Me but with sleep 😬

Nice

But most of the possibilities when you do ask suck

No lol

Unfortunately, the entire thing is plagued by politicians, so it is falling apart.

Then the structure of your government is trash.

Yep. Now I just know all the shit I failed to do today :\

Would you like to provide those receipts?

inside egg was good but outside is best

Nah

If you are reading this then you are having a poo poo!

Not necessarily. I could be crying.

set up shop on an instance

Don't do that. You probably should have multiple accounts on different instances. If you really need a continuous, single identity, post links to all your usernames in each.

This is why the move from Reddit was so difficult for Redditors: because we put all our eggs into Reddit Inc's basket. All our content is under Reddit's control. This analysis can be applied to any centralized social media service. If your instance shits the bed or bans itself from everyone else, you can move somewhere else. You can start your own in the worst case. It's annoying, but at least there is a real path to move on.

We shouldn't be putting our eggs in any one basket. We shouldn't have been doing it before the Fediverse, and we shouldn't be doing it here either. Your social media access should not be dependent on the goodwill of one person or entity. Eventually, that entity will corrupt.

Also, I'm on vlemmy.net. Right now, they haven't defederated from anyone, and I believe we're still not banned from Beehaw or anyone else. If you really want the whole Fediverse (and you probably don't), make an account on vlemmy or one of the top three instances on this page.

Why don't you have a second account?

Lazy. Don't care if my shit gets fucked. But if you do care if your shit gets fucked, then you shouldn't rely on centralized social media.

Yeah. If the signal changed from 0V to +3V, in any way, at any time, then technically it is AC. However, we might treat it as DC for engineering purposes depending on the context. If the system the DC current is going into is stable and responds quickly enough, we can ignore the effect that "starting" the signal will have. However, most non-trivial circuits have non-trivial dynamics, so we need to make sure that, at a bare minimum, they can be started properly.

Dynamic circuits have, amongst other things, resistances, inductances, and capacitances. Resistors are boring; put in a current I, get back voltage V = IR. Circuits with only resistances are not dynamic. Capacitances and inductances are themselves dynamic elements. For them to exhibit any interesting behavior, the signal (input current or voltage) needs to be changing. Circuits can (but will not necessarily) experience weird behavior when turning on if the power is taken from zero to some voltage too quickly. For example, if a current in an inductor is set from zero to a nonzero constant, you will get a huge (theoretically infinite) spike in voltage. This is because voltage across an inductor is proportional to the rate at which the current signal changes. In the case of a current switched from zero to non-zero, the change from zero to not-zero happens almost instantly, implying a voltage that approaches infinity as the transition becomes steeper. Practically, you get a voltage spike which, when multiplied by current, could generate enough power to blow up whatever you're working on.

I didn't mention this in any of the comments, but real "DC" sources are dirty. Noise is a class of signals that can take on random values at all times. The fact that it can be a different random value at any time implies that noise is a subclass of AC signals. A "pure" source contaminated with noise is colloquially called a "dirty" source.

Dirty power supplies, the effect of turning the power on and off, and other supply imperfections are why if you look at the power sections of electrical circuit diagrams, you will see capacitors from the supply voltage to ground. The current through a capacitor is directly proportional to the rate of change of the voltage across it. A constant voltage would imply a zero rate of change, so no current is going through the capacitor. Colloquially, it shouldn't do anything unless there is a disturbance in the circuit.

Engineers generally expect power supplies to "kinda suck", even those marked as DC. If there are any other dynamic circuits being powered by the supply (and there almost always are; we want our electronics to actually do things for us!), they will be affected and possibly compromised entirely by a dirty power supply.

I couldn't really think of an application where blowing could be treated as a DC signal and talking could be treated as an AC signal. From an electrical engineering position, blowing is a particular subclass of speech signals, for which there is a dearth of literature, all of which hinges on the assumption that speech signals are "AC", e.g. time-varying.

All talking is DC AC, unless you also speak while breathing in.

Slowly varying signals like the waveforms generated by speech in all its forms are still AC signals and need to be treated as such for engineering purposes.

because all of them can also be said of DC electrical current.

I mean I can't and wouldn't force you to think a certain way, but that premise is false, and I thought I demonstrated as such in the previous comment.

