aasatru

I’m just here because I hate capitalists.

I also hate stalinists, so the joke is on me I guess.

In my city cycling is faster even if you’re not stuck in traffic because you can take one way streets and shortcuts. During rush hour it’s not even comparable.

I have a pretty comfy saddle, and if it’s too bumpy I prefer cycling standing up anyway. Don’t really get why people insist so much on sitting down all the time.

It’s not reasonable, but it is understandable. This is why FOSS is the only viable alternative for sustainable computing.

My favourite type of posts is the ones by people signed up in one instance, posting in a community hosted by another instance about how they don’t understand how they are supposed to make use of federation. And then often still not getting it when people from all over the web tell them that they already are.

It makes sense though - federation is sold as a feature for users, but when done right the users should hardly notice it at all. So of course people end up a bit confused.

Seems like a community that has it’s natural home at programming.dev.

There’s a genocide going on with what appears to be more or less the full support of the countries that make up the defence union my country is a part of.

There’s war in Europe.

I find those topics worthy of discussion, and any social media where this is not actively discussed seems to me to be a smokescreen more than anything.

Of course tragic realities like the genocide we are complacent in, climate change, war in Europe, Russian propaganda and the rise of the far right is going to be actively discussed. It concerns more or less everyone who uses this platform, and they are the most important issues of our time. It’s not about negativity, it’s about coming to terms with reality and seeking to understand it.

That said, the communities I follow are largely apolitical stuff that interests me. Woodworking, knitting, gardening, owls, art, and the Fediverse. With the exception of !europe@feddit.de and !energy@slrpnk.net, I let the political stuff come through the cracks rather than actively following it.

I also have a Piefed account on which I follow news communities but actively filter out Trump and Musk. I can see how Amercians still feel the need to talk about these men, but at the end of the day they’re just fascist attention whores.

At some point recognisability is also worth something. I can immediately read this graph, I understand it, it’s good.

Occasionally it’s used in a confusing way where people assume it starts at zero despite it not being the case, and sometimes intentionally so. But that’s just the case here.

Well, it does make sense, doesn’t it?

What we’re interested in is not the number of users, but the trends: whether the number is increasing or decreasing over time. Starting the axis at 0 would not be useful in this regard, as the trend would be almost completely obscured.

It varies everywhere, even from state to state in the US.

The US system is kind of broken - they ask you to vote for way too many things. Where I’m from I just vote for a party - I basically say “yeah, the green party are cool”, and then the party decides who to put in which position should they get enough votes. I can give a +1 to candidates I like personally, but I don’t have to.

In the US you might be asked to vote for school boards, a sheriff, and a bunch of weird positions. There’s no realistic chance you’ll make an informed decision for all of them.

Sadly, it’s very important you still vote, because the republicans are using this broken system to fill these positions with far-right lunatics. So basically seek out information as much as you can, but at the end of the day just vote for whichever Democrat is on the ballot whenever in doubt. They’re not guaranteed to be good - in fact they’re likely to be pretty bad - but they’re pretty much guaranteed to be the lesser of two evils.

Still might vary though - local politics are weird, and there are no rules set in stones. Some places you still have decent republicans on the local level (or so I’ve heard).

Fascinating how the federated Bluesky spam came from Nostr. Dorsey’s lovechild vomiting crap all over his disowned brainchild. Clearly he bet on the right horse.

I could read the full article, not sure what’s going on.

Anyway, the journalist is writing about the Verge and 404 Media, and the more general potential benefits for the industry. There’s nothing about Digiday.com following the same path.

It’s a nice write-up. The main things I learned is that the Verge is transitioning to WordPress, and 404 is using Ghost. Both hope to activate the ActivityPub capabilities of these platforms when they’re ready - the Verge when it finishes transitioning, 404 when Ghost implants AP support.

I guess the rules of the instance you’re posting from always apply, in addition to the rules of the instance you’re posting in. If you’re posting stuff that’s not tolerated by your instance it will probably kick you out, no matter which communities you post in. :)

Artificial intelligence. There’s nothing intelligent going on in an LLM model. There’s learning, but not intelligence.

