eleijeep

Thank you both for telling me the answers to your security questions.

I generally do not trust manfucturer preinstalled OS.

Especially pertinent for Lenovo.

You get incremental backups (snapshots) by using

--link-dest=DIR         hardlink to files in DIR when unchanged

To use this you pass in the previous snapshot location as DIR and use a new destination directory for the current snapshot. This creates hard links in the new snapshot to the files which were unchanged from the previous snapshot, so only the new files are transferred, and there is no duplication of data on disk (for whole-file matches).

This does of course require that all of the snapshots exist in the same filesystem, since you cannot hard-link across filesystems.

I haven’t used Discourse, but what you describe sounds like the way that Slashdot has been doing moderation since the late 90s, by randomly selecting users with positive karma to perform a limited number of moderation actions, including meta-moderation where users can rate other moderation decisions.

I always thought that this was the ideal way to do moderation to avoid the powermod problem that reddit and lemmy have, although I acknowledge the other comments here about neglecting minorities being a result of random sampling of the userbase, but it is likely that this also happens with self-selected moderation teams.

Within minority communities though, a plurality of members of that community will belong to that minority and so moderating their own community should result in fair selections. Another way to mitigate the exclusion of minorities might be to use a weighted sortition process, where users declare their minority statuses, and the selection method attempts to weight selections to boost representation of minority users.

A larger problem would be that people wanting to have strong influence on community moderation could create sock-puppet accounts to increase their chance of selection. This already happens with up/downvotes no doubt, but for moderation perhaps the incentive is even higher to cheat in this way.

I think a successful system based on this idea at least needs some strong backend support for detecting sock-puppetry, and this is going to be a constant cat and mouse game that requires intrusive fingerprinting of the user’s browser and behaviour, and this type of tracking probably isn’t welcome in the fediverse which limits the tools available to try to track bad actors. It is also difficult in an open source project to keep these systems secret so that bad actors cannot find ways to work around them.

Switching your firefox profile to a firefox fork is super easy peasy squeezy cheesy peas.

You just need to follow the steps for moving your profile in this Firefox support article: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/back-and-restore-information-firefox-profiles

When you start librewolf or whatever you switch to (librewolf is what I use) it will have everything from Firefox including whatever your last session was (if you save your session) and all of your history and bookmarks and even addons and UI customization etc.

Population expansion is exponential but the tram moves at constant velocity, so by the time it reaches the end of the track of 8bn people there will be an exponentially increasing number of people further down the track.

The bottom one will kill an infinite amount of people in finite time.

instantaneously FTFY

I checked your Mastodon timeline but I don’t see the post, only the one where you relate the story.

Yes the volunteer software authors should work to the beat of the drum of the baying and braying users who insist on using cutting edge software before its wider ecosystem has adapted to its novelties. A very good point.

It really is a shame that they force you to update to the new version. If only there was some way to continue using the existing Gnome version until the extensions have been updated by their authors.

Slightly off-topic for this post but would it be possible to get a metadata field in the instance picker for the country that the instance is hosted in?

Some of the instances say this in the text blurb, but many don’t mention it, and it’s something that is becoming increasingly important for people with all the new social media laws coming in in various countries.

Thanks.

https://mastodon.social/@Liberux/114773833271790172

We’ll relaunch crowdfunding with a functional prototype. We’re also in talks with investors who respect our values.

It began upon the following Occasion. It is allowed on all Hands, that the primitive way of breaking Eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger End: But his present Majesty’s Grand-father, while he was a Boy, going to eat an Egg, and breaking it according to the ancient Practice, happened to cut one of his Fingers. Whereupon the Emperor his Father published an Edict, commanding all his Subjects, upon great Penaltys, to break the smaller End of their Eggs. The People so highly resented this Law, that our Histories tell us there have been six Rebellions raised on that account; wherein one Emperor lost his Life, and another his Crown. These civil Commotions were constantly fomented by the Monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the Exiles always fled for Refuge to that Empire. It is computed, that eleven thousand Persons have, at several times, suffered Death, rather than submit to break their Eggs at the smaller End.

XChat

I haven’t seen this youtuber’s videos before. Do they normally drop 40 minutes of spoilers for a game that came out just 6 months ago? I thought this was going to be a review and it turned into a walkthrough less than 10 minutes in.

There are multiplayer games from 30 years ago that still have 30 people who play on the first Friday night of each month, and they will put that in their calendar and keep the game alive.

The idea that multiplayer games need huge communities of players otherwise they are “dead” is what is killing multiplayer games.

uutils is coreutils re-written in Rust that Ubuntu just switched to by default in 25.10