Yeah, that’s why I mentioned votes — I think that it’d make sense to be able to maybe do something like build a score aggregated from multiple lists or something.

Another thing I’ve mentioned in the past is using this as a mechanism for tagging. The NSFW flag was a hack that Reddit put in because some people wanted to browse Reddit at work and some people wanted to post stuff that wouldn’t be considered acceptable in most work contexts. There are many, many different categories that someone might want to “tag” things on. Some people are fine with nudity. Some people are fine with gore. Some people are fine with suggestive content. Some people object to specific items in the above. I think that it will never be the case that everyone will manually tag their own content in all the same areas, but it could be the case that someone could create “lists” that one could subscribe to that could permit that sort of tagging; same mechanism.

And over the past several months, the team and I have spent a great deal of time analyzing your feedback. What came through was the voice of people who care deeply about Windows and want it to be better.

Today, I’m sharing what we are doing in response. Here are some of the initial changes we will preview in builds with Windows Insiders this month and throughout April.

More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions: Repositioning the taskbar is one of the top asks we’ve heard from you. We are introducing the ability to reposition it to the top or sides of your screen, making it easier to personalize your workspace.

I actually have seen people here complaining about the Windows 11 taskbar, and I believe I recall someone specifically raising this limitation. Like, they probably are addressing things that Windows users care about.

I didn’t know it was like that.

If you go to:

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list

And then click on the “Active Users” column to sort by that column and look for instances with 0 or 1 “Active Users”, then look for instances with “Signups” set to “false” (i.e. new users can’t get accounts on those instances), that’ll probably give a feel for about how many “private” instances used by a single user there are out there.

but not individual instances.

You can. If you’re using a Lemmy home instance, as you are currently (lemmy.world), in the Web UI, go to your user menu in the upper-right corner, click “Settings”, click the “Blocks” tab, and then you can choose instances to block in a panel there.

If what you want is “I don’t want auth-left stuff”, avoiding hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and lemmy.ml can help. You aren’t going to get some kind of ironclad avoidance, but that’ll avoid the great bulk of it. Your home instance is lemmy.world. lemmy.world is defederated with lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net for exactly the reason you mention (in fact, I see people who don’t like lemmy.world because they consider it liberal, which they don’t like) so you already won’t be seeing stuff from the first two instances.

I don’t think I’ve personally seen fascist material on the Threadiverse (though there are some people with quite broad definitions of the term), though there are or were some far-right instances out there, based on defederation lists. Most of what little I’ve seen on the Fediverse seems to me to be on Pleroma, though I haven’t spent much time on non-Threadiverse Fediverse stuff.

moderate conservative

The home instance that I use, lemmy.today, has one user (@DonaldJMusk@lemmy.today) that posts a bunch of Trump stuff and a conservative community, !conservative@lemmy.today. I don’t know if your definition of conservative and his match up, but maybe you’d find it to your taste; it’s probably the closest to mainstream US, Republican material that I’ve seen with much activity on the Threadiverse. The instance isn’t going to be just moderate conservative and moderate liberal users though. But, if that’s the kind of community that you might be participating in, I’d imagine that he’d like to have more users.

EDIT: My own personal take is that the long term solution to having people with disparate positions on what content they want to see, above-and-beyond use of moderated communities and admin activity on instances, is to have “curator lists”, where people can basically “share” lists of blocks/subscribes/votes or something like that, and other users can subscribe to them. Then you have a list that — for example — excludes or includes content on various grounds without requiring effort on a per-user-who-wants-curated-content basis. I think that Usenet pretty much established that killfiles don’t really scale well in combating spam and stuff like that, because there was never a mechanism to share killfiles among users. Anyway, today, there isn’t support for something like that on the Threadiverse. I understand that BlueSky has something along those lines.

I don’t think I have anything to offer the online world in creating an instance.

I mean, people create single-user instances for their own use. You don’t have to let anyone else use it. I’m just saying that if you’re interested in doing stuff like “give me a list of all users that only downvote”, that’d probably be a reasonable way to do it. Take time to set up the instance, sure, but then you can get more-definitive answers to questions like that and run analyses on voting or whatever.

He could probably run an NFS server that isn’t a closed box, and have that just use the Synology box as storage for that server. That’d give whatever options Linux and/or the NFS server you want to run have for giving fair prioritization to writes, or increasing cache size (like, say he has bursty load and blows through the cache on the Synology NAS, but a Linux NFS server with more write cache available could potentially just slurp up writes quickly and then more-slowly hand them off to the NAS).

Honestly, though, I think that a preferable option, if one doesn’t want to mess with client global VM options (which wouldn’t be my first choice, but it sounds like OP is okay with it) is just to crank up the timeout options on the NFS clients, as I mention in my other comment, if he just doesn’t want timeout errors to percolate up and doesn’t mind the NAS taking a while to finish whatever it’s doing in some situations. It’s possible that he tried that, but I didn’t see it in his post.

