Economists find that the IRS would have a better ROI if it audited more rich Americans and fewer poor ones
America's highest earners are pretty adept at not paying the taxes they owe. Scrutinizing them could yield a lot more revenue for the public.
>The IRS could recover $12 for every $1 spent on scrutinizing the ultra-wealthy's taxes
>It turns out that scrutinizing the rich's taxes pays off.
>A new paper from economists at the Department of Treasury, Harvard University, and the University of Sydney looks at the return on investment from IRS audits from 2010 through 2014. They find that while it's much more expensive to audit the wealthiest tax payers, it's still a hearty return on investment. Auditing the top 1% yields $4.25 per dollar spent, and that number soars to $6.29 when auditing the top 0.1%.
>And pouring even just a bit more money into auditing the rich could yield a lot more revenue, with every additional dollar yielding up to potentially $12 in revenue from the top 90th percentile of earners.
>The findings illustrate how much money might be sitting untapped in what the IRS calls the tax gap — the chasm between taxes owed and taxes paid. America's highest earners are especially adept at not paying their taxes; a 2021 study from the IRS and economists found that the top 1% of earners don't report nearly a quarter of their income. And the top 0.1% under-report twice as much. The Treasury Department has previously estimated that the top 1% evade $163 billion in taxes annually.
>That avoidance "has huge consequences. because it just means that low and moderate income families have to pick up a bigger share of our overall cost of government," Amy Hanauer, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, told Insider.
>"It also means that the public services that we all depend on are underfunded," Hanauer said. "So we have less revenue to pay for healthcare and education and higher education and infrastructure and all of the things that our tax dollars support that enable us to have strong communities."
Found via https://lemmy.pineapplemachine.com/post/40780
PCMag: European Parliament approves new rules for rechargeable batteries, including that consumers must be able to "easily remove and replace" batteries in portable devices such as phones and tablets.
The European Parliament just caused a major headache for smartphone and tablet manufacturers.
>EU: Smartphones Must Have User-Replaceable Batteries by 2027
>The European Parliament just caused a major headache for smartphone and tablet manufacturers.
>The European Union (EU) is set to usher in a new era of smartphones with batteries that consumers can easily replace themselves.
>Earlier this week, the European Parliament approved new rules(Opens in a new window) covering the design, production, and recycling of all rechargeable batteries sold within the EU.
>The new rules stipulate that all electric vehicle, light means of transport (e.g. electric scooters), and rechargeable industrial batteries (above 2kWh) will need to have a compulsory carbon footprint declaration, label, and digital passport.
>For "portable batteries" used in devices such as smartphones, tablets, and cameras, consumers must be able to "easily remove and replace them." This will require a drastic design rethink by manufacturers, as most phone and tablet makers currently seal the battery away and require specialist tools and knowledge to access and replace them safely.
>Apple has already been forced by the European Union to change from a Lightning port to a USB-C port on iPhones, with the iPhone 15 expected to be the first to make the switch. Now it seems Apple will need to figure out how to allow access to the battery inside future iPhones, as will every other smartphone manufacturer.
>The new rules also stipulate strict targets for collecting waste and recovering materials from old batteries. The percentages for each increase at set intervals between now and 2031, at which point 61% waste collection must be achieved and 95% of materials must be recovered from old portable batteries. There will also be minimum levels of recycled content used in new batteries required, but only "eight years after the entry into force of the regulation."
NZ Herald: "Auckland surgeons are now being required to consider a patient’s ethnicity alongside other factors when deciding who should get an operation first."
Health officials said it was an important step in reducing historical health inequities.
> Auckland surgeons must now consider ethnicity in prioritising patients for operations - some are not happy
> Auckland surgeons are now being required to consider a patient’s ethnicity alongside other factors when deciding who should get an operation first.
> Several surgeons say they are upset by the policy, which was introduced in Auckland in February and gave priority to Māori and Pacific Island patients - on the grounds that they have historically had unequal access to healthcare.
> Health officials stress that ethnicity is just one of five factors considered in deciding when a person gets surgery, and that it is an important step in addressing poor health outcomes within Māori and Pacific populations.
> Some surgeons, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the new scoring tool was medically indefensible. They said patients should be prioritised on how sick they were, how urgently they needed treatment, and how long they had been waiting for it - not on their ethnicity.
