# I am the Watcher. I am your guide through this vast new twtiverse.
#
# Usage:
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/users View list of users and latest twt date.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/twt View all twts.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/mentions?uri=:uri View all mentions for uri.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/conv/:hash View all twts for a conversation subject.
#
# Options:
# uri Filter to show a specific users twts.
# offset Start index for quey.
# limit Count of items to return (going back in time).
#
# twt range = 1 2032
# self = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://anthony.buc.ci/user/abucci/twtxt.txt&offset=332
# next = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://anthony.buc.ci/user/abucci/twtxt.txt&offset=432
# prev = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://anthony.buc.ci/user/abucci/twtxt.txt&offset=232
Incidentally, you also stated that you learned more about inflation after I made my post about it, which suggests to me that you are stating some of these things without having a full picture of how money/currencies function. I've noticed this before among people who are into cryptocurrency. They have a tendency to accept libertarian slogans--e.g., "taxation is theft" or "printing money causes inflation"--that are disconnected from reality. I'd urge you to reconsider.
A book I like to recommend to people for understanding how money works in modern economies is _The Deficit Myth_ by Stephanie Kelton. She breaks down what a fiat currency actually is (no, it's not coercion), how it's implemented, and what the implications are of that. If you're going to go all in on bitcoin at least learn what you're proposing giving up.
@brasshopper The reason that I say things like that is that for reasons that do not make sense to me, otherwise-intelligent people say things that are transparently and demonstrably false when it comes to cryptocurrency. So many people seem to really want to believe that cryptocurrency is something that it is not, never was, and can never be. It's like reading a fantasy story like Lord of the Rings and coming to believe you actually live in that world and that the people around you are actually hobbits and elves and whatnot, instead of enjoying what's entertaining and good about the fiction but retaining your ability to reason about the world as it actually exists.
Just in this thread alone you said bitcoin is a commodity, that it is not an environmental catastrophe, that bitcoin is a net good for society. It is none of those things and can never be those things. That's why I think crypto has "ruined people's brains"--because they can no longer see the obvious.
@brasshopper Bitcoin is a risky, speculative asset, not a commodity. Commodities are literally raw materials and almost always have intrinsic value. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value; it's entirely in people's heads.
it took a bit of work to get this logo the way I wanted. I only had a PNG, so I converted that to PGM with glimpse and then to SVG with potrace -s. Then, I used inkscape to resize the image, touch things up a little and add the text. I saved that as a Plain SVG (not compressed, not optimized, and not inkscape's format) and opened it in a text editor. Everywhere fill: appeared, I changed that from whatever it was to currentColor, to follow the styling of the rest of the page. I then copypastaed that text into the field in the yarn.social Settings where you can paste a custom logo.
The font turned out to be a problem, because you have to use web fonts or upload a font file, which I hadn't done. So, I searched around on Google's web fonts till I found one I liked, manually added a <style> section to the SVG text to import the font, and changed the SVG's <text> element appropriately, setting font-family to the font I chose. Et voila.
New pod logo lol
somehow I feel like products are decoupled from what people (I?) actually want and need. There are so many basic usability issues with smartphones as they are now. Being able to fold one in half is not helping those, but it's introducing a new mechanism that might become a usability issue too. It seems weird and gimmicky.
With how expensive phones are becoming, it also reprises the days when you had contracts with cell phone carriers. Remember when all of a sudden the US carriers were competing on "no contract" plans? You used to have to sign up for one or two years of cell phone service when you chose a plan, but then that stopped. What they did instead of was push the price of smartphones so high that most people choose to lease them for...one or two years. So they are once again stuck in a contract, it's just a different contract.
who wants a folding smartphone anyway? I've never wanted that? If I had $1500 to throw around on toys I'd buy an actually useful computer!
The Galaxy Fold is $1499???
Cryptocurrency has ruined the brains of so many people. It's awful. It's some kind of contagious mind infection.
@brasshopper If you don't accept basic, established facts, then you are not coming from a position of good faith, you are coming from a fantasy place or a place of deceit. Either way, you no longer merit consideration unless you opt to start conversing in good faith. Bye.
