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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • i believe the general attitude on the threadiverse is that down votes are not a great option: they should represent low quality or untruth rather than simply dislike. given this preference, and downvote to hide might overload the downvote function: no longer is it a last resort, but it’s a normal part of browsing your feed. i’ve seen nothing but staunch opposition to overusing h the down vote feature in this manner



  • not exactly because of pairs unless you’re talking about 1 and 0 being a pair… it’s because the maximum number you can count in binary doubles with each additional bit you add:

    with 1 bit, you can either have 0 or 1… which is, unsurprisingly perhaps, 0 and 1 respectively - 2 numbers

    with 2 bits you can have 00, 01, 10, 11… which is 0, 1, 2, 3 - 4 numbers

    with 3 bits you can have 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111… which is 0 to 7- 8 numbers

    so you see the pattern: add a bit, double the number you can count to… this is the “2 to the power of” that you might see: with 8 bits (a byte) you can count from 0 to 255 - that’s 2 (because binary has 2 possible states per digit) to the power of 8 (because 8 digits); 8^2

    the same is true of decimal, but instead of to the 2 to the power, it’s 10 to the power: with each additional digit, you can count 10 x as many numbers - 0-9 for 1 digit, 00-99 for 2 digits, 000-999 for 3 digits - 10^1, 10^2, 10^3 respectively

    and that’s the reason we use hexadecimal sometimes too! we group bits into groups of 8 and call it a byte… hexadecimal is base 16, so nicely lets us represent a byte with just 2 characters - 16^2 = 256 = 2^8




  • kinda the same reason people suggest something like linux mint over slackware, gentoo, arch, etc… mint is easy to install and is preconfigured to be an easy to use user desktop environment. you can configure any other option to be have like that, but they tend to be a bit more “DIY”, which is great if you know what you’re doing!

    dedicated NAS OSes will have good software out of the box that make it easy to configure and manage various common disk-related configurations (RAID, SMB, NFS, etc). you can certainly do all this yourself, but it might not have a pretty, unified user interface, or you might have to deal with software that isn’t compatible with some version of a library that’s in your distro of choice… all resolvable things, but they take time to solve: anywhere from installing a package manually to applying a kernel patch and recompiling the kernel to get something to work





  • a healthy democracy requires others to have privacy. people like investigative journalists need to be able to blend in with the crowd and expose government wrongdoing

    blending in the the crowd is the important part: if everyone cares about privacy, nobody sticks out for caring about privacy… but if nobody cares about privacy, the investigative journalist suddenly looks really obvious and can be targeted much more easily

    if someone doesn’t think they have anything to hide, that’s fine (wrong, but fine) however they can help to make sure the government acts appropriately simply by not splashing data around everywhere for all to see







  • afaik activitypub/fediverse doesn’t have to be fully open… there’s private messages and followers only profiles on mastodon… sure, any server admins of your followed would be able to see anything you post (and thus in this case for threads for example, if you accept any follower from threads then meta can see your stuff) but this also doesn’t grant them a license to use the content

    also, bluesky will eventually be the same: it only doesn’t have those issues now because they haven’t opened up their software… it’ll have federation in the future, which means it has to be somewhat programmatically open to others