Just passing through.

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  • 85 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • It seems these pagers were actively used by Hezbollah though. It was a targeted attack where, for once, Israel’s target was not the murder of a civilian population.

    Whether it was well executed is a completely different question. Did they successfully strike their targets, rather than bystanders or people who happened to get the wrong pager? Were there civilian casualties (as it seems there was), and were those worse than in what we would expect from other types of military operations targeting terrorist organizations? The answers are not simple yes/no, but gradients. Which is different from their ongoing genocide in Gaza, where the cruelty is the entire point.

    Saying an attack isn’t targeting civilians is a long way from saying it is legitimate. But coming from a regime that has been actively targeting civilians for months claiming that there is simply no other way of doing things, I guess this is at least evidence that they are aware of alternatives.

    Hezbollah is attacking Israel from the north, and it would be naïve to expect Israel not to strike back. This attack appears to have lead to fewer meaningless civilian deaths than what we have come to expect coming fram Israel. That is all.



  • What the fuck is this article?

    How can it go on about this without ever saying what the “Jewish Community of Chile” actually is?

    "It is absolutely unacceptable that the President of the Republic addresses this delicate issue through informal posts,” it said

    It? The Jewish Community of Chile said that? Did every Jew in Chile say it out loud in perfect symphony? Did they communicate it using their famous telepathy, or draw it on the sky using their space laser? Are all Chilean Jews part of some organization, which in turn elects a spokesperson, that then speaks for “the Community”? Is it a synagogue somewhere in Chile that has a leader that claims to speak for everyone?

    Going to Wikipedia for answers, there’s a brief summary:

    The Jewish Community of Chile […] is an organization of Jews in Chile. The Jewish Community of Chile is a non-profit organisation. As of 2022 Gerardo Gorodischer is its president.

    So it’s an organization, with presumably some members, and a president who is probably the one speaking as “it”. But how many members do they have? How many Jews live in Chile? How is the president of this organisation elected, and does he have legitimacy to speak for all of them?

    Their website does not offer me any answers, as it just reports “Sorry, you have been blocked”. Apparently my public university internet connection is not appreciated.

    It seems to me to be some random tiny organization that cleverly named themselves the “Jewish Community of Chile”, and can now successfully trick people into thinking they speak for everyone. But I might be wrong of course; the information doesn’t seem to be available anywhere. The journalism almost seems to be intentionally sloppy.


  • At least this time around they were not targeting civilians, proving that it is possible, even for the Netanyahu regime. I don’t have enough information to judge it yet (fuck Hezbollah, fuck Netanyahu), but there’s at least little doubt it’s better than what we’ve come to expect from Israel.

    Now, time for my unsponsored content of the day: As amazing and hospitable as the Lebanese people are, their state is weak as fuck, their political system is a mess, and their economy is down the drain. There seems to always be several crises going on all at once in recent years. In this situation, non-governmental organizations tend to be the ones stepping up and filling the gap left behind by the state. If you are into giving money to charity, the Lebanese Red Cross would therefore be a good cause to consider. :)




  • A lot of people use Mastodon as an RSS feed where they can leave comments. This would basically allow you to subscribe to the content of a writer, and get it full-form straight in your feed.

    I could also imagine following artists on Pixelfed, throwing money in their tip jar to keep posted on their newest creations.

    I think there’s a lot of potential here. But monetisation is always tricky on the internet, of course.




  • Yeah, the pitchfork crowd manages to shut down everyone who tries to do something genuinely good for the community, while leaving all the bad actors running wild in the background.

    I mean, we always knew loud voices in the open source community were toxic as fuck - that’s obvious enough from the Linux mailing list. Giving these people their own social network to ruin was wildly optimistic from the beginning. It’s a wonder it hasn’t gone worse.

    It’s amazing how computer nerds posting on the fucking fediverse can be so sceptical of seeing their content leave the platform they’re currently on. Like that’s not the whole goddamn point of posting here in the first place.

    Also, Bridgy.fed rules. Anyone out there on Mastodon or Bluesky: Please opt in! :)


  • If I understand correctly, there’s a central pump running behind the scenes in any AT implementation. You feed content into the central hub, and it pumps it out to everyone connected to it. Bluesky itself provides the one major pump that feeds its network right now.

    So in that sense, Bluesky is a centralised network with decentralized users.

    Frontpage is building a different pump, spreading different kind of content to a different type of platform. So there’s no obvious connection between the Bluesky pump and the Frontpage pump - that’s why they’re talking about bridging in the post.

    It almost seems a bit silly - in order for two AT hubs to talk, you need to build a bridge for them. At that point, you could might as well have built an AP protocol and made it work with Bridgy.fed.

    Furthermore, all “instances” running Frontpage would process data through the same central hub. If that goes down or they run out of funding, it’s all over.

    I’m applauding the Frontpage crowd for trying something new. But I’m not entirely convinced I see the benefit compared to what we’re doing over here.


  • I think support for boosts is a game changer for interoperability. As a Mastodon user I wouldn’t really want to follow a community even if it was well implemented, but I’m happy to follow users who boost content I’m interested in.

    Boosting content is the way posts spread on Mastodon. If anyone follows me from Mastodon they will see all the content I boost; if they enjoy it, they might re-boost to their followers and the ball starts rolling. And that’s how you suddenly get comment sections where Mastodon users are actively participating.






  • I feel like dark theme is often tricky on different monitors - If the font is too heavy it’ll look awful, if it’s too light it might look bad on low resolution displays. Combined with different colour contrasts on different screens, and it gets really difficult to know what people will end up seeing.

    The headline - “MBIN SERVERS” - looks great on my 4K monitor, but slightly less good on a worse one. The same goes for the text stating that “Also view servers on FediDB and Fediverse Observer”, but it’s not so bad for the white text. The hyperlinks, however, might suffer from a lack of contrast with the background (a slightly too dark blue) combined with very thin text on low resolution monitors.

    I guess brighter hyperlinks could also benefit the names of instances.

    It’s not something I ever noticed myself when using the site, but keeping it in the back of my head while looking at it I can see why some might have some problems with it. :)



  • That’s brilliant, thank you so much!!

    I’ll change the soil, take a new cutting for good measure, and buy some bottled water after careful inspection in the local supermarket. The water here is indeed quite hard, and this explanation fits perfectly with how the plant has been behaving - doing really well in the beginning, and then gradually terrible as the soil deteriorated.

    I have also moved it to a corner of the brightest room of the appartement. It used to stay in the bedroom, which is probably the darkest place I could have found, and then I would give it direct light in the window sill whenever I wondered if it was not getting enough light. Mistakes mistakes.

    Thanks again! I’m feeling mildly optimistic now. :)