squaresinger
@squaresinger@lemmy.world
- Comment on I'm gonna die on this hill or die trying 3 days ago:
One of them is the boss, the other is the people who have to read the AI garbage.
- Comment on Truly 4 days ago:
Without money, pretty much all gambling games turn out to be extremely boring.
I don’t even do in-game gambling because it’s just annoying. The last time I tried that, I ended up instead buying the 9999 coins with cash to get a Porygon, because the slot machines were so boring.
- Comment on Truly 4 days ago:
Poker isn’t really a fun game. Try playing it without money. It gets boring super fast.
If a game needs money to be fun, it’s not a fun game.
- Comment on it's just science, i guess 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, they could just as easily pivot to “Well, sure, autism was around before that, but it didn’t happen nearly as often.”
In fact, that was their actual argument. This is what Trump said:
First, effective immediately, the FDA will be notifying physicians that the use of, well, let’s see how we say that. Acetaminophen. Acetaminophen. Is that okay? Which is basically, commonly known as Tylenol. Can be associated with a very increased risk of autism. So taking Tylenol is not good. I’ll say it, it’s not good.
Within the rest of the rest of the speech you can clearly see where Trump goes off script and does his regular monkey-in-a-suit act, and he says stupid shit as always, but that up there is the core claim: “Can be associated with a very increased level of autism.”
That’s a claim that’s totally not affected by the “but autism existed before Tylenol” argument.
The whole argument is a strawman, nothing else. And that’s really infuriating because there are ample real arguments for this point. It’s not hard to argue that Tylenol has no link to Autism. But making up a strawman argument and butchering to even tear that strawman down is ridiculous.
- Comment on it's just science, i guess 2 weeks ago:
People died already 10 000 years ago.
The Ford Model T was released in 1908.
Anyone trying to tell you that being run over by a car kills people is entirely full of crap.
There’s real arguments that can be used. No need to publish weak crap that’s easily refuted.
- Comment on it's just science, i guess 2 weeks ago:
Adding to that what @Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works said: “links to” doesn’t mean “is exclusively caused by”.
That gotcha would only work if that was the claim.
So the argument reads a little like “People died before the Ford Model T entered the market, so obviously deaths aren’t caused by cars running over pedestrians.”
- Comment on it's just science, i guess 2 weeks ago:
Adding to that: “links to” doesn’t mean “is exclusively caused by”.
That gotcha would only work if that was the claim.
So the argument reads a little like “People died before the Ford Model T entered the market, so obviously deaths aren’t caused by cars running over pedestrians.”
- Comment on Samsung phones embedded with 'unremovable' Israeli spyware 2 weeks ago:
The region is quite an important part of the message.
- Comment on proof of wormholes 2 weeks ago:
Am I doing this right?
- Comment on proof of wormholes 2 weeks ago:
I guess we can.
- Comment on proof of wormholes 2 weeks ago:
@meowmeowbeanz@sopuli.xyz is totally right. The meme is based on a wrong premise.
It claims that Autism was a known thing in 1911 (true), and that Tylenol was created in 1955 (misleading since the active ingredient, Paracetamol was created in 1878 and was in wide use before the brand Tylenol was created). Then it implies that the argument is that Tylenol is the only cause of Autism and then poses that as a contradiction.
Logically, that’s like claiming that some People died in 1700, and that the Ford Model T was only created in 1908 and then claiming that thus it’s nonsense that cars can kill people.
On the one hand it ignores that the active ingredient of the medication was in use far earlier than that one random brand showing up, and on the other hand it claims that the argument with Tylenol and Autism is that every single case of Autism happens due to Tylenol, which pretty much nobody is claiming.
So the meme is just wrong on many levels.
So instead of making up and disproving a lie, why not use actual science? There’s overwhelming scientific evidence that Paracetamol has no effect on Autism.
One might say that this doesn’t really sway those who choose to ignore science in favour of their own gut feelings, but on the other hand, does a fallacious lie sway them?
- Comment on proof of wormholes 2 weeks ago:
How on earth is that a thing? Do Americans just read the first two letters of a name and then give up?
