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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Stress is relative to your own personal conditions. It’s not absolute. A tech executive might have a nice house and financial security, but if he’s working 80 hours/week under intense pressure to meet some deadline, that’s still stressful. Nobody wants to be perceived as a failure at work, even if their personal financial consequences for failure are minimal.

    Your argument seems to imply it’s impossible to feel stress if you’re comfortable in life. Even the poorest Americans can count on access to food, clean running water, electricity, internet, etc. For most of humanity’s existence, and still today in some parts of the world, these would be considered enormous luxuries, so anyone with access to them would be seen as extremely comfortable in life. Clearly though, people can still be stressed out despite having access to these sorts of things that most of history would consider luxurious.

    Stress is relative, not absolute.




  • Why? You should let each post stand on it’s own merit.

    First, account age is silly for Lemmy, as almost 100% of people on here will have an account creation date in June 2023 or later because this place was a ghost town before Reddit decided to kill the APIs. A month from now, is someone with an August 2023 join date automatically presumed to be a troll, or are they just someone making the switch from Reddit a month later than everyone else?

    As for karma, neither negative karma nor positive karma really tell you anything about the poster:

    For instance, people can make good faith arguments advocating for conservative political opinions, but because the user base skews pretty far left here, those arguments will be downvoted. A discussion forum that bans opposing viewpoints is useless, and the echo chambers on Reddit are something I’d love to avoid here.

    Similarly, it’s also possible to effortlessly build positive karma. Simply copy/paste highly rated comments from the last time a common repost appeared on the feed, and chances are, your copy/pasted comments will get upvoted too. You can even automate it with a bot.

    Karma meant nothing at Reddit, and moderators shouldn’t be using it for decisionmaking purposes. It’s useful for ranking posts and comments, but anything beyond that isn’t helpful.


  • In what context?

    In the insurance world, you sometimes see the phrase “L+ALAE Ratio” to refer to the ratio of (losses + expenses) divided by premium. It’s a way to measure profitability for a book of insurance business: how many dollars of loss and expense do you have to pay per dollar of premium earned? Lower is better, and you don’t want that ratio too much higher than 100%, because that means premiums aren’t high enough to cover losses (though investment income can sustain small underwriting losses).

    I could see “L+” used as shorthand for “L+ALAE” or “L+ALAE+ULAE,” though admittedly, I’ve never seen that specific shorthand used.







  • The past 15 years of growth in anything technology adjacent has been fueled by one thing: Extremely cheap debt. Interest rates have at been rock bottom since the 2008 crisis, and they’ve only started to tick up recently. That means the ability to fund infinite growth for basically nothing, so tech companies have relied heavily on debt financing.

    Now though, that’s no longer viable. Silicon Valley Bank was very heavily involved with all these tech companies, and it went insolvent in March largely because of rising interest rates. They held a lot of long term bonds at low interest rates. In normal conditions, rising interest rates mean lower bond prices and unrealized losses, but not a major problem because they can just hold them to maturity and never realize the loss. Bank runs forced SVB to sell the bonds for huge losses though, turning unrealized losses into realized losses, and a non-issue into a major problem.

    Now that cheap debt is gone, these tech companies are desperately scrambling to attain profitability. It hasn’t been discussed much, but this is a big reason for the changes at both Twitter and Reddit.


  • That’s why it has to be done today. At the moment, Jerboa instantly crashes when trying to access Lemmy, which will definitely scare away new users. My understanding is that this is because Lemmy.World is on version 17, but Jerboa requires instances to be on version 18 or higher. If successful, I believe this would fix the instant crash issue, so we’ll at least have an Android app working again.

    Hopefully, these are just growing pains symptomatic of a site trying to deal with rapid growth and rapid improvements.




  • No chance.

    Creating a Reddit alternative is easy because you only need to host text, and text doesn’t take up a lot of space. The entirety of Wikipedia’s text, for instance, can be compressed into something like 22 GB, which is small enough that it can be stored on low-end consumer hardware from 20 years ago. The more difficult problem is getting a user base: people don’t want to switch unless they have a compelling reason to, and even with Reddit shitting the bed recently, Reddit alternatives are still pretty empty.

    With video, you have both problems. Like Reddit alternatives, getting people to switch and produce content for the platform is difficult as hell. However, even if you somehow manage to succeed at that, video takes up an enormous amount of space. It simply isn’t feasible to host that much content without millions/billions of dollars of funding available if the platform takes off, and no company wants to invest that sort of money on a low probability gamble competing against one of the largest companies in the history of the world.






  • Agree that it shouldn’t be so complicated. I see that as a major flaw of the platform that will curtail adoption, but who knows, maybe one will win out over the others?

    In any case, my understanding is that you can’t log into the other instances with your username from lemmy.one, but you can read posts and interact with communities on different lemmy sites. For instance, I’m commenting from lemmy.world on a post you made using lemmy.one at a community hosted on lemmy.ml, but we can both read each other’s comments, and so can people that signed up on other instances like beehaw.org.