Yeah. I grew up in the days of serial ports and parallel ports, and USB in general is so much better for most purposes. (I recall plugging my first mouse into the serial port…but wait! Where will my Hayes Smartmodem modem plug into then? Also, don’t plug and unplug things from the serial port while the computer is running.)

And USB-C is even better. My tablet needs a charge? Well my laptop charger is right here… My phone is low and needs a quick charge? Well my USB-C tablet charger will give it a decent boost very quickly. No worries about getting it plugged in the wrong way, either.

I have a docking station for my work laptop, so when I had to replace my personal laptop, a laptop that supported USB-C power delivery was mandatory. I don’t use it with the docking station very often, but knowing I can without an issue is great. My wife also has a Macbook that works on the docking station, too, in case she ever wants to use my dual monitor setup. All three laptops, from three different brands, are just plug in and go.

Shouldn’t it be an X 2.0? Did he just deadname his own company?

Some subs are very negative. I remember antimlm was, as well, people spent all day mocking people who got involved in MLM schemes. I subbed for a while because my wife was in one, and I was hoping for help, advice, tips, etc., but it was all just mocking them and calling them “hon bots” or whatever the term was. I had to unsub, I don’t need that negativity in my life.

The hobby subs, on the other hand, always seemed extremely supportive, or at least the ones I was in were. For example, the radio control (cars, planes, boats, etc.) sub members were totally into it and totally supportive of whatever it was you were doing. It was inspiring and made me want to get back into the hobby. Those kinds of subs were the best part of reddit, and unfortunately we haven’t recreated that energy for things like that here - just not enough users.

Can I bitch about that redaction for a bit? Someone hit our car while it was parked on federal property. There were cameras, and the security people figured out who did it (and called them, and they denied it). When we finally got the police report, all of the information for identifying the guilty party had been redacted, along with the officer’s name and any other useful information. For a literal fender bender. Shitty driver got away with it. The police report was completely useless. I can only imagine my insurance company was like, “We waited 3 weeks for THIS?” They might as well have sent over a blank page.

I get the idea behind redacting stuff in general, but that one just pissed me off.

I was on the phone with our ISP after our internet service went out. The rep asked me if the box had a green light on it - yes - then asked me to plug a light into the same outlet and confirm the power was on. I said, “Look, I understand you have to follow a script, but you literally just asked me to confirm the power light on the box was on. Clearly the power is working.”

Same ISP sends me an email whenever we have a power outage letting me know that our internet might not work when the power is out. (I’ve joked that this email arrives before the ceiling fans have come to a stop.) But when my internet goes down, they’re completely clueless. “Ohhhh it must be that your power is out even though we monitor that closely and aren’t showing a power outage right now!”

Because I didn’t know it existed until now. :) I’ll have to look into that, thanks.

This is a tough one. The problem with local only backups is, what if there’s a fire?

I use Amazon Glacier to store my pictures. It’s $0.0036 / GB per month, so I pay less than $2/month for ~535 GB of storage that I’m using right now. There is also a cost for downloading, but if I need it, I’m going to be happy to pay it (and the costs aren’t crazy). Uploads are free.

(The other problem with Glacier is that it’s not really an end-user-friendly experience, nor is it something easily automated. I use SimpleAmazonGlacierUploader, a Java program someone wrote, to do it. You can also upload to S3 and have it archive things to Glacier automatically - I’ve never tried this but it should work.)

I considered getting my brother or a friend to build two storage servers (with RAID5 or something) that we’d each keep at home, and just sync to each other. Good if you have a friend or family member willing to do it (or at least host your offsite box). Down sides: Cost to build it, time to build and maintain it, cost to replace things that break, plus cost for electricity. I’ve been using Glacier for many years, so by now maybe I would have spent less on that theoretical backup system, but I also did not have to worry about it.

I wonder what the wifi access in the school is like?

Page 3: Wireless infrastructure at all buildings, in 2015.

I have no idea why I remember mine, 520009. Haven’t used ICQ in many years; I didn’t know it was still up.

Most cars I’ve used with it won’t lock until you put it in drive or start moving at a certain speed; I assume that’s because of incidents like this one.

I can’t find the exact quote right now, but I saw in another article he said something like, “If they don’t pay for advertisements, X will be gone. How sad!”

It seems Musk thinks he’s tending another Mona Lisa or some other world cultural artifact that society would hate to lose. Not some website that’s fairly easily recreated by, say, a bunch of hobbyists.

