rastinza @rastinza@qoto.org

It's been a while that I've been telling around I intend to write a #guide about socializing on #mastodon.
Of course I didn't finish the guide, in fact I didn't even start writing it... I'm still in the note taking phase.
However, today I took a plane and read an [article](https://yarmo.eu/blog/make-it-on-fediverse/) by @yarmo in which he compared Mastodon to a village and Twitter to a metropolis.
I didn't like this analogy very much, so I came up with my own in which Mastodon is a big city with a lot of different places where people hang out.
I didn't polish this yet, it's just some notes I jotted down quickly, so take it as an unpolished draft.
I'd like to know your opinion about it: if you're a long time user if you believe that this analogy actually reflects Mastodon and if you're a new user if the analogy made you understand some things about Mastodon you didn't previously know.
I'll take into consideration your comments while polishing this up and to decide whether to actually include it in the guide.

So, here we go:
Mastodon is like a big city with a lot of people that hang out all the time.
Since the city is big, people hang out in many different places where they meet their friends, and generally people always hang out more or less in the same places.
Some people live near the centre, where there's a lot of different people and they can barely recognise faces and other live in isolated outskirts where few people live and everyone knows everyone else.
Some people just hang out in places where they do things that interest them, such as churches, gyms, workshops, art galleries and so on and thus mainly hang out with people that shares their interests.
The more you hang out in one place, the more you get to know the people that stay there and become their friend; moreover, staying there you get to know their friends, which may just be passing every once in a while but who normally hang out in other places.
Some groups of people despise others and try to avoid each other as much as possible by not talking to each other, avoiding common friendship and not going to the places where those people hang out.

When you move to a new city it's difficult to make friends; if you already have a friend living there, it's good to go around with him for a while to see all different places and to get to know some friends so that you can then choose where to hang out and who to meet.
If you don't know anyone living there then you have to start making friends autonomously; a good way to do this is to just choose a place that you think you like and hang out there for a while, trying to talk to people and getting into conversations with them. It's unlikely that you'll immediately find your favourite place in the city or that the first people you meet will become your best friends, but it's good to start making these "introductory friends". Through these friends you'll meet other people and eventually you will meet someone who's really cool and with whom you get along very well. Eventually you may distance yourself a bit from these people as you hang out more with other friends you made and you may stop hanging out in the place you were initially hanging out as you discover places you like more.

Thus, you'll slowly discover the places and people of the city until you find a good spot that you like.
If you're like me, you won't be happy with just one place or just one group of people and you'll start going around many places and making several groups of friends.
On the other hand you may just find a few good friends and always hang out in the same place.

Thus, it's inappropriate to start by asking around who are the cool people to follow: if nobody knows you nobody will be able to tell you who you might get along with.
It's also inappropriate to ask people to present you other people who do your same job or have your same interests; the best thing to do is to go in places where such people hang out and try to meet them naturally.
Just imagine going to the barman and asking him for the list of engineers specialised in photovoltaic panels that go to that bar... And then just going to those guys and saying something like "I heard you do my same job, we shall hang out together." That's not nice, even though he does your same job he may loathe you or you may not have fun with the guy, this is a place to hang out and not a job board.

I'm happy to announce that I finally published online the first version of the #GustavinoRatio calculator!
You can access it here:
http://gustavino.crucitti.xyz/
(Yes, sure... I'll add some ssl eventually)

Of course I'm open to subdomain donations for this thing...

It is not polished, but should kind of work...
If it breaks it breaks, don't really know all problems that could arise.
Oh well, take it as it is and if you find some problems let me know.

Usage: Enter the number of days you wish to analyze
Enter the url of you instance, including https://
Press the submit button

Log in your instance and authorize the application to read your stuff (I'm not storing any of it)
Wait for a while, it will stay on the authorization page for a while; this is normal, keep waiting.

A table will appear with your daily #GustavinoRatio and the one of the whole period and the name of your Gustavino

For the people reading this and not understanding all the fuzz about this ratio.
The #GustavinoRatio is the ratio of toots in you home timeline by the person who appears most often over the total amount of toots in your home timeline.
The name is Gustavino because @GustavinoBevilacqua gave me the idea of measuring this quantity, and I since discovered that he often accounts for 50% of the toots in my home timeline.

#presentación
Hola a todo los españoles que empezaron a seguirme.
Me presento: yo soy un quimico italiano, ahora estoy mudando en Santiago de Compostela a trabajar.

