Notices by Fish Id Wardrobe (fishidwardrobe@social.tchncs.de)

@quinn paganism: there is probably at least one god. you can worship them if you want. how? LOL no idea

@hellomiakoda whatever works for you

@AnarchoNinaWrites already blocked. "if only everyone voted for…" is enough of a red flag for me these days.

@AnarchoNinaWrites autistic pickiness over the word "always", maybe? I might have tripped over that.

Or, of course, someone looking to disagree with you because they feel attacked by you being mean to fascists :(

@AnarchoNinaWrites never a good idea to sound like J Edgar Hoover…

@hellomiakoda @RegGuy my take is usually the same — broadly Utilitarian. It's not perfect but it tends to point in the least bad direction.

(Of course it can also lead to some horrible moral cul-de-sacs. Have you read Ursula le Guin's _The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas_? ::shudder::)

@hellomiakoda @RegGuy well, I agree. But that's still not a "good" act. Neither is leaving the lever alone.
So I get it if people don't want to. It's a hard choice.

@RegGuy @hellomiakoda So if I understand you correctly, you're okay with murder, just not *direct* murder.

To my way of thinking this *is* the trolley problem and you have decided not to pull the lever.

@RegGuy @hellomiakoda I'm not sure you understand what I mean by the trolley problem: that both choices are wrong, that there are no "good" choices.

Voting has so far failed to fix the US health system for how many years now? Twenty? Forty? I don't think there is a "good" choice to fix this. Which, again, does not make murder right.

@RegGuy @hellomiakoda yes, but so did that guy he killed, for the same reason, and that was never going to happen. So it's — well, it's the trolley problem, actually.

@quinn they do. although most of the people you see here aren't running anything.

@quinn I'm sorry about the arseholes. They are always there, wherever we go, of course. But it seems more personal when they pop up here, somehow.

@etchedpixels @cstross @graydon Is it the _resources_ we don't have, though? Or something else? We're seeing the limits of IT as we currently understand it — I think.

A breakthrough in, say, human-machine interaction, in machines being able to perceive the world and act in it as we do; that's not going to be solved by more computing _power_ but by a breakthrough in techniques. If at all.

@etchedpixels @cstross @graydon I'm not sure the human brain is doing "computation" as we know it, and there's a big problem to solve: "as we know it"

@quinn possibly not the next one.

@AnarchoNinaWrites It's not my place to criticise Biden, but perhaps Harris would have done better if he had managed to actually do some of that. (Maybe not, though.)

@sashin @AnarchoNinaWrites We tried blocklists, then shitty folks got control of some of them. This is not a one-off; it happened on Twitter too. Still, there may be some value in them.

I'd be tempted to look at what works now, and change the software to make it easier. Say, build in a registry recording which admins blocked what for why, and a federated sideband channel for admins to talk to each other.

@sashin @AnarchoNinaWrites What could?

Out or in -- if you make the admins work out what the technical pros and cons are you're making their job harder. Up to a point it can be empowering, but eventually we get to (guy sitting at desk with lemon press being pelted by lemons from a chute)

@AnarchoNinaWrites Don't get me wrong, I think it's *good* when software chooses to pass a lot of options to the folks running it. But you can't use it to evade responsibility for making good software. You end up with a system that is too complex for the admins to understand...

@AnarchoNinaWrites Speaking as a coder, this is a design problem that is common, and I've fallen for doing it myself: "the software can't tell which are the nazi servers, sooooo... I guess the admins of each server will have to make their own minds up each time. That's democracy or something!"

No, mate, assuming that every admin will be more equipped than you to make complicated decisions just because your *software* can't ... is a copout.

Yes, this is a hard problem. So?