andrew_s

andrew_s , 5 days ago

That's arguably the expected behaviour - for a discussion, 'link' effectively takes you to the comments, for an article (or a link to a image), it takes you there instead.

You could use 'guid' instead - that always links to the post on Lemmy, and it usually contains a useful thing on other sites' RSS feeds.

andrew_s , 4 days ago

Oh, okay. Citing the specs is a good argument killer.

There's a Closed Issue relating to this at https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3540
From there you can navigate to the right place to open a new Issue if you want.

andrew_s , 5 days ago

There was a great windows app called 'dvdshrink' that let you rip commercial DVDs onto blank DVDs (shrinking them if necessary). It got taken down with a Cease & Desist, but the MPAA or whoever didn't worry about who took the domain. For a long time, the site was just filled with ads instead - now it's a bit more sophisticated: no real link to download the software, but lots of genuine-seeming donation requests.

The fake site is at the first search result for that software (edit: it's probably best not to link directly to it)

andrew_s , 5 days ago

That sounds like a tricky combination. Wherever you go, they'll be a good chunk of users who are unaware of / indifferent to how well the app they're using interacts with other Fediverse platforms. Mastodon has the userbase, and - as you say - is the place where the serious discussion of accessibility takes place.

As for Lemmy - it doesn't yet support alt-text, but when it does, I believe that the plan is to follow Mastodon's format (i.e. a 'name' field in the 'attachment' array)

andrew_s , 4 days ago

Oh right, yeah. I was thinking more of the images that people link to with posts. Lemmy currently sends those out, with

"attachment": [
    {
      "href": "<a href="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e798447e-a79f-45b2-b3da-3aa669cbc0e5.png" rel="nofollow ugc" target="_blank">https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e798447e-a79f-45b2-b3da-3aa669cbc0e5.png</a>",
      "type": "Link"
    }
  ]

But there's nowhere in entire JSON for any alt-text. The plan is to add alt-text as a 'name' in there.

In-line images do prove a point for the OP, though. A Lemmy comment with one will be sent out as
&lt;img src="<a href="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9d483052-29b6-4d34-baaf-3ee092be9718.png" rel="nofollow ugc" target="_blank">https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9d483052-29b6-4d34-baaf-3ee092be9718.png</a>" alt="bear vs man in woods meme" /> in the 'content' field, but Mastodon expects all images to be attachments, so it just completely ignores it. (compare https://lemmy.zip/comment/10342640 with https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/112438348076482957).

andrew_s , 5 days ago

Yeah - I think anything the UI is doing, it's getting the info from the API, so the poster would've had to use the 'cross-post' feature. There are some apps (e.g. Voyager) that try to wrangle cross-posts by title or URL, but title-matching can give false postives, and URL-matching usually assumes that one link hasn't picked up some cruft, and it can't do much for uploaded images if the poster didn't cross-post (because it'll be 2 different files with different URLs)

andrew_s , 5 days ago

Oh, right. Sorry. I've gone back and checked the post I was thinking of when I made that comment, and - yeah - it turns out I was misremembering / didn't properly investigate the first time.

andrew_s , 8 days ago

"No", and "No". More info here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/18710212 (includes reply from Nutomic)

andrew_s , 8 days ago

Pièces?

andrew_s , 12 days ago

Congrats. Tesseract has always been very impressive.

This post suggests there's a problem with Lemmy/PeerTube federation, but it'll be good to see the videos embedded (even if they have to be brought through manually)

andrew_s , 12 days ago

Decades ago, my school's drug info was similar: every drug had a single entry ('euphoria') in the Pros column and a massive list (ending with death) for the Cons column.

andrew_s , 13 days ago

I saw some criticism of Netflix's 'Ripley' adaption, based on the fact that Andrew Scott is in his late 40s, so his character (and all associated characters) had to be maybe in their late 30s but not much younger. They said that a father wouldn't be as interested in him returning the USA in the same way that he would be if his son was in his early 20s (as in the 'Talented Mr. Ripley' film). I thought they could just add a line from the father, saying he'd tolerated his son galivanting around Europe until now, but now needed him home because his father was starting to consider retirement and wanted him to take over the business.

andrew_s , 13 days ago

It's a proper ActivityPub feature

andrew_s Mod , 11 days ago

No, it's twiddling its thumbs waiting for the crawler at lemmyverse.net to start working again.