What I can add is that actual "DC current", e.g. that delivered by a physical, nearly-constant current source that turned on at some point in time and ostensibly will be turned off before the heat death of the universe, does have an AC component! At the very least, it will turn on and off, which is a variation in time. When we design circuits for "DC current" (or voltage), we make the assumption that the AC component is too small to be considered, and thus we just pretend that we have an ideal DC current.

So when we talk about DC current with any kind of precision, we really mean the constant part of the current waveform equal to the average value of the signal. Blowing as a set of related signals in all it's media are not constant signals. A recording would demonstrate this, and the requirement for sound to have a nonzero frequency also rules out the possibility for a DC sound.

Now I know that analogies are loose comparisons, and if your analogy aids your understanding then more power to you, but I genuinely cannot find any way that they are analogous.

Yeah, it was and is a lot easier than desktop usage. I am lying in bed right now typing this with my phone while my desktop is playing YouTube videos. I am too lazy to pick up my keyboard and type this out.

I tried out the Reddit app for a few days during the protests, and it just fucking sucked. It was slow, buggy, and not customizable. Even in dark mode, it was too bright and gaudy for my tastes. And I had to install extra software to disable ads.

I used RiF, which was a bit like a more mature Jerboa with some features like swipe to hide posts, built-in username switching, saving post/comment drafts, and well-done integrations for embedded images and webpage links. Links I click in Jerboa currently appear in my browser history, whereas RiF opened up its own browser. Hopefully, Jerboa will add a WebView option.

More importantly, I felt like Rif was text based, as any Reddit client should be. The Reddit app uses icons where RiF would use a text field. As someone who has put in the time to learn how to read, and used that skill continuously for over two decades, it is annoying to have to freshly learn an app's specific, increasingly abstract icons when we already have the ability to read text.

I came to Reddit for the in-depth text posts and comments. The meme communities were a nice side thing, but I was really there for the long posts, and to dump long posts of my own.

IMO, the standard Lemmy web app has more features implemented than Jerboa right now. However, I want to keep my Lemmy/Reddit history separate from my ordinary browsing. For both sites, the app allows my browser not to get cluttered with Reddit links. Jerboa currently opens up a canned tab of one of my browsers, but the browser doesn't get info about every post I open on Lemmy, so it still does have a great deal of utility.

IMO Lemmy is really well designed from the ground up. The web app is pretty good, but I would simply rather not use it in my browser if I don't have to.

Apparently, Reddit's app and web interface were additionally inaccessible for blind people to use, so they resorted to 3rd party apps (although I don't think RiF was one of their typical choices). Reddit has allowed a few select non-commercial accessibility-focused apps to use their API for free, but I think that the status of serving NSFW content to these 3rd party apps is tenuous. The concern was that for all practical purposes, Reddit unilaterally decided that blind people could not interact with NSFW content. Now I just checked /r/gonewild, an established porn sub, and /r/erotic literature, a text-based erotica sub, on RedReader. So far, it is fetching new content for both subs. However, I have not checked any other apps (other than RiF, which is just completely dead) or subs. Anyone with more perspective on the current situation for blind users, please reply.

Lastly, I didn't moderate any communities on Reddit, but apparently, moderating through the Reddit app or their modern interface sucked. Somehow, the 3rd party apps had much better tools than Reddit's own app.

For me, RiF was the "frontpage of the internet". I'll miss it, but Lemmy has given me hope for the future of the internet for basically the first time in my life. Jerboa is currently the primary way that I access Lemmy, so I am rooting for it's success, as well the other Lemmy apps and Kbin.

I can already imagine it being used in a phrase with something about jumping off cliffs and being brainless followers and whatnot.

Yeah I'm okay with that. It'll keep us humble when we inevitably screw up.

[Air] being blown out of your mouth is similar to DC ( direct current ) and that it's a continuous wave of air with frequency zero.

Nope. You can't have sound without a vibration. A vibration of zero frequency is constant for all time. When you blow air, you get a bunch of "not-zero" frequency noise from the actual movement of air. Even if you could somehow blow a perfectly DC (0Hz frequency) wave, the fact that you started at some point of time mathematically implies that there are higher frequencies in the signal. [1]

To convince yourself of this, record an audio clip of yourself blowing into a microphone. Any mic will do, just don't overload it.[2] Open up the audio file in Audacity, Ardour, or any other audio program that can display waveforms. It will be oscillating quite a bit.