I run an internet forum for a very specific topic. I have to manually register people, because before I did that, spammers would come in and crap all over everything. (Fortunately it’s not a very popular topic, so I only have to register new accounts a few times each month.) I run the forum on my own dime, no advertising or anything, as a side hobby.

There’s also a very active Facebook group. The Facebook group is great for general conversation, but often when a technical question comes up, please just link to the forum where the info is stored. Searching in Facebook is terrible, and what happens if Facebook decides to block access to history for some reason? (Not that they necessarily would, but I’ve seen it happen many times. Remember when Photobucket blocked access to old pictures unless you had a paid account? We lost a bunch of useful pictures on the forum when that happened.)

Insurance money? He thinks that there’s insurance for businesses being run into the ground?

Yeah, sometimes it got a little nasty about other people on reddit, which I was never a fan of. It was supposed to be in good fun, but sometimes people got carried away OR people would start posting every single question that was asked. (For example, I can poke fun at the people who just started riding a bike in their 20s and are now wondering about getting into a professional racing career, but sometimes people would repost what I thought were completely valid questions - no one knows everything, especially when they’re new to something. Fortunately those latter posts rarely got many upvotes or comments.)

Overall though it was generally a lot of fun. And honestly they were probably the most knowledgeable, helpful group if you had a detailed cycling question.

No, I didn’t, thanks for the tip. Subbed! I might drop the other one now.

I do miss /r/bicyclingcirclejerk. I loved the absurdly fake bragging and having fun with the stereotypes. Then one day we realized quite a few of us actually ride Cannondales, and that made it even funnier.

I can’t believe two people downvoted your comment.

You’re right about contributing.

As for the filtering, I’m not sure how I feel about that - I use the web interface on my computer and an app on my phone and tablet. I’d prefer them to have similar results. But I see the point you’re making; it could be curated by user instead of a massive algorithm for everyone.

I follow a sub that’s all reposts from reddit. Occasionally I think about replying to something, but then I just go, “What’s the point? OP isn’t here.” I don’t recall ever seeing anyone else respond to any of the crossposts, either. The community is c/bicycletouring@lemmit.online if anyone is curious, which is a pretty niche topic to start with.

I’m not convinced it’s adding anything to the Lemmy experience, but at least those are clearly marked as crossposts and are all posted by one account, so it’s easy enough to ignore if I wanted.

On the “all” thing - remember that reddit has a mode, which is the default, that’s between Lemmy’s “truly, everything all” and “subscribed”. In this mode, you’d get popular posts on subs that had opted in to allowing them to hit that page (or didn’t opt out, I don’t remember).

/r/hockey is a good example - their posts usually generally stayed in the sub, but their Super Bowl post (and occasionally others) would usually hit reddit’s front page and bring in a ton of people who weren’t subbed to /r/hockey.

This was a good feature of reddit, I hope Lemmy eventually gains something similar.

It’s possible I misunderstood your last goal, but if you’re planning to have Lemmy comments posted back to reddit, I suspect that wouldn’t go over well with reddit’s admins after they figure it out.

Of course it’s just my view, I don’t know what people are actually doing. But I’ve seen comments that I thought were good discussions of the topic at hand downvoted for describing the other side of an issue, even if the commenter doesn’t agree with it. To me the only reasons to downvote are things like trolls, off topic, personal attacks, racism, homophonic, and the like.

There’s definitely a “downvote if you disagree” ethos here. There’s not even a pretense of “this contributes to the conversation, even if I disagree” reason for upvoting.

I know this is how it worked in practice on reddit, but at least the rule was that you were supposed to upvote contributions and downvote things that didn’t contribute, and at least a few people followed that rule (or maybe only me).

I wouldn’t be surprised if that drives some people away - they see a bunch of downvotes on their comments and think people don’t want to hear from them (even if there are more upvotes than downvotes).

You’re arguing that there’s no algorithm that promotes content users interact with on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and so on? This has been proven repeatedly.

On Facebook, most people seem to think they get the feed in time-ordered manner, and that hasn’t been true for a decade or more. For example, posts with pictures get promoted to be closer to the top of the feed. Crucially, posts with more interaction (replies, reactions, probably even reports) are also shown closer to the top of the feed, so the user is much more likely to see those when they load Facebook.

So, things that upset people will get a lot of interaction, and they show those at the top of the feeds, which generates even more interaction. So then the algorithms start looking for similar content that will generate the same type of interactions, to put that near the top of the feed, and next thing you know millions of people are worshiping the ground some idiotic politician walks on.

Sure, it’s free will to respond, but the fact is that the users’ feed is being curated, focused on whatever extreme thing generates reactions.