I submitted an Issue to the GitHub last time it failed, and the developer responded with some info. I didn't really understand it, tbh, but it looks to be the same problem, so hopefully it'll right itself again.

andrew_s , 16 days ago (edited 16 days ago)

Preventing replies can done on some Fedivere apps (not Lemmy, yet, though, I guess). e.g.
https://i.postimg.cc/65WY3RcS/blocked-reply.jpg

As for your other points, they all sound like attempts at improving the quality of the conversation. They might not have been implemented well, but requiring a clarifying comment for a question, and blocking low-karma accounts aren't bad ideas in themselves. Lemmy, etc don't really deserve praise for not even trying to implement ideas like this at all.

(the benefits that others are mentioning in the comments have lots of validity, though, of course)

andrew_s , 16 days ago

The Wasp Factory and We Need to Talk about Kevin (both have scenes of an older child abusing the trust of a younger sibling, which really bothered me at the time).

andrew_s Mod , 17 days ago

!nowhereelsetoshare has a broken outbox (no posts if you're the first person from your instance to visit). The Issue was recently fixed, so hopefully the fix will be included in 0.19.4 (and all instances on .3 upgrade to that when it comes out).

andrew_s Mod , 14 days ago

Just bad luck I think. The convo on the bug report suggests the problem stems from a user making a post, and then the user being deleted (voluntarily or involuntarily).

andrew_s , 17 days ago

For remote actors, it seems to mostly rely on banned users not being very imaginative when it comes to naming subsequent accounts, and/or them not being able to leave a particular subject alone.

andrew_s , 17 days ago

A user on an instance that's different from the instance that wants to ban them (so methods like IP logging or browser fingerprinting or whatever wouldn't be available).

andrew_s , 17 days ago

It does. This reply is from PieFed, and the vast majority of the content here has come from Lemmy via ActivityPub.

andrew_s , 17 days ago

Not yet, no. There's no API for clients like Boost to interact with. There's some discussion about one here

andrew_s , 18 days ago

'Sugar' is okay. It has a particular editing style that takes a while to get used to. Each episode is only about 30 minutes, so that makes a nice change. He's just told someone that he has a secret, and if it's not "We're all aliens", I'm going to be disappointed.

I think I'm going to give up on 'The Sympathizer'. I've realised I've little tolerance for an actor playing more than one part. Robert Downey Jr. has just shown up as his third character, and it's not he's particularly known for being a chameleon. I find it gimmicky and distracting.

'Taskmaster (UK)' is on tonight. Yay!

andrew_s , 19 days ago

Have you been playing with language settings? This post is in 'Akan', but your previous posts are a mix of 'English' and 'Undefined'.

If you've removed 'English' as a language you understand, the posts from 3 hours and 3 days ago won't be visible to you.

andrew_s , 19 days ago (edited 19 days ago)

I think it's typically hidden by UIs for privacy reasons, but you could see it via something like:
curl --header 'accept: application/activity+json' --location https://sopuli.xyz/u/cyrus | jq -r .matrixUserId
or
curl --header 'accept: application/json' 'https://sopuli.xyz/api/v3/user?username=cyrus' | jq -r .person_view.person.matrix_user_id

As the other comment says, backends hook into Matrix if someone uses the 'Send Secure Message' option to contact you (I don't think that option shows if you don't both have a Matrix ID).

andrew_s , 18 days ago

The meme is riffing on the criticism that Star Wars has become too self-referential. That modern Star Wars are inspired only by earlier iterations of Star Wars, rather than the more diverse list of inspirations for the original film. It's not a comment on the quality of the PT.

andrew_s , 17 days ago

The lead dev is Rimu - which isn't on LW's admin list.

andrew_s , 19 days ago

From the long-distant past, I can still remember choosing 'Secrets and Lies' as something to watch when I was living with house-mates. I didn't know anything about it, just that it was highly regarded by critics. Everyone in the house hated it, it was an awkward experience watching it, and I get vague second-hand embarrassment even thinking about that film.

