Unblended

I saw the writing on the wall a few years back, it was so painfully obvious. I started switching to KiCAD early, and feel so bad for ever recommending Eagle to people who will now have to learn yet another new tool in order to find something usable.

Fusion360 is so bad, I had to explain why SolidWorks was different earlier today and they were shocked by things like "if I move the case the board I say is attached to the case moves to" and "I don't have to align it by eye, it's a computer".

And I'm definitely not starting VMWare to run Fusion360 with nonsense online components that slow it down to uselessness and integrate it into a tool that doesn't need to be on at all... it's just not possible. It was obvious once they stopped updating the version. It's pathetic nonetheless that they cannot think beyond the one-true-way of integrating a dozen mediocre tools into one extra-mediocre product.

Thanks for looking, and indeed signal still works fine on my desktop computers with the VPN running.

Really feels like their tech support was lying. I do just enough of this that the recommendation makes my eyes glaze over while sounding transparently wrong. Suddenly I need open UDP and TCP ports, but only on my phone (computer is fine) and only as of a few weeks ago (prior to that it was fine)? What?

Allow *.whispersystems.org, *.signal.org, updates.signal.org, TCP port 443, and UDP traffic. If you have a transparent or reverse proxy it needs to support WebSockets. Signal uses a non-standard TCP port to catch filtering issues at the signaling step and also utilizes a random UDP port. All UDP ports will need to be opened. The underlying IPs are constantly changing, so it'd be hard to define accurate firewall rules.

If the wildcard FQDN config is not working properly and you notice issues with calling, allow turn2.voip.signal.org, turn3.voip.signal.org and sfu.voip.signal.org. These are subject to change at anytime.

I think I'm much too old for Prodigy or something because one episode was too much.

But Lower Decks is absolutely amazing, it's really nice to have a legitimate comedy within the honest-to-god Star Trek universe so they can just actually make fun of Riker by name.

I like Strange New Worlds alright. It's better than Discovery, and I liked Discovery fine.

Picard was great until the S1 twist and I refused to watch further. Maybe that's not fair, I found it a bit Disney-ish but wow that ending. I just have to head cannon a more respectful ending and I imagine I'll get around to it.

Though I have somehow never managed to get around to Enterprise...

I just went to reddit and redditmigration and blocked those magazines, and just do that for the magazines/communities I get annoyed by since each instance has their own. It's actually kind of nice, people are at least forced to add a tag to every post (unlike mastodon where we have to rely on text filters when people do cute mispellings like "elno tusk" or whatever).

I appreciated that on Mastodon I had the ability to hide stats from my UI view, no harm making it optional I suppose.

I'm not from reddit, what is a reputation and what practical effect does it have? Is it just upvotes minus downvotes?

I found a reputation in my profile of "1" but I don't have a clue where that came from. I'm not sure why we need to have scores associated with our accounts, that in itself seems toxic to me to care about (clout chasing).

Upvoting comments in threads makes sense, I'm just not seeing any actual practical connection with the thing called "reputation" on my profile. What does it do in a best case?

I think that bots that repost automatically are lame, personally, but as long as they are clearly tagged and I have the ability to ignore anything from any bot that's fine. We had the same issue on Mastodon, I still can't figure out how to straight up block bots on there which is frustrating so instead I just filter out any posts that say "twitter" or "RT".

I don't have any issue with bots as long as they're easy to block across the board instead of individually.

I do think it's lame and that y'all are better than that.

I wonder if China has a favorite.

Can't control when you do it.

I've been kind of suggesting the same thing a few times inside of posts. I'm coming at it from the perspective of having had to do a lot of in-person recruiting for voluntary activities, mentoring, and teaching -- you cannot tell people things like "you should just join lemmy/kbin" -- you have to wait for them to ask "how do I join lemmy/kbin?"

That's okay! It just means that the focus when introducing people to it has to be "here's what you're missing", positive about where they could go rather than negative about where they are.

It's an uphill battle trying to argue with people who do have a point about it being harder to use (we shouldn't gaslight people), but they're also saying what the audience is wanting to hear because it gives them permission to do nothing.

How many are just admin accounts or sock puppets for some agenda or another anyway?

Consider focusing on the positive -- link to specific posts on these systems that are objectively worth going to participate in. They don't need an account to read and enjoy.

Then, if they discover that they wish that they could participate in the thread -- that is the time to explain that they should just join whatever instance the post they really enjoyed was on for starters. They'll realize that they can see magazines from other instances, probably after a week when they realize other instance domain names are showing up on things. Then some nice person explains what's going on.

And now they've convinced themselves it's worth joining...

While true, people seem to pretty immediately get it once it's clear where to see the source instance. If they care, they're usually surprised, and then the reason magazines on different instances are different makes sense.

I'm not sure what there is to do about it, the impression that there is one magazine is a relic of centralization, all there is to do is explain that it is not the case when people are inevitably confused. I hate simplifying it to "[email protected] and [email protected] are different people" because I know it feels more complicated than that but it seems like it doesn't take that long to click honestly.

Best I figure is to have welcoming communities that don't turn into asshats if someone is confused or asks questions. This doesn't seem like something you can force people to understand before they run into a problem and try to figure out what's going on. Eventually there will be an AI bot that answers questions I'm sure...!

I wonder to what extent the massive imbalance in news coverage was simply super wealthy families handing journalists pre-written pieces so that laziness would dictate this result (rather than the journalists doing this naturally, although laziness is natural enough I guess).