in a town of this size they probably knew the guy and thought (correctly, as it turns out) he'd be back in jail by Friday and didn't want to do the paperwork again

Guys I'm starting to think Arkansas State might not be able to pull this one off

Oh yeah, I make no claim that any of my experiences are anywhere near universal. Basically no part of the American experience is.

Or driving in general. As an American who didn't get a driver's license until I was 21 (gasp! so old) due to some reasons, I can attest that many, many people here simply can't comprehend the idea of someone over 17 or so not having one. I got turned away from a hotel once because they didn't know how to use a passport as an ID.

The only other people I've met with this problem were immigrants. And we were always able to bond over lamentations of how difficult it is to solve this problem... the entire system to get a license here is built around the assumption that everyone does it in high school, so every step of the way is some roadblock like "simply drive to your driving test appointment"...

American here. The nearest swimming pool to my hometown was in Canada. So no.

Edit: I don't think this is normal

prison

My other reason is that it's the only way to know I picked an instance that isn't going to just go away without me and take my account with it. It will be an interesting day when the first major lemmy instance goes down...

Confirmed that I am able to comment on that thread if I manually set the comment language to English, but leaving it as the default "Select language" makes it spin forever.

Not relevant to lemmy (yet), but this does break down a bit at very large scales. (Source: am infra eng at YouTube.)

System architecture (particularly storage) is certainly by far the largest contributor to web performance, but the language of choice and its execution environment can matter. It's not so important when it's the difference between using 51% and 50% of some server's CPU or serving requests in 101 vs 100 ms, but when it's the difference between running 5100 and 5000 servers or blocking threads for 101 vs 100 CPU-hours per second, you'll feel it.

Languages also build up cultures and ecosystems surrounding them that can lend themselves to certain architectural decisions that might not be beneficial. I think one of the major reasons they migrated the YouTube backend from Python to C++ isn't really anything to do with the core languages themselves, but the fact that existing C++ libraries tend to be way more optimized than their Python equivalents, so we wouldn't have to invest as much in developing more efficient libraries.

If you can read this, the Ansible playbook mostly Just Worked™ to install it on a clean Debian VPS. I actually did start over at one point because I wanted to change the domain name after learning there's not currently any way to use different domains for the UI and usernames like there is in Mastodon (relevant github issue); from that, I suspect it should be good about not clobbering anything except maybe SSL certs for existing nginx sites.

For some reason, my nginx also now seems to try to use the cert lemmy installed by default, even on a site I just set up to only listen on port 80 (http://gillen.dev). So that's kinda weird, but just installing a new cert for such a site with certbot fixes it (https://sdg.fyi).

It still seems to be struggling a little bit: votes and comments on this thread are taking a looong time to show up here (your comment just got here and it says it was from 24 minutes ago)... or maybe I'm just impatient :)

Of course, the real test will be when it comes time to update to the next Lemmy version...

This is the main reason I'm here - I realized that with an account on lemmy.world or something some admin somewhere could just unilaterally decide to defederate some major server and I wouldn't be able to get to half the communities I like anymore. And lo and behold, beehaw.org defederated lemmy.world while I was setting this up.

I always thought this mechanic would drive a lot of people away from the fediverse, but mastodon still seems to be pretty active after the mass migrations from Tumblr and Twitter so what do I know?

WOOOO I had to mash "search" for a while but I think I'm here now