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Joined 10 days ago
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Cake day: April 10th, 2025

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  • I remember a few more terms and phrases…

    But… ok so this may also sound ridiculous, but basically, when I speak in Japanese, I find my tone just naturally shifts to be lower, bassier.

    I am decently good at singing in English, and am a baritone.

    But when I just normally speak in English, its usually a bit higher pitched than the middle point of my singing range.

    … But when I speak in Japanese, it is either at or lower than the middle point of my English singing range.

    I do not do this intentionally and am not sure why… I do this, lol.

    Maybe it is again trained into me from associating shouting out numbers and osu in Japanese with very intentional diapraghm/breathing control from Karate?



  • I can count to ten in English (native), Japanese (did Karate for about a decade) and Spanish (took classes in middle and high school).

    I can … read and listen to Spanish and maybe understand at about a 2nd or 3rd grade level… very much out of practice.

    I would not say I can speak Japanese or understand it … basically at all, unless the conversation entirely consists of either counting, or using nouns describing Karate forms, lol.

    The first time I dated … a combination weeabo and owns her own horses, horse girl, who was actually taking Japanese in college to major in it…

    She asked me a very grammatically basic question in Japanese, a yes no question…

    And I responded ‘Osu!’… and then quickly learned that that is not a standard Japanese word for ‘yes’, that would be ‘Hai’, and that Osu … basically only contextually makes sense in the context of a dojo or some other sports/military type setting.

    Apparently in proper/normal? Japanese it is a casual greeting amongst martial arts practitioners… but I was literally drilled to say it as an enthusiastic, affirmative response to any command.

    EDIT: Also, this will sound insane, but I swear to god this actually happened: Many years after the aforementioned clarification from my at the time gf… I later encountered a man who told me he was … a yakuza, specifically a yakushi… we chatted for hours, he showed me how one of his fingers had been severely busted at the knuckle.

    He explained to me that… there had been a fuckup on his part, but his… direct superior decided to basically accept some of the blame for the fuckup of this guy I met, and struck him with the blunt side of the blade instead of the sharp side… and then exiled him.

    Which was why he was in America, and could no longer safely return to Japan.

    Anyway, he explained to me that the reason why… most Japanese say ‘yon’ instead of ‘shi’ to mean ‘4’ … is because ‘shi’ is also the character/sound that… basically means ‘death’.

    Which then circled around to why he referred to himself as a ‘yakushi’.

    As he explained it to me, it meant that he had both dealt, and been sparred from death.

    … I have no idea if what this guy was saying is actually true, if he actually was a yakuza… but he did tell me these things and seem very serious about them.


  • It is astonishingly easy to get basically any LLM to output a simple iteration from one to ten function in all of those languages, and more.

    Here’s Assembly:

        newline db 0xA  ; Newline character
    
    section .bss
        number resb 1  ; Reserve a byte for the number
    
    section .text
        global _start
    
    _start:
        mov ecx, 1  ; Start with 1
        mov edx, 10 ; End with 10
    
    loop_start:
        cmp ecx, edx  ; Compare ecx with edx
        jg loop_end   ; If ecx > edx, jump to loop_end
    
        ; Convert number to ASCII
        add ecx, '0'  ; Convert number to ASCII
        mov [number], ecx  ; Store the ASCII value in number
    
        ; Print the number
        mov eax, 4        ; sys_write system call
        mov ebx, 1        ; File descriptor 1 is stdout
        mov ecx, number   ; Pointer to the number
        mov edx, 1        ; Number of bytes to write
        int 0x80          ; Call kernel
    
        ; Print newline
        mov eax, 4        ; sys_write system call
        mov ebx, 1        ; File descriptor 1 is stdout
        mov ecx, newline  ; Pointer to the newline character
        mov edx, 1        ; Number of bytes to write
        int 0x80          ; Call kernel
    
        sub ecx, '0'  ; Convert ASCII back to number
        inc ecx        ; Increment the number
        jmp loop_start  ; Jump back to the start of the loop
    
    loop_end:
        ; Exit the program
        mov eax, 1        ; sys_exit system call
        xor ebx, ebx      ; Exit code 0
        int 0x80          ; Call kernel
    

    Here’s FORTRAN

    program iterate_from_one_to_ten
        implicit none
        integer :: i
    
        ! Loop from 1 to 10
        do i = 1, 10
            print *, i
        end do
    end program iterate_from_one_to_ten
    

    Here’s COBOL

    PROGRAM-ID. IterateFromOneToTen.
    
    ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
    
    DATA DIVISION.
    WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
        01  WS-Counter PIC 9(2) VALUE 1.
    
    PROCEDURE DIVISION.
        PERFORM VARYING WS-Counter FROM 1 BY 1 UNTIL WS-Counter > 10
            DISPLAY WS-Counter
        END-PERFORM.
    
        STOP RUN.
    

  • As someone with an actual Econ degree:

    … Yeah, a whole lot of ‘technical signals’ aka, chart reading that a lot of ‘retail’ (ie, amateur) day traders use… is basically astrology.

    Its not quite as absolutely nonsensical as astrology, which is just absolutely 100% bullshit… like, a 50 MA crossing a 200 MA downward… definitely does indicate that stock is not having a great time right now… but as far as the “power” of such a signal to reliably indicate future trends?

    No, basically no. There are some technical indicators that have a slightly higher correlation coefficient of being a reliable leading indicator, but the correlations are not really that strong… there are just way too many other confounding variables.

    Even the quants who work for hedge funds… who use some of the most advanced and complex mathematical models in the world to try to untangle all of those confounding effects…

    …well, they are on average, over a decently long timescale, no better, or even slightly worse than random chance at picking stocks, bonds, a portfolio that will grow more than just the average.

    Part of this is because… if a technical trading strategy that actually works to generate outsized gains… is actually figured out by one of the big boy quants… the other big boy quants will notice this and reverse engineer it from analyzing what their rival is doing.

    Then, once all the big boys are using the same strategy… well now it doesn’t return outsized gains anymore.

    … Which is why all your 401ks are basically index funds for their stock component, which is just a weighted average basket of whichever particular market, usually the DJIA or SP500 as the Nasdaq is historically a bit more volatile.

    Now, all that being said… one arguably ‘technical indicator’ that always has been correct in the last 100 years… is when the bond yield curve inverts… the economy and stock market generally suffer a downturn roughly proportional to the time and magnitude of the bond yield curve inversion… soon after or right as the bond yield curve uninverts.

    Except for right now, the last few years.

    We have now, in the last 4 or 5 years, had 3 periods of yield curve inversion, 2 uninversions… and the broader economy has technically not yet entered into a recession, a period of negative GDP growth.

    But it looks like we are heading now for basically something akin to the Great Depression, as the latest inversion is pretty widely being interpreted as ‘investors no longer see the US Bonds as the defacto save haven, the USD as the defacto world currency’… which means the dollar will devalue as demand for it goes down… which means even if the tariffs went away and never came back, all our imports would be more expensive… and our exports won’t be worth as much… and our external debt to other countries will become even more onerous…

    And we are kind of massively reliant on importing material things and exporting services or non physical ‘products’.

    (Great work Mr. Trump -.-)

    So… yeah you can’t really make a day trading strategy out of that.

    Beyond all that, its probably also worth mentioning that GDP per capita is not a reliable measure of actual wellbeing of the population of a country when it has enormous wealth disparity.


  • A foot like this is a blend of decorative and functional, imo.

    You end up with more surface area than if you had just gone with a straight column, and that helps with stability, slightly lessens the pressure.

    Many modern tables or desks have… much less ornate footpad type structures, if the thing itself is quite heavy, or intended to hold a decent amount of weight.

    Of course… I have no way of knowing if this old… desk? table? whatever it is, was intentionally designed with that in mind, but the function is still there, at least to some degree.


  • Not only are they water soluble and easily washed out… the vast majority of them are also non toxic.

    If you get paint on your mask, and it splatters through to your mouth… non toxic. Tastes terrible, but its not gonna harm you via ingestion. Much of the ‘paint’ is … basically just food dye.

    … Also… a whole lot of police… just use paint markers (they are technically, legally classed as ‘markers’ because they aren’t firearms thus are not ‘guns’)… they use markers with pepper balls.

    They just shoot miniature tear gas / skin irritant /eye irritant ‘paintballs’ as a less lethal weapon.

