Along with other things said here, people tend to “forget” that there’s a real person on the other end.

I vaguely recall Nicholas Christakis talking about a study they made, where they created a bot which would simply remind people of the fact that there’s a real person on the other end, and they found that it would help. (That study was done in some university platform and is centuries old in internet time, though. I think he spoke about it about 6 years ago on podcast with Sam Harris.)

/s means sarcasm.

(I myself don’t find this one funny though…)

Some people see “free stuff”, and assume that it’s now open season on wasting OP’s time.

It’s a good way to kill any enthusiasm. Imagine your kid made a spaghetti portrait as a gift for you and instead of just accepting it you asked, “but what exactly did you do differently from all kids on the block?”

Why? Why ask for this from the creator?

If someone can create new software and offer it for free, they should not also be expected to also create a comprehensive analysis of what other people did and list of differences.

Just take it or leave it, it’s that simple. No need to act as if you’re trying to waste some door-to-door salesman’s time.

Edit: I expected some downvotes but not that many.

To my defense, the question in this thread is “you could elaborate what exactly you did different than all the others”. Look, I’m not a native English speaker either but I feel we could agree that is still pretty far away from simply being curious about design choices or “what led you to create this” sort of exploratory question.

I might have overreacted, though, so sorry for that.

When it comes to identifying the server, hostname the first thing that counts. lemmy.world or mastodon.social or google.com are three different hostnames. At this point you can basically treat the period as no special character, it’s just part of the funny world. This basically answers your question: those are two different domains, ie. for all purposes, different instances.

However, your computer does not really connect to hostname but to IP address, so the next important thing is to translate the hostname to an IP address.

Aside: a valid hostname does not even have to have period in it. For example, localhost is a valid hostname! But generally hostnames without periods don’t get translated to any useful IP addresses. localhost is probably the only one widely used hostname but your OS will translate it to a special IP address which marks your own device.)

So to translate the hostname to IP address is done using so-called DNS. So before you can connect, your computer already knows an IP address of a DNS server, and asks it to translate the hostname to IP address. Technically, this is still not where the period is strictly important.

Where the period does start to be meaningful is when you think about: so we have billions of IP addresses, billions of hostnames, how do we organize it all? Who is going to maintain the huge massive list?

So it works like this: There are dozens of organizations, each of which is assigned one or more “top level domains” (TLD). Then they are responsible for maintaining lists of all hostnames ending with those domains. Many of these organizations are local to certain states. For example, in Czech Republic, where I live, we have organization called CZ.NIC which maintains all domains ending with .cz. So it’s up to CZ.NIC how it manages permissions and gives out the domains. In this case, basically anyone can register any free domain ending with .cz, and what this registration means is that now they can get a server with an IP address, run whatever they want and have the registered domain name point to that IP address.

Note that other organizations may decide to add additional rules. For example .uk domains are managed with extra rules, where non-government (commercial) entities are normally allowed to register only .co.uk and other .uk names are not handed out easily. I don’t actually know the details about .uk but my point is that if you are going to think about a hostname and how to begin to understand who owns it, first thing that matters is the TLD, and from that point the rules might be slightly different. To be fair, I haven’t seen much variance between this; almost all public TLD’s I’ve seen were either “simple”, meaning myname.tld or this thing that UK does (also New Zealand, from the top of my head).

One almost universal rule is, though, that if I, say, register seznam.cz with CZ.NIC, then I automatically get not only seznam.cz but also any address I can possibly come up which ends with .seznam.cz. foo.seznam.cz, bar.seznam.cz, www.seznam.cz, I can now start organizing my servers using this whole infinite space, with any number of extra periods. I could totally start a business and start promoting my server foo.bar.baz.whatever.cz on billboards, as long as CZ.NIC grants me whatever.cz.

So back to your question: mastodon.social and piefed.social are two completely different domains. All we know that they have in common is that whoever registered them, had to deal with the same organization; that is whoever maintains .social.

So TL;DR: there’s really nothing that suggests that they would be the same instance.

What’s even worse that the stolen comment got much more engagement than the original.

I’ve seen her comments all around YouTube, and this always seems to happen to her. (I’m assuming it’s because they are the most insightful, informative yet still on point.) Don’t give up Barbara, some of us are seeing through the scam and rooting for you!

Also in my experience LLM can often propose solutions which are working but way too complex.

