Systems Engineer and Configuration
Management Analyst.

Postgrad degree is in computer science/cybersecurity, but my undergraduate is in archaeology. Someday, maybe, I’ll merge the two fields professionally!

I love true science fiction, as well as all things aviation, outer space, and NASA-related.

Lastly, Calvin and Hobbes is the best comic strip of all time!

Glad to be here trying out kbin and the fediverse.

  • 6 Posts
  • 60 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 3rd, 2023

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  • I’m not sure why that’s a conceptual hurdle. Electromagnetic radiation, including the visible light spectrum, is one of the primary methods in which we gather data about and interpret the universe. To say that the matter is “dark” is to say that it’s not detectable on the electromagnetic spectrum to us as we know it.

    It’s not an uncommon turn of phrase, it’s the same reasoning for the colloquial term “going dark” regarding radio communication silence.

    To say that it’s “invisible” or “clear” would imply the existence of some property causing it to be so. This would also imply the presence of interpretable data in order to term it as such, when in truth none exists. You could perhaps say “unknown” but then that’s truly arbitrary, “dark” at least implies the opposite of “light”, i.e. detectable and serves a conjectural purpose in that sense.










  • Bear with me here, I’m thinking about all this as a thought experiment…please don’t jump on me all at once :)

    I don’t disagree with you, there is a difference in utility, however what would you say to someone who has two homes? Say a vacation home on a lake? This wasn’t uncommon for persons of older generations (before shit got expensive). Because while two homes may not seem egregious to citizens of highly developed countries, it is, relatively speaking, a true extreme luxury in many parts of the world, perhaps even obscene if you consider those who live in shanty towns or those who are homeless.

    And what about extra cars? Or any other luxury for that matter? Anything that explains why those in less developed countries see middle-class individuals in developed countries as “rich”?

    Now these are nothing in comparison to the several orders of magnitude greater that a billion dollars is, but take them as the best examples I can think of off the top of my head lol.

    Remember marginal utility is relative. My point is that, who decides what defines excess to the point where you’d make the argument you just made? where is the line? Certainly billionaires qualify, but how many millions does one need to hit that threshold? And who makes that determination? The individual with the extreme wealth will have warped perceptions (“It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?”), so then it must be the non-wealthy who have insight, if any, or is it all relative?

    I’m not trying to defend or apologise for the ultra-rich, but I think about these things in the sense of: what would I do if I won the mega-millions? Or had some secret unknown relative bestow obscene wealth on me? Never in a million years of course, but I’m the kind of person who likes to have positions that don’t change situationally, I’d like to be confident enough of my beliefs that I’d know what I’d do if the situation were reversed.

    Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk lol. Again please don’t think i’m trying troll or something, this is a philosophical question for me.


  • I don’t thinks that’s accurate, Kbin has only co-existed for a few Lemmy versions. I’ve been on Kbin before the initial wave of new users, when the site had about 200 users, federation was fine. You may be thinking of when federation was deliberately broken by Ernest with the entire fediverse for about a week when he had to enable Cloudflare DDOS protection during the first surge of signups.

    The specific issue here was highlighted by a Kbin user several days ago. They monitored the traffic back and forth and saw that inbound Kbin-bot requests were denied by Lemmy.ml after the latest upgrade. At the time of that post, Lemmy.world did not have the issues and it had not upgraded yet. I’m not sure if that issue has since been fixed in the code or not.



  • Whats wrong with Dutch posts?

    I actually like seeing the posts in other languages. Imagine what using traditional social media like Reddit was like for other countries? Why are English speakers suddenly unable to cope when the tables are turned? (In general, not saying that’s you!)

    Personally, I’d love some kind of built-in translation options. Tag the different language but allow an auto-translate user setting so everything can be switched to one’s native language.

    I love the idea of interacting with the parts of the world, or speakers, that don’t participate in English.



  • On your first line, agreed 100%.

    I don’t understand what people are seeing in terms of issues. Maybe once or twice my comment or someone else’s seemed to not be fully synchronised. And Kbin had some notification issues (processing backlog), but the federating problems seem far worse on the Lemmy side. Lemmy has outright protocol bugs.

    I wonder if a lot of people are seeing the Kbin error message and assume that is “federation”, when really it’s a host of things that still need to be ironed out site-wise. For example, there is clearly a maximum file size allowed for a photo, but I don’t think there’s a warning coded in there yet, so try to post something too large and you get a site error, reduce the size and it works 100% of the time. That’s not federation, that’s simply Kbin being very new.

    And lo and behold it seems like Lemmy’s fault the Kbin isn’t federating properly (blocking inbound Kbin traffic).



  • Right there with ya! GameCube has always been my favorite. It also has the best iterations of Kart and Smash imo. I’ve recently been acquiring more GBA games to play on the adapter which is a fun time.

    A tip for anyone who has the DOL-001 version with the digital output: you can easily get and adapter to HDMI, and there’s a company that now makes a USB-drive sized signal processor that does some upscaling and anti-aliasing. I’m now able to play on my 4k TV with a 1080p signal. Anyone feel free to DM me for the details!

    I’m not saying a big old CRT isn’t still the best experience, but this lets me play on my main TV which is great for party games.


  • Just a note,

    It was shown a lot of the recent threadiverse federation issues were/are being caused by Lemmy. Major Lemmy instances were/are intentionally or unintentionally (due to a bug in their platform), blocking inbound federation traffic from Kbin and Lotide. While allowing their own outbound to go through.

    The jury is still out on if it was an oversight/issue with their latest release, or something more nefarious on the part of the devs with regards to competition.