Developing a platform like this is a lot of work and very technical. Communicating every step of the way to a non-technical audience would double the workload.

There's basically two types of projects: Those that are dead, and those that are not. The fact that it is still getting commits means it's in the latter category, and it'll be done when it's done.

It can be frustrating waiting for open source projects to progress, but part of what makes open source great is that you don't need to rush half-baked features in order to meet some corporate roadmap. :)

We all know Trump is Putin's man in America. We all witnessed his presidency, we all saw their cozy little press conference with their secret little meeting.

It boggles my mind how dishonest or plain stupid one has to be, as a serious journalist, to frame MAGA Putin supporters as something intellectually surprising or out of the ordinary. Trumpism has been Putin's project since day one, and there's no way the journalist is not aware of that.

Journalists are so fucking hungry for a spin they obscure reality in the process.

I hate that I'm surprised by the clarity of this answer. Hopefully Netanyahu is too.

Shoes. You don't end up saving money and it's not worth the pain. I tried for years back when I couldn't afford a thing and concluded that there's simply no such thing as cheap good shoes.

Obviously they won't give too much of a shit and they're not going to send any mail, they'll just block the server like they would anyway. They are, however, going to be annoyed to be treated as insignificant nobodies. So all in all not a bad idea.

She's only 69 though. Four justices are younger than her, three are older. She's closer in age to Kamala Harris than she is to Joe Biden.

I get the concern, but at some point it gets silly.

Let's not forget that US/Israeli relations were at an all-time low during Biden's presidency because he didn't want anything to do with Netanyahu.

Not saying the US response to all this hasn't sucked, but I'm pretty confident any other president the US has had the last 50 years would have been worse.

It's not your president. It's your country. You allowed this to happen over decades, not months or even years.

And in a race where the other candidate is firmly pro genocide... Yeah, I struggle to interpret this shit in good faith. Kindly fuck off.

Everything is just vibrations; vibrations are just waves. Vinyl records make a physical copy of the sound wave. As the needle drags across it at the correct speed it starts vibrating, reproducing the sound that went into the groove in the first place.

Sound files are more tricky: Basically you need to measure the wave as it goes up and down, store it into a file, and then have a computer convert it back into vibrations with the help of a loudspeaker. The more times you measure the sound wave per second, the better quality your recording will be.

As we know that sounds are waves, it's not so hard to imagine a text file containing sound. Below is a very simple wave form represented with numbers:

- _ - ⁻ - _ - ⁻ - _ - ⁻ - _ - ⁻ - _ - ⁻ - _ - ⁻ - _ - ⁻ - _ - ⁻ - _ _ - - ⁻ ⁻ - - _ _

1 0 1 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 0 1 1 2 2 1 1 0 0

In theory, a computer could convert this into sound. It would sound awful.

Nice overview but I'm not sure I completely agree with you on everything.

If I want to make a community, is there a reason I would choose one lemmy over another?

There's absolutely good reason to choose instances wisely when making a community. Some instances defederate from others, and you want to make your community somewhere where you agree with the moderation policy. Also, it might be easier to immediately reach people on a larger instance.

If you create your community on lemmy.ml, you might not reach everyone because some people and instances have blocked .ml due to different philosophies. If you make it on Beehaw, you'll reach fewer people as they have a higher moderation standard than most, which could of course also be good for your community. Lemmy.world is more neutral in their moderation policy, but I'm sure there are pros and cons there as well.

I like it when there are specific instances for specific niches, as it gives the community control over who to federate with. But of course, that's not always possible.

If I report a comment, is my report private?

They're not public at least. Few things on the Internet are truly private.

They quite obviously never cared. Obama was more respected among America's allies than any president since JFK or some shit. Meanwhile their candidate was globally treated as a fucking joke.

Not even a funny joke - one of those racist sexist jokes your drunk stepfather tells. And the Kremlin were the only ones laughing.

Existence is meaningless and we just wobble around here for a little while and then we die. There's nothing to it. Everything that happens is just a logical consequence; beauty is nothing but a tiny chemical reaction in your brain. Once you rot it's all worthless.

Science is great at giving explanations, but not so good at providing meaning. For a lot of people, meaning is probably more helpful in order to facilitate a happy life.

Nietzsche writes at length about this stuff, most famously in the anecdote about the madman coming down from the mountain to inform the villagers that God is dead and that we have killed him. Everybody knows the three words "God is dead", but I think it's worth reading at length:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Nietzsche, whose father was a priest, recognizes that "God has become unbelievable", but he does not celebrate it as the progress of science. Rather, we lost something that was fundamentally important to humans, and which science cannot easily replace.

Here one could start talking about the Free Masons, who attempted learning from religious rituals without the added layer of religion. Or one could dig deeper into the works of Nietzsche, and the contrast between Apollonian and Dionysian. It's all fascinating stuff.

In short though, spirituality used to offer people a sense of meaning that is not so easily replaced by science alone. How do we bury our dead now that we know our rituals are pointless?

On the bright side, as a tall bearded guy I get a lot of fun reactions when kitting in public. The silent confused onlookers are fun, but the enthusiastic middle aged women are the best.