litchralee

@litchralee@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How many virtual machines can you nest?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  All I can offer you is USA interstate commerce, notable rail vs road innovations in the 18th Century, North American electricity supplies, and bicycle wheel construction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How many virtual machines can you nest?⁩ ⁨⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll take a stab at the question, but we will need to dive into a small amount of computer engineering to explain. To start, I am going to assume an x86_64 platform, because while ARM64 and other platforms do support hardware-virtualization, x86_64 is the most popular and most relevant since its introduction at the beginning of the 2000s. My next assumption is that we are using non-ancient hardware, for reasons that will become clear.

  As a base concept, a virtual machine means that we have a guest OS that runs subordinate to a host OS on the same piece of hardware. The host OS essentially treats the guest OS as though it is just another userspace process, and gives the guest some time on the CPU, however the host sees fit. The guest OS, meanwhile, is itself a full-blown OS that manages its own userspace processes, divying out whatever CPU time and memory that it can get from the host OS, and this is essentially identical to how it would behave if the guest OS were running on hardware.

  The most rudimentary form of virtual machine isolation was achieved back in the 1960s, with software-based virtual machines. This meant that the host emulated every single instruction that the guest OS would issue, recreating every side-effect and memory access that the guest wanted. In this way, the guest OS could run without change, and could even have been written in an entirely different CPU architecture. The IBM System/360 family of mainframes could do this, as a way of ensuring business customers that their old software could still run on new hardware.

  The drawbacks are that the performance is generally less-than-stellar, but in an era that valued program correctness, this worked rather well. Also, the idea would carry into higher level languages, most notably the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The Java language generally compiles down to bytecode suitable to run on the JVM (which doesn’t really exist), and then real machines would essentially run a JVM emulator to actually call the program. In this way, Java is a high-level language that can run anywhere, if provided a JVM implementation.

  An advancement from software virtualization is hardware-assisted virtualization, where some amount of the emulation task is offloaded to the machine itself. This is most relevant when virtualizing the same CPU architecture, such as an x86_64 guest on an x86_64 host. The idea is that lots of instructions have no side-effects that affect the host, and so can be run natively on the CPU, then return control back to the host when reaching an instruction that has side-effects. For example, the basic arithmetic operation of adding two registers imposes no risks to the stability of the machine.

  To do hardware-assisted virtualizaton requires that the hardware can intercept (or traps) such instructions as they appear, since the nature of branch statements or conditionals means that we can’t detect in-advance whether the guest OS will issue those instructions or not. The CPU will merrily execute all the “safe” instructions within the scope of the guest, but the moment that it sees an “unsafe” instruction, it must stop and kick back control to the host OS, which can then deal with that instruction in the original, emulated fashion.

  The benefit is that the guest OS remains unmodified (yay for program correctness!) while getting a substantial speed boost compared to emulation. The drawback is that we need the hardware to help us. Fortunately, Intel and AMD rose to the challenge once x86-on-x86 software virtualization started to show its worth after the early 2000s, when VMWare et al demonstrated that the concept was feasible on x86. Intel VT-x and AMD-V are the hardware helpers, introducing a new set of instructions that the host can issue, which will cause the CPU to start executing guest OS instructions until trapping and returning control back to the host.

  I will pause to note why same-on-same CPU architecture virtualization is even desirable, since compared to the emulation-oriented history, this might not seem immediately useful. Essentially, software-based virtualization achieved two goals, the latter which would become extremely relevant only decades later: 1) allow running a nested “machine”, and 2) isolate the nested machine from the parent machine. When emulation was a given, then isolation was practically assured. But for same-on-same virtualization, the benefit of isolation is all that remains. And that proved commercially viable when silicon hit a roadblock at ~4 GHz, and we were unable to make practical single-core CPUs go any faster.

  That meant that growing compute would come in the form of multiple cores per CPU chip, and this overlapped with a problem in the server market where having a separate server for your web server, and database server, and proxy server, all of these cost money. But seeing as new CPUs have multiple cores, it would save a bunch of money to consolidate these disparate servers into the same physical machine, so long as they could be assured that they were still logically running independently. That is to say, if only they were isolated.

  Lo and behold, Intel VT-X and AMD-V were introduced just as core counts were scaling up in the 2010s. And this worked decently well, since hardware-assisted virtualization was a fair order of magnitude faster than trying to emulate x86, which we could have done but it was just too slow for commercialization.

  ---

  Some problems quickly emerged, due to the limitations of the hardware assistance. The first has to do with how the guest OS expects to operate, and the second to do with how memory in general is accessed in a performant manner. The fix for these problems involves more hardware assistance features, but also relaxing the requirement that the guest OS remain unchanged. When the guest OS is modified to be better virtualized, this is known as paravirtualization.

