K‮ly‬e @khird@qoto.org

@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"

@design_RG meaning no disrespect, but if I have to make multiple filters for someone I just mute them. Filters are just a tool to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of someone's posts, but there comes a point where the effort invested exceeds the payoff. You can have a filter for cat pics OR for the penpal app OR for banging pleroma's drum, but in combination they drop the SNR beyond what I was interested in salvaging.

I wrote this XPath rule because a remote account I follow seems to have recently deployed some kind of a crossposter, and my home (not local) timeline was getting flooded with twitter URLs in batches of ten to twelve.

Here's another handy rule for your XPath-aware adblockers, to improve your viewing experience on QOTO.

By default, when you create a filter in Mastodon, any matched post is replaced by a useless stub - you can't expand it to see the original post, you can't dismiss it, you can't do anything but leave it there. Each stub takes up less space than the original post, but many of the nuisance posts you'd want to filter come in swarms, so it still ends up occupying a big chunk of screen space.

Here's a rule to remove those stubs. To the viewer, they're invisible, but the original text remains in the browser's memory in case you want to have a look.

qoto.org##:xpath(//div[contains(concat(' ',normalize-space(@class),' '),' status__wrapper--filtered ')]/ancestor::article)

@freemo sorry, what gradient becomes less at depth? dP/dh = ρg no matter what depth h you have.

@freemo well, not exactly. Going deeper underwater changes the gauge pressure a diver observes, but not the hydrostatic pressure difference between his head and his toes (ΔP=ρgΔh). ρ and g are effectively constant no matter where the diver is, and Δh is just a function of his posture - his height, if he stands upright.

But for the pilot in a non-inertial reference frame, g is not constant. So when he manouevres, the ΔP changes substantially, while the diver will always see about 17.8kPa (182cm diver standing upright in freshwater) higher pressure at his toes than at his head if standing upright.

@freemo that's the idea behind the g-suit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-suit

It directs fluid to bladders around the lower body to counteract the ρgh gradient the pilot's blood is subjected to, which means that pooling blood in the legs doesn't represent a low-energy state, which in turn means that blood has less tendency to leave the brain and impair function.

@arteteco enabled Talk on the Nextcloud server not long ago, and it works well for voice, video, and text chat. One could create a "general" conversation, add every user on the server, and start an ongoing call to which anyone could connect as they pleased.

I feel like this should be initiated by an admin - although I could in theory follow this recipe myself, I don't think many users would look favourably on a possibly high-noise chat to which some random account added them.

@freemo @realcaseyrollins

Here's an XPath rule that can be used in a compatible adblocker. It works, but causes a bit of flickering as the blocked post loads and is removed in a fraction of a second. Of course, if you want it to affect a different website than QOTO, you should change that.

qoto.org##:xpath(//button[contains(concat(' ',normalize-space(@class),' '),' status__content__spoiler-link ') or contains(concat(' ',normalize-space(@class),' '),' spoiler-button__overlay ')]/ancestor::div[contains(concat(' ',normalize-space(@class),' '),' status__wrapper ') or contains(concat(' ',normalize-space(@class),' '),' detailed-status__wrapper ')])

@realcaseyrollins

The original word is ΠΟΡΝΕΙΑ (porneia) which Wiktionary tells me can be either "prostitution" or "fornication".

But even so, that doesn't necessarily indicate that Paul *meant* fornication specifically being immoral, since he was writing in Greek. That's just the way the language was used - one might write "wine" when meaning alcoholic beverages in general, "iron" when referring to weapons in general, and so forth. So even if the word literally means "fornication" it's entirely possible he was using it with the intention that his Greek-speaking readers would take its meaning more broadly.

The translator has to make a decision to render the word's meaning or the author's meaning. If he's writing to an audience that knows these conventions in Greek, he can go with the former and let the audience infer what Paul really meant. But even among educated adults, familiarity with Greek is on the decline, so modern translations are increasingly likely to reword the phrase to preserve the intended meaning as opposed to the literal meaning.

@realcaseyrollins Do you think that's maybe more accurate? I know Greek is *big* on synecdoche, and, if that's the source language, it's appropriate for the translator to choose a phrase that reflects the broader scope intended.

@freemo Thanks! That's close enough - I was trying to see how high the second heavy stroke reached. Looks like roughly the same height as the dot on the i.

I don't really enjoy calligraphy the way I think you do, but I think it's important to write legibly and that looks like a rather more recognisable letterform than the half r I ordinarily use. So I might try incorporating it in my Zaner-based cursive. I already use other styles for a few letters (the Zaner G in particular is contorted to a silly degree).

@freemo do you have a geometry/construction sheet for the full r?

Different teachers preferred or required different styles for other letters but not r in my upbringing. I learned at different times two cursive forms for G and three for x.