I … oh. Hey! Ow.

I agree that Hitler should have been assassinated. Therefore, I am as much of a hero as those who tried.

Offering a slight damper / correction:

This is about two things (design and ownership), which are correlated, but not identical.

Malicious design can be things like:

• Algorithms to keep people engaged
• UIs to confuse users (luring them to purchases, or making ‘cancel’ hard to access)
• Using intermediate currencies to make it harder to assert value
• …

Obviously, these patterns and practices can also be applied to a FOSS instance you own. There is less incentive to do so if the profit motive is removed - which makes a huge difference.

These design patterns are fundamentally about making user numbers go up. Attract more users, keep them on your platform longer, make them leave less. And a portion of user guidance mixed in. None of that is inherently evil, to some degree even desireable, and to some extent unavoidable to offer a functional service.

Some users may expect a feed like lemmy to browse indefinitely, since they find it inconvenient to have to click to go to the ‘next page’. And because they got used to this feature elsewhere. Others already see this as a dark pattern.

I just wanted to highlight how some of the malicious stuff may still be present in the fediverse, without any company involved. Here, we’re kind of in charge on both sides: Each is responsible for their own user agency (like controlling your online hours, or what sites you visit), and collectively to decide what user experience we want to shape (which might include controverse patterns).

I spent way too many words on this. Mostly I agree with you! And overall, users will encounter far less malicious patterns on FOSS.

[Edit: Formatting]

Same here. My max is about 5.5’’ and 160g. Otherwise I feel it’s too hard to carry and handle, or even just hold. I also want to be able to reach the opposing screen corner with my thumb.

The question is wether there was sexual violence.

The claim from your screenshot answers that with a ‘no’: “It was all fabricated”.

Though what you provide to support that claim (I did not open the link) does not support it. On the contrary, it even provides accounts of sexual violence.

There is a 2nd, different claim muddled within: Wether sexual violence can be proven in court.

Of course, that can be difficult for a number of reasons related to sexual violence (“victims were murdered”, “not prepared to reveal”). But failure to prove an offense does by no means conclude that the accusations were “all fabricated”.

Maybe this is related to people confusing proof and evidence. Evidence (even numerous and strong) can exist although a proof is not possible.

Feel free to clear things up if I missed your point. At the moment, it is not understandable how that guy jumps from “there is evidence, but we will have trouble proving in court” to “it was all fabricated”. If you can add something which closes this gap, that would help your point.

Hehe, good point.

people need to read more code, play around with it, break it and fix it to become better programmers.

I think AI bots can help with that. It’s easier now to play around with code which you could not write by yourself, and quickly explore different approaches. And while you might shy away from asking your colleagues a noob question, ChatGPT will happily elaborate.

In the end, it’s just one more tool in the box. We need to learn when and how to use it wisely.

Quality comment, well said.

I’m not sure (take that literally, please) wether both causes deserve to be treated as equals, but I can very much vibe with the general spirit of your comment. That’s what I had in mind when writing the last paragraph of my previous comment.

This is like if Hezbollah bombed Yoav Gallant in Tel Aviv. And then Hezbollah starts bombing israeli airports “pre-emptively” because “an israeli attack” (retaliation) is coming.

Yes, exactly. They had good reasons to assume the other side is angry and might do something violent, because they themselves just did something very violent to them! So to protect themselves, they deprive their opponents of means of retaliation. Pre-empting the retaliation.

Hitting someone and then hitting them again because you expect them to hit back does not seem very " self defensy" or “pre-emptive” te me.

I get you. I would totally agree if this was about a school dispute. However in war, there are a number of things which can be done in self defense or to pre-empt an enemy attack which might seem counterintuitive at first, like for example destroying your own infrastructure, or investing in weapons with the intent to never use them.

In war, an attacker can very well attack again to defend themselves and/or to pre-empt the enemy reaction.

If you could hire one of two generals to protect your country; one which considers pre-emptive follow-up attacks and one who would rather let the other side strike back because it seems fair, who would you hire?

You expect a military force to sit tight, not move, not shoot, while they know the enemy is about to attack?

Because, the enemy “is defending itself”?

I’d love to hear that rally speech with which you would motivate your soldiers to just eat incoming rockets without using the tools they have to prevent being attacked.

The strikes are only pre-emptive if we put on white-nationalism glasses and take away Lebanon’s right to defend itself. Israel attacked Beirut first.

I guess as always with language, there are many possible interpretations. Yours is one, that’s right.

To me, it came somewhat surprising to see you connected “pre-emptive” to moral judgements, or to the question who attacked “first” (which is a controversial and potentially infinite topic to track the actual honest true ‘first’ origin).

Another interpretation is just military doctrine. The best defense is a good offense. Who cares who started the fight.

In this interpretation, the IDF felt there might be an attack incoming, and prevented it’s adversary from doing so by striking first.

Much like Hezbollah (or any other military force) would gladly pre-emptively strike their foe to protect their own troops. Doesn’t say anything about who started the overall conflict or even who’s right.

You still have a point; by highlighting the reasons behind the strike, and painting it as a protective measure, it probably makes it easier for the reader to sympathize.

Much like that comment. Can you give a better example, or express why it’s a bad example? That would bring some quality in.

FYI you can self-host GitLab, for example in a Docker container.

Gotta know your whales.

making the shops pay more to use the payment service, so that the shops then increase the prices, so that you pay the same as before

Just nitpicking because I enjoy these thoughts:

When the shop increases prices, it has to do it for all the customers, including the ones without credit card. So a part of the cost is offloaded to other types of customers. While credit card customers should see a slight increase in price, it should not be as much as they saved previously. So still a net win for them, at the cost of others.

As others pointed out, the real scheme is probably entirely different.

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You can use more debug outputs (log(…)) to narrow it down. Challenge your assumptions! If necessary, check line by line if all the variables still behave as expected. Or use a debugger if available/familiar.

This takes a few minutes tops and guarantees you to find at which line the actual behaviour diverts from your expectations. Then, you can make a more precise search. But usually the solution is obvious once you have found the precise cause.

How reductionist. You ignored that you have a brain, too. This comment section discusses the topic if you’re unaware of reasons.

I think that’s one of the best use cases for AI in programming; exploring other approaches.

It’s very time-consuming to play out how your codebase would look like if you had decided differently at the beginning of the project. So actually comparing different implementations is very expensive. This incentivizes people to stick to what they know works well. Maybe even more so when they have more experience, which means they really know this works very well, and they know what can go wrong otherwise.

Being able to generate code instantly helps a lot in this regard, although it still has to be checked for errors.

There’s a very naive, but working approach: Ask it how :D

Or pretend it’s a colleague, and discuss the next steps with it.

You can go further and ask it to write a specific snippet for a defined context. But as others already said, the results aren’t always satisfactory. Having a conversation about the topic, on the other hand, is pretty harmless.

Those LLMs are great fools, but I am just paranoid to use it in that manner.

Exquisite typo. I also agree to everything else you said.