Gregory's Server
“One of the oldest and largest known qanats is in the Iranian city of Gonabad, and after 2,700 years still provides drinking and agricultural water to nearly 40,000 people.”
What? Planned obsolescence my ….
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I don't use Google Docs very often. But when I do, like right now ... this is a really bad product. I can't do anything of what I want to do. Custom paragraph styles? Nope. Insert a spreadsheet? Nope. We had all of those since ... the eighties? Why not in Google Docs?  In other news, almost nobody understands abstractions. No obvious place where one can hands-on / learn practice the idea either, other than maybe object-oriented class library design, and how many people do that? Long postmortem piece on #Neeva from the Verge. I played with it at the time, and I’m not surprised at all that the project failed: the product never made any sense. No, nobody will pay a monthly subscription fee for a web search website, even if it is more private (but merely self-asserted), in particular an unproven one. How they could think otherwise is beyond me. All the money they raised could not help with that. https://www.theverge.com/23802382/search-engine-google-neeva-android Is the US coming up with its own version of what the EU calls “gatekeepers” in recent legislation covering big tech companies? Bipartisan legislative initiative … intriguing! https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/27/tech/big-tech-regulation-new-federal-agency/ Need a job? This one at Netflix pays just a tad more than average. While these salaries of course exist in Silicon Valley, it’s rare they are publicly advertised. (It’s towards the bottom of the post: Up to $900,000/yr, and the way this reads I think the winning candidate could negotiate this further up.)  @J12t this them trying to get around the State (inc cali) rules that say they need to display salary ranges. So they stick ridiculous ranges on it (supposedly reflecting current salaries). Someone posted one for google that was something liked 100k to 1m. It’s so hot even the cactus population is dying. https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/saguaro-cacti-collapsing-arizona-extreme-heat-scientist-says-2023-07-25/ Github says: "Great repository names are short and memorable. Need inspiration? How about "solid-octo-computing-machine"?" Great example, github! EFF: "FBI Seizure of Mastodon Server is a Wakeup Call to Fediverse Users and Hosts to Protect their Users" Now that's a subject that hasn't been discussed much at all. Unlike commercial social platforms, most fediverse servers are operated by volunteers on shoestring budgets. They don't have the legal resources (or simply reputation for them) to stand up much for their users I would think. Found via a post to the Fediverse press coverage group https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse_press
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 @J12t This is one of those areas where I wish we had a nice legal kit (Rocketlaw style) where you could fill in some forms, answer some questions, pay a nominal fee, and get set up. It isn't where we need to be, but it would be a significant step from where we are.  So this new #arc browser by https://thebrowser.company . Some good ideas, like pinned tabs. (Will soon be copied I would think.) Some concerning: lots of data apparently gets sent to Google, unless you turn if off/ Some features I would miss from Firefox, particularly containers. I have walled off some companies (like Meta) and use them to easily access multiple accounts at others (like Mastodon.social) But the biggest question is: what's their business model? They have venture investment.
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@J12t unless users are paying them money, their business model is selling users by the pound. @J12t Arc actually have something called Spaces, which is the main reason I’ve been using Arc as my primary browser. But that’s because I had missed Firefox’s containers. Seems to be exactly what I need – and makes it possible for me to switch back. “South Florida ocean tops 100 degrees F” (that’s almost 38 degrees C) Anybody still think that #climate thing can’t be so bad? Remember this year is going to be a cold year compared to most years in the future. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/07/25/florida-record-warm-ocean-climate/
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 @J12t Cripes this should be a 6 alarm fire all-hands-on-deck. Ouch. The Washington Post has this piece: “Twitter rival #Mastodon rife with child-#abuse material, study finds”. The author does not understand the implications of a decentralized network at all (“mastodon did not respond”) but imho that’s on us, not on them: we have not done the work to communicate it. The #fediverse needs a #PR team that can react quickly on press like this.
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  @J12t one thing is educate more Fediverse developers about PhotoDNA and screening for CSAM. I was product manager at WMF on our work to hook up MediaWiki to PhotoDNA. I'm familiar with the platform and understand its importance. I'd like to invite @alex and/or colleagues to come to our next #SocialCG meeting to discuss the paper and talk about solutions. @dmitri could we push this to the top of the agenda? I'll take a task of soliciting participation from dev teams on the fediverse. What percentage of accounts in the #fediverse do you think are "fake"? How would we tell?  It could be done. Myself, @accesstoken , and some others created a system like that for Twitter more than a decade ago. Hey @LemmyDev, I'd really love to tag my Lemmy posts. For the fediverse press coverage group https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse_press , it would be really nice to be able to add tags for which apps and other social networks are mentioned in those articles, and then have stats like "in the past week, articles that mentioned ActivityPub also mentioned Twitter every time, but Bluesky only 25% of the time" or such. The Kaiser Permanente website at this point I think is a total write-off. It is slow as molasses, has spaghetti navigation (like spaghetti code, just not as tasty) and clearly many parts of the site have no idea what other parts of the site are up to. Is there a medical condition as a result of which you are sick, because you were unable to tolerate and make sense out of unacceptable healthcare websites? Should I call my primary care physician? It is fun to watch #fediforum registrations come in. Join us in September? https://fediforum.org/ For those of you who don't know about California Redwoods and their symbiotic relationship with fire: the trunks are all that's left over of the world's largest trees (Redwoods) after a wildfire, like here in Big Basin 3 years ago. All the branches burnt off, but the trunks were protected by thick bark so they remain standing and alive. Now they are regrowing branches everywhere! (Looks like cypress trees! But will turn in to a Redwood again in due course.) Since I first set foot on that California beach 30 years ago this December, the sea level apparently has risen by almost 10cm. At a faster rate in the most recent decade, of course. |
