Along with other things said here, people tend to “forget” that there’s a real person on the other end.

I vaguely recall Nicholas Christakis talking about a study they made, where they created a bot which would simply remind people of the fact that there’s a real person on the other end, and they found that it would help. (That study was done in some university platform and is centuries old in internet time, though. I think he spoke about it about 6 years ago on podcast with Sam Harris.)

/s means sarcasm.

(I myself don’t find this one funny though…)

Some people see “free stuff”, and assume that it’s now open season on wasting OP’s time.

It’s a good way to kill any enthusiasm. Imagine your kid made a spaghetti portrait as a gift for you and instead of just accepting it you asked, “but what exactly did you do differently from all kids on the block?”

Why? Why ask for this from the creator?

If someone can create new software and offer it for free, they should not also be expected to also create a comprehensive analysis of what other people did and list of differences.

Just take it or leave it, it’s that simple. No need to act as if you’re trying to waste some door-to-door salesman’s time.

Edit: I expected some downvotes but not that many.

To my defense, the question in this thread is “you could elaborate what exactly you did different than all the others”. Look, I’m not a native English speaker either but I feel we could agree that is still pretty far away from simply being curious about design choices or “what led you to create this” sort of exploratory question.

I might have overreacted, though, so sorry for that.

When it comes to identifying the server, hostname the first thing that counts. lemmy.world or mastodon.social or google.com are three different hostnames. At this point you can basically treat the period as no special character, it’s just part of the funny world. This basically answers your question: those are two different domains, ie. for all purposes, different instances.

However, your computer does not really connect to hostname but to IP address, so the next important thing is to translate the hostname to an IP address.

Aside: a valid hostname does not even have to have period in it. For example, localhost is a valid hostname! But generally hostnames without periods don’t get translated to any useful IP addresses. localhost is probably the only one widely used hostname but your OS will translate it to a special IP address which marks your own device.)

So to translate the hostname to IP address is done using so-called DNS. So before you can connect, your computer already knows an IP address of a DNS server, and asks it to translate the hostname to IP address. Technically, this is still not where the period is strictly important.

Where the period does start to be meaningful is when you think about: so we have billions of IP addresses, billions of hostnames, how do we organize it all? Who is going to maintain the huge massive list?

So it works like this: There are dozens of organizations, each of which is assigned one or more “top level domains” (TLD). Then they are responsible for maintaining lists of all hostnames ending with those domains. Many of these organizations are local to certain states. For example, in Czech Republic, where I live, we have organization called CZ.NIC which maintains all domains ending with .cz. So it’s up to CZ.NIC how it manages permissions and gives out the domains. In this case, basically anyone can register any free domain ending with .cz, and what this registration means is that now they can get a server with an IP address, run whatever they want and have the registered domain name point to that IP address.

Note that other organizations may decide to add additional rules. For example .uk domains are managed with extra rules, where non-government (commercial) entities are normally allowed to register only .co.uk and other .uk names are not handed out easily. I don’t actually know the details about .uk but my point is that if you are going to think about a hostname and how to begin to understand who owns it, first thing that matters is the TLD, and from that point the rules might be slightly different. To be fair, I haven’t seen much variance between this; almost all public TLD’s I’ve seen were either “simple”, meaning myname.tld or this thing that UK does (also New Zealand, from the top of my head).

One almost universal rule is, though, that if I, say, register seznam.cz with CZ.NIC, then I automatically get not only seznam.cz but also any address I can possibly come up which ends with .seznam.cz. foo.seznam.cz, bar.seznam.cz, www.seznam.cz, I can now start organizing my servers using this whole infinite space, with any number of extra periods. I could totally start a business and start promoting my server foo.bar.baz.whatever.cz on billboards, as long as CZ.NIC grants me whatever.cz.

So back to your question: mastodon.social and piefed.social are two completely different domains. All we know that they have in common is that whoever registered them, had to deal with the same organization; that is whoever maintains .social.

So TL;DR: there’s really nothing that suggests that they would be the same instance.

Also in my experience LLM can often propose solutions which are working but way too complex.

Story time: just yesterday, in VueJS I was trying to iterate over a list of items and render .text of reach item as HTML, but I needed to process it first. Note that in VueJS this is done by adding eg. <span v-html="item.text"></span> where content of the attribute is the JavaScript expression needed to get the text.

