volkris @volkris@qoto.org
Since I guess everything is political these days, I'll identify as extremely liberal but without a home in US politics.
Mainly, there's so much misinformation out there that people in society have trouble even organizing into coherent political groupings. So I'd rather not talk about politics but instead focus on information and education. Nothing else matters until the bedrock of fact is buttressed.
But... people are always going to be wrong on the internet, as the saying goes.
So: Old man yells at clouds is a famous joke from The Simpsons, and it probably fairly describes what we do when venting on social media.
Just speaking into the void, since I figure it's an exercise in futility to conduct discussions on these platforms.
Joined Dec 2022
Pinned post
Both #Trump and #Harris are ridiculous candidates, and the parties need to be held accountable for that.
I can't help but keep thinking about how Harris has been openly talking about ignoring Congress, ignoring the law, ignoring the democratic process, to implement her preferences while claiming that Trump is the authoritarian even as he is also being bashed for promising to give up power, promising to relinquish power away from the federal government to the states.
This is the level of nonsense we have in #USPolitics these days. It's absolutely #Orwellian.
And beside all of that, this platform seems really eager to promote those propagandistic messages.
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Lately I've been thinking about how the #Republican party has evolved over the last decade or so as viewed through the lens of the games that major voices in the party play.
Previous generations of #GOP speakers were proudly golfers, but lately major voices are football fans. You can hear them make that shift from talking about golf to talking about football.
Well, over the years Republicans have made this marked shift from looking to work together and build consensus to just looking to fight their opponents. And it strikes me that that's also a difference between golf and football.
The new generation of conservative speakers don't understand the realities of political systems where they have to work with others, convince others, to get things done. It's as if they are projecting philosophies from football on to their politics in ways that didn't happen previously.
And that's a shame for us all. That's how you get #Trump... and #Harris.
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I've heard it said that if you don't vote with whichever party then you are a coward. I think that's exactly backwards, and even reflects poorly all the person making that argument. It doesn't take much courage to go with the group.
Instead I go the other way: no matter which party you might prefer in general, it takes courage to say they nominated a moron, and fortunately the other party also nominated a loser, so no matter what the US is going to slog through these next few years.
In my opinion the courageous position is to say no, you nominated a moron, and I'm not going to give you my vote. We're going to be okay I guess, whether you win or not, but I'm not going to let you assume that you have my vote if you insist on nominating a moron. You should have nominated someone better. You should have nominated someone worthy of my vote. Do better next time.
That's the state of #USPolitics . As South Park said, big douche versus turd sandwich. So screw both #Democrats and #Republicans. Neither of you managed to nominate someone worth voting for, so I'm voting for my dog.
To give either party our votes is to sign on to their nomination of garbage people. Let's not. Let's say that they need to actually nominate worthwhile administrators.
But more practically, let's focus on #Congress. No matter who wins this election, they're going to suck, but we can still express ourselves through our representation in Congress, and that's honestly how it should be anyway.
Check out your representatives. See how they have actually been voting, and vote them out if they have been letting you down. That's really where our focus should be anyway.
Not on which jerk ends up in the Oval Office.
(But thank God #Biden is on his way out, as he has been terrible for #science in the US, which has not gotten nearly enough attention from the press.)
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For folks upset about the #Trump case being thrown out over the unqualified prosecutor, remember that it was Biden's administration that screwed that up by not having any of their properly appointed and qualified officials lead the case.
We really need to be holding folks like #Biden accountable for their screwups, and it's just one more reason Democrats should dump him as their nominee.
But no, so many that are most disappointed in the guy's performance are going to vote to keep him in power.
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There's an old idea of fairness that when cutting a cake between two people one person cuts and the other picks the piece they want.
This method aligns the interests of both parties, no matter how corruptible and *human* they may be.
I think it's underappreciated how often the US government design has a similar method in its checks and balances: one group can reject an official, but they don't get to choose the replacement.
See, for example, impeachment proceedings.
After all: "This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public."
--Hamilton (maybe)
@geos heaven forbid one engages here on social media.
volkris
boosted
Long post whining about ActivityPub
I've talked about this a bunch in the past, but thinking about "fediverse improvements" always beings me back to when I learned what ActivityPub actually does and what its design goals were.
