Kichae

@[email protected]

Astronomer & video game data scientist with repressed anger

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Kichae,

People deny the ongoing genocide of indigenous North Americans all of the time. It's really easy when you have some sort of intrinsic motivation to do so, apparently.

Kichae,

And Instagram. PixelFed's really good.

Oh, and Goodreads. BookWyrm doesn't get enough love.

There's also Mobilizon, a federated events calendar and groups platform.

And a whole bunch of other stuff, but, like PeerTube, they're somewhat content sparse at the moment.

Kichae,

On the other hand, more and more video creators on YouTube make the bulk of their money off of Patreon, rather than YouTube ads, and if it were possible to increase their Patreon subscriptions by posting to PeerTube as well as YouTube, interesting things could happen.

That would really surface the cost of video hosting, though

Kichae,

Cool. Cool, cool, cool.

Just gonna go ahead and block you now.

Kichae,

Brands don't have to do shit like this. They have weird trolls with weirder parasocial relationships to intellectual property to do it for them, unprompted.

Kichae,

And don't just link to your instance's homepage. Link them to content. Show them something they might want to take part in.

Kichae,

I don't know, I found the learning curve on Reddit very weird. In so many ways, it was just a real downgrade from what I was used to, at least with respect to the actual design. But then, I think the switch to flat forum layouts (eg things like Discourse) was a huge step backwards, and having that, but also a bazillion of them in the same place, and a flat view that shuffled them all together just seemed overwhelming and impossible to navigate.

Going from that to "that, but they're different websites again" honestly feels less confusing to me.

Kichae,

By my own accord? Probably Back to the Future 2/3, or Serenity. But my partner and step-son spent 6 months last year watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy over and over again, so those are the ones I've probably actually seen the most number of times.

Kichae,

They would still need to be able to migrate the community to their own instance.

Kichae,

Ok, Calckey migration, then.

Kichae,

Mastodon uses aliasing for account migration. Your old account still exists on the original server, but it points to your new account. Following the old account automatically reroutes the follow to the new one. This could be done at the group level for lemmy without needing to manually lock the original group or ask users to find the new one.

Kichae,

Because when the best thing that can be said about what you're saying is "it's not literally illegal to say it", you're probably scraping the bottom of the barrel with respect to the content of your words.

It's also often that if people are reduced to using it as an argument, they've already been told to shut up, and that no one in their company wants to hear what they have to say. Kind people who say disagreeable things are usually open to hearing about why people are disagreeing, or having feelings about what is said. So, that leaves the unkind assholes insisting they have a right to an audience.

Kichae, (edited )

Misskey will have all of those features. Calckey has quite a few QoL improvements over Misskey, but the core features are the same.

Kichae,

It really depends on the type of study it was, and what these sources of asbestos were supposed to have been.

If they were doing a comparison study, so long as the control group was exposed to asbestos in similar amounts and in similar environments, it's still a strong finding. J&J shouting "they were exposed to other asbestos!" would just be an empty attack on the researchers' characters, and an attempt to falsely discredit them to an uncritical and uneducated public.

Things do seem to be a bit more complicated than that, though, as these are post-hoc investigations with no control. That said, it looks like they tried to do their due diligence to filter out participants who had known environmental exposure to asbestos. If some of them lied or mis-remembered, then it's up to J&J to show that the researchers were negligent or operating in bad faith.

That's going to be a pretty big hurdle to climb. I don't believe they actually intend to climb it.

The fact that the researchers asked about environmental during recruitment, plus the fact that J&J is only claiming that a small handful of people involved in the study were exposed to other sources of asbestos, really shows this for what it is: An attempt to scare researchers away from doing research, and especially from agreeing to be provide expert testimony in lawsuits.

One of the defendants here even has a new paper out this past January that includes patients with known environmental exposure to asbestos, and they show that cumulative exposure from all sources matters. Including exposure from talc:

Conclusion
For individuals with exposure to asbestos through cosmetic talc usage and additional alternate sources, all exposures contribute to the development of mesothelioma. Published case reports and case series have identified over 100 individuals whose sole exposure to asbestos was through cosmetic talcum powder usage.

This finding basically cuts J&J's apparent argument off at the knees, and was published months before they ever filed suit. They'd have been aware of it at the time of filing. They don't seem to have anything here. Just the opportunity to try and make their detractors look as dirty as they are in the eyes of people who haven't read any of the research.

Kichae,

It might be quite the opposite! The study itself concludes that “for individuals with mixed exposures to asbestos, all exposures should be considered”.

