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
@TomWellborn you don't understand, Gaetz is not a loyalist. His history is one of backstabbing and generally screwing things up even for his own side, if he has one. That's not what's going on there.
Mass deportations? Well if the president has the authority to connect such negative things, then he should have had that authority taken away by law. We need to hold Democrats accountable for not having fixed the law.
You say Democrats must regroup, but in the end they screwed us over real bad here. It's not about regrouping, it's about calling them out and firing the whole lot of them for being utter failures to fix the laws that obviously needed to be fixed.
@BrianJopek I mean, putting an energy expert in charge of the department focused on energy...
Here you're promoting conspiracy theories that just don't add up. Somebody is misleading you and you should stop listening to them.
Billionaires bought the Supreme Court? Well that doesn't make sense considering the Supreme Court ruling against billionaires over and over.
Thanks to technology billionaires no longer have to fear angry mobs? Well that's going to be news to the billionaires getting attacked physically and also losing market share to movements coming out of tick tock.
Somebody is feeding you some lies here, and you really should stop listening to those people.
@Legit_Spaghetti The problem is, the alternative was promising to double down on that situation.
I mean, it's a blog post from someone who clearly seems very out of touch with a large part of the country, not understanding them, but feeling very entitled to project assumptions onto them to suit personal cognitive biases.
That's not the way to make for a better life, to make for a better society.
It just doubles down on the stuff that got Trump elected in the first place. It doubles down on the stuff that trolling Trump supporters are making fun of such people over.
It's better to go for understanding than to close back up into the echo chambers that kept the opposition from staging a solid, well, opposition during the election.
@QasimRashid meh. Democracy decided it didn't care.
@geos heaven forbid one engages here on social media.
@mpopp75 The story that Trump tried to overthrow an election was roundly debunked by anybody who bothered to point out how the Electoral College process actually works.
So no, that conspiracy theory never had legs.
Trump committed crimes, I'm pretty sure of it, but that nonsense doesn't help convict the guy of the things he actually did.
In fact, people spouting that myth helped get him reelected instead of put behind bars.
@sun Yeah, a lot of people with that priority probably helped tilt the election in favor of Trump.
@parsley what?
RFK has stated publicly that he supports vaccinations. And it's not really up to him in the first place.
Those rumors are false and need to be called out.
@Legit_Spaghetti no.
But I do remember getting really good health insurance without an employer before the ACA, and then getting a job, and then after the ACA losing my good health insurance even though I had one.
So many of us lost out on health insurance thanks to the ACA.
We should not hide that. We should present it as the failure that it was.
@mpopp75 kind of under sells a lot of the really bad criminals we've had around here.
Trump's white collar crimes are goddamn stupid, but we've produced much worse in this country.
@realTuckFrumper Well part of the issue is that Lloyd Austin sets such a low bar that this guy is a step up.
We were never set up for anything good coming out of this presidential election. Both candidates were awful. The best we can do is try not to make things much worse before we can try again next time around.
@everton137 ... The direction in the US right now is skeptical of authoritarianism. That's the whole reason Trump got elected, because people wanted to fill the vacuum of authority that had let them down.
@nyquildotorg ever since I first started reading the AP standard documents I had similar hair raising reactions.
This seems to be a system designed by people who have never heard of big O analysis, people more interested in cobbling together off the shelf components rather than thinking about how the whole system would work if it were to scale.
I'm incredibly critical of the engineering behind AP and you're really capturing my attitude.
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.
@PattyHanson which, for example?
@wizardbeard I'm on my phone here, but maybe I can find some links when I get back to a computer.
Basically, under BlueSky the end user submits content to whatever distribution site or sites they want, and the person browsing retrieves content from whatever nodes they want, choosing between different algorithms as they wish, in contrast to the PubSub design where users submit content to an instance, and it all comes through a particular instance.
Like I said, this platform is centralized around instances while BlueSky avoids that, making everything between content posters and content readers decentralized.
@sabreW4K3 My qualification is that I've read the protocol documentation and seen the way it centralizes around instances?
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