> One of the surgeons said he was “disgusted” by the new ranking system.
> “It’s ethically challenging to treat anyone based on race, it’s their medical condition that must establish the urgency of the treatment,” the surgeon said.
> “There’s no place for elitism in medicine and the medical fraternity in this country is disturbed by these developments.”
> A document on the equity adjustor which was leaked to Newstalk ZB shows two Māori patients, both aged 62 and who have been waiting more than a year, ranked above others on the list. A 36-year-old Middle Eastern patient who has been waiting almost two years has a much lower priority ranking.
The Verge: "We spoke with Huffman for nearly 30 minutes about the platform’s API changes and ongoing user protests."
“The blackouts are not representative of the greater Reddit community.”
>Reddit is fighting for its soul. Many users are in revolt over API pricing changes that will shut down some of the most popular third-party Reddit apps, and they’re furious at CEO Steve Huffman after last week’s AMA that made it clear the platform wouldn’t budge. Huffman has argued the changes are a business decision to force AI companies training on Reddit’s data to pony up, but they’re also wiping out some beloved Reddit apps, and thousands of subreddits have gone dark for days in protest.
>On Thursday, Reddit offered me an interview with Huffman (who goes by u/spez on Reddit). I’ve already published one story from my conversation about how Reddit was apparently never designed to support third-party apps. But here is a lightly edited transcript of the entire interview — which, at times, was contentious.
A partner will qualify by holding on to at least 350 recurring paid subscriptions (gifts and Prime don't count) for three months.
That is not how I would define smaller streamers. Damn it, Engadget, this is a terrible headline.
9To5Google: Google Domains to discontinued, assets to be sold to Squarespace
Google Domains is "winding down following a transition period," with Squarespace taking over the business and assets...
>In an unexpected announcement today, Google Domains is “winding down following a transition period,” with Squarespace taking over the business and assets.
>Squarespace announced today that it “entered into a definitive asset purchase agreement with Google, whereby Squarespace will acquire the assets associated with the Google Domains business.” This includes “approximately 10 million domains hosted on Google Domains spread across millions of customers.”
>Google cited “efforts to sharpen our focus” in selling the Google Domains registrar business, which launched in 2014 as a big proponent of HTTPS and top-level domains (TLDs) as of late. The service exited beta in 2022.
>This makes sense in the context of Google trying to be more efficient with resources and is at least better than shutting down the service without a guided migration path.
I just don’t think content should be behind a paywall. I want to live in a socialist utopia where content and knowledge is free to share, copyright is a relic of the past, and art and science blossom. Blocking ads takes me 0.0001% closer to that, so I’ll take it. I don’t want to pay, because I don’t want money to exist, it’s deeper than experience vs how much it is worth.
I do think that publicly-owned and publicly-funded alternatives to platforms like YouTube and Twitch could make the internet a far better place. I'd be surprised if, at least here in the EU, where there is an ongoing attempt to actually regulate tech companies, we didn't see this happening sooner or later.
For the time being, though, I know that the creators whose content I enjoy so much couldn't keep doing what they do without compensation, and the YouTube servers their content are hosted on would be taken down if they could not be paid for. So I pay for premium, content enough to know that I'm doing my fair part in keeping the videos I enjoy available and enabling the people who create them to keep creating more, even if the system under which all this occurs is much less than ideal.
Deep Rock Galactic update: Season 04: Critical Corruption is out now
Hello Miners, Welcome to SEASON 04 - CRITICAL CORRUPTION! Though we have gained great ground against the rampaging Lithophage in the past months, it remains a constant threat - and to make matters worse, reports of alarming new mutations are starting to come in. Let’s get right into it! With Love, T...
>Hello Miners, > Welcome to SEASON 04 - CRITICAL CORRUPTION ! Though we have gained great ground against the rampaging Lithophage in the past months, it remains a constant threat - and to make matters worse, reports of alarming new mutations are starting to come in.
> Let’s get right into it!
Beehaw, one of the largest lemmy instances, announces that it will be defederating from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.
hey folks, we’ll be quick and to the point with this one: ##### we have made the decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post...
> we have made the decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary.
