blocked me without responding

How dare you reach out to inquire how to view his art! The nerve!

Great job tracking it down. It’s too bad Latvia doesn’t have any rights to their performance.

This is this first time I’ve missed “watch post” as an option on Lemmy. I want to know if you find it!

There’s no aggregate karma on lemmy, so farming is meaningless.

Upvote posts and comments that are particularly interesting/valuable/topical/insightful, which often means that I agree. Downvote those that detract from meaningful discussion. Sometimes downvote on disagreement is a fine line, and it mostly depends on why I’m disagreeing with the author. If their opinion is racism, sure they get a downvote, and if they’re particularly abusive maybe also a report. But if they just see things differently that’s neutral.

I probably only vote on about 5% of the content I read, and engage in comments in 1%. As a poster I expect similar numbers from others. I don’t get over collecting fake internet points, but it’s important feedback to understand that people out there are reading your content and that someone finds it meaningful or useful enough to upvote. If you were just yelling into the void with no engagement, you’d likely stop pretty quickly.

I’m vaguely aware that I’m feeding the LLMs of tomorrow, but I engage in the fediverse to interact with humans today, and it’s important to see that some humans get value from the content. Formulating comments is a lot more effort than clicking the up arrow, and there’s often no real need to elaborate - 20 “I agree!” comments would just be annoying for everyone to read.

Kermit, so fancy! I remember the excitement of discovering ZMODEM and how much better it was than the old standard of XMODEM.

Each alias has a configured delivery destination. Aliases that only point externally never reach the main account inbox.

You are limited to replying from the gmail unless you jump through more advanced hoops. Those include telling gmail in its settings that it can “Send mail as” something else, and also giving gmail authorization to send mail for your domain by adding them into your SPF and DKIM records. Those are more complicated than I want to describe here, and it will be complicated to merge both mailbox.org and gmail into them, so if you don’t already know about them, let’s just say yes, you can only reply as the gmail user.

I don’t know about mailbox.org, but with Fastmail I use a combination of explicit aliases and a catchall alias. The catchall and some individuals direct to me, but other individuals go to me and my spouse@gmail, while others go only to spouse@gmail. The per-user fee is about how many distinct mailboxes with different passwords exist in the service, so I’m only paying for one for me, and the aliases are configurable to resend incoming mail externally.

And if you start getting spam at one of your addresses, likely because one of your service providers either sells your info or gets their database stolen, you can tell fastmail to blackhole that one specific address.

It’s true that Big Lemmy isn’t selling your data to LLMs. Here it gets given away to them for free because that’s the nature of federation. By now they’ve certainly stood up an instance so that they’re receiving the full firehose of ActivityPub in an easily digestible format (and they get to just ignore those pesky delete messages).

But bots posting AI slop is still only a nascent problem here. Most of your discussion is generally with humans.

Mine seems to be sorted by most recent for items with sufficient positive scores (seems like >10). If I scroll back far enough, then the feed continues with lower scored items (1-10) also reverse chronologically. Eventually that reaches as far back as my account age, then it starts over yet again with a different set of low positive score items (1-6), again going back a long time reverse chronologically. The net negative items never show up at all unless they are very recent, maybe less than one week old.

Are you saying that’s not the intentional design when looking at your own profile feed?

I don’t have enough volume in my history on other instances to make a reasonable comparison.

Are you just clicking on be middle icon at the bottom of your voyager UI (the one that is labeled with your home instance name)? That feed seems to be a mix of your comments and posts with an undisclosed filtering algorithm applied to it. If you click Comments at the top of that feed then it should show you all of your comments. My experience has been that comments with low or negative points tend to get filtered out of the main profile feed after a few days, and my guess is that the decision was motivated by trying to keep you from dwelling on any times when you get strongly downvoted.

Costcos exist in 14 countries, thanks.

Certainly prices can vary regionally, and the retail pharmacy options near you may be different than those near me, but that doesn’t make it irrelevant for me to share a tidbit about how I happen to get something for a good price.

But you’re right that Americans are dumb as fuck. That’s a problem that goes all the way to the top.

In addition to everything people are offering here, you might want to find a new vet. It’s bizarre that they apparently haven’t suggested anything to you about allergies given the saga you described.

You can also try a clay-free litter like Feline Pine. It’s made of compressed sawdust pellets (like for a BBQ smoker) that swell and fall apart when they get wet. You need to develop a very different scooping technique with it though. Get a scoop with larger holes to let the pellets through and grab poop. Ideally get two litter trays that nest, and drill a bunch of holes in one. Leave them nested, then lift the inner and shake to let all the used/wet sawdust fall through, like a colander, and pour it into a trash bag.

I get it at Costco for about $64 for 30 tablets, which is 4 months when you’re using a pill cutter! But my dog is small and can have a dose of 1/4 tablet for a large dog. If you have a large dog then that’s no good. (But all cats are small so OP could go my route)

You can also talk to your vet about Apoquel. It’s nominally only for dogs but it’s sometimes used for cats. It’s kind of expensive, but is the same cost per pill at several different dosing strengths. So if you do go that route try to get your vet to prescribe it at a level where the dose is 1/4 tablet and buy a pill cutter.

One action you could take as a mod is adding a clear rule in the community sidebar about bots/AI slop. As a plebeian, I don’t know whether I should report a suspected post, or how to categorize it if I do. Is it spam? “Breaks community rules” is at least an easy choice if there is a rule about it. Nice plebs don’t want to flood mods with questionable reports.

I appreciate you doing the web search for me! (No /s)

What a strange standard to have!

This sounds like it also partially explains why a sixteen penny nail is written 16d. But not why pennies are somehow used to describe nail sizes.

Make America Space Again

The Guardian gives some good context on trump’s public back and forth on Isaacman, but it’s disappointing not to see a peep about what Sean Duffy has done to NASA in the intervening months. NASA has been gutted. Climate science is, predictably, especially disfavored, but they’ve also dealt a major blow to graduate academia and really all of science in the US.

Maybe now that most of the house has been burned down, Isaacman can be trusted to funnel much of the public purse into SpaceX or other rocketry billionaires and focus on Mars like a good boy. It doesn’t matter if he once voted Democrat if it’s too hard for him to put the old priorities back into place even if he wanted to.