Some weird, German communist, hello. He/him pronouns and all that. Obsessed with philosophy and history, secondarily obsessed with video games as a cultural medium. Also somewhat able to program.

https://abnormalbeings.space/

https://liberapay.com/Wxnzxn/

  • 445 Posts
  • 319 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: March 6th, 2025

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  • The way I understand it, the whole “paradox” is more: If we aren’t the first culture-producing life, and if technological life is not an exceptionally rare occurence, and if technological life is persistent and not (almost) always fleeting - going by the age of other stars and their exoplanets in the galaxy, we would expect there to be signs of life visible in abundance (e.g. electromagnetic waves of clearly artificial origin as “background chatter”).

    The fact that this isn’t so, indicates that something about that assumption has to be wrong. What exactly, we cannot easily say, and theories go all the way from “Life like humanity really is exceedingly rare and needs very special circumstances and ‘luck’” to “technological life quickly evolves to a point, where it doesn’t produce any signs like that” to “there is a great filter still ahead of us, which extinguishes life wherever it arises” to “life behaves according to Dark Forest rules and actively tries to stay hidden”.

    But all of those are currently just wild speculation. The only thing certain is, that we have found none of the abundance of chatter we would expect from many worlds having had more time than our Earth to theoretically develop life akin to our own. And the most we so far have noticed are some sporadic signs that may hint at basic life, e.g. on K2-18b, but it is all in the “very fuzzy and uncertain” ballpark.




  • I guess the engagement bait “please contradict the headline”-title is working well, I always want to keep editorialising to a minimum when sharing videos like this, but this was one of those “what they meant could have been made a little bit clearer, and they knew it”-things.

    Really the stuff he is talking about concerning that - mainly initial cost vs long term savings and lack of existing infrastructure/expertise - are just realities that are important to address in the political process. He could have gone into more detail considering Munich’s attempt at Linux (LiMux) - where to my knowledge the reason it failed was a combination of lobbying by Microsoft, Conservatives (CSU) winning the local elections, and costs (as well as employee complaints) from having processes be more complicated, the latter mostly thanks to Microsoft’s outright obstructionism concerning document format standards, as well as expertise being relatively costly (whereas finding MS-certified anyones in the office space was relatively easy). Those are considerations to have, but I think more and more, the advantages of Linux and Open Source clearly outweigh that stuff in the face of rising costs and enshittification, and he does talk about all the good stuff pretty well in the video.







  • On my own instance I am using “Recent Views” - where in the backend (sadly, not user-configurable as far as I know), it’s set to 3 days, so “trending” will be whatever got the most views in the network in the past 3 days - which I personally found to be the “best of the worst” of the sorting algorithms at the moment, definitely better than the “hot” algorithm (AFAIK an adaptation of Reddit’s old algorithm).

    There’s also PeerTube Picks - a Firefox add-on which tries to provide a little bit of a personalised-algorithm experience as an opt-in feature, but that one is extremely basic at this point. I did find a few interesting videos I would have otherwise missed with it, but I would be lying if its anything more than a very bare-bones curiosity at this time.

    Other than that, discoverability still is the biggest blind spot - searching videos on Sepia Search, building up a subscription catalogue, casually browsing the “Discover tab” to maybe find one creator you might like in the random selection, or even browsing the “New” section of videos are still the main things to do. Oh, and this community here, of course, as well as [email protected] - without more complex algorithms and the like, word of mouth is also a good way to find new stuff.

    Note that at this stage of development - while the name might indicate otherwise - the position of PeerTube and Framasoft is to firstly aim for creating an alternative to Vimeo and other hosting-focused solutions, where unlike YouTube, the algorithm and distribution aspects aren’t front and centre. While better ways to discover content through PeerTube itself are being worked on, it’s not the biggest focus, at least at this moment in time.


















  • That is a possible explanation, although I think it was weirder than that, because I remember checking some “obvious” settings like that afterwards. I also re-encoded the file with VLC media player out of curiosity, where it should have just re-encoded whatever audio track it had, without adjusting it to a specific output device, and the resulting file then also had the same issue when played in SMPLayer (whereas the original worked in SMPlayer).

    I might still have both files laying around on my NAS, but I myself at least don’t really have the energy right now to go into a rabbit hole again years after the fact, and sharing them would be non-trivial.


  • So, I once watched The Lighthouse together with my then girlfriend remotely, being in a long distance relationship at the time. We used the same file, started at the same time and were in chat together.

    The audio codec of this (of course 100% legal) file for some reason did not work with my VLC player properly. There were no voices. But it also wasn’t just complete silence, some music and subtle, surreal sound effects came through. None of this was happening for my ex, btw, even though we had the same file.

    Talking about the movie in chat and afterwards was fascinating, I only then realised it was, in fact, not a masterful, purposeful, stylistic choice: A major production not just in black and white, but as a silent movie. I also was able to get the essential things that happened and the important plot points, so that is also another point very much in favour of the film.


  • You are right, and thank you.

    Still, I have to add one small thing, quickly, because I did indeed not communicate what I meant well for that point: My point there was about Himmler having (superstitiously) thought of some “pure” Roma people potentially being essentially a worthy “Aryan precursor race” - that belief also being connected to his expeditions to Tibet/India. That was the point I maintain would have been completely unthinkable for Nazis to even entertain for Jewish people, whom they deemed as fundamentally, irredeemably evil and without worth. And while, yes, things like the Madagascar plan (essentially a less direct form of genocide) were discussed, I maintain, that the implementation of finding, registering and exterminating of Jewish people after it was decided upon as a “solution” was more “urgent” to the Nazi state.


