- For what it's worth, pubnix - public accessible UNIX systems - were/are that to an extent. You'd get a free account on some shared system, you log in via a terminal, and you get access to all those things: gopher/gemini/web hosting, chat, bulletin boards,...
Some modern day examples include: https://tilde.town/, https://tilde.club/ and https://sdf.org/.
But shell access doesn't appeal to non-tech users. It's the difference between engineering the electricity in your own house to become self-sufficient, and just expecting to magically get power when you plug a device in the socket.
- This an interesting question. Forgive my meandering take on this.
We already have a mix of technologies to achieve that effect. Sort of. Simplified, you can host a personal website on shared hosting, a VPS, or wherever, at the same time chat via IRC or XMPP, and use RSS to create feeds to share tidbits about yourself. Nothing stops you from combining different programs and services to get that.
So, what are the problems you're actually trying to solve here?
Do you want to improve accessibility, that is: lower the bar for non-technical people to join feeds, publish their own thoughts, join group chats,...?
Do you want to improve discoverability across what we already have? Make it easier for everyone to serendipitous finding information? Like, search, recommendations, linking, pub/sub, and so on?
Do you want to solve sustainability? Developing models that also cover the expenses involved i.e. either covering the costs in maintaining tech, or redistributing the costs?
Do you want to solve governance, the issue of providing enough affordances to communities to moderate/govern themselves?
These are big questions, and once you try to solve them together, you'll have to make trade-offs, inevitably. Decentralizing everything sounds great, but that has an impact on discoverability, as well as accessibility. Not having another account sounds great, but that hides complex debates about online and offline, distributed identities.
Even more so, if you dig deeper, our approach these affordances is based on our values. And those can be very different depending on who you talk to. That's where things enter the murky, ambiguous teritory of sociology, culture, and so on where few absolute truths are offered.
That doesn't mean we should just accept throw up hands and accept the status quo, though. Talking in terms of a single "network" or a single "protocol" is too crude to approach these questions. The intrinsic value the Internet offers us, can be found in a handful foundational design principles like standardization, composition, openness,... which allow us to create many networks that host many diverse communities. Each to their own isn't a bad thing as it's too naive to think that there's a catch-all solution that caters to everyone's needs. Balkanization, such as it is, becomes really problematic if it erodes common beliefs we hold about a free, open and accessible digital global network.
Many "technical" people who are active in these niches like Mastodon, Nostr, the Fediverse, or even the Smolweb, do so because they are steeped in a particular (counter)culture that espouses the same values that also led to the birth of the early Internet. Cyberspace really is a marketplace of ideas first. Technologies are an expression of that.
- From the posted article:
> EPA Seeks to Eliminate Critical PFAS Drinking Water Protections
> The move continues to expose communities across the country to toxic forever chemicals in tap water
If this really were a "team sport", one half of the team wouldn't be set on undermining the health of the other half of the team.
- If a pension system is purely based on repartition: yes. But that's not the case in most countries. Pension plans mostly involve pension funds which are rooted in the financial markets. It's the individuals responsibility to max out their pension plan, and fiscal policies are used to incentivize this.
Ownership of assets, like home ownership, also contributes towards the totality of a pension.
In that sense, not owning a home, having to pay rent in old age, is a form of impoverishment. If that rent isn't offset by other sources of income like financial investments.
- Oh, it's not just the "big stories". History is a pretty big flag that covers a lot of territory. At heart, history is about asking perennial questions like "where do we come from?", "how did the past shape us today?" and "how could the past inform us?".
This is true on an individual as well as a collective level, and goes well beyond academia. Consider genealogy & family history, local and regional culture and traditions, remembrance,... There is always a personal connection, and that tends to become extremely tangible in individual stories. Whether that's finding a lost relative, honoring one's culture, or just being able to empathize with the lives of people who are centuries gone and discovering that they weren't all that different from us today.
Historians do carry a big responsibility. That's why accountability is at the heart of anyone who does historical research on a professional level; or are motivated to spread their interpretation of the historical record well beyond a few listeners. That's why historians are instilled with a reflex to keep a pragmatic attitude and ask critical questions.
- As someone who lives in one of those locations mentioned in the article: split out locale and language into different settings. Because they are not the same thing. This article explains that nicely. [1]
You want your users to be able to change their location (and, therefore, locale) and their language independently. The Accept-Language header could be used as a sentinel for language. Then again, I wouldn't outright rely on geoIP to set the locale which is an umbrella for regional differing variables like timezone, date formatting, currency, VAT / Taxes,...
