• 31 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • There is already plenty of empirical evidence to support the claims of the harms of social media, but in spite of this, change is glacial.

    I think at one point you could make the same argument about medicines. The problem is that politicians are appointed with a popularity contest.

    I don’t remember all the arguments of the article, but when you think about it, the harms of social media are medical. It’s possible that we could expand the scope of the current medicine approval boards to include algorithms, with their job not being to understand the algorithm but to understand the research on mental health.

    I don’t have all the answers, but I do think it’s an idea worth exploring.




  • In my view social media is probably not the problem, but the algorithms they use that are designed to be addictive and manipulative.

    I saw an article once arguing that the algorithms should be regulated in a similar way to medicine. Give some base ingredients they can use freely (e.g. sort by newest first), then require any others to run studies to prove they are not harmful.

    There would be an expert board that approves or declines the new algorithm in the same way medicines are approved today (the important bit being that they are experts, not politicians making the decision).


  • I use a dedicated Raspberry Pi (5, previously had on a 4).

    I host everything else on a different server, the HA one is dedicated. Pretty nice because then it can run HAOS and basically manages everything itself.

    One factor in keeping it separate was I wanted it to be resilient. I don’t want stuff to stop working if I restart my server or if the server dies for some reason. My messing around on my server is isolated from my smart home.

    I also have a separate Pi (4, previously on a Pi 1B) that runs Pi-hole, on it’s own Pi for the same reason - if it stops working or even pauses for a moment, the internet stops working.




  • I can absolutely understand that it’s difficult to conceptualise. For someone who already understands, the concept is dead simple.

    But I still remember the confusion trying to join Mastodon all those years ago. You are shown a list of servers, huh? Never being introduced to the concept of federated social media, just being asked makes you feel like you don’t belong because you don’t understand what’s happening.

    Ok, so you search around and work out that it’s across many servers. You now have to somehow pick a server with no frame of reference. Pick randomly and hope you don’t pick the lemmdgrad equivalent (which is always high on the list on join-lemmy.com BTW). Then you go to join and you have to apply - oh, but what if they don’t want me? How do they know who I am, why would they approve my application?

    Each one of these things is a barrier to entry, they stack like swiss cheese so that very few people make it through.

    Then there’s the part where all these people have friends that could help them through it, but the friends never mention the fediverse to them because of the whole don’t talk about thing. I am guilty of this.



  • I turned it off because it kept triggering when I (or someone else) was talking to my Home Assistant Voice Preview (which the blog says it won’t do…). I also never really worked out good uses for it. My HAVP is in my kitchen/living room area, and is mostly used for playing music and kitchen related things (setting timers, unit conversions, etc).

    If I ask home assistant on my phone to play music, it plays it on the HAVP speaker in my kitchen. I don’t really have a need for timers or conversions outside of the kitchen where I already have the HAVP so didn’t find any use for it on my phone.







  • One time I was in a class where we had this beginner level web dev assignment, and we were writing HTML and CSS. We had to submit the assignment as a zip file.

    When you open the HTML from the zip file in Windows without unzipping it, it can’t access other files in the zip file, namely the CSS.

    The entire class failed the assignment because the teacher didn’t unzip the files first, and refused to entertain the idea they might have screwed up.