maegul, 6 months ago

Bob Dylan certainly thinks so: medium.com/…/like-it-is-bob-dylan-explains-what-r…

His take is that Rock n Roll was bringing white and black people together and so the establishment sought to shut it down.

maegul, 6 months ago

Well he’s not alone … a number of relatively vocal “fedi-advocates” are positive about it too, even those who also acknowledge that meta/facebook are fucked and defederating from them would make sense.

Which reveals, I think, a curious phenomenon about tech culture and where “we” are up to.

From what I can tell, mainstream Silicon Valley tech culture has permeated out fairly effectively over the decades such that there are now groups of people walking around who consider themselves “the good guys” and have generally progressive political views and believe in OSS and the importance of community etc but are also fundamentally interested in building some tech, making it grow in usage and effecting some ideology or agenda through creating “significant” technology. Some of them seem to have money, or tech know-how or a network into such things and some experience working in the tech world. They’re all mostly, to be fair, probably middle aged white cishet men.

When face-to-face with the prospect of having “your thing” accepted by and (technically) grown to the size of Meta/Facebook/IG, these people seem to not be able to even think about resisting. “Growing the protocol” and “growing” mastodon is what they see here and all the rest is noisy nuance.

This may not be the full corporate buy out worth millions, because they’re “the good guys” and don’t work for big-corps, but this is the equivalent in their “ethical-tech” world … the happy embrace of a big-corp on OSS terms.

Which in many ways makes sense, except in the case of social media so much is about culture and values and trust that sheer “growth” might completely miss the point especially if it’s by riding on the back of a giant that would happily eat or crush you at a whim and has done so many times in the past.

And this is where I’m up to on this issue … both sides seem not to be talking about it much.

What is the “emotional”, “social fabric”, “vibes and feelings” factor in all this … that a place, protocol and ecosystem, predicated on remaking the social web with freedom, independence, humanity and fairness at its core, openly embraces the inundation and invasion of the giant for-profit evil big-corp social media entity this place was defined against? How are we all supposed to feel when that just happens … when Zuck and all the people on his platform is literally just here, not with some consternation but the BDFL’s loud gesture of welcoming embrace? I’m betting most will feel off … like something is wrong. The vibe will shift and fall away a bit … passion and senses of ownership will decay and we may even ask ourselves … “what was the point of coming here in the first place?”.

Now, to be real, it’s not like a big-corp connecting over AP can be prevented, it’s an open protocol after all. But the whole thing would be different if there were open discussions and acknowledgement from the top about the cultural feeling of the disproportionate sizes and power here and the possibilities that it won’t be completely allowed without a more decentralised model. Maybe Threads would have to create their own open source platform which people could run instances of themselves? Or maybe Mastodon could wait until the user sizes are more equal (though that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, which is kinda the point here in many ways right? … that Mastodon is kinda giving up and saying it’d rather be a parasite on a big-corp in order to be significant than just own its niche status?)

Eitherway, it seems clear that many of the power brokers over on mastodon are there to create their own form of influence and this sort of deal with the devil is exactly the poison they’re willing to drink for their ends.

For my purposes … I don’t think I’ll want to hang around mastodon much after Threads federation happens … the embrace from the BDFL and a number of users is just off putting and the platform is too crappy to care about it … I’d rather just go back to twitter than suffer through that swampy egotistical place.

maegul, 6 months ago

It’s the year 2023 and people are still using “X” to represent the number ten.

And “A” to represent the wide open mouth vowel … and …. You get the point.

I wonder what the oldest symbols still in use are? You could probably argue for some of the old language roots for say water that arguably as far back as language itself.

maegul, 6 months ago

I was certainly under the impression that Threads was already dying down or at least reeling from falling user activity. I’m not there so I wouldn’t know.

My general take is that with the kinda fracturing of social media happening right now, the big traditional places like Twitter won’t actually die. It will become like the suburbs and the city. Niche places like this will be the suburbs. But everyone in niche places will still go to the city at least sometimes or pay attention to what happens there for the things that can only happen in the big city. Meanwhile the suburbs will come and go with cycles of interest and disinterest.

The only things that will take down the big city places like Twitter will be other new big cities, especially as a new generation gravitate toward something new and resonant with their culture. Threads, in trying to clone Twitter, I’m betting was always a long bet, because cloning alone isn’t enough to break the inertia that keeps people in a place like Twitter.

If TikTok did something on the other hand, which they might not even need to do anyway, it might be a different story.

maegul, 6 months ago

Excellent answer! That blog is heroic! Always a treat when you encounter a new one!

maegul, 6 months ago

Given all the different ways “active” is defined we may as well just collect all the meanings available.

Mastodon and Twitter etc, for example, count logging on as active.

