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9 days agoFor those not familiar with the author, he is a Lib Dem life peer, and was president of the Lib Dems until 3 months ago.
I used to be @ambitiousslab@lemmy.ml. I also have the backup account @ambitiousslab@reddthat.com.
- 6 Posts
- 27 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
Cake day: January 11th, 2026
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He added that the government would provide an extra £63m to the 21 areas affected.
This issue has trundled on for so long, the concern being cost on local government, and then it turns out it can be sorted out overnight with just £63m.
If you ran on a pledge to clean up politics, and you’re up against Reform saying “they’re all the same and all as bad as each other”, then it should be obvious that delaying elections because you’re scared about the results is not a good look.
24·16 days agoMany very small services will just not bother with compliance. And the risk of enforcement on them might be low.
If you use a federated alternative, you can switch to a server that doesn’t bother with compliance without losing your contacts.
Many of the laws don’t specify how the age check should be done. There are more privacy-friendly ways to comply, like running a server for your friends or family and already knowing they’re over 18.
19·17 days agoOoooo, someone’s getting worried!
Bangor debating and politics society responded that “in line with our values” it was declining his offer, expressing “zero tolerance for any form of racism, transphobia or homophobia”.
Reform’s Zia Yusuf thundered on X that Bangor got £30m from taxpayers and he was “sure they won’t mind losing every penny of (their) state funding under a Reform government”. And that’s where it suddenly got serious.
Anyone who thinks that Reform will not just copy every part of what has happened in the US, has the wool over their eyes.
9·18 days agoI agree with you, and I think there’s a tension between the technical solution (meeting users where they are) and political solution (persuading the users to come to our way of thinking).
The technical solution is an unequal fight. We have to provide a familiar and equally good experience - integrating everything into these easy-to-use everything apps, on a shoestring budget compared to the proprietary apps. And, without the “education”, users will converge on particular instances because that’s what’s most convenient, giving a lot of power to particular players in the network.
If we can persuade people to prioritise freedom over convenience, then we end up with a much more resilient userbase who will go help with the existing networks.
I don’t know how we can make people care, though. The free software movement has been trying for 40 years to make regular users care, but the message only really lands with developers. There’s certainly more interest in taking down big tech nowadays, but convenience still seems to come first.
Searching for a single Discord alternative may be asking the wrong question however. Discord itself is an extensive bundle of functions smashed together: real-time chat, persistent forums and documentation, voice chats, events and even games. Rather than replicating that bundle in a single app, the open social web may be converging on a different model entirely, where specialised services handle specific functions while sharing identity and social connections across protocol boundaries. These individual services themselves do not have to share the same protocol underneath, and may actually work better if they don’t, with each protocol handling the part it is best designed for.
This is the most interesting part to me. Can users be persuaded to have different expectations from the proprietary apps they’re used to?
Whenever these sudden migrations happen, the alternatives that win seem to be the ones that look and behave as similarly to the proprietary app as possible, as the people switching don’t care about decentralisation, and are much more sensitive to any changes in experience.
I think we need to create separate experiences, backed by the same protocol, for people who care about decentralisation and freedom (and discover the fediverse naturally, outside of these big migrations), and those that show up during the big migrations.
For the first group, we want software that’s easy to self-host, customisable, spreads users between instances, ultimately empowers them to have the exact experience they want. For the second group, we should just copy the exact experience of the proprietary networks as much as the protocol allows.
Of course, the risk is that we get even larger influxes of people who never had to learn the community norms. Is that worth it? - I’m not sure.
It’s scary to see the UK going down the same steps as the US. It’s like we’re sleepwalking into it, having seen the effects, without really acknowledging what’s happening.
3·23 days agoI bought someone I fancied 99% chocolate as a joke. After a year or so, we got together. I opened the cupboard one day and saw it there, unopened. It came upon me to eat it :)
I love dark chocolate and until that point I thought the darker the better. Since then, I realised that I top out around 85%.
21·1 month agoOk, I know this is crazy, but I’ve had one phrase go round in my head for at least the last 15 years:
No thanks, I really would not like that please, thank you very much.
When I was a child, some intrusive thoughts would pop into my head that bad things would happen in random situations, unless I did certain things. E.g., if I didn’t breath in at least 15 times before the end of a song, or take an even number of steps before someone said something, then I would suddenly die.
My brain developed the lore that, when these thoughts popped into my head, they would be binding unless I repeated the above phrase in my mind over and over again. I think it started off as “no thanks”, and gradually got expanded to its current crazy form.
Although I don’t believe that anymore, the phrase is firmly implanted in my mind and pops up several times a day. It’s probably one of the few things I’ve remembered verbatim for so long, and it’s completely useless :D
7·1 month agoI use mythic beasts. They are not the very cheapest, but they offer predictable pricing and just charge a fixed increase compared to the price they pay their supplier. You can trust that they won’t mess around with the renewal price or arbitrary extra fees.
For my .org domains I pay ~£15 per year, but if you don’t care about the tld, you can get some for ~£6 per year (the costs on the website exclude VAT, but if you buy multiple years at a time, the amortised cost including VAT ~= the price excluding VAT).