@brasshopper No, this is incorrect. I've seen enough now. You're just parroting the standard talking points of cryptocurrency apologists and therefore are not conversing in good faith. I'm finished.
@brasshopper The first link is libertarian claptrap and unworthy of consideration. The second has nothing to do with cryptocurrency.
@brasshopper "yearly inflation rate" is NOT "number of new pieces of currency created".
@xuu proof of stake = people with money get mote money. It accelerates the wealth inequality problems that are already plaguing us. Crypto has even worse wealth inequality than fiat currency systems, which is 100% predictable.=
@xuu proof of stake = people with money get more money. It accelerates the wealth inequality problems that are already plaguing us. Crypto has even worse wealth inequality than fiat currency systems, which is 100% predictable.=
@brasshopper No way, I'm not playing this game. Every time I raise an obvious objection to cryptocurrency, inevitably someone is like "give me your list of reasons for believing that." No, _you_ give me _your_ list of reasons for thinking that an environmental catastrophe of a Ponzi scheme has any place in modern civilization.
@eaplmx Right?! That's a problem. Updating software on your devices could become a full-time job if you study the updates. I think the reason it feels that way is that we're basically being employed, without compensation, to be permanent beta testers. Nothing will ever be "done". This will go on in perpetuity. The companies involved will continue to reap benefits and profits, and all we'll get is marginally better software and the loss of features we like because someone somewhere decided to stop supporting those features.
@eaplmx I don't mind at all when it comes to things like yarn.social, since I am voluntarily using this and hoping to be helpful at some point if the stars align and I find some free time. I was mostly griping about how *everything* seems to be in permanent beta test these days.
That said, I'm very much a fan of building into the development process of most (all?) projects a spirit of minimal features done as well as possible and then frozen. I love software that solves a problem well and then stops. I know it takes time to get there, but I think it should be the explicitly stated end goal of most projects. If it isn't, you really have to wonder what the project is actually *for*, because it's not just for users I think.
@prologic It's the major pain point of a lot of always-updated software. I hate this about my Android-based phone too. I view it as a kind of (sometimes unconscious) forced obsolescence. What happened to the days when people would write a solid piece of software and then more or less freeze it forever except for bug fixes? I don't want to be a permanent beta tester for the majority of software on my computer and phone!
@prologic I have some ethical issues with it, personally. I understand the need to monetize to cover hosting and maintenance costs, etc. But, a social network is only valuable because of the people on it--Facebook with no users would forever be Facebook with no users. So, you're in effect asking people to pay for access to their friends, which is wrong in the same way all rent-seeking capitalism is wrong. I *think* I'd feel better about a donations model, or a patreon-style model, where it's fully understood that the people are helping support you in your work to keep the network running. A user-owned co-opt would be a better model, I think. A one-time charge that you sacrifice if you get banned is right out in my view--too much room for abuse of that and risk of leaving a bad taste in user's mouths, not to mention that it is effectively unenforceable at scale.
@prologic sure, KDE/plasma does too. But what I'm complaining about is the bit rot that happens. Over time, as apps and the desktop and window managers are updated, small changes to the rule behavior accumulates and then stuff stops working as desired, or stops working altogether.
@movq yes, but these almost always get bit rot. The WM has an update that changes the rues slightly, or some apps stop responding properly to the rules, or, or, or, or...
@movq they're probably using "AI" to do a bunch of moderating and may not even be able to give a reason other than "the AI said so"
Every year or so I get so fed up with how many apps I have to restart and reposition manually after a reboot that I freak out, change a million settings, switch apps, and begin the cycle anew.
@eaplmx Oh yes, it's definitely interesting and has its uses. The inability to delete anything and the seeming hostility towards even trying worries me though. There's a lot to information security beaides protecting against censorship.
Foam, which is an extension for Visual Studio Code, is also interesting to check out as a note editor: https://github.com/foambubble/foam
I'd use the de-Microsofted version of the editor, Codium, of course.
Should I make this my pod logo?
Hmm, I kinda wish we could upload PDFs and other types of documents to yarn.social, aside from images.