  All modern multi-tasking OS with non-trivial amounts of memory (which would include all guest OS’s that we care about) does not organize its accessible memory as though it were a "flat’ plane of memory. Rather, memory is typically “paged” – meaning that it’s divvied out in pre-ordained chunks, such as 4096 Bytes – and frequently also makes use of “virtual memory”. Unfortunately, this is a clash in nomenclature, since “virtual memory” long predates virtualization. But understand that “virtual memory” means that userspace programs won’t see physical addresses for its pointers, but rather a fictional address which is cleverly mapped back to physical addresses.

  When combining virtual memory with pages, the OS is able to give userspace programs the appearance of near-unlimited, contiguous memory, even though the physical memory behind those virtual addresses are scattered all over the place. This is a defining feature of an OS: to organize and present memory sensibly.

  The problem for virtualization is that if the host OS is already doing virtual+paged memory management, then it forces the guest OS to live within the host’s virtual+paged environment, all while the guest OS also wants to do its own virtual+paged memory management to service its own processes. While the host OS can rely upon the physical MMU to efficiently implement virtual+paged memory management, the guest OS cannot. And so the guest OS is always slowed down by the host having to emulate this job.

  The second issue relates to caching, and how a CPU can accelerate memory accesses if it can fetch larger chunks of memory than what the program might be currently accessing, in anticipation. This works remarkably well, but only if the program has some sense of locality. That is, if the program isn’t reading randomly from the memory. But from the hardware’s perspective, it sees both the host OS and guest OS and all their processes, which starts to approximate a Gaussian distribution when they’re all running in tandem, and that deeply impacts caching performance.

  The hardware solution is to introduce an MMU that is amenable to virtualization, one which can manage both the host OS’s paged+virtual memory as well as any guest OS’s paged+virtual memory. Generally, this is known as Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) and is implemented as AMD’s Rrapid Virtualizaion Indexing or Intel’s Extended Page Tables. This feature allows the MMU to consider page tables – the basic unit of any MMU – that nest below a superior page table. In this way, the host OS can delegate to the guest a range of pages, and the guest OS can manage those pages, all while the MMU gives the guest OS some acceleration because this is all done in hardware.

  This also helps with the caching situation, since if the MMU is aware that the memory is in a nested page table (ie guest OS memory), then that likely also means the existing cache for the host is irrelevant, and vice-versa. An optimization would be to split the cache space, so that it remains relevant only to the host or to the guest, without mixing up the two.

  ---

  With all that said, we can now answer your question about what would happen .With hardware extensions like VT-x and SLAT, I would expect that cascading VMs would consume CPU and memory resources almost linearly, due to each guest OS adding its own overhead and running its own kernel. At some point, the memory performance would slow to a crawl, since there’s a limit on how much the physical cache can be split. But the CPU performance would likely be just fine, such as if you ran a calculation for digits of Pi on the 50th inner VM. Such calculations tend to use CPU registers rather than memory from DDR, and so could run natively on the CPU without trapping to any of the guests.

  But I like the other commenter’s idea of just trying it and see what happens.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't cars have a way to contact nearby cars like fictional spaceships do?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  What if the ability to communicate freely with other drivers made the experience closer to walking in a crowd.

  In a dense crowd, the information being exchanged amongst the crowd is enormous. It is a constant negotiation, of different parties trying to get somewhere but also trying (hopefully) to respect other people’s space. And the stakes are lower, because bumping into someone is fine at 1 kph but totally unacceptable at 50 kph. And humans are dynamically adjustable, like raising ones arms so that a stroller can pass more easily. Cars can’t really do that (except Transformers: Robots In Disguise).

  In a crowded bazaar, the bandwidth from reading people’s facial cues, from seeing whether they’re distracted by goods on display or from their Instagram posts, plus what people actually say – and what they don’t say – and how quickly or slowly they walk. All of that is context that is necessary to participate in the activity of passing through the crowd, and I think that cost-optimized technology to exchange the same amount of info while also needing to react 50x faster and deterministically, with safety standards suitable for 2-tonne machines that already kill and maim thousands per year, that’s not really feasible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't cars have a way to contact nearby cars like fictional spaceships do?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly this. I’ve long had a thought that if all automobiles were like the Invisible Boatmobile from SpongeBob, then most of the suble cues between humans would make it easier to understand intentions, with corresponding reduction in misapprehension and collisions.

  That said, humans simply are poorly adapted to traveling at 100 kph, so whose to say if these cues are even understandable at high speed. And of course, it’s downright impossible to see those details when blinded by mutual headlights on a rural highway at night.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't cars have a way to contact nearby cars like fictional spaceships do?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  As a thought experiment, I’m prepared to momentarily set aside the practical and societal issues to see whether a mechanism for motorists to communicate to any other nearby motorists would have a use.

  To set some ground rules, I think it’s fair to assert that such a communication mechanism is not meant for lollygagging, but would be used for some sort of operational reason that is related to driving a motor vehicle. So the use-cases would be broader than just safety or traffic management, and could include coordination between drivers all heading to the same place. This criteria means we won’t require the generality of a mobile phone network (which can call anyone) and instead is very local.