I personally prefer browsing the web with JavaScript disabled, and using search engines like Marginalia to find simple websites. I don’t see a big difference in experience between browsing these websites in lynx or edbrowse, vs using Gemini.
I get the appeal of having everyone on the network share the same culture and values, but I prefer to just find the people doing that in the wider network of the web.
Still, I’m happy it exists and that people enjoy using it. To each their own!
I worked at a bank at the time. We were moving to a new system and running recons against the old system to check the behaviour was the same. I had to run a manual recon of the old system vs the new 4 times per day. There was a lot of focus from management and users on the new system.
The week leading up to Christmas, I was the one person not on holiday yet, and also the most junior person on the project. I found that week so stressful, as I had to run these recons and quickly decide whether each break was real or not before reporting to the users. Despite having worked on that system, I had very little confidence and didn’t have the same intuitive mental model of the system my colleagues had. I had to dig into each break case-by-case, but they seemed much more able to understand what was going on via a few simple queries.
Anyway, I get through the week and left for the holidays on Thursday evening. I’m just grateful that I’ve gotten through it. Then, around 3pm on the Friday, I see a missed call from the tech lead. I log in, and everything’s on fire. I join the incident call, and it turns out that we hadn’t processed a single trade in the new system that whole week. I discover that it was thanks to a config change I’d made several weeks before, that had just made it to production. No-one (neither the users, nor I) had realised! But we missed several hundred million pounds worth of payments in that week as a result.
It was so jarring, having been relieved that I made it to the holiday, then joining the incident call and struggling to work out what to do. I completely dissociated and my mind was blank. I remember being on the call and really passively and calmly walking around my room. I kept thinking “I need to do x, I need to do y” but my mind couldn’t focus and I was just staring at the screen. At some point I just lay in bed with my laptop while on the call.
There had been a total failure of process: my change had been approved by two people, the nonprod environment was configured differently in a way that didn’t expose the bug, the recon failures looked very similar to the false positives, and there were so many false positives that it was impossible to dig into all of them. Meanwhile, we didn’t have basic queries monitoring that trades were flowing in, and the users weren’t paying much attention either, until they realised that it was broken.
Still, I made a lot of mistakes. I should have just escalated that there were breaks instead of trying to figure it out myself. I shouldn’t have been afraid to call the tech lead and bring them out of their holiday. And I shouldn’t have been afraid of the confrontation with the users.
Anyway, that experience really messed me up mentally for a long time. I lost so much confidence and became so much more scared of production (not in a healthy way). It really was not the right environment for me.
There are a few such foundations!
- NLnet (among other things) donates to a lot of fediverse and similar projects, including multiple donations for lemmy.
- Software in the Public Interest acts as a fiscal host for its 45 member projects. You can make a general donation, or a donation to specific projects.
- The Software Freedom Conservancy, among other things, acts as a fiscal host for its projects. You can donate to individual projects, or make a general donation to conservancy and they will use it in whatever way best advances software freedom.
- Likewise, the FSF has a “Working together for free software fund” which has a few projects listed. I can’t see a way to donate to the fund as a whole, but if you don’t mind some (most?) of the money going to things that aren’t directly developing software, you could make a standard donation to the FSF.
8·1 month agoNice to see that even in the virtual world, anti-immigration protesters are not “patriotic” enough to know what the flag looks like.
It is not OP claiming that. It is the description from the link preview.
It’s an alternative to Lemmy with some different features. Since it uses the same protocol under the hood, its instances federate with Lemmy. There’s more info on the differences here.
I get you. I can never think of anything that would be interesting to post or ask in the more discussion-oriented communities, let alone choose a specific one to post in. I definitely find comments easier, as well as posting to more niche communities. I feel the scope is usually better defined there.
Would you say it’s about not knowing if your post would be accepted in the community, or just finding the best place for it? If it’s the latter, AskLemmy could be good for general questions, or failing that, any of the casual chat communities such as !chat@beehaw.org.
As long as your post meets the rules of the community/instance, I feel it’s better to post somewhere than not at all - people can always crosspost it elsewhere if they like.
You can trust the software in your distro’s repositories (if you run a distro with well-maintained repositories). This is because, generally only well-known software gets packaged, the packager should be familiar with both the project and the code, and everything is rebuilt on the distro’s own infrastructure, to ensure that a given binary actually corresponds to the source.
It might still be possible for things to slip through, but it’s certainly much safer than random programs from online.
I’m quite crazy:
Depending on the thing I’m searching for, I have search shortcuts set up. These shortcuts are really handy. It seems much easier to get good results on dedicated search engines for each task, than finding another general purpose search engine that’s as good:
Finally, if all else has failed, I use Google (which still unfortunately happens at least a couple of times per day 🙁). Although, reading the posts now, I should switch this stage to DuckDuckGo instead.
I’d quite like to set up my own instance of SearxNG + YaCy at some point. It’d be nice to configure SearxNG to basically do all of these steps at once that I’m doing manually, prioritise my YaCy index, but use other engines to fill in the gaps, and then gradually fill in the gaps in my YaCy index.