I think it's okay to have your content served, by default, in a language that reflects either the majority of your target audience; or the culture / place you're based in. Changing the locale / language should follow a clear UI pattern e.g. a language switcher & locale switcher in the header; or a clear navigational aid pointing to a context menu. That's how Hetzner works, for instance. Another example is Deliveroo.
- > personal responsibility
A sense of personal responsibility dilutes very quickly as more people get involved. This is a well researched dynamic in groups and collectives.
As it turns out, it's very easy to rationalize your own actions if you can defer your responsibility to a wider context. On an operational level: "My job - HR, SRE engineering, project management,... - didn't hurt anyone.", "I received an industry award last year for my work",... On a strategic level: "Too many people rely on us, so we can't fail.", "Our original mission didn't change.", "Our mission was, is and will be a net positive", ... Not just that, actually being convinced that those rationalizations are 100% true, and not being able to consciously notice how your own actions in a small, or large, way contribute to a negative impact. Just listen to testimonies of these people, the truly are convinced to their core that their work is a net positive for humanity.
> If I sell 400 million skateboards - do we need a regulatory board to approve skateboard design changes?
Suppose your design involves a wonky wheel. If you sell 10 skateboards, and 1 person falls, breaks their leg and decides to sue you for damages: that's a private problem between you and that person. If you sell 400 million skateboards, and millions of people people break their leg: that's a problem for the entirety of society.
Safety is also why car design is heavily regulated. Not necessarily to ensure individual safety, but to make sure that society, as a whole, isn't crippled by hundreds of thousands of people requiring care or getting killed in car accidents.
If you are able to sell 400 million skateboards, I sure hope there are regulations that enforce the safety of your product design.
- > Your standalone web site is like a cactus in the middle of a vast desert nobody cares about
Yet, cacti thrive in the desert, uncaring about the opinions of others.
> in fact now at a mercy of Google's indexing policies.
Inherently, the Web doesn't carry "maximizing an audience" as a maxim. That's an expectation that the Web's denizens have come to believe in as a matter of principle: the only valuable reason to put anything online, is because you intend to cater to an audience.
That doesn't exclude owning a personal website that you'd just peruse for your own sake. In fact, the author writes as much:
> You can write at length, ramble nonsensically, and people can choose to read it or not. It’s about putting things out on the internet for yourself.
Like, sure, there are platforms where you could share cooking recipes. But maybe that's not something you want for yourself, for whatever reason, maybe you don't want to attract undue attention, and you just want to keep them in your own quiet corner of the Web, for yourself.
You might want to write for the sake of the craft of writing, and use the Web as your medium, rather then paper. Others happening to stumble on your work, is just a by-product of your choice to publish thoughts on the Web.
Maybe you don't care about search engines, and if you need someone to find your work, well, you can just hand them an URL.
From your perspective, all of that may sound horribly inefficient, and that's true, it is inefficient and not the right way to do things if your express goal were to cater to large audiences. But that doesn't make it any less valid an option to approach the Web.
> There is no bottom line here. It's all about economy and capitalism, which seem to always win.
Well, my argument is that the Web, such as it was, experienced an Eternal September with the advent of social media and mobile devices. Suddenly, everyone could reach an audience with nothing but a smartphone. And that notion caused millions, billions, flocking to those few central platforms that catered to this apparent want, creating a self-perpetuating feedback loop.
Whereas, do you thoughts and intentions really need to be shown in front of an audience of billions, just because that's possible now? Of course not.
Wanting to be like a cactus is perfectly valid, giving your thoughts a quiet spot in some corner of the Web you can call your own, not having to worry about likes, favorites, comments, shares or clicks. As long as doing so caters to your own intentions.
- I strongly disagree.
One of the examples mentioned studies population changes during NZ's colonization. It's part of Maori-led research. Such research provides a better understanding of the history and culture of the indigenous population of NZ. In turn, this research contributes towards contextualizing and enriching relationships between communities within the larger modern NZ society with respect to the economic and political plight of these groups.
The overarching theme here is identity. Both on an individual level, as well as a community level. Our shared past, heritage, traditions, stories, relationships with others,... are all what make us "us". And social sciences are paramount within that never-ending debate.