  Some examples that might use this mechanism:

  1. Broadcasting a safety hazard to motorists further behind, such as objects in the road or right after a sharp curve
  2. Telling a specific car that their trailer has lost a strap, that it is flailing in the wind, and it might get caught under the rear wheels
  3. Informing all cars in the camping group platoon that you’ll be stopping at Micky-D’s for a bathroom break, and they should keep going
  4. For two cars that already drove over some sharp road debris, they can look at each other’s cars to relay any observable damage, to decide whether to stop on the shoulderless highway or keep driving to an exit

  This selection of examples represent exigent circumstances that arise while driving, rather than something which could have been planned/coordinated in advance. More over, they cover scenarios that are one-to-many or one-to-one, as well as unilateral messages or bilateral conversations.

  We need to also consider what existing cues already exist between motorists, some of which are quite dated:

  • Honking (so that someone else will do something that fixes the situation)
  • Waving through (to indicate that you are yielding and they can proceed)
  • Turning an invisible crank (asking them to roll down their window, despite manual windows being very uncommon now in the USA)
  • High-beam flashing (to request they change lanes so that you can pass them; or at an intersection, that you’re yielding and they can proceed)
  • Stopping and opening the hood (the time-tested signal that your car has malfunctioned and you need assistance)
  • Turning on hazard lights (you have unexpectedly stopped somewhere and cannot move; or you are traveling very slowly; or otherwise, some unspecified hazard exists and you need space to manoeuvre and everyone should be on-alert)
  • Left/right indicators (you are going to turn or change lanes; if a parking space, you are claiming that parking space)

  Before we even check if these existing cues can be used for the examples above, we can see there are already a fair amount of them. The problem with cues, though, is that they might not be universally understood (eg a motorist from flat Nebraska might not understand the hazard lights on a slow-going truck climbing up Tejon Pass heading in/out of Los Angeles). Moreso, some cues are downright dangerous in certain circumstances, such as waving a motorist into an intersection but neither could see the oncoming fire truck that strikes them.

  Notice that for all these cues, only fairly simply messages can be conveyed, and for anything more complicated, it is necessary to “turn the invisible crank”, meaning that you and them need to roll down your windows and talk directly about what the complex situation is. So if a situation is simple, then it’s likely one of the existing cues will work. But if not, then maybe our new car-to-car system might turn out to be useful. Let’s find out.

  Scenario 1 is partially addressed by one very long honk or using hazard lights, depending on if the hazard is avoidable or if the hazard requires all traffic to halt. If it is about a small object in the road, then perhaps no message is needed at all, since we assume all motorists are paying attention to the road. If the hazard is a hidden one – such as behind a curve or it’s black-ice – then only hazard lights would help, but it might not be clear to following motorists what the issue is. They would only know to remain alert.

  A broadcast system could be effective, but only to a point: motorists cannot spend more than a sentence or maybe even a few words to understand some situation that may only be seconds away. We know this from how roadway signs are written: terse and unambiguous. So if a broadcast system did exist for hazards, then it must be something which can be described in fewer than maybe 5 words. This means the system isn’t useful for info about which parking lots at LAX have room, for example.

  Scenario 2 involves a hazard that is moving, and can be addressed by honking and high-beams to get the motorist’s attention. There is no ability to convey the precise nature of the hazard, but outside of nighttime environments where people may be hesitant to stop just because someone is trying to tell them something on a rural Interstate, this generally is enough to prevent a roadway calamity.

  But supposing we did want to use our new system to send that motorist a message, the same concern from earlier must be respected: it is improper to flood a motorist with too much info when the driving task doesn’t really allow for much time to do anything else. An apt comparison would be to air transport pilots, where a jetliner at cruising altitude actually does have a lot of spare time, but not when preparing for takeoff or landing. Driving an automobile is a continual task, and for the time when a car is stopped at a traffic light, then there is virtually no need for a car-to-car communication system; just yell. The need for ACARS for automobiles [pun intended] is looking less useful, so far.

  Scenario 3 is similar to Scenario 2, but is a one-to-many message. But given how such exchanges tend to also become multilateral (“can you get me a Big Mac as well?” and “well, we don’t have to be at the camp site until 4:20”), this once again starts to become a distraction from the driving task.

  Scenario 4 is probably the most unique, because it rarely happens: motorists always have the option of stopping, although stopping can itself create a hazard if the location is not great (eg left lane on an American freeway). It would be truly unusual for two cars to have struck something AND then need to quickly decide if they can press on toward the nearest exit (eg minor body damage) or if they must stop immediately (eg a fuel rupture that starts a small fire beneath the vehicle) AND there is someone else who can mutually exchange info about the damage.

