that to work, but I also never seriously tried.

Yea. From memory, it’s just an unrendered chunk of HTML that you can select and clone with a bit of JS. I always figured there’d be a pattern that isn’t too much of a cludge and gets you some useful amount of the way to components for basic “vanilla-js” pages, just never gave it a shot either.

Yea, I’m unclear on how you can take web components and still have widespread browser support (not knowing enough about their ins and outs).

Plain template elements are widely supported and have been for ~10 years (which ideologically matters to me along the same lines as the top post’s article) … perhaps a little bit of hacking together can get you close with just that?

But nah. These goobers got high off npm modules and did shots of JSX in the bathroom at lunch time.

Fucking LoL!

Anyone here have thoughts about doing basic interactive stuff with at most vanilla JS?

Youre right about lemmy-ui, unfortunately it doesnt have enough contributors. I dont know why that is, you’d think a project written in a popular language like Typescript would easily find contributors.

Random thoughts:

• Is it obvious enough that one can contribute to the UI separately from the backend and that it’s a Typescript SPA style UI?
  • If not, maybe a bit of a “dev recruitment campaign” could help … let people people know and what sorts of issues could really do with new contributors lending a hand? Maybe even a bit of a “Inferno isn’t that different from all of the other SPA frameworks/libraries spiel?”
• Is the use of Inferno as oppose to one of the big 3 React/Vue/Svelte a repellent? (perhaps a downside to the “diversity” of frontend frameworks?)
• Are would-be UI contributors more inclined to make their own front-end or app than contribute to the default webUI?

More generally:

• Would a server side rendered webUI be welcome?
  • Then the contributions would mainly be on templates and their “simpler” logic, which might be more attractive or easier to get started on?
  • Plus, it might be more efficient? The current UI feels to me like it would suit server side rendering well.
  • Is this where the new leptos UI is heading … more server side rendering (I don’t know much about leptos)
• Do you have a sense of usage numbers for the different apps and frontends? Obviously you only run lemmy.ml, but do you have a sense of how much the front-end gets hit versus the API directly?
  • I ask, because If the default WebUI is really the main interface, then it makes sense to try to organise some more contributors (It’s certainly my main, nearly exclusive interface, as much as I’ve like some of the alt front ends or apps)

I hear you for sure on this.

I personally appreciate the push the core devs make for a “less demanding” relationship between users and open source devs. I think they have a point and it’s good for long term sustainability and I’ll probably find myself defending it.

But I like you’re framing, and in retrospect it seems (as is usually the case) that some people organising was what was missing just to get everyone helping each out as much and efficiently as possible. While any member of the community can (and should) do that, at some point it makes sense for the core devs to take on a task like that, I agree.

Should there be something like a lemmy admin’s community for talking about the ins and outs of running a lemmy instance? Something like that over time can be some sort of band-aid for missing documentation (it’s searchable etc).

I’m aware that there’s the matrix room and a lemmy support community … but maybe just opening things up to any chat about hosting lemmy in one place could actually help (in part because you can easily search specifically within one community).

but we’re at a critical point right now. It’s no longer software that is just fun side projects and building stuff that looks cool, it has some real issues now that it has a real userbase. I’m definitely one to say “But it’s FOSS, and other people can pick up and submit a PR” - but it also says something when the head devs just completely ignore a massively huge issue with it.

This is a general issue I think, not just for lemmy but the whole fediverse (whatever one’s opinions might be on particular priorities).

It’s all non-profit and being run and built at a much smaller scale than many users would appreciate (I think). Sure there are plenty of people here, but not that many. Combined with no obvious revenue streams, such as ads or subscription fees, there really is only so much that can be done. Some time last year even the Mastodon team (by far the most successful fediverse platform) admitted that they didn’t have the capacity to work on new things for a while … they were just busy keeping things running. And they are (apparently) notorious at being slow to ship new features. Meanwhile platforms like firefish just straight up died last year.

So yea, it might be a critical point, for sure. But putting more on the core dev teams may not be the answer for the simple reason that it’s just not viable in the long run.