Yes, but the study still shows that people with no environmental exposure still got cancer. It's still explicitly stating that talc exposure is asbestos exposure. If J&J's argument is that these researchers made their product look more dangerous than it is by including people with environmental asbestos exposure in their studies -- whether by accident, or for nefarious purposes -- and therefore creating a false link between talc and cancer, this paper side-steps that issue entirely by including people with and without known exposure, and showing that talc exposure is equivalent to environmental exposure.

If J&J is saying what I think they are saying, then the researchers made these products look more harmful than they were, and included people who would have been harmed by other exposure to asbestos but concealed that fact in the study.

Proving that they concealed this information would be difficult, I think, though it would be devastating not only to their bank accounts, but to their careers more generally. Emory, Maddox, and Kradin's study explicitly states:

One hundred forty subjects with documented exposures to cosmetic talc were initially reviewed. Exposures were identified through sworn deposition testimonies and answers to sworn interrogatories provided from subjects, parents, and spouses. Sixty-five subjects were excluded due to recalled occupational or paraoccupational exposures to other sources of asbestos.

So, that wouldn't even be a lie of omission. It would be straight academic malpractice. Their academic careers would be over.

Kichae,

They don't automatically get a pass. They get peer reviewed.

It's also not one study. They've done multiple over the years, with hundreds of participants. They've done studies where they include people with known environmental exposure, and they still find that exposure to talcum powder counts as part of cumulative exposure.

Is it possible they're just flagrantly lying about their research results? Of course. Tell good enough lies and it becomes up to reproduction studies to find contradicting results. But there's as much money, if not more, to be found in finding those contradicting results, and yet...

Kichae,

It's true, the results are weaker than if they had done a comparison study, but a lot of medical research is just post-facto observation reports. Like, to do a proper double blind study here, you'd have to start with healthy people and then knowingly expose some of them to something you suspect may be a carcinogen.

That's not going to pass the ethics board.

You can look at people who have already gotten cancer and try to lump them into those who have used talc-based products and those who haven't, but then how do you actually measure the impact of the talc there? Do you look at the number of patients who did use talc-based products vs those who didn't? Those might just reflect the rate at which those products are used among different subsets of the population.

The key bit here is that the kind of cancer they're looking at -- mesothelioma -- is known to be caused by asbestos. It's also known that talcum powder contains asbestos. So, the observational link here is seeing whether people with mesothelioma have had known significant exposure to environmental asbestos and how much exposure they've had to talc-based products. And if you can see in your observations that higher or more prolonged exposure to talc is correlated with increased mesothelioma rates, and can assume that these people -- based on their own memories -- have not been exposed to environmental asbestos at a rate higher than any other average person, then environmental exposure becomes an independent factor and you can assert the correlation between talc exposure and cancer rates.

Kichae,

On some level, protest is about harming other people, at least mildly. Protests are frustrating. Protests are interrupting. Protested make it more difficult for people to do what they want.

This is by design. This is part of the point.

Protests that aren't inconveniencing people are protests that can be safely ignored.

It's all the better, though, when those inconveniences can be paired with a clear alternative for people to turn to to have their needs met.

Be honest, do you still use reddit?

I used to check the front page at least once every day, and occassionally check specific subreddits. Now I don’t look at reddit unless theres some drama, like mods getting purged, then I’d go there and enjoy the drama. Occasionally there will be questions that only reddit has the answer to so I have to reluctantly use it. I...

Kichae,

Eh, I still use it a little bit. I follow Blue Jays games via the team's subreddit, and the Pathfinder community hasn't really migrated over, so scan that every couple of days. And the memes have just clobbered my feed these last couple of days, even after blocking most of the meme groups.

But I'm using Reddit very differently now.

Kichae,

predatory government loan

privatized ... fiscally responsible

Man, I know things are über fucked in the US, but WTF is this nonsense?

Kichae,

The guidelines, they be bein' ignarrrrrred

Kichae,

This is heavy, Doc!

Kichae,

This is just a normal new product engagement pattern. Especially in a market where you're dealing with parity products.

People hear the hype, so checkout the product. They spend a few days kicking the wheels and comparing it to what they already have. Then people return to old habits and old products.

The tech news has lost its mind with respect to these things, trying to excitedly report on every minor fluctuation in web traffic. I don't hold the business press in any esteem, but I did expect them to not fall into the same trap on this one.

Guess I was wrong.

Kichae,

It depends on what you mean by "mass exodus".

There has been a mass exodus, in the sense that a mass of people have exited the site and moved elsewhere in a very short period of time. There has not been one, in the sense that the majority of users have left the site.

I get that the people most affected by changes may want to feel like literally everyone and their dog pulled up stakes to follow them. That they'd want that sense of solidarity, and the feeling that they're giving a proper "Fuck you" to the people that ruined their good time. And I get that people who are just exploring new spaces want to feel like they're choosing the "winning" side.

But that isn't the way these things work.