I should give it another chance sometime, but of Leigh's films, I think Naked is the only one I've liked (but I wouldn't have wanted to watch that with other people in the room either).

andrew_s , 19 days ago

PieFed (which'll let me subscribe to this post), Matrix, and Mastodon (using the phanpy web client)

andrew_s , 20 days ago

Not sure why your post was removed when this post (to use a similar example) wasn't. Not providing a reason is, at the very least, self-defeating, because you then have to deal with the not-unreasonable follow-up question as to why.

From what I remember, I think this place ultimately exists because of the mod at the other place being a bit opaque.

andrew_s , 21 days ago

Looks interesting - I imagine there's lot of uses for this. I currently use ngrok to tunnel from 443 to a local server, which is good way to test fediverse apps, but I wouldn't be able to use bore for that (because it only assigns random public ports above 1024, and doesn't deal with the SSL end of things)

andrew_s , 21 days ago

There's some that have done extra to get the best out of young performers.

Examples would be: Room (2015) with the director making things into a game (like 'who can scream the loudest?'); and Close (2022) where the director worked with the kids for ages before even introducing a camera.

A counter-example would be Gran Torino (2008), where the young actors aren't particularly good ('cos Eastwood is more of a "you get two takes, and if you haven't got in 2, you haven't got it" kinda guy)

andrew_s , 21 days ago

!askmbin

It won't show any posts if you're joining from a remote instance 'cos MBin returns empty outboxes for their magazines, but there's only one post there atm anyways.

Lemmy will probably error when clicking that link, so just wait a bit and refresh.

So this comment has one link, and two paragraphs about how it might not work as expected, but - other than that - yay Fediverse!, I guess, ha ha.

andrew_s , 22 days ago (edited 22 days ago)

Well it's good to see that - unlike Lemmy - Reddit users have found a way to bash Windows without using pre-transition images of Elliot Page. So they've got that going for them, at least. (I'm assuming this post is also poking fun at Reddit, for being riddled with ads)

EDIT: Apologies, I shouldn't have made this comment. I'll leave it up, so the replies have some context.

andrew_s , 22 days ago

It was two, fwiw. They were also upvoted, and engaged with (which is what the trolls want, of course). I shouldn't have made that comment - it's a sign that I've been on my phone too much this morning. I'll amend it, and then go out for a walk or something.

andrew_s , 22 days ago

Sorry. It's from me being too online. Must. Put. Phone. Down.

andrew_s , 22 days ago

His Bio does include 'software engineer', and he's worked at Microsoft before from here. I get the sense that the problem that people have with Mastodon is that they've subbed the PRs, but they've not been approved. For example, there's apparently a 12k line PR for Groups that the main guy isn't keen on.

It can be tricky getting your own code into other people's projects - the maintainers need to have a lack of ego that can be difficult to achieve. Generally, developers react better to code, than to ideas about code, but you want to convince them to look at future code, and not waste your time creating it, by floating the idea first, so you can end up in an impossible situation. Subbing big PRs only for them to be dismissed by a maintainer is what causes people to rage-quit the project altogether (for Lemmy, see Tesseract UI, and the 'bulletintree' guy)

andrew_s , 22 days ago

Mastodon also has a different outbox format (one that's paginated), so that's the other reason their posts don't show from Lemmy. Solving the problem of following users with fake communities has also been proposed (by me, and also here), but it's generally a bad idea - a hack that will come back to bite you. If Lemmy were changed to integrate Mastodon more, it'd ideally be a big project - one that would fully embrace the idiosyncrasies of Mastodon (like muting replies and denying Follow requests) because ignoring them would lead to trouble later on.

