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
@philip_cardella@historians.social @hc_richardson
There's so much wrong with this article, but I think the introduction really sums it up:
"Two years ago today, rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of electoral ballots that would put a Democrat in the White House. There was no doubt Joe Biden had won"
Right there is a factual contradiction thrown out as if the author just really doesn't care about the facts. No, Joe Biden obviously had not one because the electoral ballots had not been counted that would have constituted a win.
The first sentence indicates that Joe Biden had not won. The second sentence declares that he obviously had.
The rest of the article really flows in a similar pattern, ignoring facts and focusing on telling a sensational story, delving into conspiracy theories, and focusing on arriving at a conclusion no matter how poorly supported.
Yeah it explains something, and the same way that pre-scientific societies explained crop failures using magic.
Facts matter. We should have our ears more finely tuned to pick out the places where the facts just don't add up.
Well the way the House works is kind of backwards from that.
In the procedure for electing a Speaker people don't really attempt to get a job so much as the job hunting committee attempts to find a candidate. There's no job application, there's no signing up for candidacy, there's no standing up and arguing for one's own selection.
So yeah, the House can't get itself in order because we elected a whole bunch of idiots to staff the chamber. But that's what we get because of the way we voted.
It reflects a divided population that not only doesn't agree with each other but is so far apart that even compromise and consensus is difficult.
These days I often end up thinking that yeah it only makes sense for rancor in the representative legislature when the legislature is representing such a rancorous population.
@Homebrewandhacking @darnell @nickapos
Well keep in mind also that one of the multipliers in the scaling issue is number of instances.
We should not be pushing people to start their own instances for a couple of reasons, one of which is the network effect of having like-minded people on a local timeline which is defeated by splitting them off into their own instances.
But for the sake of this discussion, the more instances the more resources required to share a post to all of the instances.
People are of course free to start their own instances if they want to, if they have a good reason to, or if they want a nice weekend project whatever. But, we should not be pushing them to do it for no reason as that is both costly and undermines some elements of the user experience.
Yep, and I just really want to keep beating the drum that Congressional Democrats have an enormous amount of blame for this situation.
They chose to vote in a way that empowered the fringe group to demand these rules changes that will end up blowing back on Democrats instead of using the fringe group as a bargaining chip to get Democrat priorities recognized in legislation.
The Democrats really really screwed this up, and we need to constantly remind them of it as this session works out.
Every time a far-right congressperson blocks a Democratic motion we need to yell at the Democrats for effectively putting that person in power in the first place. And we need to have these people voted out.
I have a question for you because I was discussing this with some other people on here, did you expect costs to be so high? Did it seem like they rose unexpectedly out of control?
I was trying to make a point about the costs of instances being exponentially higher than what people were predicting at the beginning, so if you have any input on that statement I think you might be capturing what I was trying to say.
@helgek @darnell @nickapos @jan
If you make a post now that is real hilarious, or a really cute cat, then you might get a couple of followers, so maybe not in 5 minutes but maybe in 5 hours you'll have more followers (depending on the cat) which means your next post will have n times more ActivityPub inboxes for your instance to deliver posts to.
So sure, if we stipulate that the network doesn't change or grow, then twice as many posts leads to twice as many messages, but I am happy to say that one part of social media is new connections being formed, and so the big-O analysis is making this greater than linear.
Which again, I've heard a bunch of people say in practice they have seen their costs spike.
@helgek @darnell @nickapos @jan
"if people post twice as much, you should expect twice as much traffic"
Here's where it broke down. People posting twice as much ended up requiring servers to spend twice times twice (or whatever) amount of bandwidth as the scaling went on.
This is core part of ActivityPub so it's unavoidable under that system.
@helgek @darnell @nickapos @jan
No! You have it wrong, and your error is exactly the point here!
ActivityPub specifies that every post should be delivered to different instances following that post, so no, if people post twice as much you should NOT expect twice as much traffic. You should expect traffic to grow by number of posts multiplied by number of followers, which feeds back into number of posts, which makes the traffic requirements not so simple!
These are exactly the scalability issues that I noticed when I read the ActivityPub standard.
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.
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
volkris's choices:
