I’m the administrator of kbin.life, a general purpose/tech orientated kbin instance.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • For threadiverse (lemmy/mbin et al) there’s not much in it. It’s fairly easy for an operator to curate their instance by pre subscribing to a whole bunch of communities. I run my own instance, barely any users and I’m constantly banning and deleting them for advertising. But I have plenty of content.

    I made my own mastodon instance and connected to a bunch of groups. Only two or three are active. There’s not really an easy way to get content without following a lot of people. So anyone visiting my instance will see virtually nothing. If they go to social they will see plenty.

    So it’s a bit of a no brainer for most I think.


  • Not sure how it is in the US. But here in the UK there’s two ways a business can export.

    1: They pre-clear the customs duty and include it in the sales total (so it’s like paying sales tax at the checkout, except it’s the pre-cleared duty fees). Then the parcel has a nice duty paid stamp and goes straight through customs (I guess unless customs are suspicious and check into it).

    2: They just charge you the item price with no tax applied. In which case you need to pay local tax and duties applicable once the product arrives. Here it’s a bit different. They will hold it at the local depot and you can either go there and pay + collect, or you can pay online and it will be rescheduled for delivery once you pay.

    As others have said, it’s not a scam. There’s no requirement for a business to do option 1, and it’s likely only viable for large businesses to register and have someone/software that knows the various duties required for various countries.

    I’ve ordered from newegg and B&M in the past for example, and in both cases the items were pre-cleared and arrived promptly without any hassle.

    Maybe there’s something similar for imports into the US too?



  • Yeah but they’re a cheat. They’re lithium cells regulated down to 1.5v. Good ones are rare, when you find good ones they’re generally expensive and because they’re regulated down you generally get 100% battery showing until just before they fail.

    I used them for some voltage sensitive stuff, but finding a brand that held a good charge for more than even 50-100 charges was hard.

    Nimh is much better for anything that won’t be upset about the voltage too much.




  • All of this is layman with some basic understanding only.

    So, on the one hand in our galaxy alone there are between 100 and 400 billion stars (wikipedia), now a lot of those have no planets, but of course a lot have many more than our system does. So at least the same number in planets. There’s a good chance there’s more than one planet capable to supporting life among that number.

    In fact as we improve our ability to observe our galaxy we are able to verify more and more viable planets and even a reasonable number that are similar to our own planet.

    This means that there’s definitely going to be a reasonable chance that somewhere, life has evolved to similar or beyond our level already.

    But, this for sure doesn’t mean there’s any reason to expect visitors. That’s because even if they can travel at the speed of light, it’s still going to be thousands of years for the majority of them to reach us, provided they even choose to come to us. Because, from where they are they wouldn’t be able to make out our radio signals, nor likely any other signs of life. So we’d be one of many “potentially live bearing” planets.

    So, just my opinion. I think the chance of life being out there is reasonably high, the chance of actually being visited (assuming it holds true that we cannot travel faster than light) is probably very very low.





  • I’m probably a bit further to the right than most on the fediverse with this opinion but…

    I think, once you have been informed of someone’s pronouns, it’s flat out rude to not use them. I don’t know if it’s a banning issue but that’s for the moderators on your instance to decide or the instance the community is on. Even if you don’t agree with someone’s lifestyle, it’s just polite to address people the way they’d like to be addressed.

    But surely there’s a difference between intentional misuse and accidental. I think banning someone for not looking up someone’s pronouns before a public interaction seems like pushing things a bit far here. I certainly am not checking such things. But, then in general when online I will use gender neutral wording because frankly, for online interactions someone’s rarely information that matters for the interaction. I don’t really need to know.

    My view is, I think it is almost always clear when someone is being malicious and thus transphobic and when someone makes an honest mistake/did not know better. We, as a whole, really should be differentiating between obviously malicious and non-malicious cases.


  • r00ty@kbin.lifetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhere'd everybody go?
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    5 months ago

    For me, there’s just been less posted that I feel I have something to say on. If I see something about programming, networking or tech that I have (probably) some useful info to contribute I will do so. Likewise if there’s a general subject I have anecdotal points to make, or I’m just genuinely interested I will comment too.

    But otherwise, I just read and move on. There’s been a lot more read and move on lately. Maybe because of the upcoming US election for which by and large beyond the fact I don’t want the orange shitgibbon (As a fan of the west wing, I like that the spelling checker suggested shibboleth to correct this “typo”) to win, I don’t have much interest. Mostly because I’m not from the US.



  • I’ve used IPv6 at home for over 20 years now. Initially via tunnels by hurricane electric and sixxs. But, around 10 years ago, my ISP enabled IPv6 and I’ve had it running alongside IPv4 since then.

    As soon as server providers offered IPv6 I’ve operated it (including DNS servers, serving the domains over IPv6).

    I run 3 NTP servers (one is stratum 1) in ntppool.org, and all three are also on ipv6.

    I don’t know what’s going on elsewhere in the world where they’re apparently making it very hard to gain accesss to ipv6.


  • When you post in a thread you get an ID for that thread. When you post in a different thread you get a different id.

    That’s what I said. You don’t need any ID to federate the messages. If you reply to a comment the nesting is based on the comment/post ID and not the usernames.

    You couldn’t track a users posts after the fact, and I think that’s kinda the point.


  • Not so sure that’s true though. If you look at a 4chan threads in some boards, you can recognize the individual anonymous’ from the ID next to them.

    I suspect it’s using either a cookie, or the IP address to track a user and while not storing that info, generating an ID hash from perhaps a unique ID for the thread + their details.

    No reason you couldn’t federate using the same. But, even without that, each post and comment has a post ID and replies would be tracked that way. Just, you’d need to remember which replies were your own.

    The home instance could store for a thread some info about posts/comments from an IP or cookie too and highlight them. But that info wouldn’t be federated.

    I actually don’t think it’d be a problem, really. But, is this something missing from our lives? I’m not so sure.


  • I mean I could have used the GDPR (still a thing in the UK, at least for now). But didn’t see it as worth it. It really wouldn’t be worth the risk selling data that was deleted from a GDPR request.

    I don’t know that they’ll risk using the data from deleted posts/comments though anyway. Most comments and posts will be deleted for a reason (moderation, or otherwise mistakes) and as such, likely isn’t going to make the best training data really.

    It’s far easier to just sell the live data and be done with it.


  • I think there were historically interoperability issues, and there used to be (my version of mbin is quite old), and maybe still are issues federating dislikes (which stems from the way they were seen in kbin, which straddles both thread based and mastadonesque sides of the fediverse). But overall there’s aren’t the larger federation issues there used to be.

    Right now, the choice mainly comes down to the interface you prefer, and if you perhaps want a limited ability to work with mastadon type posts. Since you can follow mastadon users and see their posts within the mbin interface.