Alan Johnson @acjay@qoto.org

@Osteopenia_Powers @mekkaokereke I feel ya, but there's a big gap between knowing how to do something and being able to effectively tutor someone through it. Also, poverty looks a lot of different ways. You're absolutely right that some poor people have sharp math skills that they use to survive. But it's also true that others rely on other supports for survival. One of the hardest parts of teaching a high poverty population is that it's impossible to generalize the challenges.

@mekkaokereke one small point from my time teaching public school in Baltimore. My school did not suffer from any lack in teachers caring. In fact, our teachers were far more intensely dedicated than the ones in the high performing suburban public school I went to. The difference was that it was our job to try to correct all the effects of the systematic damage of poverty.

@GeePawHill The Seven Years' War also directly precipitated the French Revolution, which completely reshaped Europe.

@Geoffberner why do you assume it's COVID-related? I haven't seen anything that suggests that. My wife had almost the same experience of near total hearing loss in one ear, since 2017, so definitely pre-COVID.

@alexelcu reports of Scala's death are greatly exaggerated, apparently

I haven't programmed it in a while, but it's still my fave language.

@AvengingFemme I have a mental block around PowerShell. It seems like gibberish to me.

At some point, I just need to go through a "Learn PowerShell the hard way" type tutorial.

@hicksca It's not just an illusion of exclusivity, it's *literally* exclusive. The only way to get on is to know someone with an invite.

I think that has made it a really enjoyable experience. But it's very unclear whether that can scale to an open network, let alone a decentralized one.

It all feels like sour grapes that Bluesky released a not even half finished product and got lots of notoriety. They obviously did something right. Try to figure out what that is, if you want your network to be more appealing

But I get frustrated when people talk about the same things being possible in ActivityPub that ATProto claims to be designed for. Someone should go ahead and make it, then. Otherwise, it's fine if another person wants to do it the way they feel like.

What bugs me about these rants is that if he's right, and ATProto is unnecessarily complicated for no good reason, then surely there's nothing to worry about for people who like the ActivityPub ecosystem.
QT: https://urbanists.social/@sam/110339902538138997

@atomicpoet @davidgarywood I haven't. I'll look into it!

@atomicpoet @davidgarywood Typically something a lot like the feeds in most commercial social media apps. The right balance of
- stuff from folks I intentionally follow, with some adjustment to balance out differences in how often people post
- stuff I might actually be interested in discovering
- the zeitgeist

I think the strict reverse chronological default Mastodon feed just doesn't do it for me.

@davidgarywood @atomicpoet to be honest, algorithms is a big missing piece of Mastodon for me. I just don't want to be beholden to one billionaire's algorithm.

@trisweb makes sense!

@trisweb I don't necessarily disagree, but why?