Programming.dev Meta

I'm not sure if programming.dev is affected (doesn't feel like it currently, but I rather note it here, before it is)

Hey everyone. The instance has recently updated to 0.18.1 which changed the default shape of icons for users and communities. As circles won the poll before when I polled for what shape people want things to be ill be working on reverting those back to circles as soon as possible. Ill aim to eventually have a setting you can set in your user settings to swap to whatever you want (square, circle, hexagon, etc.)

Will take a bit as im in the middle of the gmtk game jam but just wanted to get a post out just for transparency on why they changed

Start by reading these two articles:

• https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
• https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

Ok, now that you've done that (hopefully in the order I posted them), I can begin.

I have always been a strong supporter of Open Source Software (OSS), so much so that all of my projects (yes all) are OSS and fully open for anyone to use. And with that, I knew that things could be used for good... and bad. I took that risk. But I also made sure to build stuff that wasn't, in itself, inherently bad. I didn't build anything unethical to my eyes (I understand the nuance here).

But I've seen what unethical devs can do.

Just take a look at those implementing the ModFascismBot for Reddit (that's not its name, but that's what it is). That is an incredibly unethical thing to build. Not because it's a private company controlling what they want their site to do, no, that's fine by me. Reddit can do whatever they want. But because it's an attempt to lie about reality, to force users to do something through manipulation not through honesty. Even subreddits that voted overwhelmingly to shut down still got messaged by the bot telling them that the users (that voted for it) didn't want it and they had to open back up or they would be removed from mod position. This is not ethical. This is not right. This is not what the internet is about.

Or the unethical devs at Twitter, who:

• built in actual keywords to mark Ukraine news as misinformation
• marked Substack as unsafe when they released their own Twitter competitor
• banned Mastodon links for no reason besides the fact that they are a competitor
• marked NPR, BBC, CBC, and PBS as 'state-funded media' even though that is clearly meant to indicate something along the lines of Russia's propaganda arm RT or China Daily, the same for China. Then when there was enormous backlash, they removed the labels, but did the same for the actual government propaganda accounts like RT and China Daily. And then they removed the limits on virality of those posts from those propaganda accounts allowing them to have a massive spike in engagement, thus furthering misinformation.

It's one thing for an organization to have political lean...that is just a part of life, and that will never end. It's another to actually sow disinformation in order to accomplish nefarious things to further your profits. It is what has caused massive addiction to tobacco, the continuation of climate change, death and disfiguration from forever chemicals, ovarian cancer and mesothelioma from undisclosed exposure to asbestos, or selling 'health products' that claim to cure everything under the sun, but can "interfere with clinical lab tests, such as those used to diagnose heart attacks".

Please do not confuse this for saying that companies shouldn't be able to sell things and make a profit. If you want to sell someone something that kills them if they misuse it and you market it as such, you go for it. That's literally how every product in the cleaning aisle of your grocery store works. That's how guns work, that's how fertilizers work, that's why we have labels. But manipulation for profit is unethical, and that's why companies hide it. It hurts their bottom line. They know that their products will not be used if they reveal the truth. Instead of doing something good for humanity, they choose the subterfuge. Profits over people. Profits over Earth honestly. Profits over continuing the human race. Absolutely nothing matters to companies like this. And unethical developers enable this.

Facebook (ok, fine, Meta, still going to refer to them as FB though) is trying to join the Fediverse. We as a community, but honestly each of you as individuals, have a decision to make. Do they stay or do they go? Let's put some information on the table.

Facebook...

• lies about the amount of misinformation it removes ^1
• increased censorship of 'anti-state' posts ^1 ^2 ^3
• lied to Congress about social networks polarizing people, while FB's own researchers found that they do ^2
• attempted to attract preteens to the platform (huh, wonder where all that "you must be 13" stuff went) ^4
• rewards outrage and discord ^3

Facebook also...

• Allows for checking on friends and family in disasters ^6
• Created and maintained some of the most popular open source software on the planet (including the software that runs the interface you're looking at right now) [^7][^8]

From my perspective... There's not much good about FB. It has single handedly caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people across the planet, if not hundreds of thousands. It continually makes people angrier and angrier. It's a launching pad for scammers, thieves, malevolent malefactors, manipulators, dictators, to push their conquests onto the world through manipulation, lies, tricks, and deceit. Its algorithms foster an echo chamber effect, exacerbating division and animosity, making civil discourse and mutual understanding all but impossible. Instead of being a platform for connection, it often serves as a catalyst for discord and misinformation. FB's propensity for prioritizing user engagement over factual accuracy has resulted in a global maelstrom of confusion and mistrust. Innocent minds are drawn into this vortex, manipulated by fear and falsehoods, consequently promoting harmful actions and beliefs. Despite its potential to be a tool for good, it is more frequently wielded as a weapon, sharpened by unscrupulous entities exploiting its vast reach and influence. The promise of a globally connected community seems to be overshadowed by its darker realities.