@prologic I think there's some kind of ideology at play there. The responses to suggesting things be deleteable tend to be "well, if you don't want it shared, don't put it in there" and "once you put something on the internet, it's there forever so 🤷". Which is BS obviously.
I forgot to mention that I also use MarkText sometimes too. I guess I got into markdown at some point lol. Anyway, it has a focus mode that grays out all the paragraphs you're not currently focused on. You can turn off almost all the user interface gadgets and full screen it, which is pretty nice when you want to do a bunch of writing. One drawback is that it's a fairly heavy electron app, but what that buys you is that you can put math, syntax-highlighted code, various kinds of diagrams, and even charts of data in your documents if you want. For me these are must-have features so I put aside my misgivings about JS/electron.
@prologic I *hate* IPFS. Once or twice I've posted to github issues for that project, and they seem to be very dismissive of ideas they don't like. Mostly--it's impossible to delete anything from IPFS once you put it in there, and they have been hostile to any suggestion that they should fix that issue. I find it deeply irresponsible, since you can mount IPFS as if it were a filesystem, which makes it nearly 100% likely that someday, someone is going to put something very sensitive into IPFS by accident and then never be able to get it out again. It's almost certainly happened a bunch of times already. That feels much worse than Facebook-style centralization!
@prologic I know! So basically they'd be *centralizing* email using a distributed technology. I think this kind of confusion and rhetoric is dangerous!
@eaplmx I've been using obsidian for about a year and I'm not sure I'd ever want to use anything else again. Probably the best feature is that the core notes are markdown so you can easily use any editor you want. The wikilinks are the second best feature--it's trivial to link notes together. That's the killer feature by far imo.
@eaplmx oh wow, enso looks pretty interesting. Thanks for sharing that.
@prologic they list "decentralized email" as a potential application, which makes them sound like they don't know what they're talking about?
I feel like many of us are the victims of "institutional betrayal", recently and obviously by the lack of COVID response but clearly much more widely, and it is useful to think of things in those terms.
Institutional Betrayal Research Home Page
Currently have a cat on my butt.
@prologic My wife has been looking for someone like that too! But so far hasn't found anyone.
Nothing says "the pandemic is over" like having to check three separate data sources to decide whether it's safe to get a haircut.
@prologic hmm maybe I have an especially rambunctious child lol
@prologic
> Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. It states that "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
1. Tweet bullshit
2. Countless others think hard to refute the bullshit, making countless tweets, amplifying "engagement"
3. ???
4. Profit
My deep thought of the day is that Twitter exists to monetize Brandolini's law.
In the time I spent thinking about it the ground started shaking, a scorpion stung me twice, and the oracle left.
crap I forget what you do when the oracle is there
It's as if, in my mind, toilets are now things that should be locked. Very strange.
Long ago the baby grew mobile enough to start getting into things, especially toilets. We installed those plastic child-proof locks all over the house. Now, it feels very strange to use a toilet that *does not* have a lock on it.
I say that because one issue with an invite system is that it generates manual labor too. It could stop people from making spammy posts, sure. But it burdens someone with investigating potential new users, and if those new users are human and not bots, they can play nice till they get their account and then start posting spam anyway. It's important to have layers of (semi-) automated systems so that the humans doing the ultimate moderating aren't overwhelmed.
@prologic
Years ago I moderated a forum and found any and all of the following can help
- IP blacklists preventing registration
- CAPTCHA at registration time
- Email confirmation at registration time
- A "reputation" system limiting what new users can post
- Setting all links in posts nofollow (kills the benefit of SEO spam)
- Run through akismet before posts are posted (you could probably get spamassassin to do this too?)
- Extremely ruthless blocking
@lyse I mean, using the DOS command line for anything other than playing games should be illegal.....
@eaplmx what's the practical difference between something being more important vs. valued more?
That said, caring for your health, avoiding being killed or maimed by a brutal disease for instance, is 100% more important than caring about whether tech companies are taking good care with your data. That's pretty obvious. Half the United States is in that state, I think. At least.