The number one goal sure seems like it was "very nearly real-time status updates, like Twitter has, but distributed."
Because that's what they wanted the protocol to do, it required doing things in a fundamentally inefficient way. Every single post you make results in an inherently uncacheable request sent to at minimum the number of instances your followers use, and in some cases, one for every follower on that instance.
The overhead of creating and cryptographically signing unique payloads to send to several thousand different instances in rapid succession, for every post everyone ever makes, is kind of bonkers for a lot of different reasons.
But that the mechanism includes an API request for an "outbox" that lists all the content that remote instances could fetch — but never do — is something I find completely offensive.
Then, anytime anyone brings this up, there's pushback saying doing that would defeat the entire purpose of ActivityPub, because the entire purpose of ActivityPub is realtime messaging.
If you start the conversation saying that the only way a post can end up in a follower's feed is if there's a unique event transfered in about the most network-inefficient way possible, it paints the picture that your concern isn't really about transferring peoples' posts to each other, but to do it with as little delay between clicking send and it appearing in a feed, no matter the consequences.
But here's the thing: because there's so goddamned many requests being sent to so goddamned many places, it's all handled with queues. There's constantly a big backlog of posts still waiting to be sent. If I have 50,000 followers, spread out evenly over the whole fediverse, that's still 10s of thousands of entries in the queue that are causing your new post to have to wait as well.
None of this is frickin' realtime!
In a lot of cases, each instance also has a queue full of incoming requests that need to be processed, which adds further overhead and delay.
The amount of work that needs to be done for every single post in "real time" via ActivityPub is pretty staggering.
Skimming this article, it strikes me as a pretty good survey of how the state of popular politics in the US ended in a #Trump election.
It captures #Democrats being out of touch and #Republicans being fed up and #Harris running a bad campaign, one that really channeled that out-of-touch-ness.
Or, at least, this confirms my baises :) reflects my perception on the whole thing.
But those themes seem to be repeated over and over through quote after quote.
‘Democrats presented no alternative’: US voters on Trump’s win and where Harris went wrong https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/12/voter-re...
I honestly think there is something wrong with #Harris
Listening to her giving her concession speech she honestly doesn't sound like she cares at all that she lost. She doesn't seem to be invested in this at all. It's kind of sociopathological.
I think that's part of why she lost, but seriously, what's wrong with this?
https://www.youtube.com/live/WckEFzGku0Q?si=oZd5jW-O7TFpQcCf
volkris
boosted
🤔 Interesting to see Dan putting effort to draw the distinction between AP and AT
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:fpruhuo22xkm5o7ttr2ktxdo/post/3l7oxg72zd22t
volkris
boosted
I have to stop posting active links to our content on Mastodon.
Every time I do so now, it brings down our website for up to 5 minutes.
We've tried pretty much every claimed fix, including third party caching (which in turn breaks other elements of our website's dynamic display abilities), code changes and such on our back end code, and more stuff I don't understand at all (but have spent money paying our WP developer to implement). None of it has worked.
The #fediverse powers that be need to fix this growing problem of the #MastoDDos effect on websites. The more followers and more servers your followers are from, the more impact this has on literally bringing a website to its knees with all the DB calls.
For instance, this morning, I posted the lovely article our creative writer Ethan wrote, which ended up only getting 2 boosts and one "favourite" here, but it brought down our website for 4 minutes and 12 seconds.
That's not sustainable.
@HistoPol What in the world are you talking about?
You're really leaning hard into the conspiracy theory territory there, into the stuff that a lot of us left Twitter to hope to avoid.
@KamalaHarrisWin @indivisibleteam @democracydocket @democratsabroad
Both #Trump and #Harris are ridiculous candidates, and the parties need to be held accountable for that.
I can't help but keep thinking about how Harris has been openly talking about ignoring Congress, ignoring the law, ignoring the democratic process, to implement her preferences while claiming that Trump is the authoritarian even as he is also being bashed for promising to give up power, promising to relinquish power away from the federal government to the states.
This is the level of nonsense we have in #USPolitics these days. It's absolutely #Orwellian.