This also indicates that approximating sound as a constant waveform is not a good engineering decision. As an hobbyist audio programmer and electrical engineering major, it would make my life a lot easier if blowing sounds were constant, because then I could do away with frequency analysis and digital filtering, which is so easy to screw up. We would simply sample the constant audio waveform in whatever medium [3] it is constant.

[1] I actually had a much more detailed post in mind where I discussed Fourier series, Fourier transforms, and the exact definitions of DC values in electrical engineering, but unfortunately Jerboa ate the comment before I could submit it. Oh well, I can't be mad since the app is so early in its lifecycle. If you need any help navigating the above pages, feel free to comment. I can also point you to more rigorous references if you need some reading material.

[2] Really, I mean not to clip any element in the signal chain. All digital audio devices have a maximum loudness. If the signal has a bunch of flat tops, like it was going to keep going higher or lower and then some jerk clipped off the highest and lowest points with scissors, you've clipped the signal. This is especially important for blowing because it (intentionally) moves a lot more air than ordinary talking, so try to physically back away from the microphone when you blow. Technically you can damage a microphone by blowing at it, but you probably can't blow hard enough to blow it. It's mostly a signal integrity issue.

[3] I have been using the word "waveform" rather loosely. The sound is physically propagated through space as related waves in pressure and particle velocity. Microphones typically respond to changes in pressure, which is converted into an analog voltage waveform. Now the pressure waveform exists over time, but also over space. Mathematically, this expresses the fact a sound might be louder or quieter depending on where in space you are relative to the sound's source. If the electrical system is competently designed, the distribution of the voltage in space should be negligible. This expresses the reality that audio distributed through headphones sound the same regardless of where the player is located relative to the headphones, so long as all the wires are connected correctly. Ideally, once you have the pressure at a point, or more realistically an average over a small region of space, the reading is converted to a voltage that is directly proportional to the pressure waveform. In reality, there are going to be some nonlinearities, but the hope is that the waveform is as close to the original as possible under reasonable restrictions on frequency content and signal size, e.g. that the signal isn't too fast or too big.

Furthermore, the analog waveform needs to be sampled. This generates a new waveform that only exists at discrete points in time. Then, because computers have a finite number of storage bits, the sampled waveform is quantized, or forced into one of a discrete set of values. This is the digitalwaveform seen in Audacity or a similar program. Furthermore, your computer has to reverse that process so it can send a voltage signal to the headphones, which finally generates the

We can use the term "waveform" interchangeably for all of these things, including the digital ones, because they carry (approximately; ideally exactly) the same information. This is not some hand-wavy term; information theory posits that the amount of information that a signal carries can be quantified. However, the hand-wavy explanation for it is that all of these waveforms are simply different ways to represent the same thing. For the purposes of classifying signals, sound signals should share common properties despite being in different mediums.

Me too. Also, AC + fan make constant continuous noise, but they're basically required for me to even begin to feel comfortable. I've mostly gotten used to the noise, but when I'm already overloaded, it's not a nice thing.

Coke/Cola -> Tea/infusion

Wut

Nah but seriously, they're not interchangeable. A Coke replacement would be another cola.

• Reddit/insert enshittified service here: data stored by corporation

• Fediverse: data stored by the community itself

• Threadiverse: above, but presented like Reddit threads.

• Why it's important: takes power back from FAANG and gives it to the people; allows you to store your social media with people you trust, including just yourself; can be studied or forked by users

I know I've left out a lot of details, but that's why it's a simplification 😄.

Feels very validating to see that everyone else's Python is held together by a thread too.

I've never been to the US, and this just sounds totally absurd to me.

It is absurd, but that's how it is. America is an absurd place based on absurd ideas held together by an absurdly oppressive government that simultaneously masquerades as absurdly free. I don't recommend coming here for any reason other than to see family, although we do have some incredible natural wonders that are probably worth seeing.

How are you entitled to part of my food?

When you order a pizza with toppings, you are usually charged a surcharge per topping. If you have a fixed amount of money to spend, a common scenario is that you could either spend $3-5 on toppings, or give that $3-5 to the driver as a tip.

How am I responsible for your pay?

Because you decided to come to my restaurant and waste my time. Any time spent at the restaurant is time I will never get back and therefore a waste; at least make it worth my while.

