No, it wasn’t like that. Remember that while computer technology was fairly mainstream, it wasn’t nearly as engrained into our lives as today. So people were talking about a worst-case scenario that involved technological things: potential power outages, administrations maybe shutting down, some public transportation maybe shutting down, … To me, it felt like people were getting ready for being potentially majorly inconvenienced, but that they weren’t at all freaking out.

I do remember the first few days of January 2000 felt like a good fun joke. “All that for this!”

I’ve been telling people that the notion that the ER lets poor people die in the US is false; instead, they make you wish you did.

Mint uses an OAuth token (I think through Plaid). This is not the same thing as sharing a username/password, and is authorized by your bank, since they provide the OAuth flow; otherwise OAuth wouldn’t work in the first place.

Ugh, sorry, the “do your research” phrase to deflect something makes me roll my eyes hard. It might kinda make sense for topics where there is actually research, like COVID prevention, or climate change; and even then, people seem to use it a lot to mean “read stuff I’ve read that I had preselected to agree with my views regardless of whether it’s backed by actual science”. But I find it even more out-of-place when the science we’re talking about is a Kickstarter campaign… It’s become such a catchphrase for thinly veiled attempts at gaslighting people.

But anyway, back to the substance of it. I definitely didn’t mean that anyone in this thread anywhere blames companies for that, I only meant it in a general sense. I agree no one here was particularly doing it. But I’m sure you’d agree that large companies being out-of-touch with their customers is hardly a marginal view.

If by “paywall options” you mean the cheap levels that don’t grant you the actual product, yeah, I posted another comment about those, I’m a bit puzzled why people would actually give their money for that. I just don’t see the point of those, so I can’t really judge the ethical aspects without understanding why on Earth people feel compelled to buy those. I would have expected those levels to have 0 people, but I guess they don’t.

However, for people interested in getting the product, and companies interested in wrapping up the product with those people’s input, I still really can’t see anything unethical going on here. It feel like a win for everyone.

Same, but even when I type one-handed, I also bounce back and forth at each word. Swiping gets short words wrong more often, but more rarely long words.

So for instance, for “I am on vacation”, the only word I’d swipe when one-handed is “vacation”. If I swiped “am”, I’d probably have a 50-50 chance of getting “an”; which may or may not self-correct later, depending on what else it got wrong.

Yeah, that I do not get. It’s basically donating money to a corporation just to receive marketing updates about a product? I don’t get it…

Yeah, same, I’m not particularly shocked here. We often blame large companies for being oblivious to what their audience really wants; this is a large company trying to test the waters to better understand and produce what their audience really wants. I’d say that’s not a bad thing for whoever’s interested in those kinds of products for that kind of price.

Also, I bought a few things out of Kickstarter over the years, and some came out looking pretty good, some… not so much. When the Kickstarter campaign fails hard enough, the supplier ends up disappearing into the ether, and the consumer is left holding the bag. It’s the name of the game, it is what it is. Another upside of this Kickstarter campaign is that since there’s a wealthy company behind it, the people giving that money know that they’ll at least get something.

For more clarity: the amount needed to overdose on acetaminophen is quite low, you can enter liver failure quite easily if you overdo it. People have been known to sometimes take more acetaminophen when they start feeling the resulting liver pains, making the problem gradually worse, and sometimes ending up dying from it.

So, if you’ve already taken acetaminophen as part of some medication, it’s not just that you don’t need to take more, it’s actually dangerous if you do.

The way I’ve seen this done before, it was not for a password, but for a token entered after the password was entered. No, the token is not encrypted, and therefore it would not be secure for the service to use it as a password.

Concussion-ball?

Threads isn’t currently using ActivityPub, but vocally expressed that they are planning to in a future release, in order to “join the fediverse”. They have not expressed when, or what people will and won’t be able to do, or what the business goal is.

About the latter, some are speculating that this is a typical attempt of a closed-source editor to pretend to join an open-source effort in order to destroy it, as has happened in the past. It could realistically be that, or something else, no one knows; but that explains why people are calling to defederate Threads when that becomes real.

Yeah… I had heard of it as a rumor, so I doubted it for a little while, until I was shown the receipts. https://lemmy.world/comment/562635

It really is disappointing.

Exactly, and my pleasure!

My best answer is: if they get to sufficient scale, both Lemmy and Kbin will face scaling issues to get through, but Lemmy is based on something that will make it much easier for humans to get through a lot of those bottlenecks.

I hope what this answer conveys is that the technology choice is a major factor, but not the only factor. If the Lemmy dev team doesn’t know how to scale a service, and don’t enlist the help of people who do, the underlying technology won’t make much of a difference. But it does give them a very strong upside.

Another Lemmy user was saying that the Kbin move to use PHP was like someone saying: “oh, I like the airplane you just built by yourself with the intention to fly above the clouds, I’m going to do the same thing, let me prepare my cardboard”, and there’s a lot of truth to it. 😉

The Kbin creator had initially joined to help Lemmy, but decided to create his own thing when he couldn’t take their political alignments anymore. The Lemmy devs used to be vocal Uyghur genocide deniers and pro-North-Korea, and would answer questions on Reddit’s r/AskATankie (a tankie is someone who supports communist dictatorships), but now that Lemmy is successful, they’ve kind of grown hush-hush on it, without really addressing it.

So, he went to create Kbin, but since he’s not a software engineer, he chose foundations that won’t really scale too well. Kbin is written in PHP, which is an interpreted and mono-threaded technology, it’s great at some stuff, but not high-scale services (source: that’s what I do for a living). Lemmy was written in Rust, which is compiled and multi-threaded. It doesn’t mean Lemmy won’t meet tricky scale bottlenecks, but it will give it a much larger toolset to get through whole classes of them.

And of course, Kbin being much younger, it doesn’t currently have a bunch of critical stuff that Lemmy already has. For instance: an API, which has been allowing other people to build great native clients for it.

It could be, but they specifically used the word “fediverse” in their marketing. It doesn’t make it sound like they want to create a new thing, that would sound like they want to integrate with the existing fediverse.

I signed up for Threads, and there were 3 upsides of Threads on their welcome screen, one of them was that it will be part of the fediverse someday. It doesn’t mean they’ll do it, but they definitely intend to use ActivityPub as more than just an internal protocol.

Agreed, we don’t want them to be aware of it.

It has become really solid over time.

But it will always be a mono-threaded and interpreted technology, and therefore never a good choice for a high-scale solution like a Fediverse application.

It is, but it aged pretty well.

Devs wanted to store state in objects, so it became object-oriented. It also gained a really solid full-fledged web framework with a strong community, with Symfony; and some strong micro-frameworks like Laravel.

But it will always be interpreted and mono-threaded, and therefore never a good choice for high-scale solutions. Facebook has to invent a brand new language (Hack) and runtime (HHVM) that was close enough to PHP so they could spend millions spending their PHP codebase to it, in order to make it compiled and multi-threaded, and make it scale.