In a way, defunding research which studies particular indigenous communities within society is tantamount to effacing those communities from a larger national historical identity. However, doing so will never end that drive communities have to remember and to assert their own history and identity.
That's why studying how the arrival of Europeans in New Zealand has had an demographic, political, economical, cultural effect on the indigenous population definitely is fundamental research. And an important one at that.
- That's at the heart of this discussion. There are two legal entities at play here: automatic, a for profit company, and the WordPress Foundation, a non-profit. It's believed that the latter carries independent governance over the open source project. As it turns out: that's likely not the case, and there's a potential conflict of interests.
That doesn't imply it's a bad model. Drupal is governed in a similar fashion, with safeguards in it's governance model to avoid this.
Dries Buytaert also considers the maker/taker issue, but does so from a place of, seemingly, healthy conversation.
https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem
I think the big issue is that, ultimately, a lot rides a lot rides on the character and the acumen of the foundational maintainer / creator of a FOSS project. As well as how they succeed in creating a particular perception about themselves. Sadly, the "mad king" moniker in the lwn article is kinda apt in WordPress' case after these last week's.
As for funding, I do believe companies leveraging FOSS have a moral obligation to contribute back, but that it's not the world we live in. Unless there are tangible incentives to do so, it's hardly possible to enforce this. As per Dries: promotion and visibility as a "trusted" party through the project's channels is probably the most concrete form of leverage a FOSS project has.
- This depends on the jurisdiction you're in. I.e. Europe's GDPR argues that you need consent to keep someone's personal data. Encryption doesn't equate anonymization, so there's a potential liabity.
- That's not because of the GPL. The GPL has little to do with barring access to a platform on which code is published. Arguably, if a copy existed elsewhere, say GitHub, then WPEngine is free to use that code according to the GPL.
In other words: once code is published with the GPL and someone has a copy, the original creators can do little to nothing to stop them from using said code however they see fit. That's what drives forking.
In the same vain, original creators always have, and will have, the freedom as rights holders over creative works, to change the license on new versions published. Of course, the caveat being holding the rights over contributions made by third parties (hence the existence of contested contributor agreements).
The real issue here is a for-profit entity driving the governance of a non-profit entity. There's not just the ethical but also legality at play here. And this has little to do with copyright.
- I'm a bit surprised that the author doesn't mention key concepts such as linked data, RDF, federation and web querying. Or even the five stars of linked open data. [1] Sure, JSON-LD is part of it, but it's just a serialization format.
The really neat part is when you start considering universal ontologies and linking to resources published on other domains. This is where your data becomes interoperable and reusable. Even better, through linking you can contextualize and enrich your data. Since linked data is all about creating graphs, creating a link in your data, or publishing data under a specific domain are acts that involves concepts like trust, authority, authenticity and so on. All those murky social concepts that define what we consider more or less objective truths.
LLM's won't replace the semantic web, nor vice versa. They are complementary to each other. Linked data technologies allow humans to cooperate and evolve domain models with a salience and flexibility which wasn't previously possible behind the walls and moats of discrete digital servers or physical buildings. LLM's work because they are based on large sets of ground truths, but those sets are always limited which makes inferring new knowledge and asserting its truthiness independent from human intervention next to impossible. LLM's may help us to expand linked data graphs, and linked data graphs fashioned by humans may help improve LLM's.
Creating a juxtaposition between both? Well, that's basically comparing apples against pears. They are two different things.
- Take a peak on Reddit's /r/datahoarders or /r/datacurator. There's also https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ who may point you in a direction.
Sometimes stations do keep a record of their old broadcasts. But that depends on their size, organizational structure, funding, etc. some stuff is just lost to time simply because someone felt it was cheaper to just reuse tapes.
As for value, that's hard to determine. Depends on what was taped, when, by whom and in what kind of context. That's where curation comes in to play.
- I dabble with Gopher for two reasons.
First, it's a simple protocol. Learning about the basics of networking, building your own Gopher client, Gopher offers a great opportunity to tip your toe into the pond.
Second, I have the DiggieDog browser installed on my phone. During my commute, I pass through stretches with limited connectivity. Reading some of the phlogs I follow is a great pass time.
I don't think Gopher needs to be the "next big thing". It has been that a while ago. The limitations are why it got superseded by protocols that cater to the needs of the many. That said, it still has its place on the Internet as a retreat for a community that values Gophers original simplicity. And I think that's absolutely valid.
