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
A fantastic sign that so many people cheering the murder of the #insurance #CEO are really off base is that so many describe that role as parasitic.
Factually that is wrong.
A parasite doesn't ask for permission to take, it just takes. In stark contrast, we pay for insurance. And these employees are paid, they don't just drain bank accounts unilaterally.
There's plenty of room to criticize insurance, insurance companies, the healthcare system, the political systems that support that, and on and on, but anyone buying into that entirely false perspective of parasitism is losing the argument flat out.
Because right from the start they're showing they don't know what they're talking about, and it only makes it worse that they're jumping from there into killing people.
They don't make a compelling argument for anyone not already in their echo chamber.
Many #Trump supporters take the stance that he was never ACTUALLY going to impose tariffs, that they were mere negotiating threats, and anyone who doesn't know that is an idiot.
Meanwhile #Harris was criticized for not laying out specifics of what she would do in office.
Funnily, then, that was a contest between someone who **wouldn't** say what they **would** do versus someone who **would** said what they **wouldn't** do.
What a time to be alive.
Access to medical care in the US has long been highly regulated. Politicians interfere in personal medical decisions every single day.
Personally, I don't think that's right, but it's the status quo, and it's not going to change any time soon, especially when so many insist on turning a blind eye to that fact.
But it's in that context that "hands off my body" arguments fall flat. We have long lived in a society where political intrusion into personal medical decisions is not only tolerated but actively demanded.
At this point it's not about whether to keep politicians out but rather which politicians to give the power to.
#Biden's pardon of his son crosses the line when it gives a blanket get out of jail free card to any laws his son might have violated, not just the ones we know about.
He put his son above the law. That's striking.
It's only the icing on top that he attempts to justify it by claiming persecution... by the administration that he himself was leading.
We need to be clear that this is disgraceful, as really that's the only way to hold such a person of power accountable.
Biden should be forever remembered for crap like this.
volkris
boosted
The Harris-Walz campaign was quite a racket.
#uspol #uspolitics #politics
At this point mainstream #Republicans are saying that they know Biden didn't get all those votes legally when he ran against #Trump not because they have evidence of any particular conspiracy, but because come on, Trump is awesome, how could anyone not have voted for him?
I don't have a dog in the fight between Republicans and Democrats, but geez, I really hate to see how far down the #GOP has fallen in the last couple of years.
That kind of imbecilic argument is fit for drunkards at the bar and fifth rate media personalities, but at this point some of the preeminent conservative talkers are laying that down.
This is going to be a hard four years in media.
@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.
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
