PrinceWith999Enemies

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

That’s pretty much what all of the site aggregators were. I ran a couple of communities on yahoo and some other sites. There were also services like Archie, gopher, and wais, and I am pretty sure my Usenet client had some searching on it (it might have been emacs - I can’t remember anymore). I remember when Google debuted on Stanford.edu/google and realized that everything was about to change.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 6 months ago (8 children)

No, because he’s actually quite mad and belongs nowhere near any kind of power. I can see his conspiracy theories appealing to the Q type, but most of them are going to go for Trump. He’s polling this highly because he’s an unknown. As more people start paying attention to who he actually is, he will be the Herman Cain of the race.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 months ago (1 children)

He went from looking like The Mandarin from Iron Man to wish.com late stage Tyrion.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago

It strikes me as exactly the kind of engineering call that Elon has tended to make, time after time. With zero training in an area, he gets a solution in his head crufted up from some set of pre-existing notions or points of view and then pushes to have them implemented. He will also go on to fire anyone who disagrees with him. I spoke with an engineer who worked on the gull wing doors, which the team had objected to, and not only did he force them through, he burst in on one of the finalization meetings where they had finally reached a design consensus and insisted they change the hinge. Given similar reports on his behavior regarding other products (including especially twitter), I have no reason to disbelieve this person.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

I’m a biologist rather than a physicist, but I will take a swing at this.

Not really, although it depends on how you do your definitions. Most of the elements were formed by stars, which were themselves formed by the OG hydrogen, so hydrogen came first. So, first energy, then particles, then hydrogen, then stars and such, then oxygen and iron and all of those things.

I’m open to any corrections.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

Negative tip value.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

I have a 3p app that still seems to be working. I don’t log in, so I only read occasionally, but I have to say that the number of upvotes seem much higher than when I was using the site. I was a very active user who quit during the exodus (when Apollo went dark), but I don’t remember the number of upvotes being regularly in the thousands to tens of thousands.

It makes me wonder whether they’re artificially boosting traffic ahead of the IPO, to be honest. I mean, if they are, it probably would have leaked by now - but it still feels like it doesn’t line up with the third party traffic reports.

In any case, I think that going public is just going to increase the pressure for monetization, and Spez has already said how much he admires what Elon did with Twitter, so I think we know where it’s heading. It’s really just waiting for a replacement. Whether lemmy can be it or not is yet to be determined, but the enshittification has started and the migration will come as soon as someone drops a couple of billion building a service and app that’s a real substitute for the casual users.

[–] [email protected] 88 points 8 months ago (22 children)

Smalltalk would probably make more sense than C++.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Uno Reverse

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

In 2012 I voted against Obama because I thought he was too conservative. I didn’t think his healthcare program went far enough, I didn’t like his foreign policy of continuing the Bush wars, and I thought he turned out to be far more establishment than he had indicated as a candidate in 2008.

I voted for Jill Stein. I said it wasn’t a protest vote and that I was voting my conscience, but it was totally a protest vote. Stein would have been the worst president in US history, and I even knew that at the time. I did it because Obama had a predicted 99% chance of winning my state, so I figured it was safe and would communicate to the democrats that there was a preference for more left leaning candidates.

What I did not do was try to campaign for Stein to try to get swing state voters to vote for her. I didn’t try to get swing state voters to not vote.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

The difference is that Elon would have said “And we can do this today!” back in 2017.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (4 children)

First “democrats” is doing a lot of work here. I’m assuming the voters that you’re talking about turning out were democrats. I’m assuming the politicians they voted for were democrats. So what you mean is some subset (eg Third Way types, which have already been mentioned).

Use numbers. What was the turnout for the previous years? What was the turnout for Obama? For Bill Clinton? Was it bigger when Dennis Kucinich was in the race? Other than Bernie, he was the leftmost candidate that I can recall - at least in the top 5 in recent years. State the point you are trying to prove clearly, then demonstrate it.