Yes, the employer should be the one to compensate employees. However, this is never the case. Now you know that, if you walk into an American restaurant, you are wasting my time and that the company will not pay me for it. You know this now. I have told you, you can look up the phenomenon on the internet, you can go into any restaurant and ask any tipped employee; I dare you to show me that this isn't the case.

If you do not pay the server, they will not be paid justly for their work. If you let go of an apple, gravity will bring it down to the ground. These facts should be on equal ground. In reality, the former is stronger; we can put a table below the apple, but Americans are not interested enough in the fate of their servers to make any changes to benefit servers.

The simple and frankly preferred solution is that if tipping is really so odious to you that you cannot factor it in your price, do not go to restaurants, particularly mine [1]. This allows me to concentrate on customers who do tip. If no one shows up, I can get my work done early and possibly use my phone, read, talk to coworkers, or do literally anything else, particularly those activities a reasonable human would actually like to do.

It's not meant as personal offence, more of a general statement.

I get it, but I do feel like I need to be stern here. People don't really consider restaurant employees because for those who have never worked in one, it's just a happy place associated with good memories, and those who speak ill of their work experience at a restaurant are just trying to attack a "good thing". The sad truth of the matter is that a restaurant is, in addition to being a social place where memories are made, a workplace where people waste their time and live real lives.

IMO, because comfortable life under capitalism is contingent on a worker's productive output above all else, places that have a dual work/social purpose should be understood as workplaces above all else. It makes for a miserable analysis where all facets of life are merely instrument of profit generation, where the human experience is a side effect of particular methods of making money. However, America is a miserable place and has well earned such a dressing-down.

[1] At the moment, this is hypothetical as I don't work in food service anymore (and never will; I would literally rather die or die horribly), but this was the answer I would have given (and did give) during the time I worked as a pizza delivery driver. (At least where I worked, delivery drivers cooked fried food, did prep in the back of house, sliced finished pizzas, and took orders when in the store; basically anything but building pizzas, which requires extra training to the company's spec.)

It seems there's a lot of discussion about getting rid of tipping, but I don't know how much has changed in this regard.

Nothing has changed, and it never will, as it concerns poor and "therefore" "deserving" people. Americans' talk is cheap.

The system seems ridiculously unfair, and that extra expense in a country where everything is already so expensive really makes a difference.

Agreed. So when you go to a restaurant and you have a maximum amount you can spend, divide the amount of money you have by (100% + local sales tax), then divide by (100% + the menu price), and subtract any surcharges added by the restaurant (assume $5.00 if you cannot look it up), often masquerading as a tip. I know it's a lot of math, but you have a computer in your pocket. You'll manage.

In my view, the US is a fractal scam. At every level, everything is an attempt to extract money from ill-informed "suckers", from the running of the government, to the prices of supermarket groceries, to the tipping culture at restaurants, to even finding a place to put your car [1]. Every single thing is someone's grift. In order to function in America, you need to be willing to be suckered to some extent. There's no way around it. Unfairness is baked into every transaction, and increasingly more social interactions.

Everything in America is ridiculously unfair. We wear this on our sleeves, and for many Americans this fact defines their personality. Unfortunately, you will have to deal with it in the short term at least.

Now if you would like to be the one to lead the charge against the tipping culture and the foisting of responsibility for servers' compensation onto the customer, then be my guest. Refuse to tip and make a big scene about it. Make plans for how to take the inertia of your big struggle and turn it into a mass movement. I would thrilled to join you. However, I somehow doubt that you're ready to go that far; none of the customers who stiffed me ever went on to start anti-tipping movements.

So will AITA if I don't tip?

Yes. You are expected by all members of the public here to tip. That is our culture, something we're proud of for some reason, and our expectation. For some servers, tips are the primary source of income at work.

Is it really my personal responsibility to make sure my server is paid enough?

No, it is the responsibility of the employer. However, when no employer takes their responsibility and you sit yourself down at a restaurant, the logical conclusion is that either you pay that part of the server's wages, or they get stiffed. You know that this is the conclusion. (Or if not, now you do.)

If you want to participate in our unique restaurant scam, you gotta accept that you're going to get suckered into paying the server's wages. Otherwise, don't go to restaurants. When you go to a restaurant, you waste the employees' finite time on this planet doing tedious, physically and mentally demanding bullshit that no sane person would choose to engage with, if not faced with the threats of homelessness and starvation. [2] At least make it worth their while.

