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Cake day: Jan 20, 2021

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Iterative development is how software development was done initially. Then there was a misunderstanding and Waterfall was invented. The DOD spread the idea that you should be finished with the design before you start implementation. I think in practice barely anybody really did Waterfall because of common sense.

Maybe Agile can be understood as the correction (or over-correction in many cases). What the movement celebrates as huge innovation is mostly a regression toward the mean.


The question is how to turn it into a technical implementation.

We assume the situation is at least two people discussing and a moderator stepping in. Now the mod needs a button which makes the two write a shared conclusion. Lemmy could provide the means to write a “joint comment”, where both can edit and both need to sign it off. How to incentivize them though? The button probably needs to block the thread, post, or accounts until the joint comment is published.


The gold standard for me would be “adversarial collaboration” as described by Scott Alexander here and here. The first describes a conflict about psychic psi powers research. The amazing twist is that both sides wrote a paper together. The second article describes a similar collaboration about fact-checking. Essentially, this is “debate until they reach an agreement” with the additional requirement that they publish a joint statement afterwards.

So, if you are in an intense discussion with somebody, the best you can do is to write a blog post together. It requires both of you to present the evidence in a neutral way and derive conclusions such that you both agree with the reasoning. The process will make you work out where exactly you disagree (the quality of the sources? different values? missing knowledge?).

Is that realistic though? Such a collaboration is much more effort than a reply to a comment which triggers me. It is the best way to make progress in the overall debate.

Is that the goal here though? We don’t care so much about the result or progress of a debate but only to keep it civilized so everybody feels welcome to continue. An “unproductive” discussion is ok as long as all participants are nice to each other.


I just bought a used iPhone SE 2020 for 300€. The screen of my old Pixel 2 broke and its support ran out recently. Still a great phone otherwise. As a long-term Android user I miss a few things like SyncThing on iOS. However, with a strong focus on privacy, I’d say iOS wins over Android.







AstraZeneca seems to make a very rare illness (thrombocytopenia) less rare. As it affects mostly younger women, giving those another vaccine instead is an appropriate measure to me.






Created a Software Architecture community
Future home of insightful discussion about software architecture at least I hope so.
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I fear there is currently little reason to leave reddit. We need a scandal like the recent WhatsApp uproar which gave Signal and Telegram more users.






A “hide” button to make submissions disappear from my frontpage even if the discussion goes on.


SlateStarCodex, Zettelkasten, Bogleheads, projectmanagement, ChrisRamsay52, rational

They are mostly about self-posts and discussions, so I cannot simply resubmit the stuff here.







Source: https://github.com/akarlinsky/world_mortality
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In Germany, many are unhappy about the vaccination progress and pressure politicians to do something. In my opinion, they sound like sports fans where everyone knows it better then the pros.

If politicians get pressured into emergency activities, they might actually slow down the pharma companies.















Should we create fake users?
By creating sockpuppet accounts, you can fake more activity in discussions. This encourages real users to participate. Repeat until there are enough real users to sustain a community without sockpuppets. Reddit did