setrofim_

Seems to be back up (10:41 GMT)

Down for me too, as of 10:38 GMT

> It is the most populus federated network I have seen.

Yes, same; but that's kind of the point. Mastodon is the best effort I have seen so far; which is why it was disappointing to see it falter shortly after it started to really pick up.

There seem to be a mass exodus from Twitter (at least, among the people I follow), precipitated by Twitter's latest unwelcome UI tweaks. Initially, it seemed really cool -- it was specifically addressing Twitters biggest pain points (longer messages, chronological timeline, saner threading), and was OSS and federated to boot.

However, quickly the veiner started to crumble, with there appearing to be an increasing number of issues, such as undelivered DMs, scrambled threads, dropped mentions. A lot of them seemed specifically related to interactions between federated instances. To make matters worse, the UI seemed to be getting increasingly slower.

Eventually, the combined frustrations, and to some extent perhaps network effects, resulted to gradual return back to Twitter.

This is, admittedly, a skewed view based on the observation of the small slice of Twitter community that I follow, and my own limited experience with the platform (spanning a few weeks).

I am still hoping that Mastodon (or something like it) makes it, but I'm not holding my breath.

> but still - is that the consensus now? That federated protocols are dead and "no longer have a place in the modern world"?

Having see what has happened (is happening?) to Mastodon, I can see where Moxie is coming from; as much as I hate to accept it.

Moxie also doesn't seem particularly happy with the situation; notes in the same post:

"Truly though, I wish you well in the endeavor, it's something that I'd love to be proven wrong about."

He notes two issue in particular:

- Degradation of UX

- Loss of development effort

From what I've seen, Mastodon suffered from similar problems (certainly as a user, I can attest to the first one). It seems those are inevitable consequences (along with performance/scalability issues) of the loss of control that comes from federation. Personally, I don't think those are necessarily insurmountable, but they are non-trivial, and will require effort and commitment -- including from the end users -- to resolve.

All other things being equal, a project focusing on federation will be at a disadvantage compared to a centralized one when it comes to delivering good UX. So lamentably, I don't see a federated platform becoming mainstream outside tech culture, and that is what Moxie's vision for Signal is...

[edit: grammar, formatting]

Yes, fair point. This is a common problem for social studies. One must keep in mind and be explicit about the population the study sample is drawn from; and very cautious about extrapolating the findings to other populations.

First of all, thank you for sharing your experience. It was insightful, and I completely agree with your criticism of the article.

I would like to make a small, and perhaps somewhat pedantic comment regarding your last statement:

>In my own humble opinion the only "science" that matters on this subject are the opinions of those whom have lived it and recovered. Go survey the opiate addicts that didn't end up dead and find out what worked for them.

There is a problem of silent evidence and survivor bias here. What is important is not what they did that led to their recovery, but what they did differently (or, more generally, what was different in their circumstances) from those that tried to recover, but didn't.

So, IMHO, what is needed is not _just_ the opinions of those that recovered, but a longitudinal study to identify which, out the many factors that were involved in the recovery process, have been the most instrumental.

> In that case, surely the professor should be commenting on the original assessment, not any paper that accepts the published literature?

She does. Most of the criticism in the blog post is directed towards the findings in the previous studies. The professor explicitly disqualifies herself from discussing the findings of the current study, as they are outside her area of expertise. The criticism of this paper is that it fails to distinguish sufficiently clearly its a priori assumptions from the conclusions drawn from the present findings.

> I don't know what the "political implications" means. I think I've missed something. Did Trump tweet about it or something? I don't know why this would have any political implications at all.

I meant gender politics, rather than the US national politics.

You are right, the authors of the paper only claim that their results demonstrate a); they are, however, assuming b) based on previous studies.

What the Professor is arguing, as I understand it, is that those previous studies do not necessarily warrant the assumption of b), and thus the paper's title "A female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics" is misleading -- there has been a confirmation of "female", but not of "warrior". Something like "Skeleton, that some evidence points to being that of a warrior, was confirmed to be female"; but that's not as pithy or sensationalist.

Those not reading the paper sufficiently carefully (or at all -- only limiting themselves to the title and the abstract) will end up drawing conclusions unjustified by the paper. Which, given the political implications, may be undesirable.

[edit: grammar]

Yup, it's kind of surprising "traditional news outlets" didn't make that list.

It's nice to see something like this being proposed, but, the NHS probably have a tonne of bespoke software running on top of Windows, all of which would need to be ported. And given the fact that they don't have the funding to even keep their existing systems patched and up-to-date, a full-on migration is out of the question, unless the cash is raised...

Well, there'd be a massive box for systemd in userspace, udev, dbus...

Reminds me of:

here was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.

-- George Orwell, 1984

It's misalignment of incentives rather than stupidity (well, in some cases, maybe also stupidity). Governments make decisions from one election cycle to the next. So taking on debt that will be some future administration's problem in order to finance public projects now, and increase the current administration's popularity makes perfect sense.