El mi Español no es el mejor, quiero que mejorarlo. Por un Italiano es facil hablar Español, pero es dificil perfectarlo porqué la gente entiende tambien si hablas alguna palabra en italiano.
Ahora soy en Varsovia, en la cama de una pintor.
En 10 dias tengo l'avion por España.
Stoy buscando una habitacion en Santiago, si sabes de alguno que alquila mandame un mesajo.

@aliceschwarze
Instances that block other instances generally publish those blocks in the about page.
I advise against joining the ones who don't follow this practice.
Discovering which instances blocked that specific one is a bit more difficult.

To have an idea of the instances you're going to interact with, I recommend this website https://fediverse.space/ I also used it when I switched to this instance.
#advice #instance

I took a closer look at the second part, the conclusions of the report are the following.

PROXIMAL ORIGIN PUBLICATION: “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” publication — which was used repeatedly by public health officials and the media to discredit the lab leak theory — was prompted by Dr. Fauci to push the preferred narrative that COVID-19 originated in nature.

Yes, closing quotation marks are missing in the original too, you would imagine they'd format their documents better, but then again the whole report is terribly formatted. They didn't even bother to copy emails as text and just pasted around the images.

It is really funny how all evidence they provide to support this claim actually appears to disprove it completely.
Because from the available evidence what we can clearly see is the following:

1. Fauci did not prompt the authors to write the article
2. Fauci did not take part in the writing of the article
3. Fauci asked the authors to analyze the Lab Leak theory if they deemed it viable and publish any results which supported it

Here, have a page of the document to evaluate how well it was drafted. No, on this page none of the text is selectable. To be fair, they did pretty good: on some other pages there is some selectable text...

#Covid #CovidReport

The government of the United States has conducted an investigation on COVID-19, its origins and on the effectiveness of responses taken to the pandemic.
You can read it here: https://oversight.house.gov/release/final-report-covid-select-concludes-2-year-investigation-issues-500-page-final-report-on-lessons-learned-and-the-path-forward/

They have a nice short summary to take a look at. I did read it and a few things came up as strange to me. The wording is a bit propagandistic and they indicate that the most likely hypothesis is that the virus was developed in a laboratory in Wuhan and then accidentally infected some researchers.
I found these findings extremely interesting as they are different from other articles I had read before.

I skimmed through the first 100 pages, which is where the origin of COVID is discussed. Out of these, only 4 pages discuss the fact that the virus was made in a lab, while the remaining ones discuss the fact that the article proposing that the virus likely originated in an animal and was later transferred to humans.

The evidence they use to sustain that the virus was made in a laboratory is the following:
- some researchers in Wuhan got sick with a respiratory disease before COVID
- the FBI is confident that the virus was made in a laboratory
- Boris Johnson said he believes the virus was made in a laboratory
- no animal carrying a similar disease was found

Now, these look like good leads to me; but the only real thing that may actually prove anything is that the FBI is certain of it. However they don't say why the FBI believes the virus was made in a laboratory. I'm not sure whether this is classified information or how they justify this belief as it's not explained anywhere.

The following part goes into the analysis of how a certain article was published. They conducted extensive investigations interviewing people involved and reading through their emails and messages. There appears to be some small academic misconduct in the process which took there, but really nothing to justify their thesis.

I don't know, I'm a bit startled: it took them two years to conduct extensive investigations and this is all the evidence they can come up with? Moreover, the conclusions of their report are nowhere justified in any way which could support their high confidence.

#covid

Last week I had to travel to the USA, to be sure I brought with me 5 packets of tobacco. For curiosity I went to a tobacco shop to check the tobacco prices over there... 20$
I'm very happy I brougth the tobacco along with me. Whenever I'll go back to the USA I'll remember to bring a very large amount of tobacco with me, can't really burn through my salary smoking at such prices.

I've been working for a while on quite a large Unity project written by researchers. Code quality was quite terrible and I decided to invest some time into refactoring a bit of everything.
Two months in, plenty refactoring done, plenty to be done. Very little functionality added.
I'm starting to consider that maybe writing everything from scratch could have been the better option...

No se porqué nunca puse estás cosas aquí, me abrí un Instagram hace unos meses para éstas tonterías. Igual no hay mucha gente de Santiago aquí.

@ifrit
#SantiagoDeCompostela