Discredited may be an overstatement on my part, but it is a flawed measure of someone’s complete abilities and strengths.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Validity_as_a_measure_of_intelligence

While IQ tests are generally considered to measure some forms of intelligence, they may fail to serve as an accurate measure of broader definitions of human intelligence inclusive of, for example, creativity and social intelligence. For this reason, psychologist Wayne Weiten argues that their construct validity must be carefully qualified, and not be overstated. According to Weiten, “IQ tests are valid measures of the kind of intelligence necessary to do well in academic work. But if the purpose is to assess intelligence in a broader sense, the validity of IQ tests is questionable.” [emphasis mine]

There are other criticisms in that section of the Wikipedia article too.

I think the first thing to recognize is that there is absolutely no single measure of intelligence. IQ scores are (a) seriously flawed and discredited (and narrowly focused measure of human abilities). Human intellectual powers have many dimensions. Someone may be weak in speech and articulation but on the other hand be an absolute genius mechanically, artistically, or in some other aspect of human intellectual pursuit.

There seem to be several theories/concepts that posit this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Crunch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bounce

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_model

I hope so too.

Thanks for helping me understand.

If any other instance were to have such behaviour collectively, they would probably get defederated as well.

I suppose that’s reasonable.

That LW, SJW, lemmy.ca, feddit.org (https://feddit.org/post/41472) and smaller instances like startrek.website (https://startrek.website/post/15928569) all defederate them shows something.

Not necessarily when the topic is anti-western sentiment, since much of the West is pretty ignorant about why much of the rest of the world feels that way.

Another example I saw a few weeks ago, with things like “the French deserve a thousand charlie hebdos” (terrorist attack) https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/24552489.

Ok, that’s the best example I’ve seen so far of what you have been talking about. Wishing terrorism on all French people is going too far. It would have been much more productive for them to take the opportunity to remind and educate people about France’s (and other Western powers’) terrible legacy in the middle east instead.

Nice for 0.19.5, let’s see how it goes!

For sure!

I had read that lemmy.world pre-emptive defederation with hexbear post a while back with interest, and shook my head. The only thing I’ve seen so far that seems like a legitimate complaint is the posting of the pig poop balls emoji and perhaps excessive emojis in general. Neither of those seem like grounds for blocking a whole instance instead of just banning individuals for posting pig poop balls.

Thanks, I hadn’t realized that 0.19.5 was very stable or that SDF was among the last to upgrade to that. I have posted a question to see what their plans are.

Most appropriately named domain registrar ever? They should have just gone ahead and named it iwantmynamebackgoddammit.

I was wondering the same thing about why they hadn’t upgraded, and after a little searching, I found out that there have been some bugs introduced that have not yet been completely resolved by 0.19.7. Supposedly 0.19.8 will fix them, so I’m hoping that that’s why they haven’t upgraded yet. If that’s why they haven’t upgraded yet, I appreciate the focus on stability.

Thanks for the links. Unfortunately, they did not answer my questions. The first link is a string of complaints without evidence. I didn’t read the entire thread but read many of the top posts. The second one is the same thing. A lot of complaints of nothing. I still have the impression that people complain about hexbear because it challenges their beliefs. What I’m really trying to understand is what’s so egregious about hexbear that would make it necessary to protect people new to Lemmy and entire major instances from them. If you could link me to specific comments with evidence and explanations of patterns, it might help me understand.

I still prefer lemmy.sdf.org. They also have an empty blocklist (from what I can tell - the version of Lemmy they’re on I don’t think splits it off into a separate tab), they’re also from Oregon from what I recall, have 2.5x more monthly active users than lemmy.today, and they’re a non-profit that’s larger than and longer than only their Lemmy instance.

Again, I don’t get the hexbear issue. I wish someone could explain to me what the problem actually is.

Thanks, I edited the post and noted that lemmy.zip was UK-based after I originally posted.

https://discuss.online/ is US based and just defederated hexbear

That’s a negative for me. I don’t want anyone blocking instances on my behalf unless those instances are doing blatantly illegal stuff.

Content accessibility can be an issue due to the way instances only fetch remote communities if a local user is subscribed. Also, having a larger userbase usually means that the instance has been around long enough to show some good track record for the instance

Yeah, that’s true. I did use some of the great Lemmy community directory sites to find some communities that weren’t already subscribed from my instance. I understand that better community discoverability is planned for upcoming Lemmy versions.

Look through this list and sort by monthly active users (MAU): https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

The server location info doesn’t seem 100% accurate, but it should still help. I would suggest either the instance I use, lemmy.sdf.org (run by an American, technology-oriented non-profit org), or perhaps lemmy.zip, which also looks good - I started looking into it but haven’t fully vetted it yet.

By the way, I don’t think that being in a larger instance has much benefit, by the way. In fact, I tried one of the larger ones and found that it suffered performance-wise, so I went back. You can get pretty much everything from every other Lemmy instance, especially one that doesn’t block and is not blocked by other instances (lemmy.sdf.org also applies here).

Edit: lemmy.zip seems to be subject to the laws of the UK, according to their code of conduct.

True, good points!

This is my understanding too. I just read in the news the last couple of days that Biden was considering handing out preemptive pardons to people like Liz Cheney, etc.

Same here. The main thing that kept me from going with Macs was that the OS only supports the hardware for about 10 years, from what I understand, while Windows used to just not care how old the hardware was. But now it’s not only the TPM 2.0 requirement bullshit - I bought a micro PC with a 5-6 year old Ryzen and it was not supported by Windows 11. Fuck them. I use Windows 11 at work and it sucks anyway. My two choices now are 1) run Linux on my old PC or 2) buy a Mac. I’m most likely going to go with 1. That way I can run Windows 11 and Mac VMs anyway.

5.6 GB RAM usage on idle, I presume on a fresh boot, is just outrageous for an OS, especially relative to 8 o 16 GB total RAM.

I would suggest blocking the communities that post all the content you don’t like. After I did that, it’s been smooth sailing, and I read the All feed. There’s not that many large news and politics communities that you would need to block to get rid of that stuff on your timeline.

Good tip about browsing by New. I don’t do that very often, and I don’t think I have since I blocked a bunch of communities. I’ll try it again, thanks!

You can still use All, if you block the communities that you don’t want to see, one by one. It’s exhausting and new ones continue to be added, but otherwise it’s hard to know about new communities that come along that you might like.

Yes, this was pretty much the same way I thought about it since I want know about new, interesting communities and hope that eventually the smaller ones will thrive like they did on Reddit. Honestly, I didn’t even think it was that exhausting. I would browse the home feed and as soon as I saw a stupid post that seemed to be typical of a particular community, I would click directly on the community link from the home feed and then click block this community. The nice thing about doing it this way is that you tend to quickly get rid of the worst offending communities which has the most significant impact on your timeline. After that, it was more of an occasional block for me.

When I look at the feed, I mostly see memes, US politics, and some tech.

My solution to this (same experience here), was to block all the communities that were flooding with this stuff and anything else I didn’t care for, and then just browse All. Now my home feed is pretty nice.

Sounds like a classic “To Serve Man” type of situation to me… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zone)