While I can see the argument for voting, it is qualitatively different from posting/commenting. Knowing both, as well as log in numbers too might make sense. But muddying the waters is probably confusing … though it is interesting that any instance can define what it means by “active”.

maegul, 6 months ago

Like everyone else you can only hope she’s ok.

It does seem like burnout is a factor here and in such cases it seems, and from my own experience too, that walking away without any contact isn’t an uncommon behaviour. So we can hope it’s that.

maegul, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Python, checking in …

<span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">return </span><span style="color:#323232;">(a </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">or </span><span style="color:#323232;">b)
</span>

Parentheses aren’t necessary, I just prefer them for readability.

See python documentation on boolean operators for reference. Short story is a or b is an expression that evaluates to a if a is “truthy” else b. “Falsy” is empty strings/containers, 0 and None.

maegul, 6 months ago

That’s a shame, it would have been fitting in “modern” Python along with the walrus and static type system.

maegul, 6 months ago

Yea I started watching the MKBHD video on it and turned it off at the part where he was kinda justifying how sophisticated the metal pressing process had to be because it has some elasticity or something and was hard to get consistent … the upshot of which was, as MKBHD admitted, that the panels were inconsistent and you were going to get random gaps in the plating. He kinda showed some examples, and to me, even over YouTube, it just felt cheap and I no longer understood how someone could feel ok spending the money.

maegul, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Interesting to see in the mastodon ecosystem.

Another thing they do is provide their own default instance, so if you don’t want to worry about which instance to join you just join theirs. They did this way before the official app put mastodon.social as the default, which has its own problems given the dominance of that instance.

Generally it seems like they’re trying to fill all the usability gaps mastodon has.

From memory though they have some VC funding. So it’s also curious to read that they may be pinning pining for Meta/Threads to join.

maegul, 6 months ago

It doesn’t help that Mastodon has very little design considerations for dealing with popular accounts, treating every account as if you’re only following your friends and family. (Emphasis mine)

Came to the same realisation myself. The whole “just friends having lunch together” vibe that mastodon aims for simply breaks down at a certain scale, which means is essentially unsuitable as a Twitter replacement for all that looking for that.

The lack of any feed/notifications management then means that you get subjected to all the annoying randos as though they are your friends or neighbours.

Which, coupled with a culture of purism and gatekeeping and HOA-ing leads to what can be a genuinely toxic culture. Not for everyone all the time but enough of the time for some to have found it awful and left.

But not enough talk about this. It’s designed as a suburban social media where you chat to friends and neighbours. Push it beyond that and you’ll have problems.

maegul, 6 months ago

The cost isn’t the software, it’s the time, energy and risk involved in using it.

The combativeness was deployed to fight off combativeness.

maegul, 6 months ago

assuming the name of the community can be changed that is

It’s just like with user accounts. The alias can be whatever you want but the address is static. Fortunately I’d say “house of the dragon” counts as a decent catch all for a ASOIAF community.

maegul, 6 months ago

Interestingly I feel like I’ve recently arrived in some middle ground where I suspect the show is a spent force unless it changes its tone or structure somewhat. It reminds a little of bojack which IMO has a redundant season or two at the end there.

This season of LD struck me as the moment that I had nothing more to gain from the show. I greatly appreciated what it gave to the franchise for the first three seasons but don’t feel like I need too much more of that. But by the same token I feel like the show has plenty of room to grow into something else that’s either more traditional Trek or its own thing. Except with this last season it seemed like the show feels like they have to retain very much the same vibe and structure.

maegul, 6 months ago

Probably same engine capacity too.

maegul, 6 months ago

Fair!

Still, I’m under the impression that some of this “trucks” can have surprisingly small engines given their size.

maegul, 6 months ago

Me too! I’m on mastodon and here and just generally feel more at home here and more comfortable with the structure and design.

maegul, 6 months ago

Interesting thing about the Misskey story is that there’s a decent amount of activity around forking it for western users.

See firefish or calckey as recent attempts with sharkey and iceshrimp being even more recent.

I hope one these gets off of the ground. Talk is that the recent Misskey update (v13) properly fixed some performance improvements which the new forks are hoping to leverage.

maegul, 6 months ago

As someone who is against use aggregate scores and pleased to see it removed I can understand the desire to make it available to admins/moderators to assist in their actions.

I think making the numbers available only for admins/mods would make sense, though I also feel it starts to get to be an arbitrary divide.

