palordrolap

@palordrolap@kbin.social

Some middle-aged guy on the Internet; Seen a lot of it and occasionally regurgitate it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4.

Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Now I'm here.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

Applying for mod in places where an occasional mod would better than none at all.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

palordrolap,

One of the main problems is that Ernest is the owner and only mod on those magazines getting all the spam. I guess I missed the memo (figuratively speaking) about deletions not being federated though. That seems like a problem even if there were alternative moderators.

There's at least one person on the mod-request queue for most of the spam-ridden magazines. That "at least one" is me, which is how I know. I'm not here all the time and wouldn't be great at it, but at this stage even a part-time mod would be better than none at all. Hopefully, as and when Ernest comes back he can assign some roles. Twice as hopefully, someone else who would be better at it gets it instead.

palordrolap,

How sure are they that his hasn't happened in the last billion years?

Maybe it happens once every 1,000 years but they've all died out before humans were able to observe it. It's not like things like this tend to leave much of a fossil.

And if you don't like 1,000, there's a few orders of magnitude to reconsider between there and 10^9.

palordrolap,

The scientific method is pedantry made manifest.

palordrolap,

"New bacteria/plant cell symbiosis discovered"

And if "symbiosis" is too much, "combination". I also like "meld(ing)", but that might be somewhere in the middle.

I wouldn't use "hybrid" because that word has definitely made it into common vernacular and implies they've bred which isn't strictly accurate, and "chimera", while more accurate, is probably the more terrifying-sounding, if not still technical alternative.

palordrolap,

I registered the next-in-sequence for one of them. Haven't seen that username since. I like to think I broke a script somewhere, but it could just as easily have broken a spammer's tiny little brain. The disappointing but more likely explanation is that they shrugged and moved on to a different set of usernames.

palordrolap,

CRISPR tail growing therapy when?

Just kidding. Not sure I want a tail. Hairy or hairless it wouldn't look right at all.

palordrolap, (edited )

In Field of Dreams the ghost voice says "If you build it, they will come.", but fails to say "Oh yeah, you have to look after it once you've done that. You're gonna need a ride-on mower."

Like many folks on aggregator sites, I'd create magazines / communities / sub-sites if it didn't mean I then had to manage and moderate them afterwards. (There are many things in life that fit this pattern.)

Rhyme criticism:

  • "-zines" and "weeks" is, well, weak.
  • "Arrives" and "cries" is slightly better, but not by much.
  • "Soul" and "foul" don't rhyme either, despite appearances.

Then again, maybe it's my own accent that's spoiling these?

palordrolap,

The lack of answer to the question "Why are Meta suddenly so open and willing to integrate with the Fediverse when they've basically been doing the opposite with their own products?" is a huge concern.

My guess is that they don't have an exact game plan yet, and are letting their naive, enthusiastic staff - those with no idea of the answer to the above question - do the initial scout and integration work with a view to see how it can be perverted for Meta's profit/benefit in future.

Meta probably wouldn't use the word "perverted", but from an outside perspective that's what it'd be.

My thinking here is exactly the same as in comments I posted about Microsoft's embrace of Linux a short while back: 1 2

palordrolap,

Needs a line about tankies.

palordrolap,

There are browser extensions available that can help with the choice. From old-school Reddit habits, I tend not to use them on kbin, but here's an example from the one I use in other places: 🥦 (Hoping broccoli is a safe choice and doesn't have any weird alternative meanings.)

palordrolap,

I only know that one time an obscure thing I was talking about here on kbin.social, perhaps as a response to a post on some Lemmy or another, ended up being indexed incredibly quickly by Google regardless of however things are structured in URLs.

This became apparent when I tried to do further research on the topic and I found myself staring at my own comment as federated on yet another Lemmy.

As long as search engines remain as on the ball as whatever happened there, we might actually end up with a repository anyway.

palordrolap,

Unrelated username commentary: Your leet/hex username had me wondering if it resolved as an IP address too. Turns out you belong to the US Department of Defense. Unsure if you knew that already.

For obvious reasons, I decided not to try to actually visit that IP.

subignition, to kbinMeta
@subignition@kbin.social avatar

#kbinMeta Is it possible to submit a thread to a magazine hosted on a different instance? I wanted to post to a lemmy.world community but I can't get it to show up in the magazine selector on the add thread page. Is there syntax I am missing here or is it just not possible?

#kbinMeta

palordrolap,

TL;DR: To create a new post anywhere in the Fediverse, you have to have an account on the host where you want to create it. (As far as I know anyway.)