andrew_s Mod , 23 days ago

Free Video Game Giveaways has appeared here before: this search shows 6 posts that include it.

andrew_s Mod , 23 days ago

So far, so good. The fundamentals are there, but - obviously - you can't compare software that's been in development for a few months rather then a few years (like Lemmy). I mostly like it because I've been able to contribute to the code. It was written to be easy to understand and add to, so I've been able to do things like handling links from these lists better (so it never dumps you in an "unknown error" if your instance hasn't yet heard of a community, like Lemmy does).

andrew_s , 23 days ago

Quentin Tarantino (pick whatever film you like. I think he's great as a writer and director, but a terrible actor).

andrew_s , 24 days ago

I've worked this shift pattern before, and found it very difficult. They call it a 'continental' shift pattern in the UK - it's not a new thing, 'cos the job I'm thinking of was 30 years ago.
Switching from sleeping during the night to sleeping during the day is okay if you're on permanent nights, but trying to change every couple of weeks can be impossible (I remember once failing to get any real sleep during the day, having to spend the next 12 hours at work, and then collapsing on my way home the next day.)

andrew_s , 24 days ago

This feels like an impossible combination, where your local instance doesn't have data from other instances, but also knows that they are out there. When a user searches their instance for something, the answer comes from local storage, in the same way that google responds by looking at its local cache of a webpage, not the webpage itself.

andrew_s , 23 days ago

Yeah, I know what you mean. I originally typed out a reply based on that assumption, but then re-read the post, and decided against it, in case I was assuming the wrong thing.

Currently, if you bring in a remote community, your instance fetches the details of: the community; its moderators (including their avatars and banners); the instance the community is on; the admins of that instance (including their avatars and banners); and the last 50 posts.

If you separated that into tiers, tier 1 could just be the community details (inc. the sidebar), and the instance name, and you could maybe skip the rest until someone subscribed to it. I don't think you'd want to bring in every available community, even for tier 1, because of the 29k communities listed on lemmyverse.net, at least 20k are completely dead (about 6k of that is just spam from a disgruntled lemmy.world user). The advantage of this is that a local user could find the community based on a local search. They'd be greeted by an empty-looking community though, so they'd have to know that subscribing to it would be worthwhile (probably by visiting it on its host instance, although apps can make that process difficult by being a bit too clever for their own good).

There's an Issue for PieFed that been raised about using something like lemmyverse to 'know' about remote communities. I'm 'freamon' in that discussion, but neither me or PieFed's developer have pursued it much further.

andrew_s , 25 days ago

I don't personally, but I've read that the appeal is that sometimes you want to play a game, and sometimes you want to watch television, and sometimes you don't want to do either but vaguely want an experience that's halfway between the two (i.e. watching someone else play a game).

andrew_s , 26 days ago

It's usually just because they have to pay an on-going licence fee to keep using it, and after a certain amount of time, the revenue that a particular game is expected to bring in isn't worth the fee.

andrew_s , 26 days ago

If you can remember some dialogue, but not much else, then usually the best thing to do is download/rip the subtitles, and search them.

I did that for Breaking Bad, and found nothing:

