cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • this meme has some truth in it, in that these six vegetables are all brassica oleracea. but, the factoid in the center of the meme is misleading: brassica oleracea can be many things but (despite brassicaceae being “the mustard and cabbage family”) brassica oleracea is not typically called “wild mustard plant”.

    edit: toned down my refutation; i guess maybe it is sometimes 👀 but i think not really







  • i don’t usually cross-post my comments but I think this one from a cross-post of this meme in programmerhumor is worth sharing here:

    The statement in this meme is false. There are many programming languages which can be written by humans but which are intended primarily to be generated by other programs (such as compilers for higher-level languages).

    The distinction can sometimes be missed even by people who are successfully writing code in these languages; this comment from Jeffrey Friedl (author of the book Mastering Regular Expressions) stuck with me:

    I’ve written full-fledged applications in PostScript – it can be done – but it’s important to remember that PostScript has been designed for machine-generated scripts. A human does not normally code in PostScript directly, but rather, they write a program in another language that produces PostScript to do what they want. (I realized this after having written said applications :-)) —Jeffrey

    (there is a lot of fascinating history in that thread on his blog…)




  • Am I still missing something? This is posted on the instance of .world, wtf are we talking about .ml and politics for? If your instance filters your comments on other instances than that’s concerning and something I didn’t know.

    Yes, something you’re missing is that it was your (our) instance which removed the word from your comment. I believe the slur filters are effectively a combination of the configured filters on the writer’s instance, the reader’s instance, and the community’s instance.

    If you view this thread from other other users’ instances (via the fediverse icon link on their comments in the web view), you will see that the word which was removed from your comment is not removed from comments by users on some other instances (despite that it is also removed from their comments when viewed from our instance). HTH.

    (imo false positives from the slur filter are annoying, but so are the people casually using slurs who are prevented from doing so by it; it’s a tradeoff i don’t feel strongly about. although i do think it would be much better if the writer-side version of it could notify users of the impending bowdlerization prior to posting.)




  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoFediverse@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    What you want is not an “uncensored” server, but rather a server that is moderated in a way that you find acceptable.

    There is no such thing as an “uncensored/open” server. Or, when there is, it can’t last long. Every open server needs to delete some things, because if they don’t, their disk will soon be full of spam and CSAM and then the server will go away. Some servers claiming to be “uncensored” might allow nearly everything besides those two categories, but they tend to quickly become nazi bars.

    Sorry i don’t have any specific suggestion, but of the 61 servers listed here hopefully there is one with a moderation policy that is to your liking.






  • as i wrote in another thread:

    Content addressability is absolutely essential for building something that will last, and BlueSky gets that right. Decoupling the many responsibilities which an ActivityPub instance operator has (especially for identity) is also essential, i think, and while BlueSky’s identity solution is less than ideal it’s much better than ActivityPub and I expect it to improve.

    If you’re interested in the topic you probably want to also read the followup post from the same author (after reading the reply linked there from someone on the BlueSky team).

    Christine’s analysis is by far the best I’ve read on the topic, but I think she is too dismissive of the possibility that people will actually build things using ATP in a manner more like ActivityPub (where there doesn’t need to be a global view). It’s also possible/likely that ActivityPub will eventually evolve to adopt content addressability (Christine actually built a proof-of-concept of doing that years ago, linked in her blog post, but there doesn’t appear to be any recent progress in that direction), and decouple identity from responsibility for data availability, and adopt something like BlueSky’s composable moderation.

    Given their respective advantages over the other, i’m pretty sure that both ATP and AP will make changes which make them more like the other in the coming years.



  • Reading through it, I’m not seeing much in favor of ATP

    See the “BlueSky’s strengths” section, particularly the last paragraph of it. Content addressability is absolutely essential for building something that will last, and BlueSky gets that right. Decoupling the many responsibilities which an ActivityPub instance operator has (especially for identity) is also essential, i think, and while BlueSky’s identity solution is less than ideal it’s much better than ActivityPub and I expect it to improve.

    If you’re interested in the topic you probably want to also read the followup post from the same author (after reading the linked reply from someone on the BlueSky team).

    Christine’s analysis is by far the best I’ve read on the topic, but I think she is too dismissive of the possibility that people will actually build things using ATP in a manner more like ActivityPub (where there doesn’t need to be a global view). It’s also possible/likely that ActivityPub will eventually evolve to adopt content addressability (Christine actually built a proof-of-concept of doing that years ago, linked in her blog post, but there doesn’t appear to be any recent progress in that direction), and decouple identity from responsibility for data availability, and adopt something like BlueSky’s composable moderation.

    Given their respective advantages over the other, i’m pretty sure that both ATP and AP will make changes which make them more like the other in the coming years.