Sorry if I come off as having a chip on my shoulder, but that's only because I totally do. So many customers used to concern-troll me as a pizza delivery person and give me shit like "sorry, couldn't afford to tip, they should really pay you more." Yeah, they should, but you absolutely could have tipped; all you had to do was order one less topping. I'd love to see some actual solidarity with food service employees, but that would require challenging deep-rooted assumptions about our culture and we're too shit-for-brains to do that. Americans are so compassionate and empathetic until the moment they actually have to lift a finger.

So when someone brings up "unfairness" or "it's X's responsibility to pay the workers" in response to tipping, I just kinda die a little inside from all the times those sentiments have been used against me and my colleagues.

[1] And don't even get me started on the process of buying a car, or how the public was scammed into accepting a car-centric infrastructure.

[2] This is really a special case of the logic behind the antiwork movement: nobody actually wants to go to work. We only go to work under the threats of starvation and homelessness imposed by capitalism.

Tag yourself, I'm deprimiert

I'm more or less a milquetoast anarcho-communist.

I was playing Fallout NV with a shitload of mind-wrecking mods a while back (e.g., all the randomizers, cheat weapons, infinite companions, meme VATS, quest mods, etc). Game was absolutely destroyed, so it was crashing several times a day for about a few weeks. Apparently, my sister was getting spammed with Steam notifications every time I restarted the game. Thanks Steam.

Thanks for providing receipts. Hope we can get the community to come here.

I get lines like "children in africa are starving", I have heard that one alot

Yeah that's super manipulative. It shows that they aren't actually trying to help you, and just want you to act more like them.

Just because someone is starving doesn't mean that they'll eat absolutely anything, nor should they be expected to.

That being said...bread with butter isn't that nutritious. You might want to start trying new foods to round out your diet. I for one am a lot more likely to like a new food if it isn't forced upon me, more so if I make it myself.

Reddit's drawcard was finding THE sub for a topic

IMO Reddit's drawcard was containing the sub, and therefore the community, for a topic. Reddit is where the discussion was, and for many communities still is. Rather than hosting a dedicated forum, people interested in starting a community can just start it and begin moderating and discussing without setting up a backend; it allows users to get to the "socializing" step of building a community in less steps. Lemmy also does this, albeit with a smaller community likely distributed over several instances and earlier in the system's lifecycle.

Hopefully, Lemmy will implement a "multi-community" option like the multireddit concept so that users can group multiple related communities into one feed.

That being said, I think that similar communities ought to find each other and work together to best serve the people of their communities. Some communities will benefit from collaborative non-competition (for example, a community for discussion about how to use a specific complex product) while some have no need to be centralized (for example, a community for sharing dank memes). However, even in communities that would benefit from non-competition in good times, users should always be free to form their own communities in case the parent community (or their moderation) becomes too odious to bear. This process was much more difficult on Reddit because sub names had to be unique, so new communities would need to pick a weird name.

If you need to use VS Code, download VS Codium instead. The product offered by Microsoft is licensed under a not-FOSS license, even though the vscode source is FOSS. More importantly, VS Code sends tracking and telemetry data to Microsoft!

Apparently you can make a blank comment with Lemmy. Fat-fingered the send button. Anyways...

That's one reason why we need not centralize on any one instance, so that the whole set of communities isn't lost if a big instance goes rogue. However, in the nightmare scenario where an instance goes rogue and it happens to contain huge communities, we can simply [1] pick up house and move somewhere else, specifically to a new instance, your own in the worst case.

It's not that we'll never lose communities or that the problem of power-tripping mods is completely solved. [2] It's that, because the system is distributed and decentralized by design, the whole system won't die if one big node goes down.

Eventually, all these instances are going to die because all things end. However, the Fediverse should be able to continue as long as users are interested in using the service.

The success of centralization as an organizational principle hinges on the success of its central hub. If that one hub is corrupted (and it will be), the whole system has to deal with the consequences. To recreate this situation on the decentralized system, you need to corrupt a large enough set of the entire network, which is possible but much harder to accomplish.

Additionally, I imagine that the Internet Archive or someone else will start archiving our content, although we shouldn't rely on that.

