
Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said the inquiry could help Congress decide whether to continue funding local stations.

I made LASIM! https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
I currently have 3 accounts (big shock):
Meanwhile just a few posts above this:
A deadly E. coli outbreak hit 15 states, but the FDA chose not to publicize it
This is a fair assessment, but all of them should know better than using Signal for this kind of thing.
For all the people cheering or indifferent to this:
But surely one user posting illegal content would get blasted to all connected instances making everyone guilty.
So... Worse. Much worse.
It obviously depends on your exact git workflow, but my last team had things setup so that the code content of a MR was automatically squashed on merge, and the text if the MR itself was automatically set as the content of the new singular git commit.
This was largely the best of both worlds because your commits could have almost any text, and the description of what changed could be updated as needed when making the MR. But it ultimately ended up in the git history where it belonged.
Of course, I still had some trouble trying to get the team to describe their changes well in the MR at times - but that's a different problem entirely.
It wasn't always an option - around the time of the first big mass migration of Reddit users it wasn't something you could do. I actually wrote a tool at that time that could automate the manual action of re-subscribing / re-blocking everything.
But yeah, these days it's a feature of Lemmy itself, which is great because it's much more efficient than trying to do things client-side.
Super cool project. FYI it does require converting your ebooks to a special format.
I suspected as much since it's using an Arduino Mega - very battery efficient I'm sure, but very underpowered.
Definitely recommend people read this except from the book in its entirety here: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm
But here's a piece of it:
"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."
I don't disagree that it could work, but I'm also not sure it's that simple either.
There's a big difference in trying to get people to protest for the threat that is over the horizon than the one in power for 40 years. People just aren't good at conceptualizing the weight of that future pain against what they currently stand to lose.
And they could lose a lot - their job first, which also means their house and their health insurance. Not to mention plenty of laws criminalizing most protest already, where you are bound to be caught on camera or via other digital surveillance, and a single arrest on your permanent record means no future employment, and missed payments on your credit history means no future economic prospects.
And believe me I know the risk of that is worth it, and the risks you'd have in the future are even worse, but most people in the country still aren't ready to make that trade - hell, most still deny the direction things are headed.
Yeah, people abroad are wondering why Americans won't just stand up, but the reality is that the country is massive and you need an incredible organizing effort to offer any real, organized resistance.
And sure, some groups have tried, but you really need your opposition party, or some kind of major celebrity, or someone else with major reach to organize something that reaches every American and pulls them together to action.
And that just hasn't happened. Some people have spoken out, but nobody has been willing to lead that next step and really lead a movement. Words aren't gonna be enough to counter this.
01/30/2025 - F.C.C. Chair Orders Investigation Into NPR and PBS Sponsorships
Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said the inquiry could help Congress decide whether to continue funding local stations.
Seth Stern, the director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, said he believed Mr. Carr seemed to be setting up a legal pretext for interfering with public media.
“The end of Mr. Carr’s letter tellingly goes far beyond underwriting and talks about his thoughts on whether public media should be funded at all and notes that this underwriting issue might be relevant to a broader legislative debate,” Mr. Stern said. “That was troubling to read.”
01/28/2025 - All federal grants and loan disbursement paused by White House
Bleh, maybe I'm an old man, but when I'm searching stackoverflow, I find the context of stack overflow answers really helpful.
I.E. the top result may include caveats itself or have comments indicating why an answer might be problematic. And sometimes the best answer isn't even the top answer. I've not used AI code assistance very much, but these all seem like things that the model is likely to take for granted.
But I also never contribute to stackoverflow, and agree I'd much rather engage with with an AI than do THAT.
Doesn't look like it's on sale, at least in the US
Well in 2015 Jimmy Carter said that the United States is "just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. "
That same year The Economist's Democracy Index downgraded the United States to a "flawed democracy" and it has continued to trend downwards since then.
If you're looking for something more recent, Bernie Sanders is saying the same thing: "We are moving rapidly into an oligarchic form of society. Never before in American history have so few billionaires, so few people, have so much wealth and so much power".
So between the massive (and growing) income inequality in the country, and rulings like Citizen's United it's hard not to believe it's not at least on the trajectory towards an oligarchy. Now throw in the blatantly corrupt picks of the Trump administration, where cabinet positions are favors to rich friends, or being given to billionaires with a direct interest in killing the government agency they are running - not to mention all the things he's routinely done / will do to enrich himself / friends with tax payer dollars and it certainly seems like an oligarchy to me.
And just on a personal vibes level, living here, it feels like legislation to help normal people or solve normal people's problems is almost non-existent. And when it does happen, it also conveniently throws a ton of money at the rich at the same time (see recent tax cuts, pandemic relief funds, etc.). Even something like the Affordable Care Act, which did a ton of net good things for this country, enriched a whole lot of private healthcare companies along the way rather than creating an actual public option with negotiated prices to keep government costs down.
I don't know enough to say if it's a valid theory, but I saw one commenter suggest this scenario:
I had a similar situation where a fence of this style was placed directly next to a bike path. At walking height, it would have been hard to land on, but on a bike at speed? It would have been way too easy to be impaled, and it was terrifying.
I've been wondering if he will try the trillion dollar coin workaround.
Previously, no one's been willing to open that can of worms, but this is Trump we're talking about.