NFSv4 has leases, and — I haven’t tested it, but it’s plausible to me from a protocol standpoint — it might be possible that it can be set up such that as long as a lease can be renewed, it doesn’t time out outstanding file operations, even if they’re taking a long time. The Synology NAS might be able to avoid taking too long to renew leases and causing clients to time out on that as long as it’s reachable, even if it’s doing a lot of writing. That’d still let you know if you had your NFS server wedge or lost connectivity to it, because your leases would go away within a bounded amount of time, but might not time out on time to complete other operations. No guarantee, just it’s something that I might go look into if I were hitting this myself.

That’s a global VM setting, which is also going to affect your other filesystems mounted by that Linux system, which may or may not be a concern.

If that is an issue, you might also consider — I’m not testing these, but would expect that it should work:

• Passing the sync mount option on the client for the NFS mount. That will use no writeback caching for that filesystem, which may impact performance more than you want.

• Increasing the NFS mount options on the client for timeo= or retrans=. These will avoid having the client time out and decide that the NFS server is taking excessively long (though an operation may still take longer to complete if the NFS server is taking a while to respond).

You mean you multi-boot, run one at a time?

No.

Honestly, if you care enough, you should be able to spin up an instance and then run SQL queries on the PostgreSQL/MySQL database backing the Lemmy instance, which is what lemvotes.org does.

Sounds like pretty much quantum computing research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Brassard

Brassard is best known for his fundamental work in quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation, quantum entanglement distillation, quantum pseudo-telepathy, and the classical simulation of quantum entanglement.[4][5][6][7][8][9][10]

EDIT: When someone asks what you do and you get to say “I work on the bleeding edge of quantum pseudo-telepathy.”

At least in the US, from past reading, I believe that there’s no legal requirement for a signature to actually be your name written in cursive.

If you get past the cazadors, then there are deathclaws on that route.

I don’t know where the best options are for sure, but one perk of a (sail) yacht is that, unless port facilities are specifically a problem, even if some place other than a yacht is the best place to be, the yacht is probably one of the better places to get at least near the place in question.

One downside: I don’t know how much maintenance a sail yacht requires. Like, I don’t know long long one could last without access to spare parts. The ocean puts physical stress on boats, and saltwater is corrosive. Boats aren’t usually designed for long-term operations away from land.

Another perk is that if the fuel production and distribution system breaks down, if what you have is a sail yacht, you probably have one of the present-day sailing vessels available, and I’d imagine that some level of sail-based trade could show up again; it was historically an important way to move goods around. You’re probably comparatively-well suited to an “apocalypse economy” where transportation and distribution is degraded.

From a security standpoint, if we’re just talking zombies and assuming that the zombies can’t climb, maybe a pre-cannon-era castle or similar fortification. I think that most of the things that obsoleted historic fortifications wouldn’t really apply to zombies.

I don’t mean one of the castle-themed buildings, like a folly. But something where you don’t have any ground-level windows aside from slits, and probably has walls around it.

You may have defense-in-depth (multiple layers of walls or building structure, with the building and walls designed to permit a retreat to an inner area if an outer area is compromised).

Cisterns for freshwater storage are likely already present (though I’ve no idea what condition they might be in) so you don’t need to get ahold of more storage.

Ample room for storage.

I guess the major issue might be the degree to which any fortifications might have been converted for public-access use. I don’t know how many gates and porticullises might have been removed or disabled over the years because they aren’t really necessary if the fortification is essentially a museum.

I get the concept, but:

• Will you have the security benefits that I think are being assumed? If your threat is human, then, yeah, being on an island is a big deal. But…if zombies don’t need to breathe, can they just walk under the sea to an island?

• Setting aside the direct issue of, say, being chomped by a zombie, one of the larger, immediate problems you face in a situation where you have infrastructure break down — which I imagine a zombie apocalypse might cause — is loss of potable water. Islands may not be the best place to go to get fresh water (though you could get salt water, and I imagine that one could use, oh, solar stills or whatever to desalinate).