  It’s such a contrived scenario, because I actually made it up, based on the similar situation that occurs for aircraft that suffer damage while in the air. In such situations, the pilot would need external support, which can come from a nearby aircraft, or ATC, or an escort fighter jet. For example, if an aircraft cannot confirm safe extension of the landing gear, diagnosing the problem is helped by a nearby news helicopter confirming that the landing gear is clearly visible and locked.

  Alternatively, if a departing aircraft has struck a piece of metal dropped by an earlier Continental Airlines DC-10, and that bit of metal causes the left tire to explode, further causing a fuel rupture from the left tank and an uncontrollable fire slowly destroying the wing, it would be very useful if ATC can tell the pilots ASAP before the aircraft is going too fast to abort the takeoff, resulting in an inability to fly and an eventual crash into a hotel.

  I bring up my contrived automobile Scenario 4 because it shows how things could always be slightly different if a small factor was simply changed, if maybe there were better warnings to the pilots from their aircraft, or if the Continental plane was better maintained, or if Charles de Gaulle ATC was just a little bit faster to radio to the pilots. So it’s perfectly natural to think that by having this one aspect of the driving experience changed, maybe there’s a lot of value we could get from it. Indeed, the Swiss Cheese Model of accident causation tells us that any one layer could have been different and thus stop the holes from lining up.

  But from this thought experiment, we can see that the existing cues between motorists already serve the most common reasons for needing to communicate while on the road. And anything more complicated messages than “I would like to pass” become a distraction and thus less useful and more dangerous in practice. Aviation knows full-well the dangers of introducing a fix which ends up causing more problems in the long-run.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What taxes are on a can of NOS in California?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Overstating the tax and then being charged less, that’s going to be less jarring to consumers than the opposite situation, where people are charged more than what it says on the can haha

  But I get it: taxes are hard, since even the supposed simplicity of a “flat tax” rate still requires exemptions and exceptions everywhere. Otherwise, people will get away with paying less tax than they ought, or more tax than is reasonably fair, or that the purpose of the tax is wholly defeated.

  Taxation systems: simple to administer, easy to understand, fair. Pick at most two. Anyone who says they’ve come up with a system that achieves all three perfectly is a liar or a conman.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What taxes are on a can of NOS in California?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Some background: retailers in California that sell taxable goods have the choice of either including sales tax in their posted prices (“tax incl”) or not (“+tax”). Whichever they choose, they must disclose which method they use and must be consistent. Retailers of tax-free goods obviously don’t need to make this choice. Vending machines invariably always include the sales tax (and CRV if packaged beverage) to make the price a round number.

  non-prepared food items no longer have sales tax

  This is mostly correct, since the sales tax on food is generally on hot food that is otherwise unprepared. If any other preparation occurs (like with a sandwich from a sandwich shop), then that added preparation makes the whole sandwich taxable, even though the individual food ingredients would have been tax-exempt.

  The only taxes I know I would be paying for a canned soda would be the CRV/California Redemption Tax, which is a flat $0.10 per aluminum can.

  Minor quibble: CRV is California Redemption Value and is a refundable fee. The tiny distinction from a tax is that fees are potentially refundable (and this is, upon recycling the container) whereas a tax is virtually never refunded in any scenario. That said, the California Constitution specifies that taxes and fees have the same requirements when it comes to approving them, since the payment of a tax or fee is mandatory. But I digress.

  Anyway, the rates that you described is not correct. The current rates are:

  5 cents for containers less than 24 ounces 10 cents for containers 24 ounces or larger

  And only applies to aluminum, glass, plastic, and bi-metal.

  So on a can of NOS (16 fl oz) pays just 5 cents, but a 24 fl oz can will pay 10 cents. I’m not sure which size can you were looking at, but I’m going to guess it was a 16 fl oz can.

  If 16 fl oz priced at $1.98, then add 5 cents CRV, that’s $2.03. The California Department of Tax and Fee Administration (CDTFA) writes that:

  Sales of noncarbonated drinks are generally not taxable, but their containers may be subject to the CRV. On the other hand, sales of carbonated and alcoholic beverages are generally taxable, and the CRV fee that is charged for their containers is taxable

  And:

  Under SNAP, we consider items purchased with CalFresh benefits as sales to the United States government, and those items are therefore exempt from tax in California.

  And:

  Sales of eligible food items purchased with CalFresh benefits are exempt from tax, even if the sale of the food item is normally taxable. For example, the sales of carbonated beverages, ice, and food coloring are exempt from tax when purchased with CalFresh benefit

  So if you’re somewhere within, say, San Francisco where the sales tax rate is 8.625%, then that brings the $2.03 up to $2.21 if bought without CalFresh, since both sales tax and CRV apply, and CRV is itself taxable. But on CalFresh, neither sales tax nor CRV apply, which would just be $1.98.

