berryworm

Many many people die every day. If Covid is widespread, some are bound to have been infected with Covid.

Are you sure car accidents are not recorded as Covid, because I've read claims to the otherwise several times. It may not matter what the doctors think, if there are policies in place, or financial incentives (extra money for treatment of Covid patients).

Why would a platform have to deal with it? The only issue is escaping government regulation (censorship). And that is a different problem. I'd rather fight for freedom of speech than trying to censor my users.

Also there would be no reason to switch away from Twitter if you want to censor users anyway.

And I disagree that the spread of misinformation is such a huge issue as you make it out to be. Misinformation existed before the internet, it isn't caused by it. The internet makes it easier to double check information.

If watching a boy burn ballots makes people burn ballots, I don't think Twitter is the problem here. I think those people have some other deep seated problems. I'm sure I wouldn't burn ballots if I saw that video (I haven't).

I disagree completely. And as I said, I wouldn't be interested in solving that problem. That governments are interested in censoring publishing platforms is an independent problem in itself.

I'll check out Pleroma. But so far, they don't seem to have succeeded in getting people to switch over in significant numbers?

I don't think misinformation is caused by social media as such, and it is not the problem I would care about solving. I care about freedom of speech and owning my own content. People should be free to build their own bubble and make up their own minds about information they find online.

I also don't think anybody would choose to be censored, that doesn't make sense. Maybe you could offer optional spam or misinformation filters, but why would anybody force them one themselves? Twitter and Facebook also employ "fact checking services", which would simply be applied voluntarily to other networks.

I also think the problem is way overblown. On Twitter you can choose who to follow. If select the right people, you won't get the misinformation spam.

I never claimed a replacement could be built in a weekend, and the incentives are exactly part of the problem and part of my question. It seems technically possible to built something like Twitter on a distributed basis with nobody having centralized control, but it probably wouldn't be as snappy as Twitter. People stay on Twitter out of convenience, and also because of the network effect. You would have to make lots of people switch at the same time. That is the challenge.

The challenge is to get a significant amount of users to switch. As in many cases, convenience wins at the moment.

Well they are the first being censored, so they are the first to migrate to other networks.

What would it take to replace Twitter and Facebook?

Let's talk again when PayPal has cancelled your account.

It's too tiresome. One of the strategies is the "overwhelming" part - listing an "overwhelming" amount of anecdotes or other articles, that give the impression of overwhelming evidence, but is really irrelevant. To address them all would be an overwhelming amount of work.

For example it is irrelevant that there are many shitcoins and many scammers. What matters is if there are non-shitcoins. Bitcoin seems to be doing well.

In the dot com aera, there were also many scams and bad startups, but I think nobody would want to cite that as proof now that the internet is bad.

"Overwhelming evidence shows..." - the whole article is a great example of many of the tactics journalist employ to manipulate people's opinions.

I'm not saying it is fun, but if you can reset the device it is not "bricked".

OK then sell it to somebody else. "Bricked" in my opinion means the device can never be made to function again. If you can reset it, it is not bricked.

Are the Quests really bricked if the Facebook account is shut down? Can you not do a factory reset and start over with a new account?

I bought this book for my son (elementary school), but it is in German: "Programmieren mit Python® - supereasy".

I would have preferred JavaScript, but had not immediately found a kid friendly book I liked (in German).

As for recommendations, the Pi Getting Started Book does have chapters about Python and Scratch, maybe it is a good start (see free download link).

I still like good books to learn a programming language. Also, good online documentation in a language is important imo. I still like the original Java tutorial from Sun/Oracle: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/

I know a teenager who has taught himself Java development from YouTube videos, which YouTube suggested to him.

I think it is important to have a project and be dedicated to solve it. What is it you want to do?

To give an example of an early issue we encountered: I wanted to write a simple program with my son, that asks for your date of birth and computes the number of days since your birth. But dates were not a subject of our python games programming book, so we had to read the online API documentation to figure out how to parse dates and compute time differences. Not too hard, but I think it requires dedication.

In a similar way, I think books or tutorials can never cover all sorts of issues one might encounter, so a lot of patience and dedication is needed to eventually master the coding.

For kids, I liked Micro:Bit, and if you are German, I would recommend the "Jugendwettbewerb Informatik" and accompanying tutorials.

I can't find the PDF of the starter book, although they say in the announcement it should be available. (Edit: found it https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/books/beginners-guide-4th-ed )

I learned programming from the handbook of my ZX Spectrum. If the Pi would come with a similar book it would be fantastic.

Maybe there are other books that fill that niche for the Pi?

In general I find it very hard to get my kids coding (especially as their English isn't good yet, and many languages don't have German documentation). There are some fancy books, but it turns out there are a lot of details in coding that most books can't cover.