Notices by phiofx (phiofx@hachyderm.io), page 4

@Lottie @archer the black bar is a virtual reality goggle. The implication is that the person wearing it is immersed in an amazing fake world while the real world around them crumbles.

The further context is provided by the fact that this is a widely circulated social media meme (distracted boyfriend) used to indicate a new hype or infatuation. The annoyed girlfriend present in the original meme is missing from the current remix.

@FantasticalEconomics @FeralRobots @paninid @jackofalltrades

We have nothing to go by but narratives. Collectively excited mental structures that act as guardrails for what is otherwise a very mysterious and silent reality.

But some of those narratives are far more broken than others :-)

And that brokenness is now almost objectively tangible as it puts at risk potentially our very survival.

@grimalkina society is built on information flow. Outside the mental patterns we instill in each others brains there is not much more than moving some dirt around. And developers sit on the most potent rewiring of information flow since printing and speech.

But our politics and hence economics is so abysmally broken that this singular moment in human history is still an oppressed emergence.

But I reckon that, just like speech and script, the transformative moment is coming.

@GossiTheDog the economy *is not* the stock market.

Why conflate the real stuff that affects all of us with speculators and bubble blowers?

@Ruth_Mottram how many hours per day do they spend with a book? Make it a 1 to 1 between books and phone and the calculus changes.

The phone is a most miraculous device. There is no point to starve a young brain from this incredible window (*). The main problem imho is it is making extinct another most miraculous device: the book. Me thinks a brain is hungry enough to feed on two power foods. But a balanced diet is needed.

(*) of course _what_ you do on the phone plays a big role too...

@henrikjernevad the trick is "good constraints" but that is not always easy to imagine ahead of time

What are good constraints? Basically you want to reduce ambiguity that is not congruent with the broader domain you are exploring. But you dont want to kill the golden goose either.

We can use #lego as a metaphor for this optimisation act. You can restrict to four pin single color square pieces or relax almost everything. When does the balance tilt against creativity? Hard to say.

@tobide one of the promising (and still mostly at initial stages) ideas for a #fediverse based on #activititypub concepts is that you can expand the role of the old "web 2" stalwarts (#wordpress, #discourse, even #joomla) but indeed it is even better and more forward looking to do so at the framework level (#django, #laravel, #phoenix etc) to enable people to build all sorts of new use cases with federation as a first class citizen so to speak.

@mrundkvist and every once in a while doing better than the general stock market index does not mean much

#linkedin is where #toxicpositivity went to breed and, my goodness, that colony thrived and its guano stinks to high heaven. Not surprising given the innate #hypocrisy of corporations that actively hide their true functions

I couldn't stand yet another phenomenon, a pure online platform pathology: the explicit (&public) #manipulation of naive people by marketeer types using fake melodramatic posts, pushing emotional buttons to create virality

The #fediverse must find cures for many a plague

@wagtail @paulox @andrew @cda @alain

The socialhub discourse forum has probably the best collection of resources in this regard https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/guide-for-new-activitypub-implementers/479

Another interesting django based project that has already implemented activitypub is #bookwyrm, a book review platform

I've been reminiscing a lot about calculators lately. I started learning math just when electronic scientific calculators were replacing slide rules as tools for engineers.

But scientific calculators are themselves almost extinct outside of the classroom, because computers, smartphones and tablets running powerful CAS or numerical software can do all the kinds of computing you really need... unless you're not allowed to use them because of classroom or exam restrictions.

So the market has contracted to education, and the high-end calculators sold today, though they're extremely powerful, are very much catering to students rather than to engineers or scientists. There's a lot of power siloed into user-friendly apps, but less ability to link those together into powerful custom-built systems of your own design.

And inevitably, because I'm getting old, I have a lot of nostalgia for old ones... particularly for HP's RPL line, starting in the late 1980s with the 28C (which was woefully underpowered, but the potential was there) and continuing through the very capable 28S and 48/49/50 series.

The ones I actually had were the 28S and the 48SX--the latter got stolen after just a few years; it was too damned expensive to leave lying around. I still have the 28S somewhere though the batteries for it can be hard to find. But I've been getting back into messing with them through emulation. Here's Calculator Culture's review of the 48SX that goes through its innovations, strengths and weaknesses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yujtxo5efbE

@SebastienK i thought jetpacks were still in the somewhat distant future

@wagtail @paulox lots of options indeed. Picking the brains of the maintainers of these projects probably advisable as a production ready activitypub implementation (that would federate properly e.g. with opinionated mastodon servers) seems to be a decent can of worms :-)

cc:
@andrew
@cda
@alain

@wagtail its a great idea as it would make potentially any django / wagtail installation a first class citizen of the fediverse, expanding functionality in various novel ways

There are already several django based activitypub servers (I am aware of #funkwhale, #takahẽ , #socialhome) and related #python projects (#bovine, #piefed) but it seems there is zero code re-use among them.

@paninid the EU is big on strategies. Which is nice. Where there is a will there is a way. But despite vile detractors, the EU is not running the continent, national governments do. And *their* will is somewhat less coherent and articulated.

Which leads to a stalemate, famously requiring a crisis to resolve.

Now, crises do come thick and fast: the financial crisis, the pandemic, wars and refugees.

But there are better ways to point a face to a direction than constant alternating slaps.

@polotek mastodon is weird already, in two major ways, but the weirdness has not expressed itself yet. Like the genes of a new organism, you only see what you've got once it grows. For now people wanted a less controlled twitter alternative. But 1) its open source. People fork it. And 2) it follows a open protocol. In the end it will be just one of dozens of server types that interoperate to some degree. This is most fertile ground for online communities to flourish. Imho there is no going back.

@RustyRing @sara these few humans who run everything know full well that they are evil, thats why they are building bunkers.

Ultimately they are as impotent as any tiny minority that seizes power. What they rely on is are the broken collective reflexes of society, dysfunctional politics, corrupt bureaucracies etc .

Having controlled the means of information diffusion they can ride this bull for longer than one might expect but therein lies also the recipe for getting rid of them.

@kaffando

the phenomenon is consistent also with ice cover extremes https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/climate/antarctic-sea-ice-record-low.html

a question in my mind is whether this outlier is of a non-normal nature, a jump to a new regime of sorts. that would be the bad scenario, suggesting chaotic dynamics. the "good" (*) scenario would be that such volatility happens, but its just not visible in the 40 yr timeseries.

(*) "Good" only in the sense that our impact would be a slower trend, more time to try mitigate something

@b_aichner

My unscientific, high level, impression from (virtual) attendance of #fosdem2024 is that we are entering a third period of the "movement".

The lone hacker #foss years are fading away, the #bigtech #opensource embrace is currently very dominant but we are slowly getting into yet another era where the public sector is involved.

We might call it the #publiccode or #digitalpublicgood era.

In the end code, being a form of cultural expression, will reflect more or less the structure of society

@b_aichner our thoughts and prayers are with Homo Sapiens at this difficult moment. Hopefully their intentional and determined ignorance will not confront an untimely end. A colorful species with so much promise, too bad if something terrible happened to it...