Agreed on aperture fever. I find 10" the largest manageable size unless you get an Obsession Ultra Compact for $$$$$.

Didn’t really consider binos for OP since viewing anything more than 45 degrees up is a pain without a proper mount. A dob is easier to use near the horizon than using a bino to view straight upwards.

For 200 you could probably land yourself an old criterion telescope or used Skywatcher. The important part is the aperture. For good nebula and Galaxy viewing, you’re going to want at least 6 in of aperture. But more is better.

Definitely check Craigslist, Facebook marketplace, and cloudy nights classifieds.

100%

So many self-identified progressives or leftists aren’t deemed moral enough to even be allies with.

I have far more moderate friends than I do leftist friends.

I have more conservative friends than I do leftist friends.

And to become moral enough for the left, you need to cut out everybody else in your life except the left.

The left expects you to cut out all of your support network, but then refuses to be a support network in and of itself. Leftists are the shittiest friends I’ve ever had. The constant judgment and moralization just drove me away.

I disagree. The modern left is too busy and moralizing consumption, people’s personal mistakes, and vilifying them before they even get to the table.

If you listen to the lefts big influencers, you would have to cut out your family, a good chunk of your friends, and are expected to maintain exclusively left-leaning relationships.

The left needs a heaping dose of pragmatism.

I say this as a person who identifies as a leftist. I say this as a person who’s tried to spread the word of multiple community actions here in Tucson, only to not get resources because the various progressive organizations don’t deem me progressive enough.

So yeah, I have an entire website, that could advertise crucial community action. But people aren’t willing to send me graphics to upload in the various languages and won’t forward me to the organizations that initially planned these things. All because I don’t measure up to their moral standards.

All in all. Fuck The Democratic socialists of America. Fuck modern progressivism.

They are all no show pieces of shit.

The moderates in my life all do far more for their community than anybody on the left.

It’s moderates I find running the soup kitchen. It’s moderates that decide to start businesses and grow their local power.

I think this take is starting to be a bit outdated. There have been numerous films to use Blender. The “biggest” recent one is RRR - https://www.blender.org/user-stories/visual-effects-for-the-indian-blockbuster-rrr/

Man in the High Castle is also another notable “professional” example - https://www.blender.org/user-stories/visual-effects-for-the-man-in-the-high-castle/

It’s been slow, but Blender is starting to break into the larger industry. With bigger productions tending to come from non-U.S. producers.

There is something to be said about the tooling exclusivity in U.S. studios and backroom deals. But ultimately money talks and Autodesk only has so much money to secure those rights and studios only have so much money to spend on licensing.

I’ve been following blender since 2008 - what we have now is unimaginable in comparison to then. Real commercial viability has been reached (as a tool). What stands in the way now is a combination of entrenched interests and money. Intel shows how that’s a tenuous market position at best, and actively self destructive at worst.

Ultimately I think your claim that it’s not used by real studios is patently and proveably false. But I will concede that it’s still an uphill battle and moneyed interests are almost impossible to defeat. They typically need to defeat themselves first sorta like Intel did.

I mean, regional instances don’t have to stop folks from engaging primarily with interest based communities.

Some regions will dominate certain interests for example - here in Tucson we’re consider one of the Amateur Astronomy capitals of the world. If mander.xyz were to disappear tomorrow, Tucson would make a good home for all of the fediverse’s astronomy needs even though its a region based instance.

Further, there’s nothing that states an interest-based instance needs any registration. One could imagine a world where local instances have all the users and identities, and the interest based instances simply provide communities to the larger fediverse with no users of their own.

But yeah, it’s definitely a paradigm shift that makes interest based communities a bit more difficult to find.

Oh okay! I’m sorry about the misunderstanding.

???

I don’t particularly have any issues with them.

But if a user did, they don’t have much recourse. I’m talking about that as a structural aspect. Not a moral one.

But sure if you just want to claim this puts me in the !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com community by ripping it out from any relevant context, go ahead I guess?

Hi there! Admin of Tucson.social here.

I think that the only way the fediverse can honestly handle this is through local/regional nodes not interest based global nodes.

Ideally this would manifest as some sort of non-profit entity that would work with municipalities to create community owned spaces that have paid moderation.