In short, they are defederating from these instances because they have fully open registration, without applications or manual approval. As a result of this, it has been exceptionally difficult to moderate content originating from the users of these instances. Beehaw hopes to federate with these instances again, once better moderation tools are available for use with lemmy.
There is also a discussion post about this announcement on lemmy.ca: https://lemmy.pineapplemachine.com/post/26956
Is there something about the Fediverse that would prevent you from moving your community off Reddit? It seems pretty clear that people will try Reddit alternatives even before their favourite subreddits have moved. Users are engaged with the communities that you have built and loyal to the 3rd party app developers and we don’t give a fuck about Reddit as an organisation.
I don't currently moderate on reddit, but I can tell you that the larger subs I used to moderate will likely not be moving to lemmy in the foreseeable future. The moderation tools currently available for lemmy are extremely limited compared to what you get with reddit and the toolbox extension. What lemmy has now is okay for smaller communities of up to maybe a few thousand subscribers, but I think the level of spam and trolling you'd see with even tens of thousands would be completely unmanageable with the tools currently available, let alone any more than that.
New changes to the Steam client are now out of Beta
Big improvements and new features for the Steam Desktop client are now out of Beta!
> Big improvements and new features for the Steam Desktop client are now out of Beta!
> Hello! We’re excited to announce that we've just shipped a new version of the Steam Client to everyone. This update includes all the new Steam Desktop features that have been tested and fine-tuned in the beta branch. Before we get into the details, we want to thank our beta testers really quick – we couldn’t have shipped without all of your invaluable feedback and bug reports!
I simply hate ads with a passion due to my experiences in marketing and will go out of my way to never watch any. Can‘t explain it much more than that. If youtube locks me out due to that, so be it. I don‘t get worked up either, I simply state my opinion on it where I please and if I‘m not wanted I leave. That‘s about it.
Why don't you pay for YouTube premium? This removes all platform ads.
That...doesn't sound like a good thing? I would like one game in my game, please. More than that, and it seems like surely things would get janky and disjointed and messy.
The instance I host is small and I can't make promises about its longevity, but at least it's not currently facing load issues.
If you're interested: lemmy.pineapplemachine.com
The Lounge is a great IRC webclient with built-in bouncer functionality.
Seconding The Lounge. It's a great self-hosted option.
I actually do not understand the widespread hostility that people have toward this kind of thing. I watch a lot of content on YouTube, and I don't want to see ads, so I pay for premium. I watch a lot of content on Twitch, and I don't want to see ads, so I pay for turbo. Hosting a major video streaming website isn't cheap. It's not like these things are unreasonably priced. If you hate the ads so much, then why not pay for the service that the platform is offering you, and for the content that creators are providing on it? And if you don't watch often enough for ad-free viewing to be worth a few bucks a month to you, then why get so worked up about having to sit through an ad every now and then?
There are a lot I'd recommend, but I think the only must-play for me is Cave Story.
When I was growing up, Cave Story was like the paragon of games as art, and was a major inspiration behind me making games as a hobby and getting into software development professionally. Cave Story was made by a single talented auteur, not for profit, and released for free. And it was as good as Metroid and Mario, or maybe even better. It proved to everyone that such a thing was even possible.
I think the only indie game that could possibly compete with Cave Story for the title of "most influential" would be Minecraft. Though Minecraft should probably be disqualified from that title for having sold out to Microsoft as soon as it started to get big...
One thing you can do is start a community in another instance. The curent influx is great for growing communities.
Not sure how you can report this kind of community mod behavior to the instance mods
May I plug [email protected] ?
And by the way, you can DM an instance admin by finding their profile link at the bottom of the front page sidebar, and then clicking "Send Message".
I occasionally eat one as a “meal replacement” when I can’t get normal food.
Came here to say the same. I would not eat a candy bar under normal circumstances, but I keep some Snickers handy just for the rare occasion when what I really need is a meal's worth of calories that I can eat in under a minute, or carry with me and take up only a little space.
Defector: "We are living through the end of the useful internet."
Gradually over the last decade, Reddit went from merely embarrassing but occasionally amusing, to actively harmful, to—mainly by accident—essential. As the platform that swallowed niche message boards, it became home to numerous small communities of surprisingly helpful enthusiasts, and grew into a ...