  This all appears to align with your observations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did it really used to be common for guys to go to a bar every night like in Cheers or The Simpsons?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d say the qualities of the average American park leaves much to be desired, when compared to NYC Central Park, San Diego’s Balboa Park, or SF’s Presidio.

  In suburban areas, the municipal park tends to be a monoculture of grass plus maybe a playground, a parking lot, and if lucky, a usable bathroom. Regional parks are often nicer, with amenities like pickleball courts or a BMX park, though asking for benches (not rocks or concrete verges, but actually bench seats) and shade might be a stretch.

  My point is that the USA has fewer parks and public squares than it ought to. I don’t mean just a place to go jogging or to push a stroller along, but a proper third space where people actively spend time and create value at. Where street vendors congregate because that’s also where people congregate. A place that people – voluntarily, not by necessity – would like to be. A destination in its own right, where even tourists will drop by and take in the air, the sights, and the social interactions.

  Meanwhile, some parts of the USA actively sabotage their parks, replacing normal park furniture with versions that are actively hostile to homeless people, while alienating anyone that just wants an armrest as they sit down. Other municipalities spend their Parks & Rec funds on the bare minimum of parks, lots that are impractically tiny. Why? Because a public park can be used to exclude registered sex offenders from a neighborhood, leading to the ludicrous situation where whole cities are an exclusion zone. Regardless of one’s position on how to punish sex offenses, the denial of housing and basic existence is, at best, counterproductive.

  So I reiterate: the USA might have a good quantity of parks, but not exactly good quality of parks. People will socialize online unless they are given actual options to socialize elsewhere. And IRL options would build value locally, whereas online communities only accrue to the benefit of the platforms (eg Facebook, WhatsApp) they run on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did it really used to be common for guys to go to a bar every night like in Cheers or The Simpsons?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Even with NA (low/non-alcoholic) beverages, it’d be nice to have third places that don’t come with an obligation to spend money.

  To be clear, I’m not asking for places that ban spending money, but there are third places like parks (eg NYC Central Park) that are destinations in their own right, but one can also spend money there, such as buying stuff and having a picnic on the grass, or bringing board games and meeting up with friends. Or strolling the grounds astride rental e-bikes. Or free yoga.

  Where there’s an open space, people make use of it. But we don’t really have much of that in the USA, that isn’t tied up as a parking lot, an open-space preserve (where people shouldn’t tred upon to protect wildlife), or are beyond reasonable distances (eg BLM land in the middle of Nevada).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Louis Rossmann a fascist like futo?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  At the very minimum, give the readers a chance to understand the context of the question: hachyderm.io/@dalias/115418530488528338

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some good things to purchase to add a new distraction to my life?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It very much depends, I think. Ham radio was really helpful to me during 2020 because it was a social activity that was compatible with distancing requirements, and is a great way to talk with people afar. As in, other continents but also local folks as well.

  Fishing, watercraft, and woodworking all have different prerequisites, like a nearby body of water or the space for equipment. They also require some logistical planning, like fishing licenses, how to identify and prep fish, and where to source wood. These things are often easier to learn if you know someone who already partakes in the activity.

  But for civil advocacy, that one has no tangible result that you can put in the living room, earns no awards or points, and puts you directly in the public spotlight, ugly as it may be. And yet, despite all that, it has the potential to impact the greatest number of people in the most accessible way. Paraphrasing a Greek proverb, to commit to this endeavor knowing full well that it will never serve to yourself a benefit, that is a sign of a great and virtuous citizen

  All the activities I’ve listed are activities that hone personal development, and can be passed on to another generation, just in case you wanted even more engrossment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some good things to purchase to add a new distraction to my life?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  !homelab@lemmy.ml can easily become very involved.

  But for other activities, fishing, watercraft (motorized or not), woodworking, ham radio, and civic advocacy (ie public transport, housing, anti-corruption). All of these can easily be a lifetime’s worth.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How much more progressive are European views as compared to progressives in America?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  One thing which isn’t immediately apparent, even to Americans themselves, is that the large American political parties are less equivalent to individual political parties elsewhere, and are closer to “uneasy coalitions”, like those found in Europe involving multiple parties trying (and maybe failing) to form a government. That makes it harder to draw broad conclusions like “USA Democrats would be right-of-center” because progressives and “DINOs” (Democrats in name only) within the party would be left-wing or right-wing, respectively. Logically, the same applies to the Republican party, although ranging from RINOs (Republicans in name only) and “moderate Republicans”, to the far-right factions of the party, like neo-Nazis and MAGA.

  With that said, what you’re describing sounds similar to social democracy. Not to be confused with democratic socialism, which is generally further along to the left than social democracy, with the goal to reform the state away from private ownership of the means of production and away from capitalism. When Bernie Sanders of Vermont says “I am a socialist”, his positions align well to European social democracy, even though he originally described himself as “democratic socialist”.

