CoderKat

Fuck. I gave it a try for real this time and hit a permanent game over condition.

Darn, I wanted to see what came next. Some of those rules were hilarious. But I'm not doing that all again.

For today's 10,000 who have never seen it, https://xkcd.com/936/ succinctly explains why the whole mixed character types thing isn't favoured.

Those requirements drive me crazy, especially because they're all against NIST recommendations. Someone thinks they make passwords more secure but they have the opposite effect.

At any rate, password managers still help in those cases. If nothing else, for providing a safe place to record what your password is for when you forget it because of the dumb requirements.

Yeah, I wish posts would straight up not mention the total number of accounts. It's not something to brag about. A significant number of the difference between active vs total is gonna be bots. Especially since we're so new. If active is monthly, then active would include almost anyone who has actually used their account.

The active users count is probably inflated for a bit, too, due to people making multiple accounts as they switch instances or try new ones out. e.g., I used a kbin account early on before switching to try Lemmy. I also have a Beehaw account that was actually the very first one I signed up for and gave up on because of the manual approval taking too long, yet I think I may have posted at least one comment cause I used it to try Lemmy first, then switched to an instance that had downvotes and didn't defederate as many instances. So I'm counted for probably triple. On the long run, I'll probably end up using just one of these accounts, but that would depend on features. I switched to Lemmy because of the features it had and if kbin gets better, I might switch back.

EDIT: oh, right, and then there's also porn accounts. The way Lemmy works makes you almost surely want a separate account for the porn instances. It's easiest to browse those instances by local posts, but that requires you make an account there (it also won't show NSFW without an account, which is a silly barrier that is just going to hurt adoption). As well, voting is public, so if you want to privately vote on NSFW stuff, you should use a separate account. By comparison, on reddit, as long as you didn't intend to post or comment, there was no reason to use a separate account for Porn.

Especially since there's over 2 BILLION Instagram users. Why would anyone who uses Instagram have any concerns with Threads?

Bigots are incapable of thinking this way. They only see LGBT+ people as "the other" and themselves as "normal", so they never realize that they themselves at one point figured out their own identity (including both gender and sexuality). They think it's only LGBT+ folks having to figure those things out.

It's bizarre, especially since society does push cisgendered and heterosexual norms at a very early age. Young boys will get asked if they like any girls and they'll constantly be pushed with gender roles and stereotypes for their birth gender. It's so normalized that most folks don't even seem to realize that it happens until confronted with the existence of any alternative (like LGBT+ folks). A reasonable person would examine their biases and realize stuff like "huh, I guess I knew my gender from a young age", but bigots have this irrational hatred for LGBT+ people so they're not willing or capable of this kind of insight. Their brain has to twist logic into justifying the bigotry that they've already concluded on.

Why would they need to go through puberty? Did you not know what gender you were before puberty?

Plus, if you figure out you're trans (or might be trans) that young, you'd usually take puberty blockers explicitly to delay puberty until you're a bit older and doctors can be more certain, at which point HRT can be started. Puberty blockers are very safe and reversible, unlike puberty (whether natural puberty or HRT puberty).

Myself, I still see reddit when I'm googling for something (e.g., I used it yesterday to find where to go next in a game I was playing, as I was stuck and it seems many people got stuck in the same spot). Reddit is useful as an archive of information in that way and Lemmy isn't active or searchable enough for that yet (plus I didn't want to ask a question and wait -- I wanted to get my answer immediately).

As well as to read discussions of stuff like the ending of a video game or movie. Again mostly because reddit has dozens of threads for basically every single video game, movie, TV, etc (including those that predate Lemmy). I love reading user discussion after I finish something. But I am trying to start conversations about that here, too. If anyone wants to discuss Horizon Burning Shores or Final Fantasy XVI, I made threads about them (which... I was gonna link to, but I can't find -- the posts section of my profile is empty and I can't easily find them when searching...).

EDIT: the FFXVI post is https://lemm.ee/comment/940061

I'm just gonna let mine die. I don't want to use the site any more than necessary. The kinds of posts I'd want to draw attention to at this time are those that would appear hypocritical to give rewards to. I don't want to give the impression of having given Reddit money (even though I've never bought a reward and all my coins are from receiving).

Didn't it also start off as an entirely user run thing before Reddit admins took over it?

Programming started as a hobby for me as a teenager. I always "liked computers" so thought I'd give it a try. I never intended to make a career out of it because it seemed so hard at first, but over a decade later, I'm decently accomplished in my field and get paid bank for it.

As a hobby, it's fantastic. You can add in missing features to open source software you use (including the one I'm posting this to right now!). You can make your own little apps to fill niches you haven't found an existing program for. You can automate boring stuff from other work. You can make mods for certain types of video games. Or if you're really ambitious, you can even make a video game (but I gotta tell you, video games are hard and need much more than just programming -- I do not recommend making video games as a goal unless you've thought out just what that involves).

If you make a career out of it later, cool. But even if you don't, it's a fun and rewarding hobby that costs almost nothing. As long as you have a computer (preferably not a mobile phone, though it's technically possible to use a phone), you can program. Hardware doesn't generally matter. Any cheap laptop works. All the tools you need have free and often open source ones you can use. You only need to pay for web hosting if you make a web tool and want to share it with others.

Also glad to know there’s as safe level of carcinogens I can ingest.

I mean... yeah? That's the case for literally everything. Almost anything will kill you if you consume too much. Surely it's no surprise that the same applies to carcinogenic properties? The sun is an easy one to see the effects of. Some exposure to sunlight won't hurt you (and is in fact vital for vitamin D absorption), but too much and it can cause cancer.