Habits are sticky. Familiar spaces are sticky. Most people do not like change, and will coats to momentum for as long as that momentum exists. They're not going to migrate until Reddit is completely crumbling.

And maybe we don't want them to.

This space is not ready for 50 million people. The moderation tools aren't there yet. The infrastructure to keep them from just jumping on a single server isn't there yet. The tools and documentation to help people easily set up new instances are still new and being stress tested.

The goal of killing a billion dollar company, or three of them even, isn't within reach. That's not a thing that happens overnight. But this is the ground work for taking on that task.

The first thing people need before they can even consider leaving is a viable alternative, and that's what we're making here by being active, and interesting.

Kichae,

Philosoraptor is in the house. I'm happy. Nature is healing.

Kichae,

Fevers are part of the healing process!

Kichae,

Yup. Not the first time I've heard this. A friend of mine went out with a rich guy a few times, and he's park anywhere ye wanted. To him, the fine was literally just what it cost to park.

The rich see the world differently than the rest of us. To them, money actually let's them do what every they want. They understand it as a currency of power, not exchange.

Kichae,

Ugh. The mole people are escaping again.

Kichae,

From a practical standpoint, sure, that's a way of thinking about it.

Strictly speaking, though, both Lemmy and kbin are different content aggregator/community forum engines that makr use of the same communication protocol, meaning they can read and properly interpret messages sent from each other. This means they're both totally independent of each other, but also can host the exact same posts and comments, allowing people to basically treat them as the same thing.

Kichae,

From Mastodon, you can treat Lemmy communities as if they're users (the ActivityPub term, I believe, is "agents"). That means you can follow them, and things posted to the community will get pushed out to you just as if they're Mastodon posts.

Kichae,

Reddit was left leaning

No, it really wasn't.

Reddit was self-siloing and community moderated, so it was easier to avoid the worst of right-wing social media bullshit, but the place was (and is) crawling with anarcho-capitalists, techbro libertarians, and socons, and fascists with just enough brain cells to rub together to not get banned from the site.

Moderated spaces tend to filter out the biggest assholes who can't help themselves when it comes to blatantly and openly attacking people, but Reddit is not a moderated space. It's just that it contains moderated spaces that became large -- the unmoderated ones don't grow at the same rate. But there have been fairly long standing, ongoing, and successful efforts to fash up mid-sized subreddits and turn them into cesspits.

Kichae,

Big, noisy rooms promote this kind of behaviours. It's also why comment chains on big Reddit subreddits degrade into memes, injokes, and other flavours of referential humour.

It's all about being punchy and popular for Internet points, because otherwise no one is ever even going to read your words. They'll just be buried in the noise.

Kichae,

Yes, this.

It'll be just like YouTube, where people are huddled on the floor praying to "the algorithm" with each bit of "content" they post, hoping to make it big as a "professional Redditor".

I can't wait to see the per-user algorithmic feeds. One post from r/conspiracy or r/conservative scrolls past your screen, and suddenly it's all you see.

Kichae,

Given the rights prisoners have in many other countries, it might be better to say that things are just as bad in the US as the media paints other countries.

Because, uh, prison labour is pretty fucking awful, especially when considering that y'all gots them private prisons down there.

Kichae,

Once you get them together, consider doing the POSSE thing and posting them to a blog first. That way you can retain full control of them and still spread them around wherever they may be useful. There's even an ActivityPub module for WordPress!

Kichae,

I have a 2019 MBP for work, and honestly, it doesn't sleep right, either. I'm kinda at the point where I think Intel has a significant problem.

Windows has become a lumbering trash heap, Intel doesn't seem to be much better on the hardware side of things. Together, Wintel has kind of become something of a shit storm.

Kichae,

Oh, I don't appreciate MacOS. I kind of dispise it.

But Microsoft still has made Windows a grotesque beast.

Kichae, (edited )

Something something ludites, something something sabot, something something hence the word .

Kichae,
  • Ears perk up *

A Chicken Run sequel, you say? Well, I know what I'm doing this December!

Kichae,

Instead the microblog view is a view of the comments in all the magazines without being organised under posts.

No, that's absolutely not the case. From the microblog feed, I'm able to find my own posts from Calckey and PixelFed (e.g. https://kbin.social/u/@[email protected]), neither of which have touched or in any way interacted with n a kbin magazine.

You can follow users on kbin, but AFAICT you don't have home or local timelines, only federated/global. Instead, these stream of posts that are not addressed to a Group actor can be mined for hashtags by magazines, and those posts with matching tags get shown in a magazine's Microblog tab. Any posts that are untagged, or which cannot be assigned to at least one magazine, get dumped into m/random's Microblog feed.

