I don’t have one yet. But I would love to play with using it as a radio pager.

So you would censor this comment you’ve linked

You’ve misunderstood. You need to re-read that entry.

I have many accounts. No issues on db0 as far as I recall.

I’ve seen removals without rationale. The software allows it and mods tend to only give a reason in the most justifiable cases (spam). I’ve also seen robotic removals, where nothing appears in the modlog. These are entirely untraceable. It happens when a removal is systemwide and not by a local moderator.

Of course these features can be designed to spec. A msg folding action could (and should) force a rationale, which would then be more transparent than removals (which users have to go to the modlog for – only to potentially find nothing). Burying rationale in the modlog is not good for accountability because that’s less visited than the thread, which is where the folding rationale would appear.

And worse, removals are unnoticeable to the author. Authors see their own removed comments just fine. The status quo is very sneaky. I’ve discovered my comments were quietly removed /months/ after the removal, incidentally, because of the subtle way they are implemented. In one case it was because I was searching for my own comment using a different account than what I authored it with, and that was the only reason I could then realize it was removed. If you generally want to know if you have been censored, you need to periodically search for your own posts in the sitewide modlog. It does not get any more subtle than that.

Their job should be removing blatant spam/offensive content.

When removal is the only tool you give them, they use it to remove outright content that is on-topic and civil. Limiting them to heavy tools encourages abuses of power.

No downvotes on hexbear. So no, it’s not the status quo here.

I said “status quo with Lemmy”, thus talking about the software, not the configuration. Note this is a cross-post. The original post was on Sopuli.

The software is designed to use the down votes to arrange the better quality content on top of the thread (to some extent¹). Of course if you disable the functionality on an instance then that particular instance does not use it, which is orthogonal to a discussion of how to improve the software. It would be bad quality engineering to design the software for a specific configuration of a particular instance.

¹ though not entirely because age is a factor AFAICT.

You’re getting pushback because we don’t put a lot of value in civility here and the best way to disagree or criticize someone is to post about it.

You can’t disagree when the post is censored. What do you reply to? I don’t think anyone has yet mentioned an alternative way to discourage a moderator from abusing their power to remove msgs they don’t agree with, which is the most rampant problem with moderation in the threadiverse (not just talking about hexbear but wherever Lemmy runs). The hexbear status quo encourages the abuses of power they think they are discouraging by having blunt tools. Which is not to say I’ve seen any such abuses of power on hexbear… not visited it much.

Folding is not an obligation, so no time is wasted.

There is already some obligation for mods to decide whether each comment should be removed or not (as content can be illegal). But luckily there are mechanisms in place so mods do not have to read every comment. If you are worried that users would use the /alert/ mechanism to ask a mod to fold something, that’s already a risk and a problem. Adding the fold capability does not add to that burden.

folding would be useless

Bizarre that you think that. Bizarre that people are agreeing. Can you elaborate? Why would it be useful to have low-quality content fully expanded by default? Isn’t the status quo with Lemmy to use voting to sink and fold low quality posts?

I personally do not have time to read every single comment when I step into a thread. I want to see the best commentary first and only the less interesting stuff if choose to keep reading, if I have time. The nature of a tree of threads results in some garbage responses to quality comments that rise to the top. If you do not fold anything, you are then forced to see junk before quality, because the 2nd best comment in the tree is still below a low quality reply to the best quality comment.

Bit early for that. I think that approach of implementation without design or discussion is largely why tech has become so enshitified in recent decades. Better quality software emerges from a meticulous series of phases starting with analysis (discussion) and design. It seems kids are being taught to run off and code without thinking which is what leads to bad quality s/w.

I’d rather see mods have less power not more

I would rather see mods have use less power, not more.

When you give them blunt instruments, you encourage excessive use of power. When you give them only an AK-47, they will use that to cut the head off a chicken rather than a machete (as you withheld the machete as it would be too empowering).

To say /subtle/ is to overlook the expressed transparency of mod votes being distinguished from user votes. Anything you understood to undermine transparency is a misunderstanding. Transparency is important. None of the mechanisms mentioned are necessarily opaque if competently designed.