The people objecting to the use of the term AI to describe computerized parrots are the people who think intelligence still matters as a concept.

Yeah, fair enough. I read the post more favourably, as a “at least my alternative is still working well for me”, but then also being aware that every time Brave is mentioned someone jumps on and reminds everyone that the CEO is a jerk, so it saves us the time by addressing it right away.

Both interpretations are valid I guess. :)

The vikings got a bit of a bad reputation, probably in large part because they were not too popular amongst munks in England (who were avid writers). Sure, there was raping and plundering, but not necessarily so much worse than other peoples, and there was also trade and coexistence. We had particularly close relations to Scotland, and England is hardly in the position to accuse anyone else of plundering! ;)

Fun fact about the word viking: It literally means someone from a “vik”, which is contemporary Norwegian for a cove. More traditionally, it’s a dwelling by the coast, which explains the many -wich-towns in northern UK: The vikings would settle, usually for salt supplies, and name the place something ending with -vik.

So a Viking is not a job description as much as someone dwelling by the sea!

I think there’s a lot of us who would ideally want to avoid both Microsoft and Google, and now that Bing is having problems it’s more relevant than ever. I don’t really see how the comment is braggy or patronising.

That said, I’m not comfortable using Brave either. I wish Mozilla or the Internet Archive would launch a search engine. Maybe both in cooperation. Then again, it would require Mozilla to bite the hand that feeds it.

I was paying for Kagi until recently, but they keep working on functionality I’m not interested in rather than lowering their prices. Other than that it was a fine experience, but too pricey, and the argument that that’s the cost of running a search engine doesn’t hold when they choose to develop all kinds of extra stuff.

I wish I liked SearXNG better, but the results are sadly not that great for me.

Is it possible that I miss out on valuable insights by immediately dismissing the opinions of anyone who refers to machine learning as AI?

Sure.

Will I stop doing it?

Sure as hell not.

Norwegians are generally leaning pro-Palestine.

In a recent survey, 46% of Norwegians responded that they have more sympathy with Palestinians, whereas only 12% have more sympathy with Israelis. 32% responded that their sympathy with Palestinians has increased in light of recent events.

I can imagine several reasons why Norway is so different from for example Germany and France in this regard.

One is that we have a pretty well-organized civil society, including an organized Jewish community that is actively outspoken about Israeli extremism. My impression is that leading voices in the Mosaic community in Norway are frequently outspoken on the side of humanity.

Another reason is of course that we are still bitter about the collapse of the Oslo Accords. There’s simply no question Israel were the ones who killed it.

Even before this, Israel might have had less goodwill in Norway following the Lillehammer affair where Mossad murdered some random waiter who was on his way home from the cinema with his pregnant wife. One of the agents involved in placing 13 bullets in Ahmed Bouchikhi has since stated that they knew they were shooting the wrong man.

More importantly however, it probably relates to the story we tell ourselves as a nation.

We’re in all likelihood prouder of our war efforts than most of Europe, and certainly more than pro-Israeli countries like Germany and France. A lot of us (myself included) have family members who helped Jews flee the country following the occupation, at the risk of death penalty should they get caught.

The author of our national anthem took active part in the Dreyfus affair, among other things writing in a French newspaper that the French government was the “most shameless of any civilized people”.

Other important national poets dedicated their lives to giving Jews right to statehood, wrote poems urging people to wake the fuck up to the horrors of nazism, or died bombing Berlin.

These people, among others, make up the core of what we consider Norwegian national identity. As a result the average Norwegian might be less afraid of criticizing Israel than the average German (or French), as we consider ourselves to be firmly footed on the right side of history.

Of course, history is more complicated than that. A lot of us will simply not read Hamsun, and never mind that Jews had to be allowed into the Kingdom in the first place. History is complicated, but the stories we choose to tell and the ways we choose to frame them matters a lot.

Also, Norwegians are pretty left-leaning, and we put a lot of effort promoting ourselves as a peace nation. Probably doesn’t hurt either.