Notices by Gavin Chait; (gavinchait@wandering.shop)

@inthehands been thinking about this for years from an education perspective. In my first undergraduate year, my zoology lecturer described much of our biology syllabus in school as "lies to children". Ways of simplifying the world to produce simple questions & simple answers. That stuck with me &, after I started teaching, it became more obvious.

All syllabi are designed to have markable tests. A question with a "correct" markable answer.

@inthehands Only if you continue into research do you learn that even the questions don't exist. All we have is problems of unknown etiology. That it's called the "scientific method" not the "scientific answer".

But most people finish school taught to go through life comfortably believing that not only are all questions answerable, but that there is only one correct one.

And now you also know why LLMs are popular.

@davidnjoku it's a mystery how people who claim that their youth was the best time of their lives then act so perplexed & outraged by youth behaviour. Don't they remember anything about the supposedly best years of their lives?

@Gargron @scottjenson and would she count as Scott's "technical"? Largely people buy a computer, turn it on and use whatever OS is there, but Linux is a choice which starts with even picking the distro. Using it once it's installed? Sure, no problem. My mom can do it too. But I set it up.

@Gargron @scottjenson and to go deeper on the challenge (having done tech support), I don't think the average person could install Windows or Android from scratch if it didn't come pre-installed. I'm not sure what the equivalent of "pre-installed" would look like for Mastodon?

@Gargron @scottjenson who set it up for them?

RE: https://xoxo.zone/@Ashedryden/115663472156365750

That's OK Microsoft, I'm quietly abandoning your products and moving to Linux for good.

@dalias @marshray @cwebber pseudo-science?

Hi #ActivityPub developers, @helge, @smallcircles, @dansup, @patak, @cheeaun

I'd appreciate help with understanding oauth2 for developing a custom server that might work with Mastodon apps like @elk & @phanpy.

I've read how Mastodon implements getting user tokens (https://docs-p.joinmastodon.org/client/authorized/) but don't understand its security, lifespan or refresh requirement.

Is it what it looks like? A perpetual token not stored as JWT? The app provides the same token indefinitely as bearer auth in requests?

@jonny my 2 cents based on my experience with my https://openlocal.uk data research project... Only a small number of research specialisms permit grant funding for longitudinal data research. The costs aren't just hosting, but mostly curation. So the work isn't done or is precarious, or is forced to be semicommercial to keep the lights on.

@jonny I get the principle, & it may work for relatively mainstream data (sort of like OpenStreetMap labelling) but a _lot_ more challenging for specialist / niche data where the learning curve is steep & the result interesting only to a handful of specialists.

I'm not sure what good potentials would be, other than the obvious Wikipedia & OpenStreetMap, & they still need paid staff to build software & maintain data integrity, even if you took away hosting costs.

What is your ideal example?

@paulisci Wait, I thought "consultants consult" was the other finalist?