[1] The Reddit exodus so far has shown that transplanting an entire community, e.g. a subreddit, is not at all simple. However, it should be easier once people learn how to use a Threadiverse app, because Kbin and Lemmy are quite similar.

[2] The problem of "power-tripping mods" is really a special case of the problem of "power-tripping people" in social organization. In my view, anarchism and similar decentralized social movements have laid a ton of groundwork and theory for robust federated social systems that are not contingent on having perfect actors, although the problem is of course not fully solved.

It's not in the fediverse

Not good. I can understand individual users or communities not wanting to be a part of the Fediverse or certain parts of it, but federation is a necessary condition for me to adopt a social media platform at this point.

For example, I've seen a few users discussing Kbin vs Lemmy. Now I prefer Lemmy, but I also want to see Kbin succeed. Despite that I think Lemmy is technically better, the fact that they use the same protocol means that we can talk to each other. We can agree to disagree in this new system.

We have seen what will happen if we allow social media to be owned by one company. Time and time again, the platform kills itself and those communities fragment. Sure Wikipedia is a company with a great deal of public trust, but so was Reddit. The issue is that the success of the system hinges on the benevolence of a single company or person. This is the main issue with centralized control in any instances: compromising the central controller kills the whole system.

If it gets popular, it's an indication that users have not learned that lesson, and eventually that platform will too "enshittify" itself into oblivion. Hopefully, they'll change course and federate.

Winter. I like my spaces very cold.

Well...it is a bit like us-vs-them. I'm all for modifying my behavior to make people comfortable around me, I'm willing to change, but it often feels like (1) nothing is ever enough, and (2) they're often unwilling to make any similar changes to accommodate us. And I do think that we need to organize based on our shared experience as neurodiverse people to defend ourselves from the weird expectations that NT people often expect from us.

That being said, NT people are not a monolith, and obviously there are lots of cool and reasonable NT people. But there are some things that they just can't intuitively understand because they're not in our skins. I don't think there's anything wrong with informing them of that, just as there's nothing wrong with NT people informing us about things we might be unable to intuitively understand.

I think mambabasa is more correct here, and I'll change my comment in a minute. The point I was really trying to make was that the term "libertarian" "belonged" to the left instead of the right as is typically assumed.

That being said, I still think that libertarian leftism is a superset of anarchism.

Not planning on returning. Reddit was getting crappy for a long time, particularly with how it responded to advertiser-unfriendly content. Federated social media is a better system, and by a metric of centralization, Reddit always sucked. It is a sad example of how corporations are successfully commercializating every aspect of human existence. I dropped in a couple times after June 11th in RiF, but at this point I feel no desire to open up the app.

Additionally, I've been posting a whole hell of a lot more here than I was on Reddit just a couple weeks prior. It's nice to feel wanted for once.

Lemmy and Kbin are early in their life cycles. I can put up with bugs and growing pains. Because the Fediverse is organized as a decentralized community, if one large group decides to enshittify their instance, we can just move to another instance or defederate from them if they pose a threat to the community. It's going to be very hard to unilaterally kill the whole community like what happened on Reddit and Digg. If it becomes possible in one of the Fediverse applications, we can read the source code, sound the alarm, and fork it or patch it out.

I had to learn how to use Reddit; I will learn how to use the Fediverse too. We'll get through this.

The way I read it is as follows:

We believe that the state usurps the natural "safety and freedom" of "individuals and communities" to "impose its own order."

E.g., not that the safety is a property of nature, or that we need to go back to a "natural" state. My view is that people are social creatures, and that without a state bearing down on us all time, we are likely to organize into groups and conduct our lives relatively peacefully.

I cannot guarantee that there would be absolutely no conflict in a stateless society and that all people will be entirely peaceful always, but any ideology that promises that is lying to you. Furthermore, the idea that people are always peaceful or even mostly rational is not necessarily a fundamental assumption in formulating our views, as it often claimed by those who scoff at our "idealism".

Lastly, it is my view that the state and its enforcers are the biggest impediments to safety in most communities. What genocide ever occurred without the blessing and help of the government of the victims? How much violence do police inflict upon our communities by enforcing the law as it is written, harassing and killing minorities and the poor, breaking up protests and movements? How much ill-will has your country's military generated on your behalf destroying other communities and plundering them for resources? The state gives an illusion of safety because that's what it is designed to do. I suppose that for some people that look is enough, but I am a practical, results-driven person and I'm not willing to pretend that the state materially keeps us safe from anything.