And beside all of that, this platform seems really eager to promote those propagandistic messages.
#Harris is a cop that the #DemocraticParty nominated without the input of all of us in an era that is marked by the public being skeptical of cops.
Why is it a surprise that she's struggling? The people in power screwed up here, and they need to be held accountable for their screw up.
We need to be very clear about that even if you want to vote for her for some reason, the party elites have disrespected us.
Hopefully things will be better in 4 years, but for now we're just screwed.
volkris
boosted
We just released Mastodon 4.3.1!
It contains some bug fixes and a few small features, like (optional) grouping of follow notifications and improvements the fediverse:creator setup instructions.
Upgrading requires re-compiling frontend assets (if not using Docker), instructions are in the release notes : https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.3.1
BBC reports that in response to calls to lock #Trump up, #Harris said the courts would take care of that, not only toeing the line to prejudice, but more strikingly... it's as if this is yet another case where she doesn't know what the different branches of government actually do, she doesn't know locking people up is an executive branch function?
As she's applying to be the head of the executive branch?
But no, that level of ignorance does seem to be pretty consistent with what she has shown for years now.
The Democratic Party did not have to such an incompetent candidate. And I'm going to say it over and over because it's so depressing, the party really let us down.
Nothing will change if we don't hold the party accountable.
The #DemocraticParty sure has made a mess of things choosing #Harris.
But this kind of thing shows #journalism has already lost so much respect.
It all goes to show how the US came to be in the state that it's in.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/cbs-accused-significant-intentional-news-195151613.html
There's the running question of how #Harris could be managing to perform so badly that she can't run away with the election against such a broken candidate as #Trump.
Well, the interview last night answers the question: she's either incapable or unwilling to connect with half the country.
That interview would have been a slam dunk for a competent candidate. She blew it, providing a TON of fodder for #GOP speakers to bash her, and they're having a field day pointing it out today.
The #DemocraticParty is to blame here. By skipping consultation with their voters and instead jumping right to this obviously weak candidate, the whole country is now saddled with this mess.
Well, I guess we'll try again in four years.
@professorhank Yeah, a simple recognition of executive privilege, which is well established.
It says if you have evidence of a crime, bring it. Absolutely prosecute presidents for crimes.
The two are just haggling over the details, but the fundamental issue is perfectly reasonable.
It's always striking to hear a self described liberal in the US praising feudalism and sounding like they wish we could get back to that sort of system.
That's just how it's going over here.
volkris
boosted
What is microRNA? Nobel-winning discovery explained https://phys.org/news/2024-10-microrna-nobel-discovery.html #science
@spytfyre talking about solving the problem of people doing things you don't approve of.
We can solve this you say. Solve what? The problem that people like a thing you don't think they should like.
Lately I've been thinking about how the #Republican party has evolved over the last decade or so as viewed through the lens of the games that major voices in the party play.
Previous generations of #GOP speakers were proudly golfers, but lately major voices are football fans. You can hear them make that shift from talking about golf to talking about football.
Well, over the years Republicans have made this marked shift from looking to work together and build consensus to just looking to fight their opponents. And it strikes me that that's also a difference between golf and football.
The new generation of conservative speakers don't understand the realities of political systems where they have to work with others, convince others, to get things done. It's as if they are projecting philosophies from football on to their politics in ways that didn't happen previously.
And that's a shame for us all. That's how you get #Trump... and #Harris.
volkris
boosted
#SpaceX has provided experimental direct-to-cell-phone connections to people affected by Hurricane Helene:
RT https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1842988427777605683
Since I guess everything is political these days, I'll identify as extremely liberal but without a home in US politics.
Mainly, there's so much misinformation out there that people in society have trouble even organizing into coherent political groupings. So I'd rather not talk about politics but instead focus on information and education. Nothing else matters until the bedrock of fact is buttressed.
But... people are always going to be wrong on the internet, as the saying goes.
So: Old man yells at clouds is a famous joke from The Simpsons, and it probably fairly describes what we do when venting on social media.
Just speaking into the void, since I figure it's an exercise in futility to conduct discussions on these platforms.
Joined Dec 2022