    You can put a whole lot of different liquids inside what is basically a semi rigid gel/plastic capsule.

    The old devious trick I remember was people would freeze their paintballs the night before a match.

    Nowadays, I’m fairly sure if you are caught doing that, you don’t just get banned from that field/course… you probably get prosecuted.


  • Yes but you also just said ‘Not true’ when I said ‘migating an account to another PDS would complicated.’

    I do grant that I … could be interpereted to have overstated the ability of an ActPub user to migrate instsnces… though I did just say ‘it would be complicated’.

    It is arguably complicated, so complicated it is impossible.

    And I did try to make it clear that getting into that level of features/capabilities of ActPub, I was not sure, and that perhaps a lemmy mod or admin could clarify.

    I am not saying you said this, but the whole problem here is that a lot of BlueSky users and fans consistently keep acting like BlueSky has all these different kinds of capabilities and features now, working currently…

    … when at best, they are planned future features, and at worst, they are an intentionally misleading early access video game style roadmap, with a bunch of super enthusiastic but low technical knowledge early adopters who basically are just enthralled by buzzwords and hope… and those fanboys/girls will just be strung along by promises the devs don’t actually plan on ever implementing, because they don’t actually have much incentive to… and then years later the early users will either realize they’ve been duped, or become delusional, hardcore uberfans, bereft of logic and perspective.



  • It is very, very clear, reading your other comments that you are incapable of grasping the concept of a decentralized or distributed network paradigm.

    Maybe go look at how torrents work, how I2P works, how a MeshNet works.

    Other metaphors would be a guerilla warfare network of cells vs a top down conventional hierarchy where individual units are allowed a degree of autonomy within certain bounds.

    The AT Protocol system is not capable of operating in a non centralized manner.

    Your only option is to point your PDS at either the official network of Relays… or set up your own system of Relays, and point your PDS at that.

    Likewise for an AppView, you can either point yours to sync with the official network of Relays… or another network of Relays.

    There is no meshing, where nodes on the mesh control what other nodes they interface with… there is only branching or forking, setting up an entirely parellel structure, that is not capable of synchronizing with the original.

    Beyond that, you still have not addressed that you said a blatantly self contradicting statement; that people self host relays, but also they don’t self host relays because that is costly and the self hosted relay code available to the public is experimental and mainly used for reasons tangential to the core function of a production ready relay.

    And for the I think third time I have asked this, not of you personally, but in this thread:

    Who is hosting a Relay other than BlueSky?

    Can you provide evidence any independent person has figured out how to do this and is actually doing it?

    I would gladly accept new information and adjust my own understanding accordingly, but all I have seen in this thread so far is multiple people claiming that there are self hosted Relays, and then either providing no evidencd, or showing that they don’t understand the subject and post a link to a guide to, or example of, somehow setting up an AppView or PDS.


  • I mean…

    ⚠️ Warning ⚠️ ️

    Account migration is a potentially destructive operation. Part of the operation involves signing away your old PDS’s ability to make updates to your DID. If something goes wrong, you could be permanently locked out of your account, and Bluesky will not be able to help you recover it.

    Therefore, we do not recommend migrating your primary account yet. And we specifically recommend against migrating your main account if you do not understand how PLC operations work.

    Also, the Bluesky PDS is not currently accepting incoming migrations (it will in the future). Therefore this is currently a one-way street. If you migrate off of bsky.social, you will not be able to return. However, you will be able to migrate between other PDSs.

    This is literally the first thing you see on the page you just linked.

    And it was last updated 7 months ago.

    So I think you mean to say that account migration in BlueSky is currently in development, and is problematic and essentially experimental, and maybe sometime in the future this will change but also maybe not, who knows.

    You are right though that is not possible in ActivityPub.




  • All that has to happen for a ‘Blackwall’ analagous scenario is enough undersea cables get cut/sabotaged.

    Then you’re looking at a much more localized internet, where actually having a reliable or high bandwidth connection to a very far away place requires you to either have an insane jerry rigged solution, or a lot of money to pay for an increasing valuable, still existing intercontinental line.

    Of course, we very much could also end up with a more intentionally constructed type of widespread firewalling as well… they already exist.