As a person, I believe that we need to choose things as a community. I do not believe in the 'BDFL'...the Benevolent Dictator For Life. Graydon Hoare, creator of Rust, wrote an article just recently about how things would have been different if they had stayed BDFL of Rust. From my position the BDFLs we currently have on this planet really suck. Not just politically, but even in tech. I don't think that path is good for society. It might work in specific circumstances, but it usually fails, and when it does, people get hurt. Badly.

So, with that in mind, I've been working on a polling feature for Lemmy. I seriously doubt I'll be done with it soon, but hopefully FB takes a while longer to implement federation. I understand there's a desire for me, or the other admins to just make a decision, but I really don't like doing that. If it comes down to it, I will implement defederation to start with, but I will still be holding a vote as soon as I can get this damn feature done.

[^8]: the website actually uses Inferno, but from what I can tell it was forked directly from React, judging from the actually documentation and references in the repo.

reddit and twitter (suposedly) jacked up their API prices because of data scrapers, what could lemmy to do try to stop them?

i dont think we can do anything

From what i see programming.dev still did not decided our stance

UPDATE: seems like this has been fixed with the update to 0.18.1 https://programming.dev/instances

I can see their posts so I know they aren't actually banned

https://programming.dev/instances

looks like maybe they had their domain name set with the https:// in it and that was breaking stuff? has this been fixed in the Lemmy code yet? we shouldn't have to manually ban invalid domain names

It's weird how the markdown formatting bits (such as ### in a heading) appear in previews of posts. I don't have time to research it right now, but I'm guessing that's a known issue waiting to be fixed by someone.

Edit: Trying to add a screenshot to show what I'm talking about, but uploading images doesn't seem to be working. I tried 2 clients and the mobile web.

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/428156

Discovered from this Hacker News post:

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36610884

I'm not suggesting anything, just want to know what do you think.

Here is a link if someone don't know what Meta's Threads is: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/

Update: I can subscribe from a post, but not the community main page.

Old Post:

I had no trouble subscribing to this mader.xyz community:

https://programming.dev/c/science_memes@mander.xyz

But when I went to other communities on mander, the subscribe button was turned into plain text and I could not click it:

https://programming.dev/c/science@mander.xyz

Does anyone have any explanation why? Does mander.xyz limit programming.dev accounts to one subscription?

There are tons of Rust communities spread on multiple instances. Is the expectation that users interested in rust should just subscribe to all of these? Is there a community which aggregates posts from all rust communities together into one?

I like having the top bar available at all times (mainly to see notifications), so I made this userstyle. If you're on programming.dev, it should come up with the stylus extension, otherwise you can install it from the link

Is it possible to create new Communities on programming.dev? I would like to embrace the full lemmy experience and create a community to contribute to

Server is going to go down for an upgrade to increase capacity at 6 UTC. This could take up to 30 minutes

Looks like Lemmy Explorer added some neat new features for introspecting individual instances, such as instance uptime, version history, and user growth. In particular, I like how it can list all instance communities, including banners, without pagination:

• https://lemmyverse.net/instance/programming.dev/communities

You can compare our stats from the post's link with other in the fediverse. For example:

• https://lemmyverse.net/instance/lemmy.world
• https://lemmyverse.net/instance/beehaw.org
• https://lemmyverse.net/instance/lemm.ee

Tucked away in the hamburger menu, there's also an "Network Inspector" tab to overview stats for all instances, including distribution of instance versions, as well as suspicious instances.

• https://lemmyverse.net/inspect

You can check out the sites development here:

• https://github.com/tgxn/lemmy-explorer

If you're familiar with the topic of awesome lists on GitHub, then you should know that there is a community driven list just for Lemmy, including a convenient aggregation of links to instances, alternative front-ends, mobile apps, libraries, tools, guides, etc.

Trying to attach an image to a post gives me a SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data error. Is this a me issue, this instance issue or a global lemmy problem?