  But I must reiterate that the precise definition of political ideology is less important than community-building, since that’s how ideology becomes reality.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does free healthcare access increase or decrease the need for medical personnel overall?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  When doing comparisons of the nature posed by the title, it is all-important to establish the baseline criteria. That is, what does the landscape look like just prior to implementing the titular policy?

  If starting from the position of the present-day USA, then it is almost certain that free-at-time-of-service universal health care would cause the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to rewrite their projections for medical personnel jobs, in very much an upward trajectory. After all, middle- and upper-class people that already had decent won’t somehow need more healthcare just because it’s free, but people who have never seen a doctor in their adult life would suddenly have access to a physician. More total patients means more medical staff needed, both short-term and long-term. The latter is because the barrier to annual checkups is all but eliminated, which should also yield better outcomes through early detection of problems and development of working rapports with one’s physician.

  If, however, the baseline situation is a functional but private-payer healthcare system in a place with a low Gini coefficient – meaning income is not concentrated in a few people – then it’s more likely that healthcare is accessible to most people. Thus, the jump in patients caused by free healthcare may be minimal or even non-existent. It may, however, be that different segments of this population would benefit by access to a higher standard of quality care under a universal healthcare system, if removing private-payer results in dismantling of legacies caused by racism, colonialism, or whatever else.

  After all, that’s one of the tenants of a universal healthcare system: people get the treatment they need, with no regard for who they are or what wealth they have (or not).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does streaming compare to "analog"?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m a bit short on time, but I think “streaming” needs to be broken down into categories of scale. Streaming video from your home Plex server (shout-out to !homelab@lemmy.ml) is a lot different than Netflix’s video delivery system.

  The latter intentionally stores the same content in multiple geographies, then with caches at local data centers, and sometimes even caches within your ISP’s network. All of this to distribute the load of millions of users, who can just as easily be in Florida as they might be in Oregon.

  Whereas a home server has just one copy of the content, and since it might not always be streaming a video to you, can save power by spinning down drives or other optimizations. It is simply not possible to describe “streaming” when such radically different delivery mechanisms can all plausible be considered as streaming.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some franchises with characters that personify countries?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Does a webcomic count as a franchise? satwcomic.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is a federated alternative to Wikipedia?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  No, I want a decentralized go-to place that I can check many points of view over a subject, just like the Fediverse works today.

  I disagree with the premise that multiple POVs on every topic will yield better understandings or discussion. It is the same flaw that Ground News or other services have, which purport to curate POVs from different news media outlets, with the implicit assumption that all the outlets have something useful to offer. This assumption is absolutely balderdash.

  The Fediverse is no more – or less – immune from disinformation and other ails, but has better user- and instance-level protections: bans and defederation are effective, because if they weren’t, people here wouldn’t log back on. For Mastodon and Lemmy and other forms of social media, the decentralization has clear and obvious benefits.

  A decentralized knowledge-store does not.

  There is nothing to fear.

  There is everything to fear when knowledge is spread out into small libraries across the land. The historical analog is book-burning incidents that dotted human history, whether to suppress paganism, Mayan culture, or the spread of communism. The modern-day analogy is when Vine went defunct and the content was almost wholly lost to the world. The Fediverse example is when an instance unexpectedly disappears, stranding all its users.

  But focusing on a knowledge-store, technology has given us the ability to copy data at rates that outpace all of history’s ecclesiastical scribes put together. We can – and do – preserve the largest datasets (see !datahoarder@lemmy.ml) because it is a matter of resilience. Yet that endeavor has become more difficult precisely because of technology. The Internet Archive faces this issue, because they cannot save what they don’t even know exist.

  The Fediverse inhabits a very special Goldilocks zone right now, not unlike Wikipedia, where the availability of interest, capabilities, and materiel allow for the existence of this internet experiment. But fragile it is, and instances are no further than the risk of a DMCA notice, a UK age restriction law, a frivolous but expensive SLAPP suit, or just plain ol running out of money.

  If I had spare time and energy and were presented with the option to either: 1) set up a decentralized knowledge store of nebulous benefit, or 2) support the online compendium which I’ve personally used for over two decades now and has helped untold numbers of students and researchers with starting the research into a new-to-them topic, and could do so by using my servers to seed the all-Wikipedia torrents… well, I think the choice is clear.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is a federated alternative to Wikipedia?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  As a website or service, sure. But the Wikipedia has been available to download for offline use since basically its inception. This is how users in places with poor internet connections can still benefit from the Wikipedia. Certainly, the idea of distributing Wikipedia on disc is a bit odd.

  But whether it be smuggling books across the Iron Curtain, downloading swaths of paywalled scientific papers from an MIT computer, or accessing information about abortion, the pursuit of knowledge is a chiefly human trait and one not easily suppressed. But if all those, the Wikipedia has the best track record for being openly available and free (as in speech, and as in beer).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is a federated alternative to Wikipedia?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think we need to start with what Wikipedia is meant to be, before even considering whether it would be aided through federation. By their own words:

  Wikipedia’s purpose is to benefit readers by acting as a widely accessible and free encyclopedia; a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge.