I’m a Bernie supporter - he actually helped secure a research grant I worked on, I’ve met him in person, and I donated to each of his campaigns since I started to be able to do that kind of thing. I’m a member of the DSA. I’m also a scientist, and I deal with this kind of thing all the time.

What you’re basically coming off as, to be honest, is that family member in the maga hat who keeps yelling that 2020 was rigged.

 

Texas and I believe a few other states have passed anti-abortion laws that attempt to cover people leaving their states to seek safe and legal abortions. The ones I’m familiar with (as I recall) applied to things like traveling on state-owned roads to seek an abortion out of state.

Let’s lay aside the question of constitutional and federal restrictions governing interstate commerce laws for now. I started wondering if these laws would govern transportation via airlines or Amtrak. They could (I assume) make the argument that they pulled you over on the way to the transportation facility, but if you didn’t buy the tickets until you get there, I think it’d complicate the state’s case. I did some thinking along those lines.

My real question now is whether the defendant could state that they were traveling for reasons of a medical consultation regarding their pregnancy but had not yet decided whether they would be having an abortion performed. As far as I know, these laws necessarily target intent. If the patient states they were traveling to a state where they would be more likely to receive competent medical advice (which is a truism - abortion-restricting states also limit what MDs can say to a patient), would the state need to prove their intent? Absent something like a text message stating “I’m going to California to get an abortion,” does the prosecution have any line of attack there?

Abortion resources:

California abortion resources by the state government

Planned Parenthood

Abortion Defense Network

LGBTQ abortion info

 

As I watch The Internet look like it’s starting to adopt a new phase (let’s call it federation writ large), I’m watching for signs of both success and struggle. I have some strong opinions of features and functionality lacking in the current suite of UIs that might help adoption, but thing I’ve been thinking about more recently is the effects of premature fragmentation.

Like so many things, it boils down to a problem of discovery. By discovery, I mean the user’s ability to find posts and topics that they want to read and engage with.

If lemmy had 10 users, we would not need separate topics. It’d probably be a few posts a day, tops, and it’d be easy enough to just scan through and see if anything of interest was being discussed. That could probably scale up a bit - let’s call it 100 users just for discussion. 100 users, 10-15 posts per day. Somewhere beyond that, you’d probably want to start some kind of classification. It would need to be at a fairly high level, like tech and politics. I’m thinking of things like 90s era slashdot. The point I’m making is that 1000 users would be too few to fragment the tech topic/tag into separate operating systems, much less specific flavors or versions of Linux.

My point is this: picture a growth curve. From biology and general network theory we would expect the growth curve of a successful service or community to grow exponentially. In the early part of growth, the exponential curve can appear linear - it can take time for the network effect to really kick in. Things like the Reddit exit can create a brief non-linearity, but until you hit the hockey stick part it’s just steady growth. Let’s call this function U(t) for users as a function of time.

Now let’s think about growth in the number of communities. From the above, and using discoverability as our fitness function, we’d expect them to grow as a function of the number of users. As the number of users goes up, both the number of and diversity in the posts go up, meaning we need additional metadata to find “our” content easily. Let’s call this one C(t) for communities as a function of time.

My thought right now is that a fitness function would discover that U(t) >> C(t). I’m not going to get a lot more specific because it’s just a thought but I suspect that there’s be some relationship between inter-topic and intra-topic diversity (and the overall information diversity of the service).

What I’m getting to is that it may be that one of the strengths of a service like lemmy, which allows for an almost unlimited expansion of communities including duplications, is not applying the concept of a fitness function, and actually can make things harder to discover and thus the service harder to use, reducing the ability to recruit and retain users. It reduces the average number of posts per topic and increases noise both in search and in the feed. I’ve ended up defaulting my clients to basically showing /all and sorting by recent just to make sure I’m not missing anything interesting, then blocking communities one by one. That’s not sustainable or friendly to more casual users. It’s definitely not the Apollo-on-Reddit kind of UX.

I’m not sure what can or should be done, given both the architecture and philosophy. I’m just thinking about how things like network theory can inform how this sort of thing can be optimized.

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