    China’s great firewall, tons of other countries that have internet and/or social media killswitches…

    … And we are already seeing massive bandwidth from corpo AI scrapers trying to harvest data to train their AIs leading to people making new ways to detect, block, and or trap them in infinite loops, to save their own servers from going down.




  • Backfill means that the AppView has to request and download and then be able to present… the entire history of all posts from everyone on BlueSky.

    If you are familiar with crypto, its like how you have to download either the entire blockchain, or nowadays, a trimmed down/compressed version of it… before you can interact with it.

    If you are familiar with any kind of database like a forum or something… when migrating, you have to actually import a copy of all the preexisting users, posts, forum structure, posts, etc… if you want the new forum to actually contain what the old forum did, before you allow people to start making new posts.

    When this rando is setting up his own AppView… he is asking the BlueSky Relays to give his AppView all the older posts, before the AppView is caught up, and can then begin to function in realtime with the rest of the network.

    I don’t mean to be rude, but if you genuienly don’t know what ‘backfill’ means in this context, it is very likely you have essentially zero experience with or knowledge of systems that involve large databases … it is a very common and well known term to anyone with basically over a year of doing most kinds of db admin/server admin work.



  • … Yeah, as 73ms already pointed out… that first link is just someone setting up an AppView.

    To truly run an independent BlueSky system… you would have to run your own PDS, your own Relay, and your own AppView.

    Your second link does actually have code and a rough setup guide to running your own Relay, so I will give you thanks and credit for showing that at least it is possible to theoretically do this…

    But you say ‘several people run their own Relays’ and then do not evidence that.

    The Relay config here is just… how to host your own Relay that would act as a member of BlueSky’s Relay network.

    Basically, that is just how to transfer some of BlueSky’s server hosting costs … to yourself.

    If you set up a totally independent Relay… could it even interface with BlueSky’s Relays?

    As far as I can tell: No.

    It would be totally independent… a parellel network, not a federated one that interfaces with the rest of BlueSky, and is thus not actually able to ‘federate’.

    What… you would have to do… is set up your own Relay, connect it to basically all the other preexisting PDSs you want to include, then also run your own PDS, then also run your own AppView, and connect it to your own Relay… or just trust someother person running their own AppView, or just trust the official ones.

    (But… I think that to connect your own Relay to preexisting PDSs… that would require those PDSs to… disconnect from the mainline BlueSky Relay system… because they can only point to one Relay system at a time… so that’s kind of a problem.)

    That would be the only way to make your own … sort of branch of the BlueSky system, that at least in theory might be resistant to centralized censorship from BlueSky.

    And again… I am not aware of anyone who has yet done this, or if it would even work at a technical level.

    When dealing with software and tech companies, a good rule of thumb is that a planned or possible feature… doesn’t actually exist untill its been provably demonstrated to exist and work.


  • Yes, you can host your own PDS server, that is known and stated.

    The entire design of a lemmy instance is meant to be more ‘self contained’, as I already mentioned. This is what enables the federation network to organize in a ‘many to many’ connection style, as opposed to a ‘many to one’.

    A lemmy instance roughly has many/most of the capabilities of a PDS, Relay, and AppView… all rolled into one.

    This is a fundamental difference of a ‘true’ federation model… all the members of the federation are capable of operating independently.

    If you are in a federation of unequals, with built in dependencies… your ‘federation’ is much more like a king with vassal states, not a voluntary association.

    Yes, migration of a user account from one instance to another would be complicated… but … so would migrating a user from one PDS to another.

    I don’t even know how you could fully ‘migrate away from BlueSky servers’… when BlueSky run the only Relays.

    Also, many (most?) actual client apps for viewing lemmy, posting on it, etc… they pretty much hold a lot of your particular user customizations, at least as it comes to visual theming, independently, locally, not even related to the actual user account on an instance you are using.

    They also support easy switching between different lemmy user/instance accounts…

    Also also, as far as I am aware… if you have an account on a lemmy instance, you can delete your account and this will wipe out all of that account’s posts and comments across the whole fediverse, aside from modlogs and internet archive web snapshotting type stuff.

    I … think you can also export your own data as well?

    Not 100% sure on these last two parts, maybe an instance admin or powermod could chime in… but I think this is correct?