Trying a switch to [email protected], at least for a while, due to recent kbin.social stability problems and to help spread load.

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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Reddit had the ability to have a per-subreddit wiki. I never dug into it on the moderator side, but it was useful for some things like setting up pages with subreddit rules and the like. I think that moderators had some level of control over it, at least to allow non-moderator edits or not, maybe on a per-page basis.

    That could be a useful option for communities; I think that in general, there is more utility for per-community than per-instance wiki spaces, though I know that you admin a server with one major community which you also moderate, so in your case, there may not be much difference.

    I don’t know how amenable django-wiki is to partitioning things up like that, though.

    EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/wiki/ has a brief summary.



  • So, first, that text is from the Declaration of Independence, not the US Constitution, which defines legal rights.

    But, secondly, the right to “pursuit of happiness” needs to be understood in the (somewhat euphemistic) language of the time. It is generally understood as referring to a right to property; this right was a core dispute in the American Revolution, and mirrors a nearly-identical “life, liberty” phrase from John Locke where the term used is explicitly “property”. That is, the right is not to never feel unhappy or depressed, but rather to not have one’s property taken away by non-elected parties.

    https://www.crf-usa.org/foundations-of-our-constitution/natural-rights.html

    The Tea Act, which imposed taxes on American colonists, was a critical dispute in the American Revolution:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Act

    The Tea Act 1773 (13 Geo. 3. c. 44) was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain. The principal objective was to reduce the massive amount of tea held by the financially troubled British East India Company in its London warehouses and to help the struggling company survive.[1] A related objective was to undercut the price of illegal tea, smuggled into Britain’s North American colonies. This was supposed to convince the colonists to purchase Company tea on which the Townshend duties were paid, thus implicitly agreeing to accept Parliament’s right of taxation. Smuggled tea was a large issue for Britain and the East India Company, since approximately 86% of all the tea in America at the time was smuggled Dutch tea.

    At the time, it was generally accepted that in England, only elected officials had the power to tax; this is one of the rights of Englishmen.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_Englishmen

    The “rights of Englishmen” are the traditional rights of English subjects and later English-speaking subjects of the British Crown. In the 18th century, some of the colonists who objected to British rule in the thirteen British North American colonies that would become the first United States argued that their traditional[1] rights as Englishmen were being violated. The colonists wanted and expected the rights that they (or their forebears) had previously enjoyed in England: a local, representative government, with regards to judicial matters (some colonists were being sent back to England for trials) and particularly with regards to taxation.[2] Belief in these rights subsequently became a widely accepted justification for the American Revolution.[3][4]

    However, American colonists had no elected MPs in Parliament. Parliament was willing neither to grant them elected MPs, nor to refrain from taxation and have locally-elected legislatures perform taxation. Parliament’s counterargument was that Americans had “virtual representation”, in that MPs elected by people in the UK – though not elected by American colonists – had their best interests at heart.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_representation

    Virtual representation was the idea that the members of Parliament, including the Lords and the Crown-in-Parliament, reserved the right to speak for the interests of all British subjects, rather than for the interests of only the district that elected them or for the regions in which they held peerages and spiritual sway.[1] Virtual representation was the British response to the First Continental Congress in the American colonies. The Second Continental Congress asked for representation in Parliament in the Suffolk Resolves, also known as the first Olive Branch Petition. Parliament claimed that their members had the well being of the colonists in mind. The Colonies rejected this premise.


  • My assumption is that that’s gonna get thrown out because they don’t have standing. Probably some kind of case law along those lines already, since I figure someone’s probably tried that before.

    googles

    Looks like it.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliana_v._United_States

    Juliana, et al. v. United States of America, et al. is a climate-related lawsuit filed in 2015 by 21 youth plaintiffs against the United States and several executive branch officials. Filing their case in the United States District Court for the District of Oregon, the plaintiffs, represented by the non-profit organization Our Children’s Trust, include Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, the members of Martinez’s organization Earth Guardians, and climatologist James Hansen as a “guardian for future generations”.

    They call for the government to offer “both declaratory and injunctive relief for their claim—specifically, a declaration of the federal government’s fiduciary role in preserving the atmosphere and an injunction of its actions which contravene that role.”

    In January 2020, a Ninth Circuit panel dismissed the case on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue for an injunction.

    Legal actions to affect climate change by federal and state-level governments have been attempted since the 1990s; one of the first known cases was led by Antonio Oposa, a Philippine lawyer that represented a class-action suit of 43 students against the Philippine government to protect a forest surrounding their village.