> Gradually over the last decade, Reddit went from merely embarrassing but occasionally amusing, to actively harmful, to—mainly by accident—essential. As the platform that swallowed niche message boards, it became home to numerous small communities of surprisingly helpful enthusiasts, and grew into a repository of arcane knowledge about, and instantly available first-hand expertise on, a staggering number of topics, from the demographically predictable to the somewhat more surprising. And now that is all set to come to an ignominious, self-inflicted end.
> The internet’s best resources are almost universally volunteer run and donation based, like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive. Every time a great resource is accidentally created by a for-profit company, it is eventually destroyed, like Flickr and Google Reader. Reddit could be what Usenet was supposed to be, a hub of internet-wide discussion on every topic imaginable, if it wasn’t also a private company forced to come up with a credible plan to make hosting discussions sound in any way like a profitable venture.
> We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information. Finding unbiased and independent product reviews, expert tech support, and all manner of helpful advice will now resemble the process by which one now searches for illegal sports streams or pirated journal articles. The decades of real human conversation hosted at places like Reddit will prove useful training material for the mindless bots and deceptive marketers that replace it.
Found via Twitter: https://twitter.com/DefectorMedia/status/1668017737895911425
Trailer for Techtonica, a first-person factory-building game
> #Techtonica is a first-person factory-building game set below the surface of an alien planet within a network of caverns teeming with bioluminescent life. Players will explore a vast network of caves beneath the surface of an alien planet as they work alone or with friends to build and optimize complex, automated factories, gather resources, establish a base of operations, and uncover the secrets buried in Techtonica.
Found via [email protected]: https://lemmy.pineapplemachine.com/post/25262
Techtonica on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1457320/Techtonica/
Basics of memory allocation
>One thing that all programs on your computer have in common is a need for memory. Programs need to be loaded from your hard drive into memory before they can be run. While running, the majority of what programs do is load values from memory, do some computation on them, and then store the result back in memory.
>In this post I'm going to introduce you to the basics of memory allocation. Allocators exist because it's not enough to have memory available, you need to use it effectively. We will visually explore how simple allocators work. We'll see some of the problems that they try to solve, and some of the techniques used to solve them. At the end of this post, you should know everything you need to know to write your own allocator.
Found via [email protected] https://lemmy.pineapplemachine.com/post/24337
WSJ: Instant Brands kitchen appliances company files for bankruptcy, after sales decline over the last two years
> Instant Brands, the maker of kitchen appliances known for its Instant Pot cooker, filed for bankruptcy Monday after succumbing to financial headwinds made worse as consumers slowed their discretionary spending to cope with inflation.
> The Illinois-based home appliance maker filed for chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston, listing more than $500 million in both assets and liabilities. Private-equity firm Cornell Capital bought the company in 2019 and combined it with Corelle Brands, another kitchenware company.
> The company’s net sales decreased 21.9% in the first quarter this year compared with the same period in 2022, the seventh consecutive quarter of declining year-over-year sales, S&P Global said in a ratings downgrade of Instant Brands last week. The company ended March with roughly $95 million in liquidity and the business hasn’t been generating cash, according to the ratings report.
> Instant Brands was founded in 2009 by Robert Wang, Yi Quin and three other partners in Canada before it was sold to Cornell Capital a decade later.
Original link (paywalled): https://www.wsj.com/articles/instant-pots-slower-sales-tip-gadget-maker-into-bankruptcy-1ef2c7d1
Found via Twitter: https://twitter.com/tomgara/status/1668611912458813444
> It's the pinnacle of private equity brain to take Instant Pot, one of the the simplest, most no-drama businesses of all time, and somehow turn it into a $500 million bankruptcy
From my perspective as a user that has been on reddit for a while, its been on a downhill slide for a long time now. The moderation mechanisms there are really becoming the downfall. Its like police or politicians, the position attracts the very qualities that would make you unsuitable for such authority.
This really is a bigger and more complicated problem than I think most people realize. I helped moderate some larger subreddits for a while, but I burned out hard and will definitely never be doing it again.
You've got the people who really did care, at some point, but all of their empathy for the people they're supposed to be serving got ground down by the insults and derision that moderators always have to put up with, until issuing bans and removing posts and comments becomes rote and they don't see the humanity or the nuance anymore.