A brainstorm is not meant as a deeply detailed specification. You have to be able to imagine how transparency can be built into the designs.

To say “petty ego tripping” is to misunderstand the purpose of voting. Voting is a means to an ends, not the ends. I doubt anyone gives a shit what the total is (except of course ego trippers). Voting has a utilitarian purpose: to influence a quality score that sinks poor quality content and/or folds it, while raising high quality posts to the top. To have contempt for accurate scoring is to have contempt for quality control and curation.

To worry about voting losing its role of displaying an integer discrete vote count is actually to promote ego tripping. Using the votes for utilitarian purpose diminishes the use case as an ego tripper’s status symbol. So if you oppose ego tripping, you’re actually on the wrong side of this.

Votes could in fact remain as integers, 1 per vote, if you want to preserve the ego tripping function. While the quality score could be a separate number with a composition and calculation that need not be hidden from view.

(update) Consider how SpamAssassin works. It computes a score then it also gives detail on how the score was calculated:

X-Spam-Flag: YES
X-Spam-Score: 7.2
X-Spam-Level: ******
X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=7.2 required=5.0 tests=HTML_MESSAGE,
 RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE,SPF_HELO_NONE,SPF_NONE,URIBL_BLOCKED
    autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4

Rough example but a post quality score could be more or less similarly refined using smarter criteria than just equal weighted votes per account, particularly if people get multiple categories to vote on.

After describing in detail how a sledge hammer lacks precision for the job at hand, you propose a battering ram. Not only is it a more blunt instrument, it’s also less conducive to quality control. If that tool works for you, why even have moderators?

I should first clarify the point of the thread: to understand the plumber’s reasoning. How old is too old for an abused tank and how old is too old for a well maintained tank? SMCF says 30 yrs is past both thresholds but I would like to know where those thresholds are (considering warranties are generally shit [esp. in the US] and a useless indicator of life expectancy).

In a good buyer’s market replacing the tank now is the right move for sure. But the house is in the US, in a region where prices are extortionate. Buying a tank is about triple the cost of a tank in Europe and almost as costly as buying a tankless combi boiler in Europe. And buying a tankless boiler in this part of the US (which is what I would prefer) is well over $2k last time I checked, and that’s not even a combi. So I’ve been holding out for prices to become reasonable.

I guess if I don’t replace it now, I should leave the sediment in the tank to avoid the risk of it falling apart when flushing it.

In my case it’s likely in a terrible state because during my timespan of ownership (last ~25 years) I never replaced the anode rod. I only recently learned about them. So the tank has probably eaten itself alive.

But what if I had diligently replaced the anode rod periodically? Wouldn’t a tank last much longer? The plumber who said they would not flush a tank that old would not have known whether the anode rod was routinely replaced.

The metadata in the headers can be avoided using Memoryhole and similar protocols which embed the headers inside the encrypted payload. The problem is again barrier to entry. Low-tech users generally can’t even handle app installs on desktops.

When you say “worry”, that’s not the right word for it. My boycott against Google is not fear-driven. I will not feed Google anything it can profit from as an ethical stance. Even if an expert linux tor user were on Google, I’m not sure we could exchange email in a way that ensures Google gets no profitable data. If we use PGP coupled with Memoryhole to strip out the headers, I’m not sure Google would accept a msg with a missing or bogus From: header. But if so, Google still possibly learns the user’s timezone. Though that may be useless if Google learns nothing else about that user. But we’re talking obscure corner cases at this point. Such an expert user would have no Google dependency anyway.

MS/google-dependent friends are generally extremely low-tech. They don’t know the difference between Firefox and the Internet. They don’t know the difference between Wi-Fi and Internet. Linux – what’s linux? They would say. At best, they just think of it as a mysterious nerd tool to be avoided. So what can I do wholly on my end to reach them via gmail without Google getting a shred of profitable data? Nothing really. So I just don’t connect directly with a large segment of friends and family. Some of them are probably no longer reachable. Some are in touch with people who connect to me via XMPP, so sometimes info/msgs get proxied through the few XMPP users. It’s still a shitshow because Google still gets fed through that proxied inner circle of friends and family. In the past when someone needed to reach me directly, they would create a Hushmail or Protonmail mail account for that temporary purpose (like coordinating a trip somewhere). But that option is mostly dead.

