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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Lumbar support, height/back/armrest adjustment, headrest, right fit for your body. In other words, features that promote good posture, instead of slouching. Nowadays I find most ergonomic chairs have pretty much the same features, and what differentiates one from the other the most is quality. Aeron and Steelcase are basically BIFL chairs, whereas a cheap chair from Staples or Amazon may last you a year or two before things start falling off.












  • There are plenty of real life scenarios that both equate and predate your example, and which don’t rely on anonymity. Lynch mobs in the US, rape gangs in southeast Asian countries, Hitler rallies, heck even bully groups among children. The size of the group does not have to be big to allow toxic behavior, as long as you have a catalyst (such as someone getting away with something) that engenders a feeling of safety from consequences and in- and outgroups. The Internet is just another medium for this behavior, anonymous or not. What is different is that the internet is the first medium that actively records it.


  • Lemmy and Mastodon are social media as well, and they are not profit driven. Non-social media like newspapers and cable TV also spread toxic content.

    In the end, you got the causality reversed. Media (both social and non-social) gravitates towards what drives the most engagement. Negative/toxic content drives the most engagement because that content elicits a strong emotional response in the consumer.

    Media amplifies the problem, but ultimately the problem is people. Toxic content is going to stick around until people stop giving it attention, and unfortunately in all of the history of humanity we have yet to figure out how.



    1. A static IP is actually not necessary, but what you need is a consistent identifier. For the server, that’s typically a DNS address, but for clients and peer to peer networks there’s other ways to identify devices, usually tied to an account or some other key kept on the device.
    2. For centralised communications yes, you would need an always online server. For decentralised networks, you just need a sufficient amount of online peers, but each individual peer does not need to be always online.
    3. Pretty much, yes. Even push notifications on cell phones work this way.
    4. Route, yes. Manually. VPN is usually not necessary. In modern web-based services this is typically done with websockets, which are client-initiated (so the client address can change), and which allow two-way communication and typically only require a keepalive packet from the client every minute or so.

    There’s other reasons why universal addressing is not done - privacy, network segmentation, resiliency, security, etc. And while IPv6 proponents do like to claim that local networks wouldn’t be strictly necessary (which is technically true), local networks will still be wanted by many. Tying this back to phone numbers - phone numbers work because there’s an implicit trust in the telcos, and conversely there’s built in central control. It also helps that it’s only a very domain specific implementation - phone communication specifications don’t change very often. On computer networks, a lot of work has been done to reduce the reliance on a central trust authority. Nowadays, DNS and SSL registries are pretty much the last bastion of such an authority, with a lot of research and work having gone into being able to safely communicate through untrusted layers: GPG, TOR, IPFS, TLS, etc.


  • Whoa, that’s a sizeable edit to the post! Regardless the answer is pretty straightforward: your VOIP client (either the device if you have one or the software) is connected to a VOIP service which acts like a gateway for your client. Since the client initiated the connection to the gateway and is keeping it alive, you don’t need to make any network changes. Once the connection is established, standard SIP call flows (you can Google that for flow diagrams) are followed.

    So no, you router is not part of the cell service. The VOIP provider is part of a phone service that receives calls and routes them for you, just like the cell towers are part of a telephony provider that routes calls through the appropriate tower.