Klye @khird@qoto.org
Mod
Joined Sep 2018
@freemo Were the Americans strongarmed into signing the agreement though? My understanding was they wanted out because an isolationist administration was in power, and they just wanted the Taliban to stop doing terrorism long enough that the army could leave without being accused of abandoning the civilians to the terrorists. @swiley
@AlexLevesque Advertising is one of the few things that results in a banning here. I try to catch QOTO accounts when they spam, but unfortunately we can't do anything about accounts on other instances. If you come across advertising from a QOTO user, please help out the mods by filing a report.
@freemo @swiley Well it was his peace talks that set up the problem, right?
> Washington under then-president Donald Trump signed a deal with the Taliban in February 2020 that limited direct military action against the insurgents. That allowed the fighters to gather strength and move quickly to seize key areas when President Joe Biden announced his plans to withdraw all American forces by the end of this month.[[1]](https://cbc.ca/1.6141568)
> If the Taliban meet their commitments, all U.S. troops would leave in 14 months [from February 2020]. U.S. troops are to be withdrawn to 8,600 from about 13,000 in the weeks following Saturday's signing.[[2]](https://cbc.ca/1.5481070)
If the government agrees not to engage in direct action against you and to withdraw its military, you no longer need to take it on at all, with or without F-15s or nukes.
The Democrats criticised Trump for reneging on the nuclear deal with Iran that Obama entered into, so now that Biden was faced with a deal with the Taliban that Trump entered into, they had backed themselves into a corner politically. Had they not made such a big deal that Trump was setting a *bad* precedent, Biden could have followed the precedent without coming off as overtly hypocritical.
I think the broader point, that a force comprising solely small arms is almost certainly incapable of defeating the US military, still stands. If the Taliban had retaken the country while the US forces were still actively trying to hold it, you'd have a much better counterexample.
.py is the file extension for Python scripts, not the TLD of a URL. :)
Here's the [software](https://github.com/halcy/Mastodon.py) and here's the [documentation](https://mastodonpy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/).
Look into mastodon.py - it doesn't provide exactly what you're asking for, but it exposes the tools you'd need to script a solution yourself.
Yeah until they come out with a traditional laptop rather than a sub-ultrabook thing, this falls in the category of "interesting, but not for me". I moved up from 15.6" to 17.3" eight or nine years ago and I was so much happier for it. 13.5" isn't even in the conversation.
Right now I work on a laptop that has dual 2.5" hard drives, an optical drive, and a dedicated numpad. It cost less than the cheapest kit these guys sell sans memory, storage, and wifi.
@freemo
1. Text in the search bar should probably be left-aligned, not centred
2. Search results are empty even if I search for text I see in your posts
3. Possessive "its" shouldn't carry an apostrophe
4. The icons under "News and Events" confuse me - I can understand why the article might be represented with a scroll, but not why the roadmap gets a church or the other article gets a parcel
5. Using GitHub's logo for GitLab links is probably frowned upon by the IP holders
6. Dunno what the icon resembling a pair of pillows is meant to signify
7. None of the links in this section are News and Events anyway
8. "comming soon" -> "coming soon"
9. "12th st." -> "12th St."
10. A direct link to the Matrix channel might be nice if possible
@DavidBond My suggestion is to check out the #followfriday tag - unless you have more specific things you're looking for, it's hard to make a useful recommendation.
@worldsendless Not that I'm aware of - in the general case, a person's alts are not all guaranteed to be on the same server, so you'd need to switch webpages anyway.
There are some standalone web clients not affiliated with any particular instance, but I don't have enough experience to say if they'd work with your requirements. If you're interested, you might look into Halcyon and Pinafore, which are the two I can recall. Please do let me know what you discover, or if you come across any others! Might come in handy in future; you never know.
@worldsendless Most phone clients support multiple accounts. On Tusky and its derivatives, it's a two-step process:
1. swipe from the left to open the navigation panel
2. tap the profile picture of your other account
Statuses also have a menu option to "open with" your other account. This saves you the trouble of navigating to it after switching.
@freemo Yep I'm going to bring it to their attention this week. It's still in development so probably just something they don't yet have a test case for.
@freemo Thanks, I'll try to remember that.
@freemo Ahh okay I see. It's a problem with Syphon.
When I signed up, I used matrix.qoto.org. But then it gave my fully qualified username as khird:qoto.org. Syphon (probably incorrectly) proceeded to send future requests to qoto.org instead. I logged out and back in as khird:matrix.qoto.org and it seems to be working.
@freemo I can't get the markdown to work. There's supposed to be a line break after the close paren and the close angle bracket
FormatException: Unexpected character (at character 1)
<!DOCTYPE html>
^
@freemo I don't quite know why, but the matrix server isn't working with the Syphon client - going by the errors, I'd guess the server is sending HTML content somewhere that Syphon doesn't expect it.
Seems to be working once I switched to Element though
@trinsec @WaysideLiege Yep. It's a banning offence actually ("NSFW without a content warning", see qoto.org/about/more#rules for context). I've marked this one as sensitive, but in future please make sure you post with the appropriate content tag.
If you'd like, you can set up your account so that it automatically marks any media sensitive when you post (Preferences > Preferences > Other > Always mark media as sensitive). This might help avoid trouble over NSFW images in future, in case you sometimes forget to tag them.
@realcaseyrollins At least for bitcoin, it's the other way around - the bans reduce demand rather than supply. It's counterintuitive, because we think of mining as producing bitcoin, but mining is effectively "buying" bitcoin with computing resources, and so it's really a form of demand.
The rate of production of bitcoin is fixed (halving events every 210k blocks), so supply is constant - but a miner's expected value for a given contribution of computing resources isn't. With less competition as regulations ban mining in other jurisdictions, a given miner has a greater likelihood of earning the reward and thus a higher expected value for his exchange. That is to say, less demand among miners for newly minted coins depresses the price in computing resources of the average mined bitcoin.
@freemo I think you're right in that it should be a trust network, but not in that it should be an automated system applying rules to determine who's trusted.
I see it working something like your browser's certificate store - you add "editor certificates" to your profile on the qoto-journal webapp in the same way you add "root certificates" to your browser. Each editor forwards submissions to his pool of reviewers and signs the articles they recommend for publication. If an article is accompanied by the signature of an editor you trust, the article shows up in your view of the journal. If an editor includes malicious or incompetent reviewers in his pool, and consequently becomes known for publishing bad papers, people will stop trusting his certificate.
I think an automated system would be prone to people gaming the rules, and the reader wouldn't have the fallback of just revoking an editor's certificate in case things got out of hand. For instance, if I were to try and exploit the rules in your example:
- I might review papers totally outside my competence, because although my experience in fluid dynamics is totally irrelevant to, say, political science, the rules award my review of one equal credit to the other
- I might find another author and set up a tit-for-tat scheme to give each other five free points every iteration, no matter the quality of our papers
What worries me is that if the system initially develops a reputation for being easy to game and accepting of low-quality content, it will be very hard to shed that reputation later on, even if improvements are made. So it needs to be done right the first time.
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