In fairness, my understanding is that there are a lot of complications with adding distributed power to existing grids. That doesn't mean it shouldn't happen, just that there are engineering and safety challenges when power is coming from "everywhere" vs centrally.
And of course, there's a lot of energy companies lobbying against clean power sources as well.
Curious did you get the survey popup in desktop mode on the deck? Or does it work in "big picture"?
I got the hardware survey on my Windows PC, but not on my Steamdeck. So I wonder if there is only 1 survey per user, and most people don't use a steamdeck exclusively?
Shounic: why can you force push the cart even if it's blocked by red players?
Click to view this content.
FYI for Rust Developers, lemmy_api_common is no longer published to crates.io (0.18.3 and above)
This is not needed anymore as from scratch installation now uses `git clone` instead of `cargo install`. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/pull/241/files
You will want to change your Cargo.toml to point to the Lemmy Github repository + either a specific tag or branch for the version you want to target.
See the examples here: https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/specifying-dependencies.html#specifying-dependencies-from-git-repositories
A list of casual communities on Lemmy (that aren't just tech news & politics)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2216085
Search Lemmyverse is good for finding communities.
I posted this on the other site but I thought I'd copy over here too, lots of good communities around to subscribe to if you want a more casual/fun frontpage that isn't just tech news, elon musk, or politics.
note: all of these communities have posts. If they appear empty, it simply means nobody on the instance you use has visited them before (or you might have blocked them and forgot, I've done it before, lol)!
Conversation communities
These are places that are 'chatty', good if you want a lot of comments.
"ask" based
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
Casual chat / Misc
- [email protected] - casual chat com
YSK there are options for backing up / migrating your Lemmy subscriptions, blocks, etc.
(Full disclosure: I made one of the tools)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/1292268
lemmy.world cross-post link: https://lemmy.world/post/1251192
With the vlemmy situation ongoing, i feel like it would be useful to put this here (i did not make either of these tools)
Lemmy Account Settings Instance Migrator (LASIM) copies all your subscribed communities and blocks and lets you upload them to another account, in just a few clicks
lemmy-migrate does the same thing but without a GUI and support for uploading your backup to multiple accounts at once
LASIM - A little tool for migrating Lemmy settings / subscriptions / blocks between instances / accounts
Move your Lemmy settings from one account to another - GitHub - CMahaff/lasim: Move your Lemmy settings from one account to another
See the linked page for information about how it works, limitations, etc. and I’ll of course answer any questions below!
Right now supports just Lemmy BE 0.18.1 (rc9, rc10, and final release).
LASIM - A little tool for migrating Lemmy settings / subscriptions / blocks between accounts
Move your Lemmy settings from one account to another - GitHub - CMahaff/lasim: Move your Lemmy settings from one account to another
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1171660
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1060796
See the linked page for information about how it works, limitations, etc. and I'll of course answer any questions below!
As I have stated in the release section, this software is alpha so please don't be afraid to report bugs!
Releases are here: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim/releases
Right now the program only supports Lemmy BE 0.18.1-rc9, but new releases will try to support new versions as they are released. The Lemmy API is changing a ton right now, but I'll try to keep up.
Note: Supports 0.18.1-rc9+ - I have tested it with rc9, rc10, and the final release of 0.18.1.
When your instance defederates from another instance, their content can’t be pushed to you, but is there a way to stop your content from being pushed to them? (Answered: Misunderstanding)
Or have I misunderstood?
I suspect the response will be that content on your instance should always be considered public, and that you can't really stop a bad actor from spinning up fake instances or scraping your site for the data regardless, but I just wanted to confirm.
When your instance defederates from another instance, their content can't be pushed to you, but is there a way to stop your content from being pushed to them?
Or have I misunderstood entirely?
LASIM - A little tool for migrating Lemmy settings / subscriptions / blocks between accounts
Move your Lemmy settings from one account to another - GitHub - CMahaff/lasim: Move your Lemmy settings from one account to another
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1060796
See the linked page for information about how it works, limitations, etc. and I'll of course answer any questions below!
As I have stated in the release section, this software is alpha so please don't be afraid to report bugs!
Releases are here: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim/releases
Right now the program only supports Lemmy BE 0.18.1-rc9, but new releases will try to support new versions as they are released. The Lemmy API is changing a ton right now, but I'll try to keep up.
Note: Supports 0.18.1-rc9+ - I have tested it with rc9, rc10, and the final release of 0.18.1.
I made a little tool for migrating Lemmy settings / subscriptions / blocks between accounts
Move your Lemmy settings from one account to another - GitHub - CMahaff/lasim: Move your Lemmy settings from one account to another
See the linked page for information about how it works, limitations, etc. and I'll of course answer any questions below!
As I have stated in the release section, this software is alpha so please don't be afraid to report bugs!
Releases are here: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim/releases
Right now the program only supports Lemmy BE 0.18.1-rc9, but new releases will try to support new versions as they are released. The Lemmy API is changing a ton right now, but I'll try to keep up.
IN ENGLISH PLEASE | Chris & Jack
Click to view this content.
Best Providers for hosting a Lemmy Instance?
Over the next week or so I'm sure a lot of people are going to try spinning up Lemmy instances - I've certainly been looking at it.
Does anyone have any recommendations for a VPS provider / resource allocation?
From what I have read, it sounds like you're going to want a host that focuses on storage / bandwidth (at least if you are allowing image upload), but maybe those of you already operating an instance have a different opinion?