  • NOTE: I only after already writing all this noticed you weren’t OP poking me with a second comment, which sort of sent me into a bit of an emotionally laden wall-of-text, because truth be told, I am not all that well at the moment. I will still leave the text as-is, but of course, some of the points or the overall tone is not fair as being directed towards you. I do agree, more broadly, that the Porajmos is underappreciated. I do still maintain, that antisemitism was much more central to Nazi ideology, and their attempts to eliminate Jews were much more driven and fanatical, however.

    I really do not want to get into this much further, I have an easier day today, but I am definitely not stress resistant enough at the moment to go into large and long-lasting internet arguments about a topic like this - but I think you are missing why people were disagreeing with you. I can cherry-pick facts from articles too. From the same you posted, which I reviewed before posting my original comment:

    For the Jews it was total and everyone knew this—from bankers to pawnbrokers. For the Roma it was selective and not comprehensive. The Roma were only exterminated in a few parts of Europe such as Poland, the Netherlands, Germany and France. In Romania and much of the Balkans, only nomadic Roma and social outcast Roma were deported. This matters and influences the Roma mentality.

    Or:

    Initially, there was disagreement within the Nazi circles about how to solve the “Gypsy Question”. In late 1939 and early 1940, Hans Frank, the General Governor of occupied Poland, refused to accept the 30,000 German and Austrian Roma which were to be deported to his territory. Heinrich Himmler “lobbied to save a handful of pure-blooded Roma”, whom he believed to be an ancient Aryan people for his “ethnic reservation”, but was opposed by Martin Bormann, who favored deportation for all Roma.

    Such a discussion and disagreement all the way up to Himmler would have been completely unthinkable to Nazi ideology to have with Jewish people in the same way. Just imagine Himmler saying, some select Jews should be preserved for their worth as a race. Antisemitism dripped from every facet of Nazi ideology, it was absolutely central, and their efforts to exterminate Jews were going above and beyond all rationality. Them just being in the same category (as I said, both “rootless” and “parasitic”, thusly seen as incompatible with nation states) does not mean they were viewed in the exact same way in practice.

    You are also missing the point on where you are crossing lines. This is not about antiziganism not being a more pressing issue in many European countries concerning their present politics, it absolutely is, especially but not only in many Easter European states - and it has definitely been addressed in a worse way, the pitiful and late reparations given are a good indication for that.

    This is not about that issue not being a fact, it is about you using that to downplay antisemitism and antisemitic structures, which are also still very much alive, and downplaying their absolutely essential and central role in Nazi ideology historically. That is the issue. Even if you did not intend to do it, you reproduced antisemitic dog-whistling and whataboutism.

    And even though in some countries it is less than antiziganism for sure (even though - sidenote, a very numbing part of reality is, that antisemitism has been reduced more thoroughly from parts of Europe, because Jews where wiped out and displaced more thoroughly by the Nazis, so there were none left to reproduce the old stereotypes against in everyday live afterwards), and some organisations have wrongly utilised the term “antisemitism” to try and silence opposition - writing out “anti-semitism” in quotes, essentially doing a “but #alllivesmatter” thing about races. That is classic downplaying behaviour.

    Antisemitic crimes are well and alive, I know only the statistics for Germany, and not off the top of my head, and I don’t have the strength to look those up now, too - but even just casual shit like swastikas spray painted on historical Jewish graveyards (is a regular occurrence around where I live) or videos going viral of some dude off the street saying “I am against Nazis, but I think Hitler did some stuff right concerning some people, you know which ones I mean.” - things like that still happen. Hell, Jewish spaces here in Germany are often ridiculously in need of security and high walls, and that is not all just their paranoia - there have been terrorist attacks on them, e.g. in Halle not too long ago for one attack that made bigger news. There have been people wearing the Kippa attacked in the street. That all happens.

    Also: Analysing how fascist elements are active in Israel, and some structures have fascist characteristics is completely okay. Resolutely claiming them to be “Nazis” is at best blind towards history and Nazism, and how it actually played out and what its ideological foundations were/are - and at worst, an actual antisemitic dogwhistle you have, I hope accidentally, reproduced.

    And again: This is part of a century old history, reproduced from generation to generation, and cause of one of the most horrid crimes committed against humanity - which is why the things you said are indistuingishable from dog whistles and concern trolling and, yes, antisemitism. I truly believe you did not want to communicate it like this, but you did reproduce the same arguments. And it is possible to try and bring across those points without crossing those lines.

    I really can’t invest much more energy into this, but it seems you are still emotionally invested in your comments getting removed, hence me getting poked with a stick after your first answer. Which is why I did not want to write anything at first, but I hope, even though I must admit, I was getting a bit dismissively emotional there, I could still bring across better what the actual problem was. I don’t think I will have another answer in me, especially since probably no one but us two will be reading it anyway days after the fact.




  • That has been my impression of present dynamics and historical data, too - boom-bust-cycles of either some other platform fucking up or there being curiosity from some synergetic effect, then the initial wave breaking over time - but usually also leaving behind at least more (genuinely active) users than before the wave. For Lemmy, one can definitely see some reduction in activity, I think - not dramatically, but I do think it’s noticeable if you spend a lot of time here. E.g. unlike during the last Exodus, I see more of “the same users” than before. There’s still enough content, it does not feel dead by a long shot, and who knows when the next wave may hit.

    That wave-like character makes it hard to estimate organic growth too, at times. The mass influx of users dying off over weeks will give shrinking numbers there, even if some users from organic growth who are more likely to stay and be active than “mass exodus users” may still join there. Also, users moving in between MBin/PieFed/Lemmy will fudge numbers, but they are essentially in the same ecosystem.