why would you be searching for it? You already have it!

Because the search UI is how Lemmy chooses to expose the concept of resolving a network resource which you may or may not already have synced to your instance. That’s, arguably but not definitively to me, a design bug separate from the original design bug I was talking about, or whatever it is that’s causing it not to work right now.

You can see by opening up the developer tools and doing a search for world@lemmy.world. It’ll submit two requests: One to /api/v3/search, and one to /api/v3/resolve_object. For whatever reason, that second call is only returning the user @world@lemmy.world, but not the community, for me right now. Am I misremembering somehow? This is how I have always located communities, to subscribe to them, when I’m not sure whether they already exist on my server. Typing the full URL https://lemmy.world/c/world still works, and returns what you would expect in the response.

I didn’t choose to put that functionality in the “search” UI. The Lemmy developers did. I kind of get the idea behind it, I’m not 100% sure it’s a design flaw, but it was definitely surprising to me to find it there, originally.

So tell me: If I “already know the user or community I’m looking for,” I know what to type, but it might not exist on my server… how do I subscribe to it? What UI do I use? I know of one answer; if you know of a different answer than the one I’m aware of, it will be news to me.

It actually couldn’t find the community when I limited the search to communities, either, and I had to type the URL. No idea what that’s about

https://lemmy.ml/search?q=world%40lemmy.world&type=Communities&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll

Notice no community result.

https://lemmy.ml/search?q=world%40lemmy.world&type=All&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll

Also no community result. On my instance, I could scroll to the end of the list, and when the call to the resolve endpoint returns, the user but not the community gets added as a single entry to the very end. Like I say, no idea what that’s about, although it seems to be a bug distinct from the bug I’m describing,

https://lemmy.ml/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Flemmy.world%2Fc%2Fworld&type=Communities&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll

Also doesn’t work? That’s a little strange, honestly. Like I say, no idea. I’m just describing the somewhat different but also wrong behavior I see on my instance.

Just wanted to let you know: I was trying to resubscribe to !world@lemmy.world so I could say something. I went to the search box, typed “world@lemmy.world”, got a bunch of results including world@lemmy.world at the end, clicked on it, but it was the user @world@lemmy.world, not the community. I couldn’t find the community in the list.

It’s no kind of difficulty to work around the problem, of course. But it was a clear instance of me wanting the software to do something, the software messing up because it’s allowing multiple entities with the same identifier to exist, and me having to go back and try another way. It actually couldn’t find the community when I limited the search to communities, either, and I had to type the URL. No idea what that’s about. But yes, it’s a cause of minor malfunctions like this.

Correct. Gmail is doing it right, by anticipating how their server’s behavior might confuse people or lead to email going to the wrong mailbox, and making extra complexity to make sure the behavior makes sense. Lemmy is doing it wrong, in this instance.

I made an SMTP server that treats email addresses as case sensitive. When it gets mail for Philip@ponder.cat, it refuses to deliver it to philip@ponder.cat, and it allows users to create himbo@ponder.cat and Himbo@ponder.cat as two distinct addresses. Within my server, it’s not confusing at all. Outside of my server, there be dragons.

What should happen: The backend checks if you’re trying to create a community that has the same name as a user, or vice versa, and refuses to do it because that would be confusing, since a lot of ways of referring to an entity on Lemmy use the exact same format for the user and the community.

What does happen: Have fun with confusing!

One way I heard it said: Cats form their own opinions, cats require consent, cats come with boundaries. Beware of people who don’t “get” cats.

I don’t necessarily think every person who likes being in charge is automatically a bad person. Dogs are fine too. But it’s generally a warning sign if someone can’t cope with not being in charge.

Oh I get it, you’re one of those people with boring friends.

I talked to those cats, and they said the same thing about you.

Dogs and cats are both fine. People who want to “train” a cat are misunderstanding the nature of the relationship, though. Do you train your friends to do what you want them to?

I think the necessity for moderators to curate the experience for the members of the community is overrated.

I’ve seen very selected cases where that kind of thing is done to good effect. /r/AskHistorians is the most obvious example. I’ve seen a whole lot of cases where there are moderators who are abusing their ability to control the conversation, going well beyond just keeping everything on the rails, and deciding for themselves what people in the comments are and aren’t allowed to say.

Personally, I think merging the comments threads from multiple communities would be a clear benefit, in part specifically because it would eliminate that ability for moderators to decide how they want to shape the comments to look like.

It’s hard for me to tell if I’m just set in my ways according to the way I used to do it, but I feel exactly the same.

I think Docker started as “we’re doing things at massive scale, and we need to have a way to spin up new installations automatically and reliably.” That was good.

It’s now become “if I automate the installation of my software, it doesn’t matter that the whole thing is a teetering mess of dependencies and scripted hacks, because it’ll all be hidden inside the container, and also people with no real understanding can just push the button and deploy it.”

I forced myself to learn how to use Docker for installing a few things, found it incredibly hard to do anything of consequence to the software inside the container, and for my use case it added extra complexity for no reason, and I mostly abandoned it.

Borg borg borg

You can combine it with a FUSE mount of the Google Drive, I’m not sure if that works but I don’t see why it wouldn’t.

A huge part of the rise of fascism in Germany was Hitler’s skillful use of media.

Most people got their news from papers, and formed opinions by talking with other people in person, and there was a robust culture attuned to those methods of information which enabled people to form a clear picture of the world, so that their picture was roughly in the neighborhood of reality. Hitler was able to manipulate the new mass media of radio so that he could distort and manipulate people into believing crazy things, because they still had the set of interpretations that were appropriate for an older set of media that wasn’t subject to the same type of skillful manipulation. It was really effective. It was a big part of what led a fairly democratic state to freely choose to elect a person who literally went on to kill millions, on purpose, when anyone who had a clear picture of reality would have been able to see it coming a mile away.

I will NEVER vote for Kamala Harris, because genocide is a red line for me, and she’s personally responsible for Gaza.

Politics is just too stressful, I try to avoid it.

I really think Jill Stein has some great things to say, I think it’s a shame that the duopoly is trying so hard to keep her down when she’s the only one who can really move things forward. I think I’m going to vote for her.

Voting doesn’t matter. If you really want progress, you definitely shouldn’t vote. I’m not going to. Why would you, even?

Whoops, sorry about that, I had some sort of fit at the keyboard. Anyway what was I saying?

Go on ebay and look for refurbished PCs, it’ll probably be cheaper than buying a wireless router. It’ll take some setup but you will get the configurability you need, in spades.

I haven’t played around with GPT o1; I just checked, and I don’t have access. I’m not saying it’s necessarily bad without having experienced it. But OpenAI has been getting steadily worse for a while, so I’m assuming that the stuff I’ve interacted with is indicative of the quality of the new stuff. It’s all of a piece.

I’ve done something like this, with RSS feeds. Read !meta@rss.ponder.cat to see the existing communities, and how to add a feed to an existing community.

The concern about spam is real. A lot of these exist, for example one for Hacker News and a whole instance for Reddit, and a lot of people including myself don’t like those. I agree with you that it’s a good idea but it’s necessary to be careful that it remains a useful seed of content and not an overwhelming spew.

They’re clearly not.

What are you talking about? I just tried two test queries on DDG, and neither one had LLM-generated nonsense, and the one that was in double-quotes returned only five results, all of which had the double-quoted phrase and one of which was the thing I was challenging it to find.

Can you give an example of a query where DDG returns LLM results or doesn’t respect your double-quotes?

Claude.ai is quite a bit superior to GPT in my experience. That one, I pay for, and it seems like it’s worth it.