This actually gets me thinking… Is anyone actually working on an aids vaccine? Maybe mRNA could do something there, theoretically it should be able to grant pretty much any type of immunity you can have naturally

They didn’t sell it at auction, they sold it at an auction for charity. Entirely different

Because immunity varies by disease.

Chicken pox? Pretty much one and done. COVID? Falls off rapidly after 3 months, whether you catch it or get the vaccine

Plus, every mutation is a dice roll on how much existing immunity will apply. It could be exactly the same as the last strain, or the old immunity might not help at all

Yeah, except they federate. They keep lists about who they federate, defederate, and know of in machine readable format

So what’s going on is the adversaries continuously hitting the lemmy.world server. On its own, a DDOS like that would be manageable - they’re much more defeatable these days

But they found request paths that run expensive db functions, giving them enough bang for their buck to make an impact, even tucked behind cloudflare.

As for mitigation, cloudflare and a larger server help, but ultimately lemmy needs some refactoring - right now it’s very liberal with the database calls. It needs to divide those up and get more granular with API calls, look at what can be optimized on the DB side, maybe do some caching/memoization… Basically, it needs to become a more mature piece of software in a hurry

Going further, there’s things like horizontal scaling - there’s even thoughts of how we could leverage the nature of the fediverse to share the load through federation.

I’m a dev, I don’t know much about administration so I’m not sure how you could help, but there’s plenty of work to go around. I think a database expert would be the most useful right now.

There’s messing with configs to tune everything for better performance - that’s out of my expertise, but I’m under the impression that there’s some significant gains to be had there

If it’s in your wheelhouse, you could look at different technologies that might give better performance - the current stack seems like it was chosen mostly with ease of development in mind, if you could make a strong argument for changing some of it out it might get traction.

As far as cyber security in general, if you want to get started - step 1 is basically locking things down, and then setting up monitoring tools and getting experience with them. Basically reading logs taken to the next level. I’m pretty sure they have that handled here, but this problem will never go away

On one hand yeah, I’d look at us pretty dimly from the outside

On the other, we’ve been kinda fucked. Our mental health is in the gutter, we’re unable to make connections the way every other generation could, we’re missing all these milestones like buying a house and having kids and older generations keep telling us it’s our fault.

Even as far as voting, we’ve been fucked. Previous generations had a choice - we get an ultimatum

They just keep gaslighting us.

We don’t have the money, we don’t have the power, but we do have the numbers and as a group we’re not ok… Frankly, there’s no way this ends well. It’s hard to comprehend how the powers that be haven’t realized that and thrown us a bone now and again

Huh… I’m a huge proponent of brushing your tongue (it doesn’t take much, just a brush with a scraper on the back makes a big difference). I’ve never really tried washcloths, but now I’m going to give them a shot

On the flip side, my skin is weird. I get hives for literally no reason, I tried one of those plastic poofs and it makes me itch like crazy.

🤞

IDK if you can convince it to run on Linux, but I’ve been pretty happy with paint.net lately

It’s basically a newer project like gimp. It’s got the core abilities and appearance of Photoshop. Feature wise, it’s less than gimp or Photoshop, but what it has works decently well

Most importantly for me, the UX is much better than gimp… Not as good as Photoshop, but I find stuff is usually where I’d expect it to be

Obviously it’s built on .net, so theoretically it could run native on Linux… Not sure if anyone has done the work to make that actually happen

Fair enough, a pejorative term for what exactly though? The most nuanced answer I’ve gotten is from a proponent of communism who pointed at the authoritarian bent to it… Which seems super weird to me.

The way I see it, a bureaucracy has more leeway in allocating goods the higher up you go, which is very literal administrative capitol - it’s totally in conflict with the core concept of Marx, which is a person getting the fruits of their own labor, and no one getting to milk others (which is really the only way to get much inequality)

I’m a lot more critical of lennonists. While on the surface it imitates capitalism’s ability to optimize production (and with a more aligned goal, minimizing scarcity instead of maximizing the supply-demand equation), it also reintroduces the alignment problem. As you scale up, individual action and ideological beliefs become blips in the data, and the super organism created through humans arranged in the structure.

Individuals have a perverse incentive to maximize their own authority, the number of people under them, and the scale of their operations - by doing that they appear more meritocratous and are more likely to move up the hierarchy. Eventually someone gets the idea to fudge the numbers, and since the metrics are too complex to spot this in a spreadsheet, the most widely selected for skill to move up the ladder is to distort (or spin) the numbers so an individual appears to be serving a greater need than what actually exists.

Lennon’s theory is great, the more centralized the distribution, the greater the potential for optimization - but it ignores the emergent properties that appear when humans form an entity too complex for individual humans to grasp the full picture. You can reign in the worst excesses through watchdogs and harsh punishments, but ultimately that just becomes another layer for power to concentrate. You can keep layering and slow down the rot, but it’s a fundamental alignment problem - either you purposely concentrate the power in a person or group and regress to autocracy, or you constantly keep adding layers of checks and balances (which eats away at the efficiency gains)

So I see a fundamental contradiction here, which is why I can get behind techno-communism with intelligent agents running the show, or I can get behind decentralizing the system and creating something more anarchistic (or ideally, both), but Lennon always seemed to me to be a smart architect given a problem with a scale and an urgency beyond his abilities

Or am I missing something fundamental?

So I’ve heard tankies defined as “someone who specifically supports the centralized, authorization flavor of communism practiced by the USSR”. They also often mention worship of Stalin and Mao, and a revisionist version of history supporting such a stance

This seems odd to me, especially since a group of tankies flocked early to a decentralized platform geared for long-form discussions

Personally, I believe capitalism is an ideological virus. You can trace a clear path from the Roman empire to the modern day, where a hyper-specialized society eradicated every other system of resource husbandry by sloppily harvesting as quick as possible and using that advantage to gangpress everyone else into service under them (and destroying anything that would even slightly slow down the process )

I don’t think communism is the answer, because I don’t think it’s a path we can walk without first curing the disease, but the guiding concepts resonate with me.

So in that light, I’d like to ask in good faith:

Self-identified tankies - how do you define a tankie?