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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 28th, 2023

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  • The metric standard is to measure information in bits.

    Bytes are a non-metric unit. Not a power-of-ten multiple of the metric base unit for information, the bit.

    If you’re writing “1 million bytes” and not “8 million bits” then you’re not using metric.

    If you aren’t using metric then the metric prefix definitions don’t apply.

    There is plenty of precedent for the prefixes used in metric to refer to something other than an exact power of 1000 when not combined with a metric base unit. A microcomputer is not one one-thousandth of a computer. One thousand microscopes do not add up to one scope. Megastructures are not exactly one million times the size of ordinary structures. Etc.

    Finally: This isn’t primarily about bit shifting, it’s about computers being based on binary representation and the fact that memory addresses are stored and communicated using whole numbers of bits, which naturally leads to memory sizes (for entire memory devices or smaller structures) which are powers of two. Though the fact that no one is going to do something as idiotic as introducing an expensive and completely unnecessary division by a power of ten for every memory access just so you can have 1000-byte MMU pages rather than 4096 also plays a part.


  • In what sense do you think this isn’t following the email standard? The plus sign is a valid character in the local part, and the standard doesn’t say how it should be interpreted (it could be a significant part of the name; it’s not proper to strip it out) or preclude multiple addresses from delivering to the same mailbox.

    Unfortunately the feature is too well-known, and the mapping from the tagged address to the plain address is too transparent. Spammers will just remove the label. You need either a custom domain so you can use a different separator (‘+’ is the default but you can generally choose something else for your own server) or a way to generate random, opaque temporary addresses.

    If you want to talk about non-compliant address handing, aside from not accepting valid addresses, the one that always bothers me is sites that capitalize or lowercase the local part of the address. Domain names are not case-sensitive, but the local part is. Changing the case could result in non-delivery or delivery to the wrong mailbox. Most servers are case-insensitive but senders shouldn’t assume that is always true.





  • Your intake of sugar participation in extreme sports absolutely impacts other people when you end up with chronic health issues that other people have to help pay for.

    It’s not as if there’s some natural law obligating you to pay for anyone else’s health issues. Your government is responsible for externalizing that private cost onto you and others, effectively subsidizing risk-taking and irresponsibility. If you don’t like it, insist that people pay for their own health care and insurance at market rates, without subsidies.


  • “Off topic” is a legitimate reason to downvote a post or comment, even one made respectfully and in good faith.

    I do sometimes wish more sites had adopted something like the system Slashdot used, with multiple categories of up or down votes (insightful, informative, off-topic, flamebait, etc.) which users could weight according to their own preferences. The simplistic “either up, down, or neutral” model is a rather blunt instrument.


  • nybble41@programming.devtoMastodon@lemmy.mlGot to love Mastodon
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    1 year ago

    The more users spread out into smaller, more easily censored instances, the more the remaining fragmented bits of the Lemmy ecosystem still talking to each other will turn into echo chambers full of groupthink. This low threshold for defederation is the Fediverse’s greatest weakness. Sure, it’s possible to work around it—but how many separate Lemmy accounts are users expected to create? Even if you have accounts on every instance of note you’d need to manually cross-post messages to each balkanized server and their comment sections wouldn’t be shared—exactly the sort of thing federation was meant to avoid.

    Email, another federated system, has this same weakness. It’s why it’s increasingly difficult to run your own (outgoing) email server which other systems will accept messages from without going through a well-known third party like Google. Especially when trying to push content to a large audience (e.g. mailing lists), which happens to be Lemmy’s core function.