K‮ly‬e @khird@qoto.org

@realcaseyrollins if QOTO had single sign-on, I think that'd really be all that's needed.

I've recently noticed a number of media outlets capitalising "Black" when referring to a person's race. Here's an example, from a CBC story:

"Officer Garrett Rolfe fatally shot Brooks in the back after Brooks fired a Taser in his direction while running away after a struggle with officers outside a Wendy's restaurant on June 12. Rolfe, 27, is white. Brooks, 27, was Black."

Here's another, from FiveThirtyEight:

"Some political science research shows that Black people vote at higher rates when a Black candidate is on the ballot, although that finding is somewhat contested, and that research is about voting for a Black candidate, not a white candidate with a Black running mate."

This is an error in English because "black" doesn't derive from a proper noun (unlike "African" which does). However, these are both fairly respected news organisations - the CBC in particular is supposed to serve as something of a language model - and the pattern is consistent enough it's clearly intentional.

Would anyone care to offer any insight as to why the writers or editors are deviating from conventional English practice here, and selectively so (note that in both examples, "white" is not capitalised)? I'm specifically interested in the reasoning from their perspective; if all you have to contribute is "the media is full of liberals" then you're not going to advance the conversation much.

@HighFunctioningSunflower H is just the letter I chose because its Persian equivalent ه has four very distinct shapes, so it's easy to see how it changes based on context. Since Persian is written right-to-left, the initial letter of a word appears on the right, while the initial letter of a Latin-alphabet word appears on the left. But in both cases you type the word first-to-last and the computer arranges the letters left-to-right or right-to-left as appropriate for the script you're using.

@HighFunctioningSunflower I assume when you ask "how it works" you mean "how the different character shapes are selected"? The keyboard just enters letters as in any other language, but it's up to the font rendering engine to decide the appropriate glyph to represent each character based on context. For example, here's the Persian letter H, and a small line (kas͟hída) that represents any letter to which the H might be connected.

The initial form (هـ) is used when there is a letter to the left, but not to the right.
The medial form (ـهـ) is used when there are letters to the left and right.
The final form (ـه) is used when there is a letter to the right but not the left.
The isolated form (ه) is used when there are no adjacent letters.

In all of those lines, I typed the same character on the keyboard for H, and the context (i.e. position of the adjoining line) tells your device which shape to use. The Latin alphabet equivalent would be typing (H_), (_H_), (_H), & (H) and seeing the letter H assume a different shape in each instance, even though you typed it in with the same key all four times.

@realcaseyrollins@mstdn.social
Additional discussion of this feature is at https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/8649

@zleap @design_RG @globcoco @freemo

QOTO differs from vanilla Mastodon in its post length limit. While we enjoy 64kchar of space, users on the flagship instance get only five hundred. So to post a longer message, a vanilla user will break it into chunks ≤500 characters each and post each chunk as a reply to the previous one. That "show thread" link pops up to make it clear the post is possibly dependent on another for context.

If you reply to a message from someone else, your reply isn't published to the local timeline (although it may show up in your followers' home timelines). Self-replies, however, do show up in the local timeline unless prevented by privacy settings. So the need to warn about hidden context is much less for cross-replies than for self-replies).

https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/9228

@freemo I'd suggest ditching the phone and envelope glyphs. If your recipient might run OCR on your correspondence (many do, so as to be able to grep it later on), those sorts of things could result in your contact info getting garbled.

@vibhi Odd. Well, turning incognito mode off fixes it - although why that should be the case doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Does your CSS delivery scheme rely on being able to save cookies?

@vibhi still the same behaviour - here's what I see.

@vibhi @freemo

"Something went wrong while trying to load the full version of this site. Try hard-refreshing this page to fix the error."

Not a great first impression.

@hansw any particular reason you want your encryption provided by PGP specifically? In my experience, OMEMO and Off The Record are substantially more widely supported in XMPP implementations - both providing end-to-end encryption.

@freemo I believe it's been reduced in the version that a network would show today. But that video has the "super duper" guys in blackface plus a weird tapdancing segment featuring maybe half a dozen on screen for close to a minute.

Apparently the song was a reference to black people in Harlem spending beyond their means to imitate the fashions of the wealthy.

@freemo I don't know how "modern" you need but at least as a colour video, check out Taco's cover of Puttin' on the Ritz.

https://youtu.be/b9Ik_x-xkQs

@realcaseyrollins The only thing that bugs me about mutes is disrupted conversation views - if someone you've muted participates in a conversation, replies to his post are visible but not connected to a parent, and it gets hard to follow what's going on. But otherwise I agree they're entirely adequate.

@design_RG Right, I'm not seeing Gab on the federated feed (and I haven't for a couple days to memory at least) so I think they're gone. I was more curious about the isolators' next steps. Having won the war, will they roll back the measures affecting instances like QOTO?

Wait so if Gab isn't on the Fediverse any longer, is there a likelihood of QOTO reconciling with the instances that blocked us for not blocking Gab?

@freemo Maybe. But it seems to me the police-prosecution department is still going to be subject to regulatory capture or defanging. What happens when a new mayor gets elected on a law-and-order platform? He'll appoint a cop-friendly leader of the department, or reduce its funding, or promote the better prosecutors away from the job leaving only the idiots who aren't effective at convicting cops. Then he can speechify about how he's fighting the deep state which is obstructing the police from doing their jobs, destroying America, etc.

@freemo as I understand it, the problem isn't a lack of rules defining unacceptable behaviour, or even consequences prescribed for breaking the rules. The problem is that the prosecutor is usually disincentivised from going after the cops, so the prescribed consequences are only rarely imposed.

From the prosecutor's perspective, maintaining a good working relationship with the police is important, since they're responsible for collecting the evidence the he uses to win convictions every day. So he does them little favours which ultimately make it unlikely an officer is convicted for on-duty behaviour in all but the worst cases.

And I don't know how you fix this. You might appoint a special prosecutor who only targets cops, so he doesn't need police cooperation to score convictions against civilians - but this role is eventually going to be subject to regulatory capture and wind up in the hands of someone friendly to the cops. You might create a separate unit tasked solely with investigating their fellow cops - but the ones appointed to this unit are going to be the doofi who aren't more valuable in other roles. How can you guarantee both the independence and competence of your oversight solution?

Any solution you come up with is going to be pitting you against perps who have a better-than-civilian understanding of the law, the rules concerning evidence, and ways lawbreakers can escape consequence. So you need to have as robust a system as possible, because the people searching it for weaknesses are very good at finding them.

@willjc Just like composing a normal post, but you use the privacy setting "Direct: post to mentioned users only"