Threads are specifically addressed the Group Actors. Comments belong to whatever they replied to. Microblog posts neither address a Group Actor nor are in reply to a thread or thread comment, and so are fundamentally detached from the core threadiverse ecosystem.

Kichae,

Is this a euphemism? Because it sounds like a euphemism.

Kichae,

Yeah.

I'm not a ML; I more-or-less lean toward anarcho-communist ideals, and am generally sympathetic to anti-capitalists, though, and have wandered into Lemmygrad on more than a few occasions, especially before everyone else showed up and they were one of the more active corners of the space.

It's always like that. They're just angry trolls, riling each other up.

Defederation, Threads and You (kbin.social)

A lot of us are pretty new to the fediverse and we've arrived just in time to grapple with what is easily the biggest federation/defederation controversy ever to hit it. I've put this thread together to hopefully help communicate some of the more complex ideas that we're trying to get our heads around....

Kichae, (edited )

I keep seeing people say that defederating from a server means your site will still send content to that server, but I don't actually see that happening in practice.

It also doesn't really make sense from a systems point of view.

If I have a server block list, that list is really only acting locally. Any site I put on that list doesn't know its been blackballed. Instead, I just refuse to accept content from it. Importantly, this is a refusal of delivery, not a stop request. When receiving content from remote sites, your site isn't actively making update requests. You basically just add yourself to a mailing list, and you and your instance get sent anything that you've signed up for. So, stuff keeps getting sent even even after your instance has defederated, it's just being filtered out before it reaches you.

But if I've blocked communications with another website, I've blocked communications with them. That should mean incoming and outgoing. If this isn't how Lemmy treats their block lists, that's kind of bizarre.

It's also not how I've seen things pan out in practice. Communities hosted on beehaw, for instance, are totally out of sync with the mirrors hosted on sites they've defederated from. Those sites do not appear to be getting updates from beehaw. There are a few breakthrough posts here and there, but from what I've seen they're few and far between, and it's possible they're arriving via third party.

I don't think the potluck analogy is a great one here, unfortunately. In the potluck, as described, all of the food gets placed in a central location, and people from all over can come and pick what they want from the table.

But there is no table here. There's no central location where instances go to pull content in from. Everything is passing back and forth from each other.

Instead, at this potluck, you carry your beans around with you all night, and sometimes people let you know that they'd like some beans. Thr fondu guy is also lugging his pot around, and sharing with people who ask.

But if you're not on speaking terms with the fondu guy, if he asks you for some beans, you're just going to say "no".

He can still get beans, though. And this is where I think things get hazy and difficult to interpret based on observed communities. Because if Iask you for some beans, and you give them to me, I can see that fondu guy doesn't have any, and I can share some of them with him.

He doesn't need to talk to you to get your beans. That doesn't mean you're actively handing them out to him, though. And he's at the mercy of other people who may be willing to share those beans.

And if everyone at the party decides they don't want to share with him?

Well, then he goes beanless, no matter how open he is to receiving beans.

Kichae,

Both Neocities and Yahoo! licking their lips over that name.

Kichae,

I think it becomes pretty intuitive if you can hold in your mind the model of each instance as a totally separate, independent website with no inherent ties to any other.

The problem is, everything here kind of vaguely looks like a place we're used to being a single website, and each instance looks more or less like each other, so that sense of independence and difference is lost. But if you think of it like, I don't know, Facebook or something like that having the possibility of communicating with mydumbwebsite.com, it becomes a lot clearer that that communication needs to be initiated somehow.

Kichae,

I think you're confusing "removes content that bothers the social hegemony" and moderation.

Kichae,

I'm looking at beehaw communities on both Lemmy.world and Beehaw.org,and they're totally out of sync with each other. There's the rare post from a beehaw user that breaks through somehow - possibly boosted from a kbin or Mastodon instance? - but for the most part, you're getting basically none of the content from those communities.

Because beehaw isn't sending you any updates.

Is it that you're seeing beehaw users who are posting to communities hosted on 3rd party communities? Because that's absolutely possible.

And that's absolutely the issue with federating with sites that continue to federate with instances you've defederated from. You're blocking direct communication in both directions, but there's a lot of indirect communication going on.

Like, this is literally the scenario I described.

Kichae,

If an instance defederates from you, that instance stops seeing stuff from your instance. But not necessarily the other way around, as defederation is a one-way action.

I invite you to check out, say, [email protected] from lemmy.world, and from beehaw.org directly. You'll notice that .world isn't receiving updates from beehaw. A couple of posts seem to have filtered through somehow, but there are almost no posts or comments coming from beehaw.

The group is completely out of sync with its origin. And it's not because .world has blocked beehaw. Beehaw very much still appears under .world's list of linked websites.

Blocked instances are blocked, and when you block communication between sites, that's usually a two-way street.

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