 Occasionally, you pull back the curtain just a tiny bit and it's still the medieval ages. Like that apparently, there is exactly 1 computer science prof at a top-5 IITs in India who is from the lower 40-45% castes. And this one, in Toronto, felt the need to hide his caste until he was granted tenure. https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~meel/opinions/caste.html The mind boggles. P.S. I know it's not "occasionally", unfortunately, and of course not limited to India-related issues.
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Amazon claims that air filters of sizes 10x20 and 20x20 and 30x20 are frequently bought together. I am prepared to seriously doubt that. How many different-sized furnaces do people have? Which means that the "frequently bought together" phrase is bunk. There may be something that's "frequently together", like they showed up in search together, but "bought" it ain't. (And if it is search, their product categorization is seriously flawed, too) The smoke season is finally upon us. Couldn't see the hills around the Bay today from the car. The graph backs this up. If the water rises by 9 feet in 2 hours … https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=tae&gage=stif1 What do you all think we do here in the #fediverse? Is it “#social #media”? (It doesn’t sound quite right to me: I post “media” only rarely) Is it “social #networking”? (Not sure, it’s different from offline networking, and I feel networked already even without the fediverse) I’ve been playing with the term “social #communications”: I’m here to communicate with you all, but not 1-on-1, but socially, where everybody else can overhear what’s being said. What to you think of the term?
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 A medium is nothing more than a material used to convey ideas. Paint and canvas are a medium. Video is a medium. Words are a medium, whether displayed on paper or a screen. So this is absolutely a social medium. (It's only one, so the singular medium would be more appropriate than the plural media, I suppose.)  @J12t if I'm not mistaken most applications handling these use readline and can be configured with inputrc. Different terminal emulator may send different escapes codes for various keys and many distros try to configure /etc/inputrc with sensible defayult that cover most. You can also have your own ~/.inputrc, just make sure you include or copy the config from /etc/inputrc as it's not implicit.  IFTAS has received funding! That's a great development, and congratulations to @jaz and crew!! If you don't know about IFTAS, it's worthwhile checking out. They are working on Independent Federated Trust and Safety for the Fediverse. You sort of wonder when this kind of #disinformation operation makes it to the #fediverse, if it hasn’t already. How would we defend against it? https://www.politico.eu/article/china-behind-largest-ever-digital-influence-operation-says-meta/  @J12t An extremely challenging problem and not one I think we are especially well equipped for at the moment. @J12t I think anyone who's switched to social media tools based in the Fediverse are by nature not passive consumers of media. You wouldn't be on the Fediverse if you weren't interested in curating your own news feed and being an active participant in the media you consume. So we would handle it through critical thinking, by raising the alarm on questionable content and by blocking or defederating bad actors. Once the Fediverse goes mainstream, however, all bets are off. Companies spend millions on social media teams, and billions on advertising on the big social media platforms. As the Fediverse grows, some of this money is going to get spent related to the Fediverse. Maybe a tiny bit, maybe a lot, I don't know. But the Fediverse, myself included, hates ads and tracking. Are there some respectful and acceptable ways for companies to operate in the fediverse? Can we show them a way? I would love to explore this with you at https://fediforum.org/  @J12t I think that it may be reasonable to insist that ads must be instance and client local. They may be inserted into an Inbox or timeline by local software, but should not be inserted into any Outbox other than that of the advertiser. This rule would make ads effectively opt-in. Users should be able to subscribe to feeds containing ads and offers. For instance, I am moving to a new town and may wish to temporarily receive move-related offers. Ad-only feeds need a bot-like profile flag. Github is forcing me to download recovery codes into a file that will be saved to my hard drive. Not a fan. Copy-paste into a password manager appears to be a much better approach.  @J12t yep, had the same issues. Iirc I had to enable the continue button from developer tools to complete the process without saving the keys to disk 🫤. Not a fan either.  Spell checker suggests that "FediForum" should be corrected to "Rutherfordium". That seems ... a stretch. At the last FediForum, we got the #Fediverse #Developer #Network started. If you don't know about it, it's mostly about half dozen Matrix rooms where a lot of Fediverse developers hang out and discuss matters they care about, from highly technical interop problems and best practices for implementing the Fediverse protocols, to how to talk about and market the fediverse. We also have a website and had the occasional video call for show-and-tools and face-to-face discussions. Links Fediverse Developer Network: https://fedidevs.org/ FediForum unconference: https://fediforum.org/ We're thinking of doing a Fediverse Developer Network session at the next #FediForum on 20-21 in September, too. Join us, in either or both places? @steve has published his #ActivityPub #test suite. He says it's "proof of concept" but I think it's a bit more. I very much like his structure with a "Server Abstract Layer". Maybe we can talk him into doing a session at #FediForum about it? England: a country in the north-west of Europe that's somewhat smaller than the land burned by wildfires in Canada this year. @J12t nice picture... Although how they managed to use **three** different area measurement systems in such a small graph is beyond me! Just remembering a quote by a college professor from a long time ago. Something like: “Some people have a mental horizon of radius zero, and that they call their point of view.” Here's an interesting question. To me, anyway :-) As the #fediverse grows, and an ever-broader set of apps talks #ActivityPub and extensions to #ActivityPub, how do we ensure that the overall architecture of the system remains consistent? Example from the past: WebDAV used HTTP extensibility as it was intended, but arguably they deviated from the architectural principles. (A consequence: it remains a niche and many apps that could've used it don't) Who else is worrying about things like that? @J12t I definitely do. It's one of what I think of as the big existential threats. Specifically what I am less concerned about is how extensions get used and more that that integration requires Θ(n^2) testing. It encourages lack of interoperability: it's one thing to say "I am doing something deliberately a bit odd," it is another to need to _either_ do a lot of odd things just to talk to anyone else _or_ just say "screw it we're integrating with mastodon and others can figure it out."  @J12t We do that by kicking Google out of the W3C, along with every megacorp that pretends your dream is to watch more advertisement :) @J12t Ran into this problem head-first, and decided the time wasn't ripe for me to develop for the fediverse just yet. |
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