Hmm, I think all of your examples were examples of the teachers during prep, which is interesting, but not what I would have called “in the classroom”. I got the sense the article was talking more about it being in the hands of students, but maybe I’m wrong about that?

You know what’s the worst? I read this headline and thought “oh yeah, I forgot they did that…”

What a fucked up timeline.

“May be doing more harm than good” but, honest question, is there evidence it’s doing any good in schools? I know I’m probably not going to get a balanced opinion here, but is the bad outweighed by good, or is the bad outweighed by neutral at best?

Kain is deified

You’re not directly wrong, but the theoretical, philosophical, answer is that the social will that allows ICE to operate, or cops to thug about, is that people feel that there is dangerous lawlessness out there, and the only way to solve it is strong force. And sometimes a few eggs need to get cracked, but it’s okay because they deserved it.

So none of the things listed here prevent ICE, but ICE is powered by fear of “the criminals”, and if we solve the “criminal problem” with real solutions, suddenly it gets a lot harder to motive a brute squad when everyone is fine actually. And I don’t mean “the officers are fine” or “the would-be victims are fine”, I mean the random citizens sitting at home, already feeling secured without the police force in military gear.

And I mean maybe at least some of the shitty dudes are there due to broken homes fractured by substance abuse or financial stresses, or are themselves victims of fetal alcohol syndrome or something, which could possibly be lessened with tighter social circles and safety nets.

As you your other point, unions specifically address wage theft and would impact Bezos for sure. At least assuming “theoretically ideal” unions.

Possibly even as far as feedback, but yeah not really recursion.

I have friends that daily drive BSD, but I never have. For me it’s because Open Source is already a small field, and Linux solves all the problems I have, while also having the most mind-share, focus, and community. I want it to be FOSS for ethics, which Linux is, but otherwise don’t need anything that BSD offers, so there’s no reason for me to attempt anything more. If there’s even one compatibility problem, it’d be one too many for no benefit.

That having been said, I do donate money every month to one of them, because I like that they exist. So that’s probably weird…

I basically agree with you, but I’m also a little pedantic, so I’ll also say that if the standard format isn’t the format MSOffice outputs, then the standard format isn’t the format everyone is using, they’re using a similar but incompatibly different format. And so if there’s an opportunity to pick what the standard must be going forwards, and the actual true OOXML spec has effectively zero users, and what MSOffice outputs isn’t an open standard, then you might as well pick ODF which has more than zero users and is standardized.

But again, this is moot if the thing MSOffice outputs is actually actually OOXML now.

Their point about OOXML has traditionally been that the format that Microsoft Office itself produces has never once matched the standardized standard they ratified. So Microsoft used it to check a box on some requirements sheet and muddy the waters (like this), but anyone actually following the standard would not have achieved actual cross compatibility with the massive gorilla in the space. But because it’s “Microsoft’s format” any issues would have felt like bugs in LibreOffice rather than bugs in Microsoft Office. In contrast the standardized ODF actually matches the ODF you find in practice.

That all having been said, I stopped paying attention to that whole scene a while ago, so I don’t know what the current situation is, or if that still applies. It’s possible later version of MSOffice actually moved to the standard version at some point, or that the standard was updated to match what MSOffice actually reads and writes. Possible, but I just don’t know.

Similar to others here, but slightly different: start with what you’re most excited about. There’ll be some shitty parts where you’re confused and frustrated, and if you feel like you’re just doing something you’re “supposed to do”, it can feel like a job for no pay. Pick something you have an inner thrill for, and maybe that fire can carry you through the dark.

Oh clearly! It’s just simple science! Philia are stored in the balls. 😉

If I remember correctly Sexologist Dr. Lindsey Doe has a story from her time as a student where she was in a lecture where a dude was talking about there being no evidence of a G-Spot, and joking about squirting as a concept being a made up porn gag, and she’s sitting in the auditorium being like “but I experience G-Spot orgasms and squirt, like… often” 😅

Now, to be fair to the field at least a little bit, I understand why maybe she didn’t want to stand up and shout “I routinely hammer my G-Spot and squirt all over the place” in front of her peers, and even in a clinical environment I could imagine it’s not the most orgasm-conducive setting to have a bunch of electrodes and cameras and stuff setup and then to be like “okay, now please show us all what it’s like at home. Anytime. We’re all ready to watch”

Up to no good???

