What happened to PugJesus?
Comment on And forgot it when waking up
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Can someone explain the formula? Is it real? What does it do?
I miss PugJesus :( he would usually explain these things
PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
luciferofastora@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
He’d been unhappy with some stuff the Lemmy devs do for a while, but when kbin shut down, he moved to lemmy, and when piefed seemed like a reasonable alternative moved his accounts and communities to piefed.social.
Then rimu decided that a handful of most active users with hundreds or thousands of upvotes per day shouldn’t get to have such an impact, so he installed a daily cap for how many votes per user per day are counted, discarding the rest. Essentially, this limits engagement in an attempt to “even out” its distribution by cutting off the top. It’s an opt-out feature for other piefed instances, but on his own (piefed.social), he obviously activated it.
PugJesus, being one of those most active users, was quite upset with the prospect of having to ration his upvotes. By his own description, he’d easily fill out much of that cap just upvoting all the good-faith replies on his posts, let alone if he were to also engage in discussion elsewhere and equally use upvotes there to encourage good-faith conversation. It evidently caused anxiety and soured his experience.
Even if he were to use an account from a different instance, that restriction still affects the communities. Having migrated three times already (idk what the third one was, but given how much effort even one move for a whole community can be…), PJ was tired of it and didn’t wanna migrate again. So he did what rimu wanted:
Stop engaging.
(He’s around, occasionally, but not nearly as active, nor does he post as much. Can’t blame him. Sure isn’t helping that there’s a certain subset of people that hate him for various reasons. He’d probably respond if I summoned him, but I’m not sure I want to drag him back to that topic and make him feel like he has to comment.)
Sources:
- his farewell post: feddit.uk/post/52137875
- a more recent comment: feddit.uk/post/54413451/27149417
PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Yay my first fediverse drama!!!
luciferofastora@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
One of today’s… lucky? ten thousand, I guess
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
You’ve missed so much. I won’t catch you up because none of it matters, and being aware of petty drama among a group of redditors will not improve your life.
jerkface@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
he left over internet points that don’t mean anything or have a practical effect on anything?
SeptugenarianSenate@leminal.space 2 weeks ago
it sounds to me like it may have been more about being able to curate the community through active engagement more than an attachment to the end product of such a feature, i.e. total profile “score” of different users’ contributions.
PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
honestly sounds like he got consumes by his hatred. I loved the guy but he had serious issues and would debate anybody who disagreed with him. Sad to see yet another active community member get consumed by hatred and frustration
luciferofastora@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
I never got the impression of hatred from him.
would debate anybody who disagreed with him
I mean, debate is the way to test arguments and refine understanding. If your understanding diverges from someone else’s (like mine does from yours here), is it wrong to point out why you think they’re wrong and either help them understand some part better or be taught by them instead?
I think that’s just a different mode of communication and using social media. I know he’s chronically ill and believe he describes himself as “cripple”, suggesting that his body has forsaken him, which makes IRL social activities difficult and painful.
The beauty of the internet is that you can interact with people there, even if your body can’t handle going to the pub or whatever. So I don’t blame him for leaning more on his mind than his body and being chronically online if the offline world is chronically hell.
Sad to see yet another active community member get consumed by hatred and frustration
I think the frustration is mostly at the fact that rimu is pursuing a policy other admins have advised against and it’s killing his fun. He has stated several times that he doesn’t think rimu is totally off-kilter and that he gets the motive, just doesn’t agree that it would have any beneficial effect on the fediverse.
That doesn’t sound like hatred to me, more the disappointment of seeing a working partner you otherwise respect take steps that make it hard for you to keep working with them.
pinto@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The man who always wrote angry comments 24/7 and refuses to have a consistent thought for upset and left. Supposedly. He always lurks when someone mentions his name.
We’re on month 2 of him leaving for good.
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
daily cap for how many votes per user per day are counted
Ok, but this is good actually, there’s a lot more accounts voting a dozen times a minute for hours than people actually reading a thousand comments a day and responding accordingly.
PugJesus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Ok, but this is good actually, there’s a lot more accounts voting a dozen times a minute for hours than people actually reading a thousand comments a day and responding accordingly.
By Rimu’s own data, there were about five users who were above the ‘cap’ of 240 a day. None of which he suspected of being bots.
Sorry that you can’t do basic math, or understand that an upvote is precisely so one doesn’t have to type a response.
luciferofastora@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Source?