First I asked ChatGPT to write the function for processing the text. That worked pretty well and even used part of the JavaScript API which I was not aware about.

Next, I had a “dumb moment” when I did not realize that as I’m iterating through items I can just say <span v-html="processHtml(item.text)"></span>, that’s all I really needed. Somehow I thought (or should I say, “hallucinated”, ba dum tsss) for a moment that v-html is special or something (it is used differently than the most abundant type of syntax). So I went ahead and asked ChatGPT how to render processed texts while iterating.

It came with a rather contrived solution which involved creating another computed property containing a list of processed texts. I started to integrate it into the existing loop: I would have to add index and use that index to pull the code from the computed property, which already felt a little bit weird.

That’s when it struck me: no, no, no, I can just f*ing use the function.

TL; DR: The point is, while ChatGPT was helpful I still needed to babysit it. And if I didn’t snap from my lazy moment, or if I simply didn’t know better, I would end up with code which is more complex, more surprising, which means harder to reason about for both humans and LLM’s. (For humans because now it forces you to speculate about coder’s intent, and for LLM’s because it’s less likely to be reminiscent of surrounding code in its learning data.)

Do you “discard” the water by… just letting it into the sink? How long before aresnic is everywhere?

That’s a noble goal but does adding more people help the (long-term only, please) effectiveness? At what point does it start hindering it?

I would assume that someone like a pharmacist has to be focused all the time, stakes is high…

Do we have precise data about how physiological state of a pharmacist is changing through the shift? Do we know whether or not the pauses between people – which we might or might not have considered a wasted time – are actually essential for their ability to stay focused and reliable? (Is the answer the same for all of them?) Or maybe they could actually still use part of that time in a productive way, right? Also, why is there lack of people in the first place?

Focusing solely on adding more people to the equation seems to neglect factors like this. This tells me that whoever this factoid is trying to impress is not someone who I would want to trust with managing a pharmacy (or anything except maybe some production line) in the first place.

Is “pharmacists seeing more patients” really a measure of something good? I’m a non-native English speaker so cut me some slack but all I can imagine is just longer queues in the pharmacy and more tired pharmacists (and people who now need to wait in the queue now).

The pic being blurred and all, I thought it’s going to be some dad joke around “pharmacist can see more patients”

I have lots of music which I got basically for free, and a lots of music for which I paid.

My general attitude towards music is that I’m in it to explore, learn and enjoy the indescribable human connection that I get through, and only through listening to someone’s little “message in a bottle”. Doing this for many years (I’m 44 so over 30 years now) I’ve learned that training my brain on multiple styles and genres, the connection can always get deeper and more rich.

So I would not be able to ever say a purchase was not worth it, because I would always assume such decision to be rushed. I had too many experiences when I listened to something, didn’t quite like it, but later I somehow “grew into” it, and then I learned to love it for years and years.

Different music ends up playing different roles in my life. Some albums end up teaching me a genre or a style, some end up acting like a gateway drug, some end up as a “stand in” for whole genre. Some end up as “holy relics” of who I was, and are re-visited from time to time to see whether I’ve changed and how. Some end up on a shelf and get re-discovered, some end up on a shelf forever.

(That “stand in” part is kinda tongue-in-cheek, but it sometimes almost works; eg. I would never set out to get a Dub album, but Dub Guerilla is one of the 100 best things I’ve ever heard, and it’s just so darn satisfying that it satisfies all and any of my Dub needs.)

Sometimes my brain can be just really petty about things, like completely disregarding an album because of a track or a section which I feel is a mistake. Sometimes I just know I will need much more time, sometimes I feel certain things might remain hard to get into maybe forever.

Don’t get me wrong, somewhere among those piles, there are really things that I won’t ever care to pick up, and perhaps would not purchase them again, but it almost never has much to do with number of listens. It might be things that I just got with bad expectation (ie. not listening upfront) or things that I enjoyed because of content (eg. lyrics) but I have changed and moved on.

Other times music is best experienced live, for some bands the “spirit” simply cannot be tamed, let alone reproduced. Sometimes I get album from band directly after a show and then end up never feeling it again from the CD, but then again, I would say it was not worth it, because it’s still a great way to “tip” the artist, and sometimes it will just work out.