In related news Israel is causing some mischief in the West Bank, and the Germans were real troublemakers in the early 40s. Some reports go so far as to call them scoundrels!

Other people have said some things, but I’ll say some things too:

1. I think it’s easy to look at the titans of success and assume it was inevitable, but in the middle were lots of corporate failures. Google failed to beat Facebook with Google Plus, MySpace was massive and is now basically dead, Vine started up and died, Vimeo failed to defeat YouTube, and while I can’t quote their names there were other “Facebook but…”, “Twitter but…”, and “YouTube but …” companies out there that sprung up with VC backing and died irrelevant. Meta currently has threads as an attempt to compete with Twitter, and probably that’ll be gone and forgotten soon. So in a sense the fediverse is beating MySpace and Threads and Vine and GooglePlus by having an alternative that’s running at all. Not all victories are assured simply by existing or being “better”

2. A lot of it is Network Effects. People go on PeerTube, there’s nothing they want to watch, they leave. Twitter has been around in the tech space for like 20 years, because other tech people at the same conference as you were on it, but most normal people weren’t on it until celebrities started signing up. Because otherwise they’d show up on the home page, not see anything they cared about, and then leave. Most platforms these days explicitly prevent interoperability, and the law allows them to, so it’s hard to migrate slowly.

3. The fediverse is explicitly anti-control and anti-centralization. This means it’s aggressively and purposely fragmented, which normal people don’t care about, but does bring a host of UX problems. Any attempt to paper over these will likely be met with hostility by the existing community and projects, because the solutions to these “problems” tend to involve central authority of some kind or another, and with centralization comes power, control, and attack vectors

4. The fediverse, similar to above, is pretty anti-profit. That’s why it’s an alternative to the big popular ones, but it also means it’s harder to have solid paid maintainers and disk storage and stuff, compared to something like YouTube or Facebook which are among the most valuable companies on this Earth. It also makes it hard to buy ads, or airtime, or grassroots astroturfing, or celebrity endorsements, etc, which might reach a broader audience and draw people in. That all takes money that the fediverse simply doesn’t have.

5. The fediverse is pretty anti-algorithm, or at least the way the other platforms characterize “The Algorithm” which is to say anti-dark-patterns. We do this both because we are care about our own health as people, so if we’re running something for ourselves why would we dark-pattern ourselves, but also because we aren’t driven by profit motive, and so usership costs money and gains us kinda nothing, so there’s no incentive to “addict” our users. I’ve seen multiple accounts, and also seen first-hand, people join Pixelfed from Instagram and bounce off pretty quick. And it’s not just the network effect, it’s also that Instagram and its algorithmic feed is constantly trying to trick you into watching more and more and more. Pixelfed says “what do you want to see?” and the user goes… uh… I don’t know. Maybe cats? And Pixelfed says “okay, here’s some cats and nothing else. Let me know if there’s anything else you want, otherwise bye thanks for coming”. Like, people want a firehose of attention, but the platform doesn’t want to subject you to that, and doesn’t benefit from it, so it goes “that’s all I have for you now. Come back later” which other social media never will.

That last one I think is really a big part of it. You have to ask “Why are so many people on Twitter? What do they do there?” and then wonder if them doing that on Mastodon is better? It’s obviously philosophically better for them to spend their time on a freedom-respecting platform than a for-profit exploitation machine, but they could also use neither and that would probably be better too. They could go to a library, a cafe, and a park. Is Mastodon essential? Why do you want it to be used by millions and millions of people? What do you get out of it? What does Mastodon get out of it? What do the maintainers of the instances get out of it?

Would the world be a better place if all Twitter users were Mastodon users, or if all Twitter users simply didn’t use either?

Also, people today have a Facebook account, and a Twitter account, and a YouTube account, and a Reddit account, and each of those services does a different thing. You mention how there’s no events built into Mastodon. Sure, but there’s no events built into Twitter, Reddit, or YouTube either. There’s no marketplace integration into frendica, but there’s no marketplace integration in YouTube either, Reddit doesn’t have hashtags, Facebook doesn’t have playlists of videos, Twitter doesn’t tell you people’s birthdays, etc.

Just because different fediverse tools use ActivityPub, it doesn’t necessarily mean they all must interoperate. It can be neat sometimes, and sometimes it basically happens by accident, but a lot of the time it just doesn’t make sense.