  Encyclopedias are designed to introduce readers to a topic, not to be the final point of reference. Wikipedia, like other encyclopedias, is a tertiary source and provides overviews of a topic.

  Content is governed by three principal core content policies – neutral point of view, verifiability, and no original research.

  That describes the content intended to go into the Wikipedia, but we need to also mention the distinction between the Wikipedia itself, the MediaWiki software package which powers Wikipedia, and the Wikimedia Foundation.

  With MediaWiki, which is FOSS (GPLv2), anyone can set up their own encyclopedia-style volume of articles to host on the web. And that’s exactly what many fandom websites or technical documentation websites do, because that level of detail would not be accepted into the general-knowledge Wikipedia. And you can hardly blame the Wikipedia for wanting to avoid scope-creep.

  Likewise, if someone disagrees with how a topic is discussed in a Wikipedia article, they can go in and make the change, provided that they follow the same rules and procedures as everyone else. Yes there are moderators, but even moderators can be moderated. In a way, Wikipedia is a collective effort that somehow democratized editorship and it’s shocking that it hasn’t devolved into major terf wars.

  And that’s where the Wikipedia Foundation comes in. They are both the charitable foundation that keeps the Wikipedia servers running, as well as administering the collection, much like how a museum protects cultural treasures. Dissatisfaction with the limited role that the Foundation plays can be solved by forking the Wikipedia; they don’t assert a monopoly on the collective knowledge, and indeed the entire thing can be downloaded for offline use or to host a mirror under separate administration.

  With all that said, Wikipedia as a concept hews very closely to the print version of an encyclopedia. It is functionally a really big book, painstakingly edited by untold numbers of people. The fact that it’s not just a bunch of random blog posts is its stength. Wikipedia is not social media; it is distributed editorship.

  But supposing you do want a distributed knowledge base, where there might exist multiple versions of an article, please explain why the World Wide Web doesn’t already accomplish that. If the WWW is too general-purpose for your liking, then perhaps something like the DICT protocol is more palatable?

  Despite ostensibly dealing with dictionaries, DICT has been used to offer the CIA World Factbook and the Jargon File, which are more like subject-matter specific encyclopedias. As a standardized protocol – even CURL can fetch DICT entries – the Fediverse doesn’t need another protocol to do the same thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is streetwear a joke?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you’ll have to provide some examples – ideally as photos – of streetwear fashion. Without any prior research, I only know the term to mean “comfy clothes” that would fall below the typical bar for “casual” dress code

  A quick web search shows examples ranging from perfectly reasonable outfits consisting of normally-proportioned shorts, jackets, pants, and shoes. To some outlandish outfits that are prominently displaying designer brands.

  And perhaps that’s the crux of the matter: what shows up on the fashion runway or “haute couture” magazines is never descriptive but prescriptive: a designer brand has a vested interest in getting the masses to believe that something is fashion so that they can move product.

  Taken to the logical extreme, there is an idea that designer clothes is intentionally outlandish, precisely so that said clothes would never be worn by “normies” in day-to-day activities, and thus can always (and persistently) be projected as high-end.

  Commercialized fashion is not a democratic experiment to see what most people want to wear. It is to move product every season. “Designer streetwear” is a poor approximation for what normal people wear when they just want to grab a sandwich from the bodega and then return to watch another episode from Season 2 of The Rehearsal. Maybe this should be called “real streetwear” to distinguish it from so-called designer goods.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would you ever give up your right to leave a bad review about a company?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Whoops, you’re right. I misread the first sentence as though OP’s brother was hired by the company. In that case, yes, this act would appear to void any clause that would restrict writing a review, whether good or bad.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would you ever give up your right to leave a bad review about a company?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sadly, this act only covers “form contracts” for the sale of services or products, and doesn’t look like it would extend to contracts of employment. That is, a consumer cannot be bound by a clause that prohibits writing reviews. And if a consumer of the company’s products is also an employee, then this act doesn’t prohibit a “no reviews” clause in the employment contract.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Looking to get a new phone with FOSS on it. What should I look into?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A phone with battle scars!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Been looking into getting an "Indexed Universal Life" insurance policy. Are these trust worthy?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The other comments correctly explain why an index fund is probably better suited, and will preserve more value by having lower fees. But I will propound on why “universal life insurance” (whether indexed or not) might not be a good fit for you.

  To explain, I have to start with what the point of life insurance even is. At its core, life insurance is supposed to provide some benefit to replace your life. That is, if when you die, you would no longer be generating income to support your family or to honor your debts. Without the benefit of life insurance, the consequences might include destitution for anyone that depends on you, as well as possibly a forced sale of the family home if the mortgage goes into default. In a nutshell, if correctly set up, life insurance should approximate the value of your life, the same way that car insurance should make you whole if something happens to the car.