I mean, as an Austrian I get the confusion between Austria and AustrALia (emphasis added so that Americans can also see it), but SwEDEN vs SwISS is just wild.
- Comment on Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently 2 weeks ago:
Coming back to SimCity 2000 today, I find it much harder to callously play with the lives of my virtual citizens. The years I’ve spent as a homeowner, parent, and city-dwelling adult make me at least pause before I willingly inflict that kind of pain on my tiny subjects.
I can totally understand that feeling! I played a fair bit of Cities Skylines. To unlock all buildings you have to inflict quite a lot of chaos to your citicens, e.g. garbage needs to pile up like crazy or crime needs to be really high.
It was almost painful to unlock these buildings.
- Comment on International travel 2 weeks ago:
Yes. Being American gives you an unique way to be a dick, but you don’t have to take it.
- Comment on 2025 Ig Physics Nobel Prize goes to perfect pasta sauce 2 weeks ago:
OP is using Physics as an euphemism, and then uses it as a fornicative for expletive infixiation.
- Comment on Amazon, Google, Microsoft reportedly warn H-1B employees to stay in the US 2 weeks ago:
Anyone on a H-1B (or any other kind of visa) should get out as long as they still can.
- Comment on International travel 2 weeks ago:
It really depends though. If you are an openminded american who respects the locals and doesn’t have any issues talking a stand against the shitty politics and the mess the USA calls an economic situation, then you will likely not have an issue.
If you are an obnoxious asshole who thinks the USA is the greatest place ever and that any other place is beneath you, you might experience some substantial blowback.
Most people are clever enough to differentiate those two groups.
If the US starts a war against the country you travel to that might change though.
- Comment on Hmm this "unisex" bathroom seems biased... 3 weeks ago:
If this was a male-only bathroom I’d still totally agree with the content of the sign.
If you want to pee standing, use the urinal. I, as a man, don’t enjoy sitting in some other person’s pee either.
- Comment on Former Pokémon Company head lawyer says yeah, those latest Nintendo patents are a bit much, aren't they 3 weeks ago:
And the patent office too.
There really should be more oversight with the patent process.
- Comment on Former Pokémon Company head lawyer says yeah, those latest Nintendo patents are a bit much, aren't they 3 weeks ago:
You want to start a violent revolution over Nintendo filing bogus patent claims?
- Comment on Former Pokémon Company head lawyer says yeah, those latest Nintendo patents are a bit much, aren't they 3 weeks ago:
Now only someone has to dare to stand up to Nintendos lawyers. Not an easy feat.
- Comment on ... 3 weeks ago:
If there is a hell, these guys are going to get the penthouse or a nice villa, on account of how many people they brought in.
Why should the afterlife be more fair than the current life?
- Comment on Is there an increasing trend in the fear of germs/contamination (Mysophobia/Germophobia) ever since Covid-19, or is it just me? 3 weeks ago:
Intelligent people fear germs and contamination. Idiots still don’t wash their hands after toilet.
(And no, making your hands wet for a second is not washing them. Think of it like that: if you had shit on your plate, would you also just make it wet before eating off it, or would you spend some time scrubbing it clean?)
- Comment on September 2025: Updates for the .worlds and call for donations 3 weeks ago:
Since the admin salaries aren’t counted in the .world figure, it doesn’t matter how well that scales. That’s why we are trying to take them out of the equation.
Regardless of the actual numbers for reddit (which we plainly just don’t have), we do have numbers for plain old forums (e.g. phpBB) which provide a very similar service as Lemmy. And these numbers are far lower that what the .worlds pay.
The main issue here is replication. Each instance needs to store everything of all instances. That requires a ton of storage and that’s not for free. With a network of conventional forums you don’t have that issue.
Or to put it differently: If Lemmy was the size of Reddit (1.2 billion monthly users or roughly 32000x the size of Lemmy right now) and the number of instances scaled accordingly, there would be about 11.6 million instances, each hosting a copy of almost all the content. That’s a crazy amount of replication that increases the cost for everyone enormously. Because not only are there more instances that need to pay hosting costs, but the costs for each instance balloon as well.