Yeah, like other people covered, it’s unfortunate but also very important. It’s easy to tie “visible wifi networks” to “surprisingly precise location on globe” in many places, so the permission is named for the worst case scenario. Yes, the app might just be looking for a wifi, but it also could use that same information to locate you, so it’s the location permission. Sensible.

If they wanted to support just this one feature without requiring a location permission, they could maybe have an API that is “are you currently connected to this opaque token” API where the app can ask “am I connected” and is just told “yes” or “no”. That’s probably safe enough. And then I could register the app with my wifi without the app even knowing what my Wifi is, it just gets a unique but random string.

The same is true of bluetooth. If I can list nearby bluetooth, I can see that speaker and this TV and guess location. But there could be an API that hides that, there just isn’t currently

Yeah, I think it’s just the way the blog post was written. When I was reading it I saw the first few paragraphs was basically “here’s how to do Cron with it”, and then everything after that was “here’s a bunch of other features it has that cron doesn’t and how to use those”

I don’t think that’s the wrong way to write this kind of article, but I could see it feeling overwhelming on a skim, because it may feel like you need to read the whole thing in order to get anything working. But actually only the start was necessary, and the rest was tasty feature pitch.

These answers will be theoretical, because it’s possible some browser or system will do things stupid and negate these positives:

It shouldn’t make things less anonymous, because different websites get unique passkeys made for them. This also makes them more secure, because if one site has a complete DB leak, that doesn’t impact other sites at all.

Also, the passkeys are used for auth, so there’s already no “anonymity” here, you’re logging into a website. They know who you are, at least which user you are, maybe not which human, which is as true as it was before with passwords.

Also they should require your device to ask you if you want to use the passkey, they’re not supposed to be automatically leaking to every site you visit without your knowledge.

Also, they are not stored via cookies. Unless you mean the login session, in which case that part is stored via cookies, but just the same way that a password login gets a session key via a cookie to use after you’ve logged in. So if someone can steal your cookies that’s already a huge problem, but they don’t get any extra information with passkeys. The actual secret material for a passkey is stored outside of the browser entirely.

The biometrics aren’t supposed to leave the device, they’re prompted for by the hardware on the device asking if you’d like to allow the keys to be used. The browser asks the passkey hardware “I’d like to sign this thing please” and then the hardware pops up the biometric thing as part of its decision making process on whether it should do that or not. Crucially this is not the website asking for biometrics, it’s your device. And if you unlock it, then it chooses to sign what it was asked to sign, and all the browser gets back is the signature.

In theory.

I’ve encountered it very little, but when I encounter it it’s because I try to do something and it doesn’t work. So I check the permissions with ls -l, and it all seems reasonable. Huh, this should work. Try again, nope. Hmm. 20 minutes of trying random variations, strange results. Oh fuck, is this SELinux? Shit. Where do those configs exist again? How do I configure that? Google “SELinux cheat sheet” hmmm, I don’t have enough context to use that, Google “SELinux getting started”. Read tutorial, try to skim just enough to figure out what’s going wrong for me.

So I don’t hate it, I just haven’t ever had a use for it, but it has surprised me in a bad way before and cost me a lot of time and confusion, but I’ve never spent the time getting familiar because I’ve never had a use for it. And it comes up rarely enough I never remember anything about it by the time it bites me. I can’t even recall now what I was trying to do the last time I bumped into it.

Huh, that’s some fun psychology. Donations make me feel guilty and uncomfortable 😛

Good to know someone enjoys them!

To devil’s advocate in a different direction, most projects aren’t setup to actually do anything with donations. They could be, like if they had a stable income source they could hire people full time as a job rather then relying on volunteer time. And some of the larger projects are already at that point, and so maybe having more money would allow them to expand the team further. And some projects have a particular goal they’re trying to fund, like an external security audit, or some kind of certification process.

But for most projects, sporadic donations are like “hey cool, I guess. I’ll go out to dinner tonight” gifts of appreciation, because up until they become a solid full time wage, they’re not a solid full time wage. And once they are a solid full time wage, any further donations are like “hey cool, I’ll go out to dinner tonight” until they’re big enough to be a second wage 😛

I’m not saying we shouldn’t donate stuff, gifts of appreciation are still appreciated, I’m sure. But they don’t produce output.