I also have to wonder if an admin/mod couldn’t simply use the view of the user’s posts/comments we all have access to along with the various sorts available. Want to know if a user posts generally well received stuff … look at their posts and sort by “Top all time”. Want to know if they’re regularly posting stuff that is poorly received, sort by “Controversial” (which is new) or just “New”. I’d suspect that in the end integrating this sort of lookup into the moderation tooling so that it’s easier/quicker to do would be more worthwhile than persisting with user aggregates.

maegul, 6 months ago

Yea I wouldn’t want to use it outside of the subscribed section, as generally the only small communities I’m interested in are the ones I’ve sought out.

That being said, it wouldn’t surprise me if the scoring for “Scaled” maybe mishandles posts at the edge of “small” where a post has one upvote. As each post starts with a single upvote, they’re not necessarily particularly useful?

maegul, 6 months ago

Well that’s kinda the point. Those posts probably come from communities with much fewer users/subscribers. There’s probably a long tail of small communities which would produce many posts with few upvotes that score well once scaled.

Hopefully you’re using it on the “subscribed” section. Otherwise you’ll just see posts from all the small communities many of which you’re likely not interested in.

Beyond that there’s a possibility that the scaling itself could do with some tweaking. In the end though, you don’t have to use scaled exclusively, it’s just another tool for browsing along with the other sorts.

maegul, 6 months ago

It’s one of those things that should get better the more people use. The more people see stuff from the smaller communities they’re interested in, the more votes and activity those posts will see and the higher they will get scored for both the scaled sort and the others too.

maegul, 6 months ago

The yellow is a bit much but I appreciate the idea. A scaled back color or design would be nice.

maegul, 6 months ago

I feel like I’ve kinda seen it. But also IME, I think every refresh from an update feels snappy, so I’d presume there’s something to the restart that clears some cruft (without knowing any details).

maegul, 6 months ago

Thanks!

Without knowing any information about this, the hachyderm instance is one which would host such a thing. They’re tech focused, and well organised with a co-op umbrella organisation running the instance that has pretty clear rules and ideas around how incorporated entities can engage and join it. So it’ll be interesting to see where this goes.

maegul, 6 months ago

Awesome!

I’d feared the worst and thought you had walked away which would have been sad.

maegul, 6 months ago

Appreciate the honest and (somewhat) applicable answer!

I also DO NOT appreciate the downvotes … we really need to get rid of those. Don’t agree, fine, move on or respond civilly. A downvote is a manifestly uncivil action sanctioned by the interface.

Otherwise … to respond to the abortion argument … where this falls down for me is the complete lack of any mention of the mother or woman in your reasoning.

Scientifically, this challenges the “humanness” of a foetus in the way it is tightly coupled and dependent on another human to live. Morally, it raises much of your reasoning in relation to not fucking with people once you consider what is effectively done to women by forcing them to carry any foetus to birth which is a massive, very active and obviously risky undertaking.

Whether these are convincing for you or others, the lack of any weight given for these considerations indicates that the act of birthing is presumed as a duty of all women. A presumption that IMO undermines the completeness of your scientific and moral arguments.

To take that a little further … should people be legally compelled to secure and save the lives of babies? As it is now, that’s not the case anywhere I know of. Causing harm would be criminal, obviously, but failing to save a baby or anyone else from harm is not.

In debating the legality of abortion you enter into similar territory. Only by presuming birth as a duty can you think otherwise.

While aborting a foetus is a positive act, there’s the complication that it’s purpose is to avoid the onus of pregnancy and birth, which can be easily seen as tantamount to “simply not doing the thing that would save the foetus’s like”, ie all the work of pregnancy and birth which is probably all too easily presumed by men (which I’m guessing you are) as a more passive and natural event than an act of effort, toil and cost.

maegul, 6 months ago

Honestly, this seems like the depiction of a bunch of people that are safe and prosperous and can’t imagine how their views could possibly be problematic, and don’t need to, and so avoid political discussions because it’s just a bit too yuck and they’d prefer to lead their happy lives.

Basically the conservative - privilege coupling that is so shit.

maegul, 6 months ago

I know it’s contentious, but the downvotes don’t help anything.

To your first para: viability outside the womb doesn’t, I think, affect my initial argument. If it’s viable outside of the womb, then so be it. Actively harming it would be illegal, but being legally compelled to care for it would be problematic.

Viability would alter abortion laws though, I think. In that it would make sense at some point to prohibit the mother from electing to terminate rather than submit the foetus to whatever the extra-womb viability state is. What happens then would mostly put the foetus in the same position it is now in that the onus of providing the viability of its life wouldn’t be something others are compelled to do, unless of course it’s trivial and withholding is tantamount to actively killing.