So then comes the problem of folks not agreeing with a local nodes moderation staff - but that’s also WHY it should be local. It’s much easier to petition and organize against someone who exists in your town than some guy across the globe who happens to own a large fediverse node.

This model just doesn’t work (IMO) if nodes can’t be accountable to a local community. If you don’t like how Mastodon, or lemmy.world are moderated you have zero recourse. For Tucson.social - citizens of Tucson can appeal to me directly, and because they are my fellow citizens I take them FAR more seriously.

Only then will people be trusting enough to allow for the key element to protecting against AI Slop. Human Indemnification Systems. Right now, if you wanted to ask the community of lemmy.world to provide proof they are human, you’d wind up with an exodus. There’s just no trust for something like that and it would be hard to acquire enough trust.

With a local node, that conversation is still difficult, but we can do things that just don’t scale with global nodes. Things like validating a person by meeting them to mark them as “indemnified” on a platform, or utilizing local political parties to validate if a given person is “real” or not using voter rolls.

But yeah, this is a bit rambly, but I’ll conclude that this is a problem that exists at the intersection between trust and scale and that I believe that local nodes are the only real solution that can handle both.

I understand the sentiment… But… This is a terribly reasoned and researched article. We only need to look at the NASA to see how this is flawed.

Blown Capacitors/Resistors, Solder failing over time and through various conditions, failing RAM/ROM/NAND chips. Just because the technology has less “moving parts” doesn’t mean its any less susceptible to environmental and age based degradation. And we only get around those challenges by necessity and really smart engineers.

The article uses an example of a 2014 Model S - but I don’t think it’s fair to conflate 2 Million Kilometers in the span of 10 years, vs the same distance in the span of the quoted 74 years. It’s just not the same. Time brings seasonal changes which happen regardless if you drive the vehicle or not. Further, in many cases, the car computers never completely turn off, meaning that these computers are running 24/7/365. Not to mention how Tesla’s in general have poor reliability as tracked by multiple third parties.

Perhaps if there was an easy-access panel that allowed replacement of 90% of the car’s electronics through standardized cards, that would go a long way to realizing a “Buy it for Life” vehicle. Assuming that we can just build 80 year, “all-condition” capacitors, resistors, and other components isn’t realistic or scalable.

Whats weird is that they seem to concede the repairability aspect at the end, without any thought whatsoever as to how that impacts reliability.

In Conclusion: A poor article, with a surface level view of reliability, using bad examples (One person’s Tesla) to prop up a narrative that EVs - as they exist - could last forever if companies wanted.

Eh, but then he won’t learn anything. I’ve never found that response acceptable. It just perpetuates the problem. To each their own though!

On a technical level, user count matters less than the user count and comment count of the instances you subscribe to. Too many subscriptions can overwhelm smaller instances and saturate a network from the perspective of Packets Per Second and your ISPs routing capacity - not to mention your router. Additionally, most ISPs block traffic traffic going to your house on Port 80 - so you’d likely need to put it behind a cloudflare tunnel for anything resembling reliability. Your ISP may be different and it’s always worth asking what restrictions they have on self-hosted services (non-business use-cases specifically). Otherwise going with your ISP’s business plan is likely a must. Outside of that, yes, you’ll need a beefy router or switch (or multiple) to handle the constant packets coming into your network.

Then there’s a security aspect. What happens if you’re site is breached in a way that an attacker gains remote execution? Did you make sure to isolate this network from the rest of your devices? If not, you’re in for a world of hurt.

These are all issues that are mitigated and easier to navigate on a VPS or cloud provider.

As for the non-technical issues:

There’s also the problem of moderation. What I mean by that is that, as a server owner you WILL end up needing to quarantine, report, and submit illegal images to the authorities. Even if you use a whitelist of only the most respectable instances. It might not happen soon, but it’s only a matter of time before your instance happens to be subscribed to a popular external community while it gets a nasty attack. Leaving you to deal with a stressful cleanup.

When you run this on a homelab on consumer hardware, it’s easier for certain government entities to claim that you were not performing your due diligence and may even be complicit in the content’s proliferation. Now, of course, proving such a thing is always the crux, but in my view I’d rather have my site running on things that look as official as possible. The closer it resembles what an actual business might do, the better I think I’d fare under a more targeted attack - from a legal/compliance standpoint.