- I agree, moreover, this is what the author wrote:
> All that aside, the problem isn’t just “bad comments”, because I’m a grown woman and can take critique. The biggest problem is that a portion of those folks take screenshots and share them with unsavory folks. Not a week goes by that I don’t get some nasty email from someone I blocked on Mastodon. Some of these have been threatening, and it’s gotten to the point where before I toot, I think “will someone threaten to kill me over this?” That’s not fun.
There's a difference between strongly disagreeing with a post, toot, tweet, what-have-you and outright taking things way beyond what could be seen as proper conduct with respect for the human on the other end.
The solution isn't to just accept that under the guise of emotional maturity. It's investing in proper governance and arbitrage, promoting shared values and morals, and providing enough affordances in digital tools that help affirm all of that.
- Potentially more then one might assume. This is an area that needs more research, but initial estimates seem to indicate that an increase in launched very much warrants concern.
CBC made this nice interactive graph highlighting the issue.
https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/features/2023/rocket-polluti...
I'm a huge proponent of space flight, but my main concern is how the drive towards commoditization, again, seems to gloss over potential hidden costs with a complex, global impact.
- I'd agree. The big differentiator being your own personality and your own outlook / expectations of life and others.
There are plenty people around looking to have a date, and maybe more. The big caveat is meeting someone who's a match.
If you want to reel in a fish, you will inevitably have thrown out your line many times and come up empty handed.
The elephant in the room is learning how to confront your own feelings regarding rejection in a healthy way. This is true regardless of how and where you meet others.
- Cooking classes, volunteering, sport clubs, the gym, group travel, boardgames, photography classes, dancing lessons, language classes, concerts, movie clubs, hiking groups, etc. etc.
Of course, you wouldn't attend those with the explicit goal of finding someone special. I'd argue that the other way around is much healthier: go out there, explore activities that mesh with who you are, or get you a bit out of your comfort zone, and you'll likely meet new people who might just surprise you.
- 30 years ago, you didn't live vicariously through the published perception of the world you friends held 24/7. Social interactions stopped when you put down the phone or went home for the day. If your friends went on a trip, while you couldn't, you'd only hear about their stories when they got back.
30 years ago, unrestrained access was still constrained to a desktop computer hooked to dial-up. Your access was constrained to a physical location.
Today, the big issue is the lure of having 24/7 mobile access to the Internet. At any moment, you can amend your own crafted online digital identity, meshing it with your real life, as you publish your location via Snapchat, Instagram or WhatsApp with your friends. Meanwhile, you can't but be confronted with notifications telling you where your friends are and what they are up to with who ("X has posted a photo, Y is currently at Z").
On a surface level, that lure has created a host of totally new social conventions and etiquette over the past 18 years, basically since the release of the iPhone. Social conventions to which one has to conform unless you don't want to lose out on social connections.
For instance, seeing whether a recipient of a PM has "read" a message and then "leaving you on read". Having that rather unrealistic expectation that one ought to respond instantly once a message has been read. At worst, friendships are put on tenterhooks as one ties value to the time between that "read" notice, and the moment a response follows.
In reality, the world 30 years ago wasn't more beautiful and people weren't more kind then they are today. In fact, if you weren't asked by your friends to hang out, or were left out when they went to a party and had all these in-group stories to tell, you felt socially isolated either way. That's not really new.
What's new is that this new lure of 24/7 connectivity creates a potential to be confronted with those feelings pretty much every waking hour. It must be anxiety inducing to scroll through your feed, not knowing if your friends did or didn't hang out last night without asking you.
To my mind, the answer isn't outright banning social media, or mobile devices. The answer is to keep having that difficult discussion about the value of the affordances - or lack thereof - the offer to foster healthy human relationships. It's about finding better ways to teach and empower young people on how to approach these tools, built by commercial enterprises, in healthy ways. And it's about being willing to properly publicly invest in aspects ranging from education to mental health support to enforcement and so on.
- If de-orbiting is your concern, then I would suggest taking a step back and considering the impact on our atmosphere of increasing the number of launches.
This isn't a theoretical question. There's growing awareness among researchers that there's a need to research how the gasses and particles produced by rocket launches at scale could have an impact on the atmosphere.
https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/features/2023/rocket-polluti...
- Balance issues usually are a symptom of an underlying condition.