On the issue of convenience, I think that’s a misrepresentation. The thrust of the argument is consistency with the rest of social norms where the “convenience” is the freedom for a whole gender to not undertake 9 months of drastic bodily transformation and work and the remaining parental duties. If the rest of society were so committed to life and prosperity as ensuring every foetus gets taken care of, then that’s a different conversation, in large part because the mothers would be taken care of too. But consigning a whole gender’s major life experiences and burdens to a matter of “convenience”, I think, marks the dissonance that a libertarian outlook encounters when it tries to compel or outlaw actions. It’s not just convenience (in principle at least), and that this onus needs to be considered trivial indicates IMO the biases against women involved treating the issue as legally black and white.

Nonetheless, I agree with your general reasoning about not facilitating the depreciation of life. I personally extend the same reasoning to animals in my arguments in favour of veganism.

maegul, 7 months ago

I mean antagonistic shaming can be awful, obviously. But getting people to care is important, and meeting people where they are sometimes requires making sure they know they should care.

Caring doesn’t mean feeling bad and guilty though. This is part of the toxicity that personal responsibility has created. Not everyone can be equally responsible for their individual contributions. But we can all be much more equal in how much we care about issues.

Something like the bus you describe won’t just appear out of no where. People have to want it, commit to it, consult in its design and then use it.

maegul, 7 months ago

Voyager might want a word …

It was always a part of it though … travel times were always there and relevant, the delta quadrant was very far away, getting to the battle in time wasn’t always possible, being alone when in trouble was almost always the point … space hadn’t been reduced from a final frontier to an irrelevant playground.

a single ship having it

Well this was part of the contrivance … once Discovery made it work why wouldn’t the whole federation be running spore drives ASAP? Security wise they’d be nearly unstoppable.

maegul, 7 months ago

And Star Trek was never about human ingenuity coming together to make near-magical technology work? Stamet’s DNA changes weren’t recorded? They weren’t studied and replicated or had the essence of their effect distilled into an interface that mimicked the physical effects?

This all seems like clutching at very untrek-like straws … which kinda encapsulates the whole issue that some have with Discovery.

I personally don’t mind the idea of a mycellial network, or more broadly, some sort of futuristic bio-physics phenomenon/technology. I just think Discovery didn’t land the handling of it. I think there are plenty of possible reasons for the spore drive not being used by all of the federation that are more interesting than these “lucky, only one person got the DNA so I guess it’s over now” reasons … reasons that would actually contribute to the Sci-Fi of it all. Like, just shooting from the hip … it has an immune system that learnt to kick out foreign starships.

maegul, 7 months ago

but for something fairly simple like that? Nah, the show is just bad.

Ok, why was the ship erased from the records? Why did it have to go into the future? What was the sphere thing again? How were Discovery going into the future again … couldn’t they have just sent the important thing separately? Does Discovery going into the future and being “erased” actually prevent the problem … which was what … AI?!

Honestly, I don’t know the answer to all of those questions. And as much as I personally liked the idea of doing Trek 900 years in the future (finally, something new in trek), I remember the plot of the backend of season 2 being just a bit too much “what? really?”.

I can’t break it down, like at all, but I’m personally not convinced at all that Discovery needing to be erased made much sense. Convince me otherwise, please. But also, to anyone else … do you honestly remember why Discovery had to go into the future and be “erased” … and even if you do … does it feel like a good or interesting story point to you? If you answer with at least one “no”, then the whole “erased” thing just isn’t a good explanation or defence for why the spore drive in a prequel is somewhere between bad and awkward.

Personally, I’d go further and say the whole “erased” thing cant be anything other than contrived … because it’s simultaneously so extreme and completely necessary to handle the issue of the spore drive … they had to do something like this and it’s just too hard to not think about the writers trying to work their way out of the problem. That their reason for needing to be erased and go into the future doesn’t seem to have any connection to Discovery or its spore drive, but just happens to have struck the same ship with a spore drive and no other ship, only affirms the contrivance.

Maybe I’m missing something here, it’s been a while since I’ve season 2. But the “erased from the records” plot point might just be a part of the problem we’re citing here, not a defence against.

maegul, 7 months ago

Absolutely, I think the 32nd Century is pretty great, and the time jump was the means to that end.

Oh I’m all for the jump! Just not sure the justification for it makes much sense. Was the sphere sentient by that point?

They couldn’t just destroy Discovery? Or spore drive the ship far away?

maegul, 7 months ago

I’d personally completely forgotten about the river of time stuff and the intention to never emerge. Though wasn’t there stuff also about Michael setting a beacon in the future? Also, in season 3 they seemed unsurprised at emerging in the future IIRC.

maegul, 7 months ago

Yea, just checked now out of curiosity. First, it was definitely a bit mirror universe creepy. Second, yea, it did seem a bit shallow and childishly dumb from what I saw. Funny.

maegul, 6 months ago

Hmmm. Came back here looking for the snippet but the image link seems to be broken … any chance of digging it out again?

maegul, 6 months ago

Thanks!!