> I don't know what the bias is called but there is this belief that many successful people have or try to bestow that they "did it all themselves" and "you can too".

This is a combination of egocentric bias[0] and post-hoc rationalization [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egocentric_bias

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc

> 1) Happiness is not as subjective as people think. Research suggest that what people state about their own happiness correlates very well with how friends and colleagues would describe a person as.

This just means that how happy a person feels correlates well with how happy others perceive them to be. This says nothing about whether their subjective feelings reflect objective reality.

Research actually seems to suggest that happiness is very subjective, and may in fact have a strong genetic component[0]. I.e. whether a particular person is happy is dictated less by their circumstances and more by their outlook/personality/genetics. Of course, one's circumstances also play a role (e.g. a person will be less happy immediately after the death of a loved one), but subjective factors seem to win out overall.

[0] e.g. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/media-spotlight/201302/...

> Most researchers probably can't afford to pay an outside lab to duplicate their research.

Even if they could, we probably don't want the researchers paying for their results to be duplicated. This would create perverse incentives, similar to what happened with investment banks and credit rating agencies. If the original researchers must get their results confirmed in order to get published, and it is them who are paying for the confirmation, they will naturally tend to choose confirmatory labs that are more likely to confirm their findings. Since the labs would then rely on the researchers for funding, that would create pressure on the confirmatory labs to adapt their methodologies in ways that make it more likely that results get confirmed (even when the original study may not warrant it).

We want confirmatory labs to have no special interest in either confirming or disproving a particular study, but in improving the overall quality of research.

Since a journal's reputation depends (at least in part) on the quality of research it publishes, the journals would seem to be the natural candidates for the source of funding of confirmatory labs. Whether they'd actually be willing to do it another matter...

>have already seen improvements in concentration and a decrease in anxiety.

Interesting to hear. Meditation is something I have considered looking into for a similar purpose. Do you have any recommendations on a good place to start?

>>You can trade off future maintenance by spending more initially, or vice versa

> Umm is that really true ?

Maybe not universally, but often, yes. E.g., you can build using more expensive materials that will last longer/are more resistant to environmental decay.

> I wonder if the cig companies have coped by pivoting into the global market and pushing hard that way.

That is exactly what happened. Global tobacco business is better than ever:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UsHHOCH4q8

The issue isn't just the lack of EXAMPLES, but also with how man pages tend to be structured. They tend to be very "encyclopedic". There is a set ordering for sections, with a lot of them very verbose, and examples, when present, near the end. Options are often listed in alphabetic order, which doesn't usually correspond to how often they are used or useful.

Man pages are OK when you're first learning how to use something; but if you're already familiar with a command and just need to remind yourself of a the specific sequence of options to achieve a desired result, they're not the most convenient.

I think it's useful to have a tool that fulfills the latter purpose without worrying about the former.

You might find this intersting:

https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr

What would your example achieve? You're making the format more verbose and error-prone (someone might easily forget to match a paren), without imposting any additional structure over what is already implied by line breaks.

Though I do agree with your overarching point that some of the formats/outputs could do with a more consistent structure. Perhaps something like YAML would strike a good balance between structure and conciseness/readability...

Essentially, yes -- it will be down to whether the company is willing to risk having to withdraw from UK market. And if a company does choose to cave in into UK government's demands for backdoors, you can't be sure whether or not they would inform you of this in a timely manner.

@grandparent: In other words, no, they can't read the texts you've sent up to this point. But they may be able to a month or year from now. Your texts up to the point the law passed are safe, but you can't be sure about the messages you send from now on.

(well, as safe as they were prior to the Snooper's Charter).

The answers to your questions will come down to which a particular company values more -- their UK revenue or the privacy and safety of their UK customers.

- Seamlessly use Vim to write and edit email

- Can easily deal with large volumes of email -- quickly tab through unread messages

- Highlights text from previous emails in a thread, making it easy to see who replied to what

- You can also set up highlighting for diffs, making it easy to review attached patches and change snippets

- Powerful search via external indexers (mu, notmuch)

- Keyboard navigation for everything (if you're using vim and tmux, then you're already spending most of your time with your hands on the keyboard, and having to fish for the mouse just to quicky reply to an email starts to feel really slow).

For handling HTML email, I use a two-pronged approach: for most email I use links browser to automatically render HTML as ASCII so I can view it directly in mutt; for email that has images or otherwise cannot be rendered sensibly with links, I have mapped a key to open it in a graphical browser (dwb for fast launching or Firefox+vimperator if I need to deal with login forms, etc).

EDIT: formatting

> but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop doing it. I've made it 30+ years without side-effect ... ha

If anything, it's probably been of some marginal benefit -- keeping your immune system on its toes.

For Firefox, Vimperator FTW!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/vimperator/

awesome[1] has pretty decent mouse support, as far as tiling Window managers go.

[1] https://awesome.naquadah.org/

Could have gone with "TITAN XX" then. The added advantage is that the next one would be "TITAN XXX", and think of the marketing opportunity there!