    Since 2011, Our Children’s Trust has been filing various state and federal lawsuits on behalf of youth, though most of these have been dismissed by courts, as courts generally have not ruled that access to a clean environment is a right that can be litigated against.[8][5][6] Such cases are also generally dismissed as lawsuits cannot be initiated by “generalized grievances”, and require plaintiffs with standing to sue and can demonstrate concrete harm that the government has done, and that the courts can at least partially redress the harm by order of the court.[9] Further, cases cannot be brought to court if they deal with a “political question” which cannot be resolved by actions of Congress and the President.[9]

    The “political question” bit should be inapplicable, since this is a company, but the lack of standing to sue for climate change probably does apply.

    I assume that this is a crowd-pleaser by the California executive, that they expect it to get tossed out but want the political points.





  • Yeah, sorry, but no. That’s not slavery. If you’re present in the country illegally and working illegally and could be returned home at any time, you may not be making as much as you would if you were present legally, but you are not compelled to work. You can always terminate working and return to the country where you are legally supposed to be. If you choose to be in Country A illegally and working there rather than in Country B legally and working (for less) there, that is your choice, and you are not being compelled to work.

    Slavery entails someone being compelled to work.


  • I broadly agree that “cloud” has an awful lot of marketing fluff to it, as with many previous buzzwords in information technology.

    However, I also think that there was legitimately a shift from a point in time where one got a physical box assigned to them to the point where VPSes started being a thing to something like AWS. A user really did become increasingly-decoupled from the actual physical hardware.

    With a physical server, I care about the actual physical aspects of the machine.

    With a VPS, I still have “a VPS”. It’s virtualized, yeah, but I don’t normally deal with them dynamically.

    With something like AWS, I’m thinking more in terms of spinning up and spinning down instances when needed.

    I think that it’s reasonable to want to describe that increasing abstraction in some way.

    Is it a fundamental game-changer? In general, I don’t think so. But was there a shift? Yeah, I think so.

    And there might legitimately be some companies for which that is a game-changer, where the cost-efficiencies of being able to scale up dynamically to handle peak load on a service are so important that it permits their service to be viable at all.




  • I mean, scrolling down that list, those all make sense.

    I’m not arguing that Google should have kept them going.

    But I think that it might be fair to say that Google did start a number of projects and then cancel them – even if sensibly – and that for people who start to rely on them, that’s frustrating.

    In some cases, like with Google Labs stuff, it was very explicit that anything there was experimental and not something that Google was committing to. If one relied on it, well, that’s kind of their fault.







  • What’s been your experience with youtube recommendations?

    I’ve never had a YouTube account, so YouTube doesn’t have any persistent data on me as an individual to do recommendations unless it can infer who I am from other data.

    They seem to do a decent job of recommending the next video in a series done in a playlist by an author, which is really the only utility I get out of suggestions that YouTube gives me (outside of search results, which I suppose are themselves a form of recommendation). I’d think that YouTube could do better by just providing an easy way to get from the video to such a list, but…


  • It’s available for me on kbin.social as of this writing, and I subscribed.

    As far as I can tell, what one needs to do on kbin is search for communityname@instance. I don’t think that “!” goes in the search string.

    But that’s already run by now.

    For people on kbin.social, you should be able to see it at:

    https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]

    If you’re on another kbin instance, do the above search. I’m still a little fuzzy about the right syntax in a comment to produce a link to perform such an initial search in a cross-lemmy/kbin, cross-instance fashion. I think that it should be:

    !@battlestations@lemmy.world
    
    

    Giving the following:

    @battlestations

    That generated link does work for me on kbin.social, but I could be wrong about it working elsewhere.

    I really wish that this particular issue would be made clear, as it’s important for community discoverability.

    EDIT: Nope, generated link does not work on lemmy.world, so doesn’t work on lemmy, at least.

    EDIT2: On fedia.io, another kbin instance, the link also doesn’t work, so someone on the instance may need to have already subscribed for the link to be auto-generated. The ability to have a link format that directs to one’s local instance in a way that works on all lemmy and kbin instances, regardless of whether anyone has subscribed, would be really nice.

    EDIT3: Trying:

    [[email protected]](/search?q=battlestations%40lemmy.world)
    
    

    Yields

    [email protected]

    Which works to generate a search on kbin.social.

    It also appears to work on fedia.io, so this is probably the right way to do a link, at least for kbin users.

    EDIT4: It also appears to work for lemmy instances! This should probably be the new syntax used on [email protected] to link to a community!