But there’s an even bigger issue with the replication: Since everything is replicated, the owner of an instance can get into legal trouble for illegal stuff hosted on the instance, say e.g. illegal kinds of pornography or e.g. in the UK any kind of age-restricted content if they don’t do age verification.
That means an admin can’t just rely on other instances doing their modding correctly, but effectively every instance needs to moderate all federated content too.
That is a strain for 40k users (enough strain to e.g. close down lemmy.ee), but it becomes entirely unmanageable for 1.2 billion users.
- Comment on September 2025: Updates for the .worlds and call for donations 3 weeks ago:
Include the salary for admin and mods in the figure for lemmy and we are not at 10^3 for Lemmy either. The figure for lemmy includes only the pure hosting cost, while the figure for Reddit involves a ton more.
Reddit has 2233 full-time employees. If only half of them are working on the product, and you take $60mio a year as the budget, that would be $53700 per year and would include taxes, benefits and all that. Doesn’t strike me as an unrealistic salary, for people like admins, mods, support, devops, provisioning and all that.
Remember, we don’t have “hosting costs” as a figure for Reddit. We have “Cost of revenue” and that includes anything that goes into running the site.
- Comment on September 2025: Updates for the .worlds and call for donations 4 weeks ago:
Cost of revenue is $45.9 Million per quarter, so ~$15.3 per month. That’s even less than the administrative cost. And again, this certainly includes the salary for everyone working on hosting, and that’s going to be much, much less than the pure cost of hosting.
- Comment on September 2025: Updates for the .worlds and call for donations 4 weeks ago:
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s close to heroic what you are doing, I wasn’t criticising your efforts or your calculation at all. I’m quite sure you shopped around as much as possible to find the best deal for hosting.
I’m just talking about the technology behind it, and sadly when it comes to Lemmy, it’s sometimes quite painfully obvious that the whole system was built by two randos without a background in distributed computing. It’s not exactly efficient.
In a larger corporation it would count as a good prototype, then they’d scrap it and replace it with the real product. Kinda like how Reddit did it, starting out on Python (web.py was built for Reddit, IIRC), and when they gained enough users they scrapped it and rewrote the whole thing using proper distributed computing technologies.
- Comment on September 2025: Updates for the .worlds and call for donations 4 weeks ago:
You are right, must have misclicked somewhere for the lemmy.world stats. Here are the real ones: lemmy.fediverse.observer/lemmy.world
15472 monthly active users.
But your Reddit numbers are off by quite some margin. First, you are comparing Reddit’s daily active users to lemmy.world’s monthly active users. Reddit has 10^9 monthly active users (1.21 billion, to be exact).
Also, the ~€2000 for lemmy.world are pure hosting costs (except of €153 for donations), but for Reddit you included their whole revenue. That’s not even their costs, that’s their income.
I dug through their Earnings press release, and also there they don’t specifically talk about their hosting costs. The closest I could find was “General and administrative” costs, which is what’s left over of their total costs if you don’t take “Cost of revenue”, R&D and marketing into consideration, and that’s $68.8 million per quarter (~$32 million per month), so 10^7, and that includes salaries and all sorts of other expenses down to the rent of the offices, the PCs their staff use and even the toilet paper. Hosting costs are at best a few percent of that figure, likely much less. So I’d knock that down to 10^6.
That would give us $10^-3 to $10^-2 (if all administrative costs are purely hosting costs) per user. That’s about the difference between paying €2000 to host a Lemmy instance with 15k monthly active users and €50 for hosting a phpBB instance to do the same.
- Comment on Time to bash Americans again 4 weeks ago:
What’s made up? That the US has school cops and Europe doesn’t?
- Comment on Time to bash Americans again 4 weeks ago:
Because these people think they are “better”. So when a wild barbaric immigrant shows up, they want that person to assimilate, but when they move among the unwashed lower folks, they don’t want to assimilate themselves, because it would be a step down in their eyes.
(I am talking about their view, which I very much despise, just as a clarification)