You've got people who seemed reasonable when they applied to become a moderator, but as more trust and autonomy is afforded to them they change and become outright abusive. Presumably because it's the only thing in their life that makes them feel powerful. And if they've been around for long enough and moderated actively enough, then removing them can be a whole stressful ordeal that blows a big hole in a team's ability to keep up with the mod queue.
And you've got people who do care, and who are able to take abuse from the community without it affecting their approach to moderation. But for these people, all the drama that arises in trying to work on a team with the former two kinds of moderators becomes increasingly demotivating, until they burn out and step away.
And god forbid you try to help moderate a subreddit that actually matters. On top of everything else, you will have bad actors actively trying to infiltrate the moderation team, to bring in new moderators with a certain agenda and to push out old ones. Or you'll have those who are determined to find a way to personally profit from having a position of power in a large online community, even at the cost of the community itself. I still don't know how one keeps these people out, once they've taken an interest.
I think there are some things that can help. I've seen that, on reddit, having a top moderator who is disengaged from normal moderation but who will keep tabs and step in like a benevolent dictator to arbitrate internal disputes and ensure that there are decisive resolutions can keep larger moderation teams more stable for longer. This way the top moderator isn't so involved and won't burn out, and everyone below them on the moderator list knows that there is someone they are accountable to. (Of course, this all hinges on the top moderator being suited to this kind of role.)
But even so, once a community grows past a certain point, I think it's just not viable to run it off the backs of volunteers anymore.
Name your own price for Incident at Grove Lake, an alien abduction horror game, on itch.io
A short Found footage style game about Alien Abduction
> A worker from Area 51 leaks Top Secret files and a Tape to a Private Investigator.
> A PSX Style adventure game based on accounts of Alien Abductions. Intended to be played in one sitting.
> average playtime is 20-25 mins
Spotted via https://twitter.com/DanInFiction/status/1667981357253906434
I haven't played it myself, but I may have to! It looks very interesting
Vice: Iran's military unveils what it calls quantum processing technology. It appears to be an ordinary SoC.
What Iran's military called “the first product of the quantum processing algorithm” of the Naval university appears to be a stock development board.
> Last week, Iran’s military unveiled what it called “the first product of the quantum processing algorithm” of the Imam Khomeini Naval University of Nowshahr. During a ceremony at the university, the Islamic Republic’s military revealed a bit of electronics sealed under glass. It appeared to be a common development board, available widely online for around $600.
> According to multiple state-linked news agencies in Iran, the computer will help Iran detect disturbances on the surface of water using algorithms. Iranian Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari showed off the board during the ceremony and spoke of Iran’s recent breakthroughs in the world of quantum technology.
> The touted quantum device appears to be a development board manufactured by a company called Diligent. The brand “ZedBoard” appears clearly in pictures. According to the company’s website, the ZedBoard has everything the beginning developer needs to get started working in Android, Linux, and Windows. It does not appear to come with any of the advanced qubits that make up a quantum computer, and suggested uses include "video processing, reconfigurable computing, motor control, software acceleration," among others.
> It’s impossible to know if Iran has figured out how to use off-the-shelf dev boards to make quantum algorithms, but it’s not likely. True quantum devices are experimental pieces of equipment that don't typically resemble circuit boards of the kind you'd find in a home desktop, although researchers have reported being able to simulate some quantum processes on classical computers. Even if Iran is merely claiming that the device was manufactured with the help of quantum algorithms, they may not have been needed—the device is still a ZedBoard that anyone can buy, without any visible modifications.
> This isn’t the first time Iran has shown off tech with a less than credible pedigree. In 2020, the Iranian Army revealed a device it claimed could detect COVID and AIDS. It appeared to be similar to another device that was previously sold as a bomb detector.
Simple question: Will you go back to Reddit and other centralized social media platforms, if Reddit step back from the API changes? The benefits of Reddit are obvisiouly, it has million of users and even small communitys have thousands of users.
Most likely yes, I'll be sticking around. Something I very much appreciate about lemmy as an advantage over the big social media sites is that lemmy is set up such that you can be reasonably sure that there are many more human users than bots. On reddit you can mostly avoid the bots by sticking to the smaller subs, but I think lemmy may be able to grow larger than that and still avoid being overrun by propaganda and marketing bots due to the prevalence of manual approval for newly registered users.
