@sab@kbin.social avatar

sab

@sab@kbin.social

Quite possibly a luddite.

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sab,
@sab@kbin.social avatar

I used to like it, now I avoid it at all cost. The problem is that the algorithm is never neutral, even if it's made with good intentions it can be gamed and manipulated, and it traps you in a spiral where what you interact with is what it shows you is what you interact with is what it shows you...

I never really used Twitter or any similar service, so I never had this happen to information shaping my opinions. I did, however, feel that the music I was listening to became shaped by the Spotify algorithm, and that I ended up listening to less rather than more diverse music than when I was sticking to vinyl. That's absurd - you have all the music in the world at your fingertips, and you end up limiting yourself more. That was my experience of course, other people probably have different ones. Anyway, I cancelled my subscription.

If there's a risk for music streaming services narrowing your field of vision, platforms shaping your opinions are downright scary. Algorithms can be tricked into showing you content, which is what russian troll farms excelled at. Tech bros tend to believe the solution is in adding more and more complexity to the point where nobody understands how it works - this is the opposite of how I want the content that helps informing me about the world to be curated.

I'm obviously not diagonally opposed to algorithms. The choose your own algorithm approach might have some merit, and I look forward to seeing more experimentation with this in the fediverse. But I do not trust corporate interests with any of this - nor do I trust a bunch of tech-optimistic rich man's sons.

sab,
@sab@kbin.social avatar

I quite disagree. Of course interoperability is not going to be a perfect one to one - that's in the nature of these being different services. You don't want threads from a link aggregater taking over your microblogging feed.

Yet it's normal for Mastodon users to join in on the conversation here. From their perspective they never left Mastodon - from my perspective, I never left kbin - and you, for your part, think it's all happening within Lemmy. But it's really not. So these things happen all the time, it's just that you don't necessarily notice unless you check the domain of the person you're responding to. Mastodon users of course often leave in the @-tags, making them a bit easier to identify.

Lemmy is a bit more isolated than Kbin, as it is not integrating microblogs at all. That's a decision on the side of the developers, not a weakness of the ActivityPub protocol.

sab,
@sab@kbin.social avatar

What do you mean kbin doesn't really support microblogging?

The only real issue I can think of right now is that it does not display videos or polls yet, but for being an early version of a software developed primarily by one guy as a hobby project those are pretty minor omissions.

sab,
@sab@kbin.social avatar

The option to keep followed users and subscribed communities separate in the feed will be great!
Really impressed by the pace of progress lately - it's very much appreciated. You're building something special here. :)

sab, (edited )
@sab@kbin.social avatar

I mean, compared to some of those other ones it's perfectly cromulent. At least it means something.

sab, (edited )
@sab@kbin.social avatar

Since the URL is pretty vital for federation (users from federated instances would follow for example !main@pigedove-lemmy-clone-u9568.vm.elestio.app in order to join a community), it's probably worth getting the domain up and running before you start federating anyway. Even though it's a frustrating wait for sure!

I think there's potential for a bird instance - I've heard rumours the birdwatching community is pretty active over at Mastodon.

sab,
@sab@kbin.social avatar

I also think Kbin is way ahead of Lemmy in terms of integrating with the Fediverse at large. It's not perfect for sure, but in my opinion it builds on a better starting point. The real test of Mastodon integration for me will be when Mastodon finally introduces groups - it will be interesting to see how they integrate with communities in the Threadiverse.

I honestly also struggle to get an overview of what's happening in Lemmy development, to me Kbin seems more transparent. But both platforms are obviously fine, and Lemmy is still more mature for sure.

sab,
@sab@kbin.social avatar

Not an engineer at all, but I gotta say the random logs going up sideways from the river to support the construction make me nervous.

sab,
@sab@kbin.social avatar

Are there any good and well known examples of this at a large scale, beyond Wikipedia and it's projects?

Not that Wikipedia is not evidence in it's own right that it could work, I'm just curious.

sab,
@sab@kbin.social avatar

That's a great example. Expensive to operate, entirely non-profit, and been around since forever.

sab,
@sab@kbin.social avatar

But you don't understand - I have reputable sources telling me that Linux is communism!

sab,
@sab@kbin.social avatar

If anything the problem seems to be that it's not communist enough.

sab,
@sab@kbin.social avatar

But that sounds like work. It's a lot easier to shit on other people's volunteer efforts than to actually contribute anything constructive yourself.

sab,
@sab@kbin.social avatar

Maybe I have my European biases, but it's amazing to me that the absurdity of eating restaurant food in your car rather than around a table is not striking to everyone.

Of course, in the late 40s this would be a fun gimmick - what is really absurd is that the concept of eating in your car seems to somehow have become normalized somewhere along the way. Again, seen with European eyes - of all cultural differences, there are others I struggle more with.

sab,
@sab@kbin.social avatar

It's certainly an element to it, combined with a lack of leisure time resulting from longer working hours and weaker unions. The power of the automobile industry in infrastructure design certainly didn't help either.

Still, the way we eat is so deeply ingrained in culture that I can't help but feel it goes deeper than this. People will not eat in their cars in Turin even though it's very much a car city. I'm from up north in Scandinavia where distances are greater (though more in time than in distance, as we travel on small winding roads rather than highways), and eating in the car still seems somewhat unheard of there.

Not that you're wrong - I think there's a profound change in culture that has taken place, but I agree the distances in the US would certainly be one of the mechanisms behind it.

I'm curious if people eat in their cars in Latin America now.

sab,
@sab@kbin.social avatar

Looks like someone did a complete 3D render or something. It's pretty different from the original.

Still relatable, seems to get more true the higher education you enter into.

sab,
@sab@kbin.social avatar

If you want luck you're probably better off handing typewriters to monkeys.

sab, (edited )
@sab@kbin.social avatar

10 degrees is incredible though.

These days in Yazd the average warmest temperature in July is 40 degrees, so if what you're saying is correct they'd be able to cool it down to a liveable 30 degrees even in the warmest part of the day. And at night temperatures still dip to 26, so the indoors temperature probably wouldn't quite reach 40 even without this system. So it might make the difference between 40 degrees outdoors and high 20s indoors, which is fantastic.

Would be interesting to know if average temperatures got up to 40 in the summer around the time they were built as well, or if average temperatures in the region have been rising.

sab,
@sab@kbin.social avatar

We're talking celsius, I hope for your sake it doesn't routinely get to 100 C where you are. :)

Edit: The user actually said 20 F, I got confused by the mix of units. "50c to 35c is 27 degrees" didn't make sense to me, but I figured I'd let it slide. No idea what's going on here. :)

sab,
@sab@kbin.social avatar

Yes, that sounds about right - the relative effect of the tower probably depends a lot on various factors like how windy it is, if extreme heat occurs only for a day or if it has been ongoing so that the water under ground is heated as well, etc.

These comments were in response to @Gangreless, who stated that a modern AC "can only cool about 20f below the outside temperature". I didn't catch that it was fahrenheit first, and now that I know I am happily backing off rather than having to think in terms of freedom units.

sab,
@sab@kbin.social avatar

There are all these Christian fundamentalists who have been told all their lives they'll go to hell if they're not one hundred percent completely straight all the time, and God sees them and knows what they're thinking. Assuming there's a biological element to homosexuality, a large portion of these people are not completely straight from nature's side. Assuming people are often excited by taboos, they might secretly be more bi-curious (or whatever the word is) than the average population.

For these people, every single step towards gay and trans rights is making it a little bit harder to live in complete denial. They cannot simply ignore it, because they're obsessed with it. One improper thought and they'll burn in hell.

Of course this crowd is terrified of trans people.

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