  (I recognize that this sounds extremely morbid, to put a price on your life. But with the current socio-economic system, this is a necessary exercise)

  A reasonable approximation for how much life insurance to buy is to consider how much monthly income would it take so that your family could continue as-is financially in the event that you disappeared from their lives. If the amount will cover everything from inflation, to future college funds, plus retirement savings that you would have made, then that’s probably the upper-limit for the correct amount of benefit to purchase.

  If you have no debts, and have no family to support, there’s little point in buying life insurance. Indeed, it’s not terribly profitable for insurance companies to offer just life insurance, which is why they market other types which are partially life insurance, and partially an investment. Every form of life insurance – except fixed term life policies – have this mix.

  So the question is, do you need life insurance? If no, then a dedicated investment vehicle – like an index fund – would make more sense. And if yes, then fixed term life insurance makes more sense because it’s cheap and doesn’t muddle your investment portfolio.

  I’m of the opinion that mixing one’s insurance objectives with one’s investment objectives is a recipe for disaster, with the extremely narrow situation where the quirks of USA tax law means that wealthy, savvy people that plan ahead could save some tax dollars. Maybe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The practice of handwritten paystubs is deeply suspicious, in an era where even the most basic of business payroll software can easily generate and print out a paystub directly. But I want to focus on the request for $1232 for 8.8 hours of apparent effort.

  That divides out into an hourly rate of $140 per hour! Such a high rate is the near-exclusive domain of a lawyer’s billable hours, as suggested from this 2002 survey by the Oregon State Bar. It is patently absurd to request the services of a lawyer for 8 hours when all it would have taken is an hour for a skilled accountant, or two hours if performed by even the most confused of small-business entrepreneurs.

  Unless your employment records extended for decades across multiple corporate entities that went through mergers and acquisitions, that is an unreasonable charge. Your former employer may be confusing the “reasonable fee” provisions for preparing documents persuant to a subpoena.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Looking to get a new phone with FOSS on it. What should I look into?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I legit ran it over with a forklift the other week

  I have to ask: what circumstance led to this particular incident?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do i tip my bartender $2 per drink and per bar food order but 20% when I order food from a waitress? Am I tipping wrong?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  if you do go to an establishment that pays based on the assumption of tips

  In the USA, there are only 7 US States (and Guam) which mandate that the minimum wage be paid prior to consideration of tips. All other states permit some fraction of tips to be considered as part of minimum wage, with some states limiting the employer contribution to as low as $2.13/hr.

  This is indeed an absurd situation outside of those seven states, but it also means that it’s nigh impossible to avoid establishments that rely on tips to supplement wages, in the other 43 states.

  With this background, I can understand why the earlier commenter views tipping as exploitative, for both the consumer and the staff. The result of either choice – boycotting places that pay less than minimum wage, or not tipping at those places – doesn’t change the fact that the staff are being underpaid, which is the root exploitative practice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does the AGPL license allows not disclosing the source of third party scripts indirectly interacting with the main software?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My understanding – IANAL – of the central thrust of the AGPL is that if there is software that runs somewhere else and serves the result to a user, then that is considered a “distribution” of the software and thus requires the source to be made available to said users, if they want a copy.

  So for your title question, I don’t think the dividing line is whether your software is directly/indirectly interacting with existing AGPL software, but rather the question is whether your software affects the service provided to the user.

  Starting with your first scenario, I presume that you mean a server-side NodeJS script, and that would modify the results returned to the user. Thus, I would think this is indeed a distribution and the AGPL’s provisions would require your NodeJS script being made available to the user.

  For your second scenario, I’m not entirely sure if you mean a server-side or client-side theme or overlay. If you modify a CSS file that is served to the user, I would think that’s a distribution. But if you’re writing a browser extension that overrides the default CSS file from the server, then no distribution of the server software has been made, I think. If you edit a JavaScript file that is part of the Mastodon package, I suspect that is a distribution, because that file is loaded to the user in order to use the service. But I’m not entirely certain on this.

  In the third scenario, a scraper would be consuming the result returned by an unmodified AGPL software package, so there is no obligation to offer the source code for your scraper.

  The fourth scenario is also a “use” of unmodified AGPL software, and so you have no obligation to offer your custom script to your users.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I got a VPO against me, how fucked am I?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  With no other info, I think the only advice available is that you should consult a lawyer for their advice. We neither know your legal jurisdiction, nor the timeline between “trying to get an abusive TTI investigated” and “I got a VPO against me”.

  The details in-between matter, but ultimately, if you’re subject to any type of restraining order, that will be controlling for whatever actions it prohibits you from doing. And the only way to lift that is to seek a lawyer’s help to challenge it in court.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I got a VPO against me, how fucked am I?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What is a VPO? What is TTI?