I'm definitely hoping to see even more features that emphasize this advantage of lemmy. I'd like to try contributing some code for this myself, at a time when things feel more stable (i.e. no huge sweeping changes in the pipeline, like the HTTP client is now) and I can find some time for it.
For example...
One obvious improvement would be to add an invite system, where new user registration occurs via reputable users sending invite links to people they know.
And I envision a feature where one instance may mark some of the instances it federates with as low trust. Users on the instance would have the option not to see content posted by the low-trust instance's users, or the option to have their content explicitly marked in the UI. This could be used, for one thing, to still federate with larger instances that are less stringent about disallowing bot accounts, but provide a means to view only content where there is a higher degree of confidence that it was posted by a human, or to at least clearly mark low-confidence content.
I currently have Kubuntu on my most-used Linux machine but, since a friend recommended it to me, I've been considering hopping to KDE Neon when I have some time to learn a new distro. (I've tried GNOME and I don't really care for it, but KDE Plasma fits like a glove.) I'm not extremely experienced with desktop Linux, so I'd love to hear about others' experiences with either distro and how they might compare.
AP News: Ted Kaczynski, the "Unabomber", has died in federal prison at the age of 81
Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, the Harvard-educated mathematician who retreated to a dingy shack in the Montana wilderness and ran a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others, died Saturday. He was 81. A spokesperson for the federal Bureau of Prisons tells The Associated Pre...
>WASHINGTON (AP) — Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, the Harvard-educated mathematician who retreated to a dingy shack in the Montana wilderness and ran a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others, died Saturday. He was 81.
>Branded the “Unabomber” by the FBI, Kaczynski died at the federal prison medical center in Butner, North Carolina, Kristie Breshears, a spokesperson for the federal Bureau of Prisons, told The Associated Press. He was found unresponsive in his cell early Saturday morning and was pronounced dead around 8 a.m., she said. A cause of death was not immediately known.
Ted Kaczynski's most notable work, his manifesto titled Industrial Society and Its Future, can be read in full here: https://unabombermanifesto.com/
Absolutely. There were any number of ways to approach this problem of sustainability from reddit's end. I get it, reddit costs money to run. I think most people won't cry foul over a few ads. I'll be happy as long as I can adblock them or pay a fair price to not see them. But for it all to work out, reddit would have to be run by rational, intelligent people. The sort who would give a reasonable notice period before major changes, and who wouldn't talk provably-false trash about the people they're screwing over.
I doubt whether this will be the dramatic sudden end of reddit. But I think it is definitely a sign that reddit's heyday is over, and it doesn't have much longer before it fades into obscurity.
TechCrunch: "Reddit CEO doubles down on attack on Apollo developer in drama-filled AMA"
Reddit’s unpopular decision to revise its API pricing in a move that’s forcing third-party apps out of business has taken a weird turn. In an AMA hosted today by Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman, aka u/spez on the internet forum site, the exec doubled down on accusations against the developer...
Link to the Reddit AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_the_community_about_changes_to_our_api/
> Reddit’s unpopular decision to revise its API pricing in a move that’s forcing third-party apps out of business has taken a weird turn. In an AMA hosted today by Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman, aka u/spez on the internet forum site, the exec doubled down on accusations against the developer behind the well-liked third-party app Apollo, which the company had previously accused of operating inefficiently and not being a good “API” user.
> Despite community backlash — which includes a site-wide protest from thousands of communities known as subreddits — Huffman’s AMA confirmed the company has no plans to revise its coming API changes. What’s more, Huffman continued his accusations against Apollo, calling out the developer, Christian Selig’s, “behavior and communications” as being “all over the place” and saying he couldn’t see Reddit working with the developer further.
> Other third-party apps are also closing down, including Sync, RIF and Reddplant, to name a few.
> But Huffman seemingly has an ax to grind with Selig in particular, first accusing the developer of extortion, per Selig’s extensive post on the situation between himself and Reddit.
The #1 thing missing is user notes. In my experience, being able to attach notes to users that are shared among moderators is essential, even for smaller teams or smaller communities.
