pmk

I'm trying to understand the way Mastodon works. Back in the day I started with IRC and then the many php-based forums and then reddit which led to lemmy. I never used twitter or similar platforms.
My understanding (and this is where I need help) is that all of the above are topic-based, whereas Mastodon is person-based? What I mean is that on lemmy I subscribe to things based on topic and I don't really care about usernames or user profiles, I only care about discussing a topic. It seems to me like Mastodon is the opposite? You follow persons and what they might say about any topic?
Is there something I'm missing here? Are hashtags close enough to sorting it by topic that it works just like a topic based platform? Is this difference inherent or just in my head because I don't understand Mastodon?

... what should we do?
I guess it all depends on how it would be implemented, which is something I have a hard time imagining at this moment. How do you imagine day to day online life in a post-Chat Control EU world? Which ways of communicating would still be private? Is there anything we can do at this point to prepare for the worst outcome?

Turns out a misaligned mirror made the laser hit the lens in a weird way, and then bouncing off something on the way out to produce this double line. Probably. What kind of strange troubleshooting have you done and what was the reason/fix?

So, I'm just assuming we've all seen the discussions about the bear.
Personally I feel that this is an opportunity for everyone to stop and think a little about it. The knee-jerk reaction from many men seems to be something along the lines of "You would choose a dangerous animal over me? That makes me feel bad about myself." which results in endless comments of the "Akchully... according to Bayes theorem you are much more likely to..." kind.
It should be clear by now that it doesn't lead to good places.
Maybe, and I'm open to being wrong, but maybe the real message is women saying: "We are scared of unknown men."
Then, if that is the message intended, what do we do next? Maybe the best thing is just to listen. To ask questions. What have you experienced to make you feel that way?
I firmly believe that the empathy we give lays a foundation for other people being willing to have empathy for the things we try to communicate.
It doesn't mean we should feel bad about ourselves, but just to recognize that someone is trying to say something, and it's not a technical discussion about bears.
What do you think?

Congratulations to Andreas!
It seems like he has lots of ideas for how to improve things in packaging, and for communicating with other distros. Debian is a big ship to steer, and I personally hope the leader can facilitate people working together to reach our goals.

What do you think of the platforms?

https://www.debian.org/vote/2024/platforms/tille

https://www.debian.org/vote/2024/platforms/srud

Took me longer than I'd like to admit to realize that \directlua is first expanded before it goes into the lua interpreter, and that \% is defined through \chardef (in plain), which means that it's not expandable.
Luckily LuaTeX has the \csstring primitive.
Is anyone else doing any fun things with \directlua?

I was thinking about copyright and licenses today. If I understand correctly, if you create a work you automatically have copyright of that work. Someone created, say, the Zero-clause BSD license, which ought to mean that that person has copyright for the actual license text. Does that mean that we are not allowed to copy the license text without the license authors approval? The license refers to other works, but not itself. It would need to reference itself, or create some kind of infinite regress turtles all the way down kind of situation?

Hypothetically, if one cross-stitched a version of a picture that's licenced under the GPL, is this considered a "derivative work", and, what would be the practicalities of including the source and the license itself for redistributing? I mean the actual physical cross-stitched item. Has anyone done this before?