Oh look what instance this was posted on.

Oh, no idea.

English.

Yup, that’s right. The scene in GTA San Andreas there has become a viral meme to express… well… “ah shit, here we go again.”

Probably isn’t going to be easy to track down. The only thing I’ve been able to find is this. The only things that match up are the last name and the timeframe (and even the timeframe isn’t perfect. September 19, 2009.) No idea beyond that whether that’s the “correct” Webber couple. (Also, the wedding registry page doesn’t mention whether Megan took the Webber last name. If not, and if the t-shirt is related, I’d think the t-shirt would use the term “Webber/Lange Wedding” or some such rather than just “Webber Wedding”. But who knows.)

I checked the Wayback Machine hoping an older version of the same page a) might be available and b) might have more information than the basically no information that the current version of that page has, but unfortunately they don’t appear to have any versions of that page saved.

The source of the page doesn’t have much information (aside from what’s visible in the page, the URL, or the title of the page) except for a zip code: 90049. Probably where Megan and Thomas live.

Again, no idea if that specific Megan and Thomas are related to the t-shirt. But I guess there’s a small chance.

Edit: I guess you could contact screen printing companies in LA near that 90049 zip code and see if you can find a screen printing company that will admit to having made that shirt. They might be able to tell you the story of it. If there’s a tag in the shirt, it might even say the name of the screen printing company.

Should metal detecting functionality be added to my electric toothbrush?

Should pizza savers also be functional Magic 8 Balls?

Maybe Cessna planes should add Roomba functionality.

Voice chat is a fine and good usecase, and I might even be persuaded that some amount of ActivityPub integration might be a good thing (mostly just for account management, though), but no, it shouldn’t be added to Lemmy any more so than my nose hair trimmer should also be a functional tazer. If a particular instance admin also wants to provide voice chat to users, great.

One of Lemmy’s greatest strengths is that it doesn’t try to do too much. It does one thing and one thing well.

True, but it’s gone in spikes largely driven by new strains since the original.

Obligatory

It’s a little bit like Satan telling someone he’s a big fan of their work.

Like someone else in this thread mentioned, Elon. I hated him well before he started doing really assholeish stuff publicly. I had plenty of liberal friends who thought he was cool and edgy and bought not-a-flamethrowers and Tesla cars. When the soccer team got trapped in a cave in Thailand and Elon called the rescue team pedophiles, I was like “I knew that guy had to be a total asshole”. Of course, now I know that was not even the tip of the iceberg.

I think I was ahead of the curve hating on “generative AI”.

Bill Gates. I hated him for being a big part of the rise of proprietary software as an institution long before the right wing conspiracy theorists started making up bullshit about him. Which is annoying because now I have to tell people I hate Gates but not because I think he’s putting 5G microchips in vaccines or whatever bullshit.

Facebook is probably a pretty good example. I quit Facebook in like 2008. Not that nobody was talking about how evil Facebook was at the time, but their evil wasn’t really as well known at the time, I don’t think.

I’m realizing a lot of these are technology-related.

I’m a little disappointed it’s not a GUI written in Visual Basic. (Kidding, kidding.)

I wonder if there’s a way to prevent people from even knowing that two different votes came from the same user.

What I outlined above should prevent anyone from knowing two different votes came from the same user… without specifically trying that user’s id on each. That’s what the salt (the comment/post id) is for.

I’ve personally been banned from one community for downvoting too consistently.

Votes should be anonymous.

I tend to agree, but the fact is that they aren’t anonymous. This tool just exposes the already-existing fact that Lemmy expressly does not guarantee anonymity for votes. The solution isn’t to not for the poster to not publish this tool. Believe me, such tools already exist in private even if none other than this one are published. Publishing this one only democratizes access to that information. (And not entirely, I don’t think. From what I’m seeing on the page, it looks like it still requires an admin account on an instance. Update: Actually, I’m not sure if it requires an admin account or not. Either way, though.) The solution is (if it’s possible) to make Lemmy itself protect voters’ anonymity.

The reason why instances know who has up/down voted things (rather than only keeping an anonymized “total” for each post/comment) is so it can prevent double-voting.

Maybe instead of usernames, the instances could store/trade… salted hashes of the usernames where the salt is the title or unique identifier of the post/comment being voted on? It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would allow the instance to figure out whether the currently-viewing or currently-voting user has already voted while also making it harder for anyone else to get that information. About the only way a tool could tell you exhaustively who had voted if that were how things worked that I can think of off hand is to try every username on Lemmy one-by-one until all the votes were accounted for.

(Of course, malicious instances could still keep track of usernames or unique user ids who up/downvoted, but only on the instance on which the vote was cast. Also, one downside of this approach would be increased CPU usage. How much? Not sure. It might be trivial. Or maybe not. Dunno.)

And there may be much better ways to do this. I haven’t really thought about it much. I also haven’t checked whether there is an open ticket asking for improved anonymity for votes already.

(Also, full disclosure, all of the above was written after only an extremely brief skim of the linked page.)

(One more edit. Something IHawkMike said led me to realize that the scheme I described above would allow instances to manipulate votes by just inventing hashes. Like, grabbing 512 bits of data from /dev/urandom and giving it to other instances as if it was a hash of a username or user id when, in fact, it’s not a hash of anything. Other instances wouldn’t be able to easily tell that it wasn’t the hash of a valid user id. I haven’t thought how to go about solving that yet. Maybe if it occurs to me, I’ll update this post.)

NO

Don’t trust anything ChatGPT says. It makes shit up all the time.

On Arch (which I’m kindof in the process of migrating away from, but anyway), I tend to use the version of vi that is pre-installed as part of the base system. And it segfaults not terribly infrequently and the fact that that hasn’t been fixed yet in all the years I’ve been using Arch makes me think it almost has to be unmaintained.

I prefer something lighter than Vim, and that fits the bill. I used something called “nvi” at one time in the past, but it had some annoying quirks as well. On non-Arch systems, I just use Vim.

I’ll take FOSS over the proprietary software we can be sure will do malicious things to us any day.