volkris @volkris@qoto.org
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
Normally the way it works is that the compromise would be drafted and agreed to in a document that would be the basis of the rules committee.
It's more or less what was agreed to by the entire chamber, and it would require the entire chamber to agree to changes later on.
So it's not really up to McCarthy personally. It's more complicated than that.
I really wonder what is going through their heads.
Are the House Democrats really so stupid as to miss this opportunity to get a really big say in legislation, or were they doing some sort of really cynical ploy, intentionally setting themselves up for failure that they will blame on Republicans to try to get votes the next time?
Either way, Democratic priorities have been thrown under the bus now. And I am very annoyed about that.
House Democrats unanimously threw themselves under a bus here, and we really need to not forget about that over the next two years.
Every time they complain we need to keep in mind that, well you idiots chose this, and we need to vote you out as soon as possible.
So the question I have is, well a little bit of background first:
Over the last few days Democrats had the opportunity to have a few of their members answer present to end all of the drama and set up a situation where the Republicans would negotiate with Democrats to get some Democrat priorities into legislation in return for getting past the fringe clown show that we saw.
But the Democrats chose instead to vote unanimously in ways that promoted the fringe and forced Republicans to bow to their wishes, actually putting the fringe representatives into gatekeeper rules that will lock Democrats out of the process.
So, who came up with that strategy? What Democrat decided and convinced the rest of them to shoot themselves in the foot that way? Was it Jeffries?
Someone on the Democrat side needs to be held accountable for that really horrible mistake.
I'm talking about the underlying protocol, ActivityPub itself.
No matter what platform is implementing ActivityPub It has to make all of these connections and send all of these messages that just don't scale particularly well.
It's not about the language or how it's written. It's about the requirements of the system itself.
Well right. Except for the things that make costs go really high, costs are low!
Yeah, following lots of remote people is one of the particular contributions to costs getting out of control under the design of ActivityPub, but since the whole offering is federation, well.
As long as you don't federate your federated part of this federated system you'll be fine? Not much of a vote of confidence there!
Benefiting the oppressor is not being neutral
volkris
boosted
How each House member voted for speaker in 15 ballots 👇
Counterpoint: "do no harm"
When I mentioned this concern to one group somebody replied that they are not actually teaching big-O scalability analysis in computer science all that much these days.
I don't know if that's true, but considering this, I wouldn't be surprised.
Really it's only jaw dropping to people who continue to overestimate the amount of sway Trump has these days.
The guy has long sense shown himself to be an impotent has been.
The sooner we fully embrace that and stop stroking his ego by treating him as if he still has sway, the sooner he will go away and stop being so damn annoying.
It's not jaw dropping. It's just the way most people would react these days.
Well it's not an answer to your question, but I don't know anything about development or future of ActivityPub.
I'm just sitting here in my armchair to say that the improvements I would want to see would probably represent a whole new standard not just tweaks to this one.
For example I really grumble that end-to-end encryption sorts of features were not core to the whole thing. I really think ActivityPub missed a chance to really empower users using PKI in its core but at this point it would have to start from scratch for a solution that I would really be into.
I'm not sure what they could do about scaling now. The decisions leading to those problems might be too far ingrained into the standard to really address them.
No, I have heard people complaining about it even on relatively modest instances.
I've heard people complaining that marginal increases in users on their instances led to them having to completely reevaluate hosting plans because of how quickly it grew.
That's how such exponential scaling works, though. Small increases in users leads to large increases in costs.
US Politics
I don't like McCarthy and I don't particularly like this speech, but I had to laugh that Jeffries came across as a badly written SNL character doing ironic beat poetry out of place.
That list of alliterative words was really the cherry on top. He seemed so proud to have come up with it, but, come on.
Oh it wasn't pointless.
The Democrats' strategy of unanimous voting managed to push the Republicans into caving to their fringe rebels so that now they've lost that enormous bargaining chip.
I have no idea why the Democrats chose that strategy, but hope it got them where they wanted to go.
Well to go on about this just a little bit more, when I read the ActivityPub standard It really jumped out at me that the standard required these exponentially increasing numbers of internet connections to be opened and messages to be passed.
It's not just about reading source code, it's just looking at the design of a system that requires an instance to contact so many other instances to transmit so many copies of messages, one by one, that scales questionably.
There's just a bunch of elements where factors multiply and multiply so that as the system gets more load it has to spend exponentially more resources to address the load.
I think a lot of people have been caught off guard by how resource intensive ActivityPub is, just based on design choices that went into the standard that maybe weren't fully analyzed in terms of scaling.
I wouldn't be surprised if large platforms like Tumblr started testing and quickly realized that it was getting out of hand for their size, and they need to figure out a way to reign that in before they can really proceed.
What makes you expect the delay for ActivityPub?
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
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