If we enjoy the bigger community focus and open and non-profit organisations that makeup the fediverse, the “answer” at this critical point might be to find a way to give back somehow … to organise, build communities, run fund-raising campaigns, think of ideas for more sustainable funding, find devs who can help etc etc. It’s perhaps onerous and annoying, even to read perhaps … but this is likely the tradeoff we have to make for a place like this.

The introduction of a plugin system seems interesting here, though it’s still alpha and basically looking for feedback from would-be plugin developers

AFAICT, there’s no established way for a plugin to surface affect the UI, which would be a somewhat unwieldy problem anyway due to the apps and frontends ecosystem. Probably the best path for any plugin that provides a UI would be to have a system for aggregating links to plugin UIs.

With something like that in place, plugins and other services that just use the DB/API, could really go a long way to filling these holes, if they haven’t already.

So it seems that the work needed here is perhaps “distribution” work … where there’s a more “plug and play” Lemmy distribution with plugins etc bundled?

The only Constitutional restriction on them is impeachment and removal,

… and constitutional amendment … a democratic process

But if your not willing to consider that an executive might at some time be right in saying “no”, then they are effectively all powerful. That’s the “optional” part.

Then would the country have any option to being subject to the Executive’s power to override the court? You sidestepped my most important question … what kind of governmental power is ever “optional”? And I suspect that’s because you haven’t thought through what happens when you override one branch’s power with another’s.

Moreover, in highlighting how easy it is to ignore the court, you’re strangely acknowledging my “least worrisome” point but then folding that into an argument that they should therefore be ignored by the executive … because “they can” or “they might be right”. Which only highlights the danger of this line of thought … if one reads between the lines, it’d be fair to conclude that you favour the more powerful parts of government flexing their muscles. The danger being that there’s no outline here of what happens next and whether there are then more or fewer “options” for the country. If the executive can just say “nah” … what law is there? What constrains the government from its natural vice of abusing power, compared to a court that can only say somethings are not permitted?

Otherwise, if a politicised court is a concern (which I generally agree with and probably like you feel should be taken more seriously to the point that formally I actually endorse your arguments, just not substantively) … I think there are various other things that can be done without throwing the baby out with the bath water. Unfortunately, I’d fear that the politicisation of the court, to the point that controlling it’s makeup seems like half of the point in a presidential election, and the constitution (or its “hot topics”) has gone too far for any side to be willing to “let go of the rope”.

It’s the least worrisome because it can be abolished (selectively)

I’d say it’s because they don’t command the police or military and are completely subject, without input, to the democratic levers of government including, not least, amending the constitution itself.

They sit completely under the constitution, and it itself is a democratic entity. If the amendment process doesn’t feel democratic enough, well then we get the elephant in the room about how much democracy do you want and whether that’s maybe your main problem.

If cooperation is not at least partially optional, then it’s not the weakest branch

What other branch is partially optional?

In the case of a court, they’re role is passive. They only act when prompted by a party who brings a case. Legislators and the Executive do what they want when they want. So surely they’re by the most optional. Honestly have no idea what you’re trying to say here … the point of governmental power and law is arguably not to be optional.

The internet cannot fit so much awesomeness … JFC that was awesome!

A few months ago, the “Nazi” presence on substack and substack’s insistence on not moderating them (like at all it seemed) broke as a story, during which Casey Newton (and by extension his “platformer” blog) got engaged with substack about the issue and, after being disappointed with substack’s responses and policies, famously left for Ghost (see their post on the move here.

Pretty sure that boosted its profile and prompted talks of federating, which they were initially hesitant to do … but here we are now.

It’s interesting to see these kinds of ideas. Can’t help but feel it’s reactionary and superficially “anti-government” without looking at other deeper issues.

What is “law” without judicial enforcement? If you don’t have constitutional law, then a big pile of power balancing is thrown out, so you have to make sure you want that. That the Court is by far the least democratic institution is pretty obvious (but to be fair, in a two-party system, I’m not sure how much “democracy” there really is to start off with). But it’s also the least worrisome if you care about individual’s rights/freedoms, which is part of the reason why it’s special status makes sense: it relies entirely on cooperation from everyone else.

So, why abolish its power to enforce the constitution? Because it’s unreliably politicised? Then I think that might be the underlying issue.