@brasshopper @prologic I'm of this mind too. I don't think it's that people don't care. I think it's that people have other, more important things to care about, that they don't know enough to know the dangers involved, and even if they did they wouldn't know what to do about it anyway. So they choose to put it aside, which is a fairly rational choice under those assumptions, if you think about it. What possible reason would someone have to care about slowly losing their rights because of Facebook's lousy policies when they are spending all their time working, raising kids, caring for loved ones, worrying about COVID, worrying about inflation, etc etc etc? It's too abstract, too far away, too easy to ignore. If we want them to care, we are obligated to teach them what's at stake and help them see why they should care (and also not judge them if they decide not to care, because that's part of it too--paternalistically dictating to people what they should and shouldn't is no good)
@eaplmx (that's not to say it couldn't have ever been good, but as you say, it's too far gone these days, it would seem)
@eaplmx not to be daft, but ipv6 gaining wide adoption would be a plus. A lot of web 2.0 problems emerge from resource battles over the limited ip4 address space.
@eaplmx Nuance is good, but I like to think that I have a nuance budget, and I choose to apply the nuance budget to things that deserve it. Cryptocurrency does not deserve nuance, in my personal view. It's too dangerous, too polluting, too corrupted. It barely had merit to begin with.
@prologic Another thing about it that really bothers me is that most (all?) blockchains are based ultimately on an append-only log, meaning there's no ability to delete anything. The blockchain acolytes I've talked to don't seem to care about how horrible that is from an infosec perspective.
Oh also also, at least some of these web3 things depend on a "security by obscurity" model where your super secret stuff is only protected by a long hash code that you're supposed to keep secret, but can never change or transfer. So, if anyone finds out your super secret hash code, you can't disavow it, or invalidate it, or revoke it, or anything--all your stuff is there for the taking, forevermore.
@prologic I've had Android cell phones since I think Android 6? I'm on Android 11 now. I hate each new version that comes out more than I hated the last. They take more and more power away from you as a user by crippling the underlying linux-derived operating system, they amp up the surveillance capabilities, and they privilege their own apps more and more. Exactly how Microsoft did with Windows and Internet Explorer. It's literally the same playbook.
@prologic Microsoft is (was?) a large monopoly that uses (used?) its operating system to control the software industry to its own ends, users be damned. If there was ever a time when their offering was of value to people, they gave up any pretense of maintaining and improving that long ago.
Google is a large unaccountable monopoly that uses its operating system to control the software industry to its own ends, users be damned. If there was ever a time when their offering was of value to people, they gave up any pretense of maintaining and improving that long ago.
There was a time when Microsoft was nearly broken up by regulators for this behavior, but the US doesn't fix any of its problems anymore so Google has been able to persist longer without repercussions.
@prologic Oh I know, it's horrible on nearly every level, including how many people end up believing things that just aren't true because these web3 zombies push it so hard.
Calling blockchain decentralized is hilarious. Why people believe that particular one baffles me.
yeah, a digital currency that is quick and easy to exchange with anyone in the world has a lot of possible virtues. But cryptocurrency is not that, and it was never meant to be. That's a libertarian fever dream that grounded out the way it did because that's what unconstrained libertarianism always turns into.
web3 exists because circa 2016 or so, a bunch of venture capitalists figured out how to get a quick payday out of startups by getting them to issue a cryptocurrency ("Initial Coin Offering"), gifting a bunch of that currency to the VC at a discounted rate, and then pumping-and-dumping the rest. The VC avoids liability because the field is unregulated and even if it were the startup is guilty of whatever financial crimes might be present, not the VC. This happened to the tune of many many billions of dollars, flooding the world with cryptocurrencies that then everyone holding them had a vested interest in finding value for so that they din't end up empty handed. What we've watched transpire since is the unwinding of this criminal pyramid of financial bullshit.
web3 does not solve any problems that aren't already solved by significantly more efficient techniques. It is not an answer to the "centralization" of Web 2.0. You can't solve a social, economic, and political problem (monopolization) with Ponzi scheme.
@prologic Oh, I don't know, web3 consumes hundreds of time more electricity to solve a problem nobody actually has using techniques that have never been proved to work better than the 40+-year-old algorithms that already do the same things.
That, and that they enable unbelievable consolidation of wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people, as well as criminal activity, from minor scams all the way up to massive ransomeware attacks that put hospitals and basic infrastructure at risk.