I just had to reach out to plumbers for quotes. All of them are gmail-served. All I could do is refuse to share my email address and push them to use analog mechanisms. They are not hungry enough for business to alter their online workflow or create protonmail accounts.

That’s exactly what I did with hushmail. I would tell low-tech folks to get a hushmail account then I would use hushtools.com to do all the key management, putting my key on the keyring and grabbing their key. So the other person did not need to know anything or take any special steps. That was best option of my time. But last time I checked hushmail was still entirely non-gratis.

Protonmail emerged when HM became non-gratis and messed with hushtools. But PM requires every one of their own users to do key management which creates a barrier to entry. I would have to walk a PM user through adding my key to my record in their address book and walk them through sending me their key. That effort is a show stopper for many. I might as well walk them through setting up a PGP-capable MUA. But then if they keep their gmail or MS acct the metadata still feeds those corps.

This simple answer is no doubt the most overlooked; probably as a consequence of the tyranny of convenience… people too lazy to go to the library.

I give out my XMPP address and offer Snikket accounts. Some go along with it and some do not. I lost touch with some friends. Some people are in contact via phone but that’s not ideal some connections are lost as phone numbers change.

I used to push some people toward Hushmail until they dropped the gratis plans. Then for a while I pressured people onto Protonmail but then distanced myself from PM when the brought in Google reCAPTCHAs and killed off Hydroxide. Tuta is a non-starter because Tuta’s variety of e2ee is incompatible with open standards, thus forcing me to periodically login to a web UI (also due to them sabotaging their Android app by way of forced obsolescence pushed in the most incompetent way).

So it’s a shitty state of affairs. 2024 and simply sending a msg to someone has become a total shitshow.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t mean take the sensor out of the wall, but just electrically unplug it from the controller to see what it does on its own when you turn on the water.

Yeah I figured that but the terminals on the sensor are hard to reach so I was figuring I would need to remove it. But then it occurred to me that I could leave the thing in place and do the isolated test by unplugging the X2 connector from the motherboard and easily access the pins through that connector. So that’s what I did. Results:

• at rest, the signal wire is 4.75 V
• water running, the signal wire is 2.3 V

So in isolation the sensor worked correctly. Then I plugged it back into the motherboard and retested to confirm again the bad voltages. But in fact the readings were correct. It’s unclear why it works now. I wonder if the unplugging and replugging of the x2 connector improved a connection that deteriorated somehow.

Thanks for saving me €36! However incidental. If I had not done the test in isolation, I probably would not have messed with the X2 connector. I would have normally just replaced the sensor as an experiment.

(edit) I can hear a ticking sound coming from the motherboard. I’m not sure how long it’s been doing that. It’s quite faint unless I put my ear close to the board. Maybe it’s normal.

It shows 5V on the diagram but I don’t think that’s precise. I measured the red wire at 4.68v which is around what the guy in the video got in his test. Since the board is part of the circuit I suppose I cannot rule out the board as a problem. Testing the sensor in isolation will be rough going because it’s a proprietary joint. So I would have to get a tight rubber hose and fit that onto a garden hose. For powering it I have a switchable ac adapter with a 4.5 V setting. Or I can maybe get 5V off a USB charger or ATX PSU from a PC. My multimeter does not have a frequency function but I can see from the video that it would be useful for this so I might look for 2nd hand multimeter at the next street market, though that will set me back a week (OTOH might be worth it if it helps diagnose this in a way that helps avoid buying the wrong part).

Whatever is broken here, it was something that gradually failed. For several months it was a gamble when turning on the hot tap whether the boiler would detect it and give hot water. It was like a 50/50 game of chance for a while then getting hot water became progressively less likely until it flatlined.