$ grep -in plus *.srt
Breaking.Bad.S01E01.2160p.WEBRip.DTS-HD.MA5.1.x264-TrollUHD.srt:463:what, Plus P Plus loads
Breaking.Bad.S01E01.2160p.WEBRip.DTS-HD.MA5.1.x264-TrollUHD.srt:1496:Fourteen dollars plus shipping. Yes.
Breaking.Bad.S01E07.2160p.WEBRip.DTS-HD.MA5.1.x264-TrollUHD.srt:417:{an8}Plus, there's an extra 15 in there.
Breaking.Bad.S02E01.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:147:Plus 360, plus 137.
Breaking.Bad.S02E04.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1687:plus the 500 you already owe me,
Breaking.Bad.S02E05.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:518:Inside, padlocked, plus gate privileges.
Breaking.Bad.S02E06.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1303:plus an extra round for your cranial,
Breaking.Bad.S02E06.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1345:your money, man, plus interest.
Breaking.Bad.S02E06.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1349:You're damn right, plus interest.
Breaking.Bad.S02E07.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1654:Plus he's married with a family.
Breaking.Bad.S02E08.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1560:Plus, he's scared shitless of me,
Breaking.Bad.S02E09.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1030:Plus the genny needs gas,
Breaking.Bad.S03E01.2160p.WEB-DL.3xRus.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:902:Plus, neither plane was full.
Breaking.Bad.S03E10.2160p.WEB-DL.3xRus.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1576:And plus, my daughter wasn't born yet.
Breaking.Bad.S03E11.2160p.WEB-DL.3xRus.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1050:Plus, they got bumper boats, so...
Breaking.Bad.S03E13.2160p.WEB-DL.3xRus.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:629:- Plus, there's that big nose of his.
Breaking.Bad.S03E13.2160p.WEB-DL.3xRus.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1361:Plus, you get to shoot at kids.
Breaking Bad S04E04 Bullet Points (2160p x265 10bit Joy).srt:849:and plus-seven...
Breaking Bad S04E04 Bullet Points (2160p x265 10bit Joy).srt:858:But its most stable state is plus-two,
Breaking Bad S04E08 Hermanos (2160p x265 10bit Joy).srt:922:Plus there's a little extra in there
Breaking Bad S04E08 Hermanos (2160p x265 10bit Joy).srt:1031:Plus, it shows our crew
Breaking Bad S04E08 Hermanos (2160p x265 10bit Joy).srt:1748:We add a plus douche bag
Breaking Bad S04E09 Bug (2160p x265 10bit Joy).srt:867:-...plus five years in prison.
Breaking.Bad.S05E11.2160p.WEB-DL.3xRus.2xEng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:357:{an8}Plus
Breaking.Bad.S05E11.2160p.WEB-DL.3xRus.2xEng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1650:and, plus, he was acting kind of shady.
Breaking.Bad.S05E13.2160p.WEB-DL.3xRus.2xEng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1591:Plus 5, that is 20.
Breaking.Bad.S05E15.2160p.WEB-DL.3xRus.2xEng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:1165:Plus you can cook on it.
Breaking.Bad.S05E15.2160p.WEB-DL.3xRus.2xEng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:2472:[HTML_REMOVED]- Black plus white makes gray.

$ grep -in minus *.srt
Breaking.Bad.S01E06.2160p.WEBRip.DTS-HD.MA5.1.x264-TrollUHD.srt:689:minus 25 bucks for that phone.
Breaking.Bad.S01E07.2160p.WEBRip.DTS-HD.MA5.1.x264-TrollUHD.srt:849:Minus the half for wasting my time.
Breaking.Bad.S02E03.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:2010:minus cash on hand...
Breaking.Bad.S02E09.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:229:minus my fee, which is 17 percent
Breaking.Bad.S02E09.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:935:minus distribution charges...
Breaking.Bad.S02E12.2160p.WEB-DL.5xRus.Ukr.Eng.TrollUHD-ULTRAHDCLUB.srt:2134:he gonna do, give you a B-minus?
Breaking Bad S04E04 Bullet Points (2160p x265 10bit Joy).srt:222:Zero, minus one, 0.6.
Breaking Bad S04E04 Bullet Points (2160p x265 10bit Joy).srt:848:...of between minus-three
Breaking Bad S04E08 Hermanos (2160p x265 10bit Joy).srt:1749:to a minus douche bag...

andrew_s , 27 days ago

This screenshot is a WEBP file.

I image it started life as JPEG, and then lost pixels every time it was re-uploaded. At some point, it was either converted into a WEBP file and uploaded to Lemmy, or Lemmy converted it into one. Either way, it always uses about 70% compression for WEBP files, so you end up with already compressed file getting compressed again.

I just tested uploading a WEBP file to Lemmy, and the picts-rs backend made it a) bigger and b) worse.