Story time: just yesterday, in VueJS I was trying to iterate over a list of items and render .text of reach item as HTML, but I needed to process it first. Note that in VueJS this is done by adding eg. <span v-html="item.text"></span> where content of the attribute is the JavaScript expression needed to get the text.

First I asked ChatGPT to write the function for processing the text. That worked pretty well and even used part of the JavaScript API which I was not aware about.

Next, I had a “dumb moment” when I did not realize that as I’m iterating through items I can just say <span v-html="processHtml(item.text)"></span>, that’s all I really needed. Somehow I thought (or should I say, “hallucinated”, ba dum tsss) for a moment that v-html is special or something (it is used differently than the most abundant type of syntax). So I went ahead and asked ChatGPT how to render processed texts while iterating.

It came with a rather contrived solution which involved creating another computed property containing a list of processed texts. I started to integrate it into the existing loop: I would have to add index and use that index to pull the code from the computed property, which already felt a little bit weird.

That’s when it struck me: no, no, no, I can just f*ing use the function.

TL; DR: The point is, while ChatGPT was helpful I still needed to babysit it. And if I didn’t snap from my lazy moment, or if I simply didn’t know better, I would end up with code which is more complex, more surprising, which means harder to reason about for both humans and LLM’s. (For humans because now it forces you to speculate about coder’s intent, and for LLM’s because it’s less likely to be reminiscent of surrounding code in its learning data.)

Skeleton:

• When the hero comes into the tomb, I want it to be dead first, no faffing about with boss fight (which they always win) BS.
• I like the musical nature of their bones.
• I already am one, sort of…

That’s a noble goal but does adding more people help the (long-term only, please) effectiveness? At what point does it start hindering it?

I would assume that someone like a pharmacist has to be focused all the time, stakes is high…

Do we have precise data about how physiological state of a pharmacist is changing through the shift? Do we know whether or not the pauses between people – which we might or might not have considered a wasted time – are actually essential for their ability to stay focused and reliable? (Is the answer the same for all of them?) Or maybe they could actually still use part of that time in a productive way, right? Also, why is there lack of people in the first place?

Focusing solely on adding more people to the equation seems to neglect factors like this. This tells me that whoever this factoid is trying to impress is not someone who I would want to trust with managing a pharmacy (or anything except maybe some production line) in the first place.

Is “pharmacists seeing more patients” really a measure of something good? I’m a non-native English speaker so cut me some slack but all I can imagine is just longer queues in the pharmacy and more tired pharmacists (and people who now need to wait in the queue now).

The pic being blurred and all, I thought it’s going to be some dad joke around “pharmacist can see more patients”

“like this comment if you think this post is especially good”

“everything has pros and cons”

I usually give the CGP Grey’s legendary answer: “…but it’s hardly ever the case that all the pros and all the cons all PERFECTLY balance each other out, right?”

It doesn’t matter if I understand how the alien antigravity socks work -if they’re tech, they’re tech.

• If you are a reasonable person (and not dreaming or insane), you can tell them apart quite easily: if it’s actually there, it’s tech.
• If you are a superstitious person (or dreaming or insane), you can tell them apart quite easily: if it’s actually there, it’s magic.

See? That’s what I like about the quote. It points to the fact that the difference is in the eye of the beholder.

from our perspective is implied in every sentence ever.

And no, you can’t expect phrases to “say what they mean”----that would just require them to include more phrases, etc…

deleted by creator

Stand-up meeting: “to be frank, Frank is starting his holiday in Frankfurt next week so…”

Does it count as reliable if I only have sample size of 1?

Beyerdynamic. Had DT770 pro for 8 years before they “broke” (cable connection failed, I think it’s still fixable–making them last for many more years—by someone with skills I don’t have, and they could have lasted more if I handled them a tad better.)

Recently I replaced them with DT770 pro X and they sound perfect to me.

perhaps there’s a alien civilization out there that’s done all this already that you can buy a colonization/uplift from. That might reasonably be a short if expensive order

This.

And if we’re speculating, why not go all the way and say we also don’t know it would be expensive. Who’s to say it would not cost, say, $15? Wouldn’t it be fun to get a Star Trek system for, like, so cheap that a kid could afford it?

(I would make sure to read the fine print, though.)

I mean, imagine enabling a trial and then suddenly finding yourself screaming and pooping all day, waaah, waah. 👼