Notices by Andreu Casablanca 🐀 (castarco@hachyderm.io)

@thomasfuchs I think it's unfair to label those initial researchers as con artists.

They were doing good and legitimate research that resulted in acceptable outcomes for the time.

Of course some people were overly optimistic, but that doesn't put them in the same position as the grifters of today, not by far.

@thomasfuchs

Idea: good
Execution: bad

And, as it happens with many other technologies such as SQL, the sunk costs are too high and few people dare to propose decent alternatives (or fail miserably when they try).

@thomasfuchs I'm a little bit more pessimistic than that.

I think we've always been surrounded by despicable people presented in many flavours, and some of them just hide for some years where it was unpopular to be like they were.

"moral progress" is even more uneven than economic & technological progress, I'd say that some people are thousands of years apart from others.

@aral I might have the temptation to ask you some things about these NLNet grants and other similar funding sources...

I've never managed a project that could benefit from them... but right now I'm bootstrapping one and I feel like a leaf in the middle of a tornado.

@thomasfuchs I see that some people have pulled together some experimental hacks to do exactly that https://fabulous.systems/posts/2023/06/fetch-own-followers-from-mastodon-api/

@thomasfuchs @stanford It's not exactly like that. It would work ONLY if they were the only nazis in their own circles, but that's usually not the case.

In fact, the other nazis in their circles might want that this happen to them, so it becomes easier to reinforce their bonds with the shunned nazi.

Exactly the same way many sects achieve their goals. One does not become a nazi overnight, most of them go through an initiation funnel, and being outcasted is just another step in their path.

@thomasfuchs Thank you :D , you saved me the time of having to research for alternatives.

#TIL that #StockholmSyndrome was invented by #police and a bad psychologist to discredit a female hostage who didn't trust the cops after they did nothing to protect the captive employees during a bank heist.

Her "crime" was trying to negotiate with the criminals to protect her own life, while the police and the state preferred having dead hostages over closing any deal with the thieves.

https://www.stadafa.com/2020/12/stockholm-syndrome-discredit.html

#sexism #psychology #badscience #ACAB

Serious question about #HTML & #JavaScript: Is it possible to create self-contained & sandboxed "components" that are "safe" to embedd even if you can't verify their code? (the same way it is relatively safe to include images or videos)

Something like that would be truly awesome for collaborative webpages focused on knowledge sharing, as it would enable introducing interactive simulations without having to add handcrafted safeguards.

#webdev #webdevelopment #frontend

@eniko What strikes me is that when I look for academic takes on the relation between tolerance and "social contracts" ( https://mstdn.social/@ZhiZhu/109501714219730850 )... there's barely nothing.

It's trully shocking that the best takes on the topic are in the form of memes, and a couple of blog articles.

@nova Actually I think that Mastodon is great at discovering new content (not sure about news).

These past weeks I discovered lots of new things at a faster pace than before, partly because people behave in a different way than on Twitter & other sites.

People might be conflating "finding stuff that they're searching for" with "discovering".