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
@lola no?
I don't know what you're referring to.
@Miro_Collas that sort of talk is dramatic conspiracy theory that lets our elected officials off the hook for their votes.
No, the people behind the Supreme Court's composition are Supreme Court justices themselves and presidents and senators that we elect.
We need to hold them accountable and not let them pass the buck to figures supposedly lurking in the shadows.
Don't like the current makeup of the Court? Push for the ouster of senators who consented to their appointment.
But that's not really how the #House rules work: any representative doesn't have to make a deal to either vote or withhold their vote.
If Democrats really wanted the House to reopen they could simply stop voting to stand in the way. That doesn't require any dealmaking.
When you start talking about deals, though, that gets REALLY complicated since this is more than just the Speaker. There are committee assignments and House Rules on the table at that point, which is a giant Gordian Knot to address.
@DemocracyMattersALot
@lauren it's an ax I've been grinding for years that we needed to normalize something like cryptographic signing to authenticate both text and visual media.
And so I'm particularly annoyed to see us get to the point I've been fearing for a decade, where such image manipulation is snowballing, but we didn't put in place norms to detect it already.
Siiiigh.
Nerds in academia have been sounding this alarm, but ah well.
@skry the thing is, sometimes a criticism is called out because it's actually not valid.
@witchescauldron well, I'd view Fediverse as a tool or as infrastructure, like the telephone network.
It's the communication framework that's available to solve whatever problem one might use it to solve.
Whether that problem is forming a community or transmitting weather reports is a separate question.
Maybe the tool will prove useful, maybe not.
@TheConversationUS because they provide fodder for dramatic storytelling that doesn't actually matter all that much.
They provide clickbait.
@pglpm@emacs.ch IMO it would be a way of interfacing with the site but not the site on its own.
Stackexchange sort of provides an archive of answers while Fediverse is about transient exchanges.
I could see Fediverse feeds to help people contribute to the site, but the site itself needs to be more than a scrolling feed to provide answers to future searchers, if that makes sense.
@fj I mean, with the FAA delaying the moving fast part, yes, we can blame them.
We are watching an FAA delay, that the FAA confirms, so why not blame the FAA?
The regulator says it needs more resources to keep up with their workload. Why not take their word for it?
@marcusgreen maybe to build on something @dameoutlaw@mstdn.social was touching on:
An ax I grind is that the ActivityPub protocol and Fediverse were consciously designed to put instances, not users, at the center of the system.
Everything is controlled by instances, and the refrain of "Well a user can just set up their own instance!" only reinforces this.
The instance focus has all sorts of implications ranging from moderation through system performance, so it's no small deal.
I would much rather have had a focus on users, but that ship has sailed, and there's not much to do about it at this point.
Does this mean we can finally agree that Krugman is an overrated moron?
These days the guy seems to do nothing but sell slanted opinions that are often so easily debunkable.
Yes, he was better in the past. Now he's off on a limb.
I think it's crucial for people to realize that Fediverse has basically no privacy protections, so regardless of what SHOULD be, fact is you don't even have the choice.
When you post to Fediverse there is zero guarantee that your content won't be subject to search.
It's just part of the design of the system, for better or worse.
Fediverse was built around giving instances all the power, so if an instance wants to search, it can.
@tc_morekindness again, SCOTUS ruled on an issue of federal law, so it went through the federal court system.
This is a state law issue, so it's going through the state court system.
They are two almost entirely separate court systems operating under different rules and applying different laws to different questions.
I don't think you realize that they are apples and oranges.
They're both tools that have their places.
Think of functional as the software equivalent of MMX/SIMD on processors, where you have a large amount of data that you can process in parallel instead of one at a time.
MMX/SIMD had been really successful, right? A ton of problems lend themselves to such coprocessing?
I do mostly program in OOP, but when I see a problem requiring the churning through of a large dataset I'm excited to slam down a functional solution :)
@binaryhawk sounds like you're missing the causality here.
The same poisoned political environment that elected Trump also elected representatives who weren't so interested or able in moving forward.
The two are symptoms of the same political failures that lead to their elections.
@binaryhawk you seem to be making the mistake of thinking the House is ruled by an authoritarian inflicted upon them.
No, the hundreds of members of the House vote for their preferred leaders, so you can't blame the ones they elected for the stage.
Really, there's so much posing for the cameras and strategic spinning that go on.
We need to stop reelecting those jerks.
I see...
I suspect it was already dead, so the new business bought the body to salvage what they could.
Joke's on them, though: "Bandcamp" doesn't have the "e" that Songtradr seems to desperately need.
@losttourist specifically on this point I'd say a lot of it comes down to hysteresis, as an engineer would say.
I assume the UK right-wing government has backed away from some workers' rights policies? Well they started from a place that means even with the walking away they couldn't politically make it back to the US policies even if they wanted to.
More broadly, everything from the design of US governments through political perspectives in the population prevented US policies from going out that far in the first place.
By design there's a good bit of dampening in the US system, so it tends to approach new equilibrium slowly when at all.
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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