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
#Democrats overwhelmingly voted against keeping government open.
That really gets lost in all of the media discussion about this. But it really needs to be emphasized. Did your representative vote against keeping government open? You should know that, and hold them accountable for that vote.
Remember, #Democrats in the #House have nearly a majority of votes in the chamber.
The math says that if they wanted to, they could partner with even a few moderate #Republicans to take control of the chamber outright or at least move their preferred legislation ahead.
The ONLY way a few #GOP hardliners get their way is if Democrats vote with those Republican extremists, supporting their cause.
We shouldn't let politicians point fingers at others, scoring points in this us-vs-them mentality, when they themselves have the tools to make things better.
If the #US government shuts down it will be because Democrats refused to break with Republican extremists and vote to pass funding.
Dems have the votes. Hold them accountable for using them.
@Chesi What are you talking about? This has nothing to do with Trump.
This is about government budgeting. Like I've said over and over, I was against this, but the people we elected to Congress chose to use income from student loans to pay for government services. That happened a while ago.
It happened before Trump was on the scene.
I really don't know why you brought him up.
@ATLeagle it doesn't, though. That's not how any of that works, despite so many special interests misleading the public about how the economy actually works.
You're buying into a lie. I'm sorry.
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
volkris
boosted
A tech story about AI & "hallucinations"
Yet another lawyer screwed up - despite being somewhat of an expert on AI & misinformation. Where he put a few placeholders into the text fed into GPT-4o (for references) and GPT-4o replaced two of them with fictional sources.
Very LONG but instructive.
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.
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