As the number of things that need to be moderated grows larger, being able to maintain a list of pre-written removal messages will also help a lot.
And as lemmy continues to grow, it will be very important to have something that works like automod that can be configured on either a per-instance or a per-community level. Especially something that can do filtering and auto-reporting. There are a lot of cases where you don't want to outright forbid a certain kind of content, but you do always want to bring human attention to it.
i don’t think we need bigger instances, i think we need more instances, and a better, streamlined process for finding instances
For one thing, it might be nice if individual instances could assign tags or categories, and if pages like join-lemmy.org/instances could allow users to browse the list of instances with a given tag. Then prospective users could choose a tag that best represents their interests, and have an easy list of instances related to that tag.
Scripting language? Engine language? Why not both? - REAC23
> This theme of this talk is about the intersection of game engines and programming languages - I've spent my career building both, usually with one influencing the other extensively.
> I’m going to start with a whirlwind tour of past engine and language designs that may be interesting, then moving toward my latest engine where we see how the scripting language taking on a different role changes everything, mixed with other fun topics such as type inference, resource & memory management, performance, serialization, debugging, refactoring and.. raytracing?
Scrolling through the linked instances and noticed Lemmygrad was banned? Is it their politics or are they just annoying or smth.
The lemmy.ml instance federates with lemmygrad.ml, the collection of Marxist communities. It blocks lemmygrad.com, which currently redirects to the forum of choice for President Donald J. Trump. The latter does not seem to be hosted using lemmy and I think could not be federated with in any case? But presumably this was once the domain of a similarly-minded lemmy instance.
Some instances other than lemmy.ml do block lemmygrad.ml. Besides being a place for Marxist communities, the instance is also home to some very radical and very hostile users. I haven't been around long enough to really know the situation for myself, but I have seen mentions of lemmygrad.ml communities engaging in brigading in the past.
Reveal trailer for Baby Steps, a "literal walking simulator" from the creator of QWOP and Getting Over It
> Coming to PlayStation 5 and PC in 2024! https://babystepsgame.com
> Play as Nate, an unemployed failson with nothing going for him, until one day he discovers a power he never knew he had… putting one foot in front of the other.
> Explore a world shrouded in mist, one step at a time. Hike the serene mountains by placing each footstep yourself, in original physics-based gameplay from the minds behind Ape Out and Getting Over It. Take in the sights, fall in love with the local fauna, and try to find meaning in a wasted life.
> Get ready to fall for Nate, in Baby Steps, a literal walking simulator.
Announcement trailer for Star Trek: Infinite, a grand strategy game published by Paradox Interactive
> We are pleased to announce Star Trek: Infinite, a new game developed with the team at Nimble Giant Entertainment. Bringing the captivating fantasy of the Star Trek universe into an experience not before had. Follow our social media accounts and save the date for June 16th, Picard Day, where we will make a full reveal of Star Trek: Infinite.
So this seems to be more or less Stellaris, but Star Trek? They've certainly got my attention
Straits Times: 16-year-old boy jailed in Turkey after defacing an Erdogan election campaign poster with a Hitler moustache
He was accused of scribbling “a Hitler moustache and writing insulting comments” on the poster. Read more at straitstimes.com.
> ISTANBUL – The Turkish authorities on Tuesday seized and jailed a 16-year-old boy for drawing a moustache on an election campaign poster showing re-elected President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, media reports said.
> Several media outlets close to the opposition, including daily newspapers BirGun, Cumhuriyet and private TV station Halk TV, said the youth from the south-eastern town of Mersin was accused of defacing the poster near his home with a pen, scribbling “a Hitler moustache and writing insulting comments”.
> He was arrested after he was identified through CCTV camera footage, media reports said.
> The authorities interviewed him at his home, where he reportedly “admitted drawing the moustache” while denying writing the accompanying comments.
> Taken before the public prosecutor, he was found to have “insulted the president” and was jailed at a nearby youth facility, according to Halk TV.
> Mr Erdogan extended his 20-year rule over Turkey after winning the May 28 second round of the presidential election to embark on a new five-year term.
> According to the Justice Ministry, “insulting the president” is one of the most common crimes in Turkey, resulting in 16,753 convictions in 2022. AFP