This is always a spectrum from how long it was since the last Debian stable release. So about 2 years max.

Modern release cadences make it crazy anywhere but Debian, but security patches are very timely. If you’re dealing with newer features, driver support or java/npm packages you’re probably also outside the typical defaults, but there’s generally some people working to keep the common ones up to date.

Still not my preferred way to handle updates and in some cases… kind of abusive to the maintainers who constantly haVE to deal with bug reports from “out of date” Debian users. The xscreensaver maintainer has some choice words. But it works, has for years with no sign of slowing.

I mean it predates a lot of the pervy anime, but Usenet looked the same at the start with lots of Unix/computer boards and an alt.

Computer enthusiasts gonna enthusiastically talk about computers. People who pick up and move to a new platform are likely to be united around being technically competent enough to get there first, and everything else second.

So, most of the knowledge of what levers are exploited is going to come out of industry. I don’t expect him to know a common persons problems, but he might know how to help.

When Obama was nominated I pretty instantly had my pulse raised over Tom Wheeler (FCC) and Tim Geitner (treasury), only to find myself surprised by Tom. His pick Jessica Rosenworcel is probably the best thing in my lifetime, and common carrier laws have only really held because he’s been ready to stick it to Comcast.

Geitner should be behind bars.

It really depends, and a lot of what’s on record from their time in industry is the company line. it’s kind of counter intuitive, but things like ‘pork’ in bills in congress get cooperation because they can seek new organizations of power.

Divide and conquer works on the powerful too.

If you dive into the theory at all about how ranked choice systems are gamed I think everyone is doomed for a headache.

Don’t feel bad, it’s infinitely better than what we have broadly, but it demands a lot more of the average voter if you’re not voting a party ticket. If you’re struggling you’re doing it right.

Christofacism. Really you can look at the Westboro baptist church for how emphasis on their duty to a fallen society over gods love looks.

If it makes it into a congregation the reasonable people leave, and the rest radicalize further.

Hey I’m you at almost 40! I was always dev adjacent, but never learned to do much more than basic scripting for work.

I started with a couple books: Chassels intro to emacs lisp and Python the hard way.

Python was helpful for a couple things, but the ecosystem is kind of a disaster. I found just the general emacs config helps quite a bit get your feet wet with lisp likes.

Other people have mentioned Go is a great start point because its simplified, and I’ve definitely found it a lot more helpful than the java and C compliers I tried to learn on in my teens.

The only other thing I’d throw out is Lua, it’s super verbose in a way thats pretty easy to understand. it’s also relatively easy to find programs like wezterm that are configured through lua and offer instant reaponses when you change something and see changes.

Just like any new language it takes time, and some hard work to internalize what youre learning, but I don’t think there’s a too old.

You don’t have to be the best programmer ever to do useful things.

Thank you for this, been hunting for a decent gesture typing option for awhile. Floris board had been decent, but the lack of actual suggestions was brutal to work around.

I don’t have a study to cite on long term bias, but Scripps used to be newsy which used to be at least serviceable for what amounted to AP syndication.

I didn’t have a clue they were still around till just this instant, but at least the foundation is not something that sprung up yesterday as a Russian puppet.

Things like this make me wish the traditionally anti government party wasn’t a bunch of loonies, because they’d be the ones pushing this to public conscious in a way that might move the needle.

I don’t doubt the intentions of (some) progressive members of government, but they’re outgunned and have a long list of priorities. Getting legislation to reverse this isn’t coming from corporatists, the infinite retention is going to seem like a feature to business.

I laughed a little because I’m not sure I ever grew out of the expectation of everything being a little broken. You are going to learn so much you could have done without.

On a more sober note I’m not sure adding a business model fixes the problem anymore.

If we paid for our anonymity like toll roads or subscriptions we box out people who can’t afford it. Commodity level information isn’t likely to be decreasing in value any time immediately.

If equitable access is also on the list, I don’t see anything but regulation and taxes getting you there. Just look at the steam store prices outside the first world and you have an idea for how poorly it could go.

The entire body of issues from the ad supported model are legion and documented by people better than I.

My point to wikipedia is it’s a charitable model with substantial overhead. The time of the dev is the product here, there is no overhead beyond the play store scrape.

He can work for what he wants, but he’s shutting where I eat.

I have to admit I’m totally soured.

Serving ads is not cool, and specifically poisoning the Lemmy instance with all the problems of tying near permanent content to an ad ID is negligent.

No you won’t convince me he had to to make a living, or do you not use wikipedia.

We still haven’t really sussed out whether the dominant model is going to be general or specific focus instances, or even brought whether niche boards want to just be in charge of the content and not the users, since your credentials are good everywhere you’re federated.

Right now your ‘all’ feed is a combination of all the various places users on your instance have trawled, but they’re not totally the same everywhere.

We could see curated instance feeds with some instance muting from admins that make it function like a public RSS, per user even if it gets that granular. Skies kind of the limit once you understand it’s limited to insecure communication, the most anonymity you have here is in a crowd.

I think the triggers are likely to die down as the CEOs gradually stop sawing at their own genitalia.

What you have here is a start, but the barriers like having to find all the niches through searching mechanics that send you to a website and back to a client are always going to be a sticking point. There’s not much support on any client to just get a list of communities on the instance, much less a different one.

If they come down or the instances centralize enough that it doesn’t matter we’ll see some growth by enticing other users because it’ll be functionally the same thing to them. But there are some definite hurdles in getting here, and there’s no incentive to advertise (read $) other than grassroots.

it’s kinda like looking at some weird bizarro version of yourself finding your old handle.

If it’s also a zombie I’m more creeped out.

Welcome to the part of the Internet with a soul.

Seriously if you’re old enough to remember the Internet in terms of users weird passion projects you could do a lot worse than hanging off any part of activitypub.

There’s a lot more people than the old days with technical backgrounds, so there’s a lot more practical stuff.