  There was a point in time where US military war planners did up a zombie apocalypse plan — to have a fun theme, but the problems that a zombie apocalypse would pose aren’t terribly far off the same kind of problems that you have to solve when doing war planning. Drinking water access played a prominent role.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CONOP_8888

  CONPLAN 8888, also known as Counter-Zombie Dominance, is a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Strategic Command CONOP document that describes a plan for the United States and its military to defend against zombies in a fictional military training scenario.[1][2][3][4][5][6]

  https://www.stratcom.mil/Portals/8/Documents/FOIA/CONPLAN_8888-11.pdf

  ii . (U) The following environmental factors apply to humans in this plan:

  I. (U) Rain will be vitally important to human survival. If civil water supplies are cut off, humans will have to rely on other means to obtain water. Ground water from streams and rivers will be unreliable since it will be difficult to determine if ground water is a vector for zombie infection.

  b. (U) Operational COG #2: Potable water sources (PWS)

  i. (U) Zombies do not drink water, but humans do. Humans typically cannot survive longer than 10 days without fresh water. Zombies will likely be drawn to potable water sources by the presence of human food sources that zombies prey on . Zombies can be expected to contaminate potable water sources with various contaminants during these attacks further limiting the supply of available potable water for humans.

  iv. (U) CR #4-Safe food, water, and fuel distribution network: Ultimately, healthy human populations and the forces protecting them will require the means to acquire, purify, and distribute foodstuffs , water and fuels for heat and machine operations. Failure to maintain security supporting the distribution networks and nodes for food, water and fuel will compromise the longevity of healthy humans; decrease the amount of time that humans can remain sheltered in place or barricaded from zombie threats and could cause competition for resources that will undermine law and order. If compromised, the capabilities in this CR could undermine all the CCs in this plan.

Game streaming serices are never going to catch on because the capital needed to build out the infrastructure is ridiculous.

I don’t know about “never”, but I’ve made similar arguments on here predicated on the cost of building out the bandwidth — I don’t think that we’re likely going to get to the point any time soon where computers living in datacenters are a general-purpose replacement for non-mobile gaming, just because of the cost of building out the bandwidth from datacenter to monitor. Any benefit from having a remote GPU just doesn’t compare terribly well with the cost of having to effectively have a monitor-computer cable for every computer that might be used concurrently to the nearest datacenter.

But…I can think of specific cases where they’re competitive.

First, where power is your relevant constraint. If you’re using something like a cell phone or other battery-powered device, it’s a way to deal with power limitations. I mean, if you’re using even something like a laptop without wall power, you probably don’t have more than 100 Wh of battery power, absent USB-C and an external powerstation or something, due to airline restrictions on laptop battery size. If you want to be able to play a game for, say, 3 hours, then your power budget (not just for the GPU, but for everything) is something like 30W. You’re not going to beat that limit unless the restrictions on battery size go away (which…maybe they will, as I understand that there are some more-fire-safe battery chemistries out there).

And cell phone battery restrictions are typically even harder, like, 20 Wh. That means that for three hours of gaming, your power budget because of size constraints on the phone is maybe about 6 watts.

If you want power-intensive rendering on those platforms doing remote rendering is your only real option then.

Second, there are (and could be more) video game genres where you need dynamically-generated images, but where latency isn’t really a constraint. Like, a first-person shooter has some real latency constraints. You need to get a frame back in a tightly bounded amount of time, and you have constraints on how many frames per second you need. But if you were dynamically-rendering images for, I don’t know, an otherwise-text-based adventure game, then the acceptable time required to get a new frame illustrating a given scene might expand to seconds. That drastically slashes the bandwidth required.

What I don’t think is going to happen in the near future is “gaming PC/non-portable video game consoles get moved to the datacenter”.

I don’t know what the situation is for commercial games — I don’t know if there’s a marketplace like that — but I do remember someone setting up some repository for free/Creative Commons assets a while back.

goes looking

https://opengameart.org/

It’s not highly-structured in the sense that someone can upload, say, a model in Format X and someone else can upload a patch against that model or something like that with improvements and changes, though. Like, it’s not quite a “GitHub of assets”.

I haven’t looked at it over time, but I also don’t think that we’ve had an explosion in inter-compatible assets there. Like, it’s not like a community forms around a particular collection of chibi-style sprite artwork at a particular resolution, and then lots of libre games use those assets, the way RPGMaker or something has collections of compatible commercial assets.

I’m sure that there must be some sort of commercial asset marketplace out there, probably a number, though I don’t know if any span all game asset types or if they permit easily republishing modifications. I know that I’ve occasionally stumbled across a website or two that have individuals sell 3D models.

You mean because indie games tend not to have high minimum memory requirements, like?

Or, to put it another way…if you aren’t spending your assets on modeling and texturing and animating a bear for the thirtieth time the industry has done so, you can be off modeling and texturing and animating a space squid or something new, and having both it in game as well as a bear that looks kind of like bears in other games.

And if you have One Bear Model that lasts for N years that most of the industry uses, it can be a really good bear model.

Like, there are a lot of ways that efficiency gains could be expressed.

I think that you have two factors here. GDC isn’t specific to PC gaming, and additionally, a lot of titles will see both PC and console releases.

For a game that is intended to see only a PC release, my guess is that that that might affect system requirements of the game.

For games that see console releases, things like “will fewer people have consoles” — because current-gen consoles are very unlikely to change spec, just price, is how this manifests itself. “Is the Playstation 6 going to be postponed” is a big deal if you were going to release a game for that hardware.