For instance, an elderly relative of mine has had several strokes. While they have regular PT sessions, it's basically impossible for them to automate countering balancing issues. Neurological specialists and therapists essentially agreed: that relative isn't going to walk a significant distance, especially outdoors, without a walker as the risk to falling is just too high. Their home (e.g. bathroom, stairs,...) has also been adapted to prevent falls.
In that regard, minding your health at a younger age pays dividends later on as it reduces to risks of landing a condition that might lead to a nasty fall.
- Mongo and Elastic have changed there licenses to the "service-side public license" (SSPL) which is a particular own flavor of AGPL. The OSI has stated that this isn't an open source license. [1]
Barring a discussion about whether or not a license is "open source", what matters is that these businesses asserted that commonly used licenses - (A)GPL, Apache, MIT,... - are leaving ample room for competitors to setup their own managed / hosted services and compete with them through scale (e.g. Amazon's Open Search offering undercutting ElasticSearch).
[1] https://blog.opensource.org/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l...
- You're linking to a generalized announcement that mentions research data, but omits mentioning the institution's own research data management services which exist specifically to deal with this challenge.
The linked post nowhere mentions research data management, or the fact that there's awareness about the existing of services at the institution.
- This is where the emerging field of research data management and digital preservation come into play.
Reproducibility and vetting research output, as well as other forms of accountability requires research data to be present and available. Hence the requirement to safeguard that data. However, a personal share hosted on institutional cloud storage isn't the best place to store research data for lack of accessibility, discoverability, etc.
McGill does offer research data management services. [1] These services are meant to guide researchers as well as cooperate with them working towards long term archival solutions and policies for safeguarding research data.
- More to the point, the GDPR is quite explicit on here as well:
> Article 3.2 goes even further and applies the law to organizations that are not in the EU if two conditions are met: the organization offers goods or services to people in the EU, or the organization monitors their online behavior. (Article 3.3 refers to more unusual scenarios, such as in EU embassies.)
https://gdpr.eu/companies-outside-of-europe/
Which is pretty much what happens given that they allow EU citizens to buy a 20 USD subscription.
- > Section 8.6 GDPR
> Part b. omg.lol does not believe its processing of limited personal data of those outside the United States (if any) brings it within the jurisdiction of these laws.
That's a hard disclaimer if there's any.
I read that as: if you're a European user, we do not believe you can legally enforce us to honor your rights, even though we operate within the EEA.
- In 2014 in Belgium there were two casualties.[1] I still have family in that region. When I was a child, one of things I was taught was to never ever touch anything rusty / iron found in the fields close by when we visited them.
Seeing small stacks of rusted ordnance neatly at the entrances of fields is a common sight. Farmers dig them up each year, and put them aside. Bomb disposal does regular rounds.
You'd drive through the region, and the most noticeable remnant of the Great War are the graveyards. However, the War itself is still very much there, just a few odd centimeters buried in the clay soil.
[1] https://www.france24.com/en/20140319-wwi-shell-kills-two-nea...
- Historically?
The 1783 Laki eruption comes to my mind. Back then, a 25km long fissure with 130 vents opened. About 14km3 of lava and 1km3 of tephra was emitted. Lava fountains were estimated to have reached between 800m and 1400m.
Some 20-25% of the population died, 50% of cattle and 50% of the horse population perished.
It is argued that this eruption was the catalyst for the French Revolution, as the amount of emitted gasses caused extreme weather patterns across Europe (and the world) throughout the 1780s leading to famine, diseases and social unrest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laki
In contemporary times, there's the 1973 eruption of Eldfell on the island of Heimaey. It destroyed some 400 homes and led to a temporary evacuation of some 5.300 inhabitants. By 1975, some 80% of the population had returned. Moreover, today it's the foremost fishing center of Island with over 1/3rd of the total fish catch originating from its harbor.
Close by where I live is a monument for civilians who were taken from their houses and shot by the German occupiers during the last months of WWII. Simply because they were suspected of having distributed pamphlets. There wasn't even evidence to that claim, and retribution was a thing.
I passed that monument countless of times during my youth, giving me pause to contemplate.
It's a tangible reminder of what ultimately happens when people stay silent about something as final and poignant as one group denying the existence of another group for whatever reasons.
I have no problem with expressing differences over world views. I take issue when that world view entails denying the other side's existence because of differences, and a fervent intent to act on that notion.
It's a matter of boundaries, and speaking up.