New to the instance. Had a couple good days using Connect for Lemmy on Android before I started getting a message that the server is "undergoing maintenance", but the web version loads fine after a Cloudflare challenge. I assume this is what's causing the issue. Am I missing something? Is there some way to allow app traffic? Anybody else experiencing this?

Compare browsing on this instance

https://programming.dev/c/technology@beehaw.org?dataType=Post&page=1&sort=New

vs

https://beehaw.org/c/technology?dataType=Post&page=1&sort=New

especially the post "Site to track Subreddit’s as they go dark" which was posted 21 days ago, still showing up at the top of New on this instance even above newer posts, but beehaw has all new posts instead

and I am subscribed to that community so it should be federated too

I think part of the issue might be because that post is deleted? or at least the permalink for it doesn't work

but also I just manually searched for https://vlemmy.net/post/430910 so now it shows up but still below the bugged post, but it shouldn't have needed a search to federate that post manually

I've gone and made accounts of a handful of Lemmy instances, all of them larger, more popular ones.

... and I can't access any of them directly today, likely due to the influx of users from Reddit.

Programming.dev is alive and well though.

Hey everyone! Its been a week since I opened the icon poll so here are the results of what people voted for

As a reminder voting is handled by single transferable vote so every round the lowest voted entry is eliminated and the next choices of the people who chose that option is given points. If a person didnt rank all of the entries and doesnt have a next choice no other option gets their points

Icon Style

The icon style vote had 58 votes submitted total

Heres the final graph:

Round one is all of the first choice votes for the people who voted. For round two no unified style was eliminated and the votes were spread to other options. For round three general unified same col was eliminated and for round four all unified same color was eliminated

The overall winning option was All unified diff colors, winning with 36 final votes compared to general unified diff colors' 16 (and having by far the most first choice votes)

Ill be switching some of the communities (ones I made the icon for) over to the new style and new communities in the instance will be created with an icon in the style. Community mods though have the final say in what their community icon looks like and can choose not to follow this result if they want

Make sure to follow the branding guidelines of your programming language, engine, etc. Some require attribution if you edit the logo, some dont allow logo modifications, some dont have a default logo, etc.

If your language, etc. doesnt allow icon modifications you can do the same icon style but instead of a gradient logo you just have the logo itself, you can make a new logo for your community, or you can just have that logo

Icon Shape

The default icon shape poll had 37 total votes and was handled in the same format as the icon style

Pentagon was eliminated first and then squircle was eliminated

The final result was circle winning with 23 final votes compared to hexagon's 14

Community icons will have a circle shape in the instance by default but I will be pushing out a change eventually to allow toggling between different shapes for yourself for the communities on web

Thanks everyone for voting! You should see icons start to change in the instance soon

The sidebar for our instance has a broken link for programming.dev - it links to https://programming.dev/programming.dev

Good day, I have some really hard time getting my gpu passed through to a vm, my current host is linux mint. The bios setting is fine, but for some reason I get a black screen every time the vm starts.

Im not sure if the card itself have limitations. Just want to confirm wether I am wasting my time on this card?

Im basically try to do a single gpu passthrough with scripts that will release gpu from host and pass through to vm, till the vm is shut down, then the host have control over the gpu again.

Just wanted to make another quick post just in case someone missed the other one

The icon poll to determine the recommended icon style for the instance is going to end tonight in around 11 hours

You can see the original post here https://programming.dev/post/190520 and make sure to dm me with the options ranked based on your preference if you want to vote (you can click on my name and then you can send a message through lemmy using the send message button that shows up in my profile)

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/314158

Announcement

The bot I announced in this thread is now ready for a limited beta release.

You can see an example summary it wrote here.

How to Use AutoTLDR

• Just mention it ("@" + "AutoTLDR") in a comment or post, and it will generate a summary for you.
• If mentioned in a comment, it will try to summarize the parent comment, but if there is no parent comment, it will summarize the post itself.
• If the parent comment contains a link, or if the post is a link post, it will summarize the content at that link.
• If there is no link, it will summarize the text of the comment or post itself.
• 🔒 If you include the #nobot hashtag in your profile, it will not summarize anything posted by you.

Beta limitations

• The bot only works in the !auai@programming.dev community.
• It is limited to 100 summaries per day.

How to try it

• If you want to test the bot, write a long comment, or include a link in a comment in this thread, and then, in a reply comment, mention the bot.
• Feel free to test it and try to break it in this thread. Please report any weird behavior you encounter in a PM to me (NOT the bot).
• You can also use it for its designated purpose anywhere in the AUAI community.