Classical liberalism, libertarianism, and anarchism are absolutely not interchangeable.

Liberalism is a group of related ideologies that descend from (or claim to draw from) Western Enlightenment thinkers. Classical liberals are people who claim to represent the views of those thinkers, in contrast with the modern generation of liberals who will pay lip service to modern notions of social welfare. Classical liberals typically advocate for free markets, low/no taxes especially for the wealthy, and "limited" government in the sense that it is only limited in their authority to help the poor and downtrodden [1].

Libertarianism is a term used for several movements and ideologies. Without qualification, I feel like it has little use. The original usage of the word was in relation to early libertarian leftism [4]. However, the current usage of the word is for """libertarian""" capitalists. Their ideology retains private property, but calls for the nominal abolition or reduction of government power.

Anarchism is, in my view, the label applying to those ideologies and movements that oppose all forms of authority and hierarchy. In my opinion, a consistent anarchist ought to oppose liberal democracy and liberal political systems in general. Liberals are creatures of the right because they don't oppose capitalism and usually don't oppose hierarchy on principle. Liberals have a historical tendency to betray movements that are too hostile towards their status quo, even if that means siding with obvious bigots who would kill them if given the chance. "Scratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds." [2]

Some people use the term "libertarian socialist" (or "communist" depending on their economic beliefs) to denote those socialists (or communists) who believe in opposing authority and hierarchy, but believe that full abolition of the state is impractical. We otherwise draw from the same thinkers. Basically, all anarchist socialists [3] are libertarian socialists, but some libertarian socialists may not strictly be anarchists (but many are).

In my view, the error that "rank and file" liberals make is in taking the words of Enlightenment philosophers out of context (assuming they're arguing in good faith, which is usually a generous assumption). This causes them to inherit the biases of those philosophers, and this is especially true about classical liberals who distinctly seek out an outdated liberal perspective that doesn't challenge their bigotry. This "useful idiot" property of liberals is exploited by capitalists to create ideologues who apologize for capitalism, and by fascists who exploit liberals' aversion to change to oppose socialist movements.

Make no mistake: liberalism is the ideology of capital, and liberal writings from at least the previous century onward should be regarded as obvious capitalist propaganda. That being said, I'm not of the opinion that we need to dispose of all Enlightenment thought, but we must read into these ideals with a great deal of skepticism and context.

[1] This is not meant to imply that the State is even designed to help the poor, or that state welfare is the be-all end-all solution to poverty. However, as a stopgap measure, government welfare is better than literally nothing, although not equivalent to genuine mutual aid or building communities.

[2] I don't mean that liberals are all outright fascists. What that expression really says is that in times of distress, liberals will side with fascists before liberation movements. However, even in comfort, liberal perspectives are...kinda wack, because they're so obviously trying to justify oppression.

[3] For various reasons, including historical atrocities committed by self-identified socialists and arguments that socialist frameworks, even those that guarantee freedom, are themselves hierarchies that need to be dismantled, not every anarchist identifies as a socialist or even a leftist. Personally, I don't think that socialist frameworks are inherently hierarchical, but I understand that even supposedly "anarchist" societies have the possibility to develop hierarchies and injustice if we become complacent, and that we should be continuously re-evaluating our relationship with the rest of the Left.

[4] EDIT: replaced "communism" with "leftism", removed "e.g. direct transition to stateless, classless, moneyless society".

I most regularly use Python, followed by MATLAB C++. Python has been practically mandatory for writing code for my undergrad research. My classmates usually know "a little" Python, and it's pretty easy to pick up on the fly. I'm trying to phase out MATLAB for Python seeing as I'll be graduating soon and my student license will run out. I know about Octave, but work done in Python is probably easier to integrate.

My favorite is C++. It's the first language I learned and it feels like home. It gives me enough abstractions to get actual work done, but it also has the low-level tools I need to shoot myself in the foot for working with Arduino or other microcontrollers.

I'm looking into Rust for audio programming. Although audio programming is done almost exclusively in C++ these days, Rust's safety features without performance penalties look like a promising language to write fast and reliable code suitable for real-time operation. Joining Lemmy and seeing how it compared to Kbin has cemented my interest in the language because so far, despite the bugs I've run into, Lemmy and Jerboa has been fast above all.