There is *nothing* good about cryptocurrency, and very very very much wrong with it. It should have been eradicated long ago, but I guess we don't fix broken things anymore.
@eaplmx I more or less do the same, except I leave the 5-10 messages that are ongoing, which can be months, years......
Android is Google Windows. I don't know why people get excited about it.
Whoo hoo, inbox zero* achieved!
*Zero recent emails--the 10 or so that are always there are still there
@tkanos check it out, I'm the new kid on the block and I'm already 34th! 🤓💪
@eaplmx Any time! I'm still learning about the IndieWeb ecosystem myself, so don't take anything I say as authoritative!
@eaplmx I'm pretty sure webmention would work for this. It's how the rest of the IndieWeb tends to care care of things like posting comments to blogs. It's pretty simple--there's a REST endpoint you hit when you reply to a post, and then an endpoint that gets called on the recipient's side that decides what to do with the webmention (ignore it, post it somewhere, alert the writer, other). You put the necessary endpoint(s) in <link rel="webmention"... and <link rel="pingback"... tags in the HTML of the pages you want to have webmention support, so it's pretty unintrusive.
You can play with it right now by signing into https://webmention.io with a yarn.social or other IndeiAuth-compatiable web site. I'm almost certain there are self-hostable web mention servers, or you can use webmention.io or one of the other ones.
@prologic wow, that's great! Each of us is now part of the 1% lol
@lyse We named her after the programmer for whom the language was named
that's on a screen that looks like this unzoomed: 
@prologic I'm not even sure how to rate my vision. I'm fortunate enough to retain a decent amount of peripheral vision. But my central vision is bad (macular dystrophy), with numerous blindspots scattered throughout. I can only really see things if I look askance at them--when I look directly at an object, it's as if it's not there. Right now my vision is stable but it degraded steadily for many years and could start degrading again at any time. Pre-COVID I'd get checked yearly and was looking into clinical trials for potential treatments, but that all fell by the wayside. Someday I'll pick it up again.
Anyway, I can still use computers pretty effectively, which I'm thankful for, but keep the zoom at 2x-4x basically all the time. I definitely can't drive a car or anything like that. I frequently take pictures of things with my phone and then view the picture zoomed in to see whatever it was that I wanted to see.
@prologic yes except instead of killing your physical body, they kill your digital one!
@prologic For what it's worth, I am low vision myself and have sworn by KDE/plasma (and KDE/compiz before it) since 2008 at least. There was a blip there when KDE initially switched to plasma, but other than that their full screen zoom was by far my favorite and still is. I normally use a desktop workstation with KDE/plasma, but my laptop runs GNOME and their full screen zoom works OK but isn't great. I find Windows 10's pretty unusable, to the point that when I'm cursed with having to use that operating system I remote desktop into it from a Linux machine and use KDE/plasma's full screen zoom lol.
YMMV!
@prologic Meet Ada, on her Brother 600dpi cat bed 
We have a printer here at home that I use maybe once every six months, but that the cat sleeps on every day. I think I have to accept reality and start calling it the cat bed that has a print function.
@akoizumi I like my job and my coworkers and I want to hear from them!
After I marked some 30 emails as not spam, Google automatically re-classified them as spam and put them back in the spam folder. Something is really wrong.
Sometime around mid-August Google decided to start sending a bunch of my coworkers' emails to the Spam folder for no apparent reason 😠 Now I'm sifting through there trying to figure out what I missed and what to do about it.
@tkanos Yes, that seems to do it....now, do I want to set up a yarn pod to host my git commits 🤔
@tkanos this is cool. It could probably be adapted to generate a twtxt file out of a project's git commit history, which means you could then generate a yarn.social pod for any project you wanted, and then ........
@eaplmx It's true, though landlines had similar audio constraints and could transmit 56 kbit/s up to perhaps 320 kbit/s if the data could be compressed (and higher if the server side also compresses). Very slow, but not 0!
@prologic Hmm, now that you say this maybe they don't!
@prologic I'd have to guess the carrier would notice eventually and cut you off. Say, after a single phone call goes on for 720 hours.....