(A bit more related to the OP: Incidentally, just today I broke my all-time record by spending about 20 EUR for V​í​n by Janus Rasmussen, and for reasons completely unrelated to OP and the price (but related to a sub-thread) I also did something I would never do normally–put one of the tracks on repeat for several hours. That’s not to brag about money–it’s just funny how it ended up accidentally as “$ per listen” experiment, although )

It’s ‘87’ by Janus Rasmussen, by the way

Also by the way, I got the album and it was the most I spent per minute of track ever (and my collection is hundreds of albums) – the album was 18 EUR (plus tax!), but then again, Icelandic economy, and I love to support artists, and I do love that song.

my music routine generally implies having a song or two on repeat for the day because they are a form of stimming for me

I’m not on spectrum on anything (anything diagnosed, anyway) but your comment inspired me to try and have a favorite tune on repeat for several hours, just to see what effect it would have on my ability to focus & anxiety, both of which are things I tend to struggle (although in my case it’s more related to insomnia).

Interesting experience, nicer than I would expect. Normally my music routine is to try and keep things diverse, but I do tend to get distracted by the need to choose what’s next (and radios can have own problems, alghough soma.fm is awesome.) This sort of removed the issue.

I do wonder how I will feel like when I turn it off, then in dreams, and then tomorrow. 😁

(It’s ‘87’ by Janus Rasmussen, by the way, and even after hours I’m still loving it!).

$10/hour entertainment budget

So… worst case you spend $87,600 per year? (assuming you want to be entertained during sleep as well…)

Dude, you just made this no doubt question far, far more interesting!

…and what if it was running AWAY from the sun!

Here, Fixed it for ya.

No, they were just superstitious, they did not know how huge the sun was.

But we know now so ALL HAIL THE SUN GOD!!!

I see, it has to be cultural. I’m from Czech Republic, but born close to Slovakian/Hungarian border. Where I come from, the spinach would be the suspicious ingredient. (I was like, “are you out of wipes or something?”)

Cucumbers, Balkan cheese, tomatoes, pepper, maybe onion would make it much easier to blend in the crowd.

There’s no justification, it’s part of a broken culture.

As a Czech citizen living in a city, I see it happening all around me. By far not for everyone, but for a lot of people treating trash properly is considered a fool’s errand, virtual signalling, try-hard, you name it. This toxicity is unfortunately too common in the culture, and lot of people (including me) are just afraid or tired of being seen as a try-hard. It’s especially “awkward” to clean up.

Obvious littering is one thing but I recon most of the trash floating around is due to “practical littering”, where people, if trash cans are full, will just “neatly” place their beloved trash next to the can, kiss it goodbye and walk around as if wind does not exist. I’m probably too cynical but sometimes I imagine the same people going judgemental when they see trash caught up in bushes.

As for cigarette butts, that’s just dumb. I don’t think I’ve seen someone toss something like a plastic bottle or a bag on the ground, just like that, more than 5 times in my life, but with cigarette butts I see them all the time – most often just before they jump on a tram or a bus. (I’m strongly against violence and bullying, but rationality aside, to be honest, there’s a part of me that is wishing they had to pick it up and chew it.)

(Goddamn, about 2 weeks ago, someone must have left some balls of yarn outside, next to a trashcan, on straight street. I was walking to grocery shop and some kind of thread was unrolled along the pavement for, i kid you not, like 150m. It was bizarre. Could have been some serious TikTok/YTShorts material if someone wanted to make a “goody PSA”.)

wait, why spinach? (text-only answer, please)

I’ve observed this multiple times with number 1.

As to anyone, it has happened to me many times over the course of my life, that after having to hold it for too long, the last minutes, seconds, end up a total rush against the time. There’s always this dramatic arc of making it just for the last second.

But I asked myself: if the urgency was merely function of the continuous kidney/bladder function then statistically, why would I almost always make it just by the lastest milisecond, and I would certainly lose the battle if my bathroom was 2 cm further. Clearly this is risky, esp. considering that sometimes things happen like the bathroom happens to be occupied or you can’t find your key or your zipper is stuck or something dumb, robbing you of that critical few seconds.

I’ve learned that to save myself from the unnecessary drama and rush, I can actually sort of convince myself that there is extra, say 10m between me and my bathroom. Just try to “lie” to my body a bit, about how far the right place is, or make up some vague extra steps as necessary to enable truly safe disposal. And it almost always gives me an extra few minutes.

It’s certainly one of those things when the signaling around the body is much more strategic than we would think.