Last I followed that conversation, rimu stated that it wasn’t about vote manipulation or spam, just about the outsized influence of people who spend more time online (for instance because they’re chronically ill and the offline world therefore just doesn’t hold any appeal to them).
Your comment took a few seconds to read in my inbox. If I made a post that took off and got a hundred replies, most of which are nice but don’t warrant an in-depth response, I could read and swipe to upvote each in a few seconds, leaving the ones warranting more time and a reply unread and going back for them afterwards.
If the intention is that people should comment or post more rather than (just) voting, making them vote less isn’t gonna achieve that. A comment is nowhere near a decent substitute for a vote. The difference in effort between “swipe” and “swipe, think of what you want to say, consider whether it’s too inane to be worth a comment, fret over the wording to avoid accidentally stepping on toes you care about, knowing that people may end up judging you for your choice of words anyway, or maybe even complain about you commenting too much in general” is monumental. The venomous treatment he’s been getting isn’t helping.
And even if he did comment, what if the other person replies in a civil manner? You’d like to reward and encourage that. If you’re out of votes for the day, the only thing you could do is reply “+” or some variant, which would probably result in people jumping down your throat for making such a pointless comment, similar to the “this” comments. “That’s what upvotes are for”, I’ve seen people argue. Which is entirely correct, but what if you’re out of upvotes? Do you just stop engaging for the day, knowing you’ll be frustrated anyway?
The bottom line is that a vote cap inhibits engagement. If we wanna prevent engagement bait and karma farming, we can simply not show anyone’s “score” on their profiles and moderate excessive outrage bait posts.
So this achieves nothing good, just punishes those that contributed most.
cabillaud@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Why is moving account such a chore, again?
luciferofastora@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Not just accounts, communities. He was managing a few communities he’d migrated over to piefed who would continue to be affected by that limit even if he switched account, essentially shadowbanning his votes at some point.
Moving a community means hoping that enough regulars see the notification to “jumpstart” the new community to the point the new posts show up in /all for the rest of the old community to pick up on it and realise they’re not subscribed. You’ll also need to keep reminding people posting in the old community to post to the new one instead for a while.
It’s kinda founding a new community for a topic that already has an established community, then trying to get that established one to join your new one.
That’s a lot of effort I can see him no longer wanting to do.
grozzle@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
PieFed did some policy change on… weighting votes for people who vote thousands of times a day, or something like that? PJ said that made him want to change instance again, but he’d done that a few times already and couldn’t be bothered with the process again. (this is from memory, i haven’t double checked while writing)
luciferofastora@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
It was a cap. 240, as far as I know. Given that it would make him ration his engagement and caused him anxiety, he was fed up, but didn’t wanna move a third time.
thethunderwolf@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
instance banned for zionism iirc and decided not to rejoin more
Jankatarch@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Ramanujan’s pi formula.
Similar formulas were used to calculate digits of pi very fast.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
I see. It makes so much sense now.
Thank you
sparkyshocks@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
There are many different formulas for deriving digits of pi, and the history of mathematics has a bunch of people trying to brute force inefficient formulas for pi out to a few digits, as they develop more efficient methods.
Archimedes drew a circle and put some polygons around the inner and outer limits to determine that it was somewhere between 22/7 and 223/71, accurate to within 2 digits. That general polygon method was used by Ptolemy to calculate out to 3 digits, and used by Chinese mathematician Zu Chongzhi to estimate pi at 355/113, accurate to 7 digits.
The polygon method was very tedious, requiring many, many calculations in order to advance just a few digits.
The Liebniz formula was a breakthrough (discovered by Indian mathematician Madhava of Sangamagrama), because discovering that pi/4 was equal to the infinite series 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 . . . meant that someone could calculate some number of digits accurately, and then continue the calculation in a way that reports what is known so far, and can continue down the line towards a more precise result. Still, by itself, it was a very slowly converging algorithm, requiring 5 billion terms just to get to 10 digits of accuracy. Mathematicians got to using other tricks (that, if I’m being honest, I don’t understand) to make it faster.
Then Ramanujan discovered series that were rapidly converging (including the one in this meme) where although calculating each term might require a lot of calculations, it would spit out 8 digits for each term you fed it. It became the preferred method for calculating digits of pi, and when computers were developed, they were able to make use of that computational efficiency. It still remains the basis for how a computer will calculate a few million digits of pi.
spicehoarder@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
How convenient, to come up with a formula that spits out 32 bits
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Okay that’s really cool actually, thanks for the explanation