To participate in comments is slightly different, and in many cases, a comment made on a separate instance (or even platform) will show up on the original instance, provided the admins of each have set up respective federation.

Nonetheless, this can also fail. Consider several people on, say, kbin.social all subscribed to the same Lemmy community on some instance or another.

They'll all see each other's comments as well as the Lemmy users' comments, and be able to interact, but if that Lemmy's admin team decides not to allow external comments to be visible, the kbin folks will be talking to each other and no-one at the Lemmy, even if their comments are in response to, and show up underneath, a Lemmy user's message.

That Lemmy user would be totally clueless unless they knew to access kbin.social and check. And no-one's going to want, or even be able, to do the rounds of all potential Federation sites to see if they have unfederated responses.

What would be nice is if it was possible to log in to one Federation site with credentials for another, or have some non-specific login details that are shared across multiple, but I suspect that's a logistical nightmare waiting to happen.

Since I'm over a thousand characters in at this point, I might as well explain that you're getting this response two weeks late(r) because your post showed up on the kbin.social sidebar for me today for some reason.

Scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don't have free will (phys.org)

Before epilepsy was understood to be a neurological condition, people believed it was caused by the moon, or by phlegm in the brain. They condemned seizures as evidence of witchcraft or demonic possession, and killed or castrated sufferers to prevent them from passing tainted blood to a new generation.

palordrolap,

Whether or not we have free will and whether this whole existence is pre-calculated, I'm going to go all meta-Pascal's wager on it and suggest that we try to act like we do have free will and try not to think about it.

Maybe I was always going to come to that conclusion. Doesn't matter.

Maybe this makes about as much sense as Wile E. Coyote staying in the air until he actually realises he has run off a cliff. Doesn't matter.

Be the Road-Runner able to run into a painting of a tunnel as if it is real and remain as happy as possible about it.

meep-meep

Ancient technology turns plant-based cheese into 'something we want to eat' (phys.org)

To produce plant-based cheeses that feel and taste like dairy cheese, scientists have their sights set on fermentation. In a new research result, University of Copenhagen scientists demonstrate the potential of fermentation for producing climate-friendly cheeses that people want to eat.

palordrolap,

Anyone remember the "Gary" meme? Can't believe that was 7 years ago.

palordrolap,

Mastodon is a lot harder to enshittify being as it's decentralised and uses an open protocol.

If it looks like an instance has gone down the path of corporate enshittification, other instances will stop federating with it.

The software itself could be a target, but it's open-source. Even the original instance created by the software creators (mastodon.social), turns to the dark side, someone will inevitably fork the last open-source version of the software and other instances will then update from the most popular fork.

As long as the underlying protocol remains the same, it doesn't really matter what happens.

Heck, kbin is totally different software but uses the same protocol to federate with the various Lemmys, other kbins, and, yes, Mastodon instances too.

Consider what happened a number of times with Reddit where various groups left and used the last open-source version of the software to set up their own Reddit clones. It wasn't particularly successful for them, but one or two of them are still out there.

If there had been a large number of them all sharing content and posts like Mastodon etc., maybe they would have been more popular. (For better or worse).

palordrolap,

Unfortunately, his son Lachlan is said to be pretty much equivalent, which if true, means not much will change.

It'd be great if Lachy has been pulling a massive bait-and-switch on his dad, but that'll be the most laughably naïve hope I've had in a while.

A big twist could be that he actually does this but then goes back on it the moment the shock kills off his dad. Sweet, sweet, early inheritance. Very Murdochian. And forty more days of winter years of Fox being Fox for the rest of us.

palordrolap,

Caution: This comment contains mildly infuriating party tricks.

Curious. This reminds me of the "Your tongue knows what things you look at will feel like" meme that did the rounds a while back. (If you missed it, it was literally that phrase, possibly with some kind of image.)

Reading the article, it also reminds me of the body confusion trick of moving the right foot around in a clockwise motion while trying to write the letter O a few times (which most people write anticlockwise). Most people will inadvertently reverse the rotation of their foot.

(Make necessary changes if you're left handed and/or write your O's clockwise.)

Or the two hands equivalent: Pointing away from yourself, move the tips of the index fingers around in a clockwise or anticlockwise motion, keeping the fingers parallel. Then, continuing the rotation, turn the hands inwards so that they point towards each other. If they're now both going over and away or over and towards, one of them has changed direction.

palordrolap,

You might be right. There are three currently known different kinds of spicy.

Still plenty of unknowns at play though. There might be situations whereby an apparent immunity is suddenly lacking.

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