CoderKat

joined 2 years ago
[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 5 points 2 years ago

I'm not sure if that's necessarily true. For one thing, thanks to ✨racism✨, who you kill will influence how you're viewed. And if you kill enough people, I think it often causes people to view the event less personally ("one person is a tragedy, a million is a statistic"). Of course, that also depends on how you kill them. Killing one innocent looking civilian with a trolley will go over a lot worse than sending a million soldiers to die in a war (no matter how pointless or wrong the war was).

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 14 points 2 years ago

While there's parts about the GPL that I do like, I think it's a generally bad license. Above all, because it limits even FOSS projects from using your code, because it would basically force them to also use the GPL. A massive amount of FOSS projects are not GPL compatible.

I think it generally often just discourages the usage of your code. You have to be something utterly outstanding for most companies to consider even touching GPL code. At least with a more permissive license, some corporations will use your code and even if they don't all contribute, some will. e.g., my company uses a ton of FOSS code. We can only import code with certain licenses, obviously not GPL code. Me and my coworkers have personally made upstream contributions to improve these projects when we discover bugs or limitations. We do certainly also have some projects where we make internal only modifications, but most of those are changes that don't make sense to commit to the upstream (like adding compatibility with internal systems or adapting to our build system). Point being that the projects with permissive licenses will at least get some commercial contributions whereas most GPL software simply won't get anything (the likes of Linux is a rare case -- most GPL projects aren't worth it for companies).

As an aside, have you seen the LGPL? Depending on what you're developing, it can sometimes make more sense. Its use case is for libraries. It basically makes it so that if you change the library, you must open source the changes (like the GPL), but if you merely link the library, you don't need to do so. That can make it a bit more compatible with other people's projects while still having GPL-like tendencies.

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Other FOSS projects can't use it, either. The only other "normal people" would be, like, tiny private projects and bad actors. Maybe clueless students, but my university project classes required us to appropriately follow licenses when using other people's code, or we'd get marked down.

The ability for FOSS projects to use your code is the best part about the FOSS movement. They can generally all copy from each other to improve efficiency, especially since many FOSS licenses are compatible with each other.

If you want to stop corporations from using your project, use a license that does that. Most typically, the GPL will do that (while still allowing some FOSS projects to use the code). It doesn't prohibit commercial usage, but for the vast majority of projects, the license is basically a poison pill and thus no closed source project will generally use GPL licensed code. But I personally strongly recommend against the GPL, as it goes too far. Most FOSS projects can't use GPL code themselves. It's a rather extreme license.

If you don't care, just use something like the MIT, Apache, or BSD three clause licenses, which are all super simple licenses that have broad compatibility. Doesn't really matter which you use. I kinda like the BSD three clause because I like the "no using us to promote yourself" clause.

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago

Super closely related is the "god works in mysterious ways" apology often used as the response if you ask what that reason was. It's bizarre that the people saying that quote are so insistent that everything happens for a reason even though they cannot answer what that reason might be (and usually get really uncomfortable if you press for an answer).

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

One thing I never understood about that nonsense quote is why it would be a bad thing even if it were true. Like, who the heck wants people to be "hard" or have hard times? What's so awful about people having easy times and getting to relax and enjoy life?

It's also usually used by "back in my day" bigots who are usually using it to complain about people they don't like and quite frequently LGBT people, because they think that their generation pushing people into the closet was somehow a good thing (or that it meant LGBT people didn't exist).

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I feel like I've never seen or heard of anyone good using that quote. I'm sure it makes some sense if used in genuine good faith. The quote would make sense applied to someone with a disability, for example, by interpreting it more along the lines of having to deal with the person not always being outgoing and maybe even sometimes needing extra help.

But no, I've only ever seen shitty (or at least allegedly shitty) people use that quote, to justify their shittiness. The "worst" they refer to is usually bouts of anger or abuse.

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago

It's weird that it's still used unironically today (and in fact feels like it's made a relatively recent revival). Like, you'd think they'd at least switch to a phrase that makes sense.

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I don't think that's the original quote, but rather came later to try and improve the clearly flawed quote. Searching, I found https://grammarist.com/phrase/the-customer-is-always-right/, which says the original quote is the rather uninspiring "Rule number one: the customer is always right. Rule number two: If the customer is wrong, please refer to rule number one".

That said, I do agree with you completely. I think the quote is just so obviously flawed, as customers abuse the heck out of it. Treating it as applying to aggregates makes way more sense. e.g., if customers want a pink doodad and you only sell doodads in black... well, then you're wrong and should start selling them in pink.

As a corollary, I also like the quote that has been often attributed to Ford (but checking, it seems unproven if he actually said it), "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." I like that quote because customers often frankly don't actually know what they want. I've had countless times myself where I didn't know I wanted a product until after I learned about it. And myself, I'm a software dev. This quote constantly applies to my field. The idea of users not knowing what they want is an extremely popular meme in the field (example). Users often need expert guidance to identify what they actually want and what a practical solution might look like.

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 16 points 2 years ago (2 children)

But that's kinda the problem, isn't it? They lost their platform. Sure, alternatives like Mastodon are cool in their own ways, but we lost a lot of reach. Twitter was utterly massive in terms of reach (and that's why there's some people on the left who still haven't left it yet). At its peak, it had something like 400M monthly users. Mastodon has like 2.5M monthly users and Mastodon has been repeatedly criticized for being difficult to discover people, so who knows how many of those users you can reach even if you manage to get something to go viral.

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 9 points 2 years ago

This is as hilarious as people who say the same thing about Rage Against The Machine.

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

IMO the pedestrian infrastructure and presence of things to walk to matters far more. There's a 4 lane road in my city that goes by the university area and it's fine because that area was designed with walking in mind. The area is full of high rise apartments, countless restaurants, a world class university, a massive park, and has a nearby LRT. There's even a pedestrian overpass.

Speaking of overpasses, I noticed really great underpasses when I visited Warsaw. They had some really large streets, but they weren't an issue cause you could just go under the street (and that was also filled with shops). I found Warsaw to be a very walkable city and it was largely because of stuff like underpasses and simply things of interest being close by.

I had a similar experience visiting London but because of the Tube. London's public transit is literally the best I've personally used. Despite being a foreigner, I was able to get to literally everywhere I wanted to go with ease. I only wish Canadian cities would emulate that instead of the States as they tend to do.

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago

K8s is amazing for big, complicated services. For small things, it quite honestly can be overcomplicated. If you're running something massive, like, say, Spotify, then k8s will make things simpler (because the alternative for running such a massive and complicated service is... gross lol). That's not to say that k8s can't be used for something like Lemmy, just that it might not be worth the complexity.

For the fediverse, I think a lot of the development is written for small, mostly monolithic single servers. K8s is meant for when you have an entire cluster running some service. You wouldn't typically run a single server with k8s, but rather you'd have many "nodes" and you'd run many instances of your binary ("pods") across those nodes for the redundancy.

I'm not very familiar with the backends of fediverse servers nor Docker Compose, but I'm under the impression that's for single servers and I've seen many Lemmy instances talk about their hosting as if they only have one physical server. That's probably fine for a FOSS social media site that is run by hobbyists, but major commercial software would never want to have a single server. Heck, they wouldn't even want to run just servers in one location. The big cloud providers all offer ways to run k8s clusters that use nodes spread across multiple data centers, usually ones with isolated failure zones, all to maximize uptime. But that's also expensive. For a big business, downtime means millions of dollars lost, so it's a no brainer. For Lemmy? As annoying as downtime is, users will live.

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