🎓 Doc Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@qoto.org

Wow. Two years here on #qoto, nearly 2k toots. Always happy to be here @freemo and grateful for this place.

I remember when I decided to try mastodon and signed up on more than one instance to find the rules written in a way that could be used to easily target users restrictively and found users very unfriendly and rude to others with the slightest difference of opinion. Not on qoto. Thanks to everyone here for making this a good place to be.

Darwinian Evolution of Taste. (arXiv:2008.12984v1 [q-bio.OT]) http://arxiv.org/abs/2008.12984

Sweet dreams!

@freemo
I agree. It was very bad choice of language on my part, and I appreciate it being pointed out to me.
@louiscouture @Tel

@Demosthenes @Tel sexual orientation has nothing to do with how masculine you are.

There are really masculine gays while there can be really feminine straight men. Also if it wasn’t the case, there wouldn’t be lesbian trans women.

You can dress all the way you want, but when you say things like : I don’t want to be perceived as gay, you perpetuate negative stereotypes about LGBT people which only ends up hurting them.

What Mastodon client(s) do you all use? I use Fedilab and it works well, but I always like trying different things.

Scientists now believe the dimming of Betelgeuse was caused by a giant sunspot ...

https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/earths-nearest-supergiant-is-cooling-down-at-the-end-of-its-life/

#astronomy #astrophysics #qotojournal

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-hidden-magnetic-universe-begins-to-come-into-view-20200702/

#magnetism and the #hubbleconstant , how magnetism could explain the Hubble tension.

#cosmology #astrophysics #qotojournal

Recent computational gravity simulations show that cyclic universes can have the same features as inflationary models.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/big-bounce-simulations-challenge-the-big-bang-20200804/

#cosmology #qotojournal

I was only half-listening to a reading of #TheMappist, but I dialed in during the meeting with Corlis. It really connected with a lot in my personal history w.r.t. to #maps, #archiving, and #planning for the future
http://www.pugetsound.edu/files/resources/7040_TheMappistLopez.pdf

#stories #selectedshorts #radio

This is my family with my cryptocurrency trading bot, lol

Mastodon is 20x more addictive than Twitter for me. How do you all handle it???

@freemo
If you are getting traction and are politically savvy, you might reach out to American politicians and discuss the anti-competitive angle of it. They're under a lot of political pressure right now
@chris

Something which I haven't heard about, but which I think is a good idea, is to license free software projects under a strong copyleft license, but add a clause so that it becomes public domain after X years (my preference is 10).

This would have a few advantages. One advantage is that it would be more consistent with my desire to reduce copyright term lengths.

Another advantage is that it would make re-licensing easier, while still being difficult enough that it couldn't be done on a whim. In the worst case everyone could dual-license every new contribution under both the old and new licenses for 10 years, and then 10 years later it would be under the new license. This is just the worst case, though. If you got every contributor for the past Y years to agree to re-license, then you'd only need to wait for 10 minus Y years.

A broad consensus would still be required to re-license the project, so it would still generally be safe from malicious re-licensing, but it would also be easier to fix licensing mistakes (for example, if the project was GPLv2 but the community wanted to switch to GPLv2+). It would also become less risky to experiment with different licenses, because it would be easier to correct the mistake if it became clear it *was* a mistake in the future.

This greater allowance for experimentation would also be useful, I think, because there exist interesting new copyleft licenses which might be a good idea or which might not, like the Parity license.

Technically I've already applied this idea today in some small things I uploaded to github, but they're not projects used by anyone else, so I'm not sure they really count.

Anyway, if anyone is curious, here's a link to the contents of a "LICENSE.txt" file applying this idea, for a project whose last contribution date was in 2019. The idea is that you'd bump up the year in this file each year, so older versions would gradually enter the public domain 10 years after their release. Note that I'm not a lawyer, so I can't actually vouch for this being legally valid.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ml-2/sslib/master/LICENSE.txt