becoming one of the ancients involves more hemorrhoids than gravitas.
why auto insurance rates are high in florida.
a pickup truck with a goat in the drivers seat.
people wonder, if democracy itself is unpopular, how can it be democratic to preserve it?
but democracy itself isn’t a choice, or as proponents imagine, a kind of privilege.
democracy is an obligation we owe one another, whether or not we feel like it or are fond of it. democratic institutions (bad as ours are) are not privileges of individuals but means of enabling informed, accountable governance. shirking costs us all a good life. u can’t morally, ought not be able legally, to just opt out.
I accused Audible last night of preemptively buying a book on my behalf it had been recommending. I was wrong.
My wife logged into my account looking for an audiobook to fall asleep to, and was seduced by the recommendation. (I had thought this unlikely, because my wife was decidedly unimpressed by another book by the same author.)
My very bad! https://zirk.us/@interfluidity/111611610413313144
audible seems to have been so certain of a book recommendation it just bought it on my behalf, spending one of my credits, without waiting for me actually to decide to buy it.
UPDATE: This was my bad, I should have investigated before posting this. My wife logged into my account and was seduced by the recommendation.
when people say “full stop”, they usually mean “go”, right?
Is a diaspora foreign meddling?
"Self Regulation is to Regulation as Self Importance is to Importance"
Good title by @40Years https://40yrs.blogspot.com/2023/12/self-regulation-is-to-regulation-as.html
life is a free trial.
people aren't martyred. they are just killed.
@maria it will be a world based on attestations, structured as digital signatures, but ultimately reliant upon the reputations of those who attest. we will judge a mediated thing real because someone(s) has attached an attestation to the thing, on pain of social and legal consequences for knowingly or negligently false attestation.
@Probertd8 @FeralRobots i hear it's a fake.
(sorry.)
maybe the coming deluge of deep fakes will, paradoxically, restore our privacy.
if most of what we see is fake, then everything is deniable.
@CoolerPseudonym (i do the same, use kill the newsletter to get 'em into my feed reeder!)
@CoolerPseudonym (i definitely think all blogs / newsletters / whatev should be rss-first. but i wonder whether there are people would want pings for eg infrequent sources they value so they don't miss them in their rss. for me at least, the rss reader is a bulk environment, though i use folders to make it more likely i see some higher priority sources. frequent publishers can dilute feeds even there, though.)
are there blogs you would want to subscribe to by SMS or similar (WhatsApp / iMessage / whatev), or would that just be noise you'd rather avoid?
We weave such intricate filigrees that no one else can see.
@elan those bridge from the blog themselves to AP, i think. the advantage of doing it from a feedreader, from the consumer rather than the producer, is that posts from sources without such bridges could enter the fray.
(of course we could just make bridges from RSS to AP, and bring in lots of sources. i think @darius has done so, and i'm working on some things related.) 1/
@elan @darius in either case, "canonicalization" is an issue. it'd be nice if there were a "canoncal" AP representation of each RSS guid (setting aside some issues about trusting that G for global). some tensions there with federation — the easiest form of canoncalization is an authoritative central service. when producers publish, arguably an advantage is we get that, let their instance be canonical for their posts. 2/
@elan @darius but i wonder whether there aren't clever ways of defining canonical representations without the author's server as the authority, letting maybe the first bridger register via something distributed like IPFS
(more tensions — what if an instance lots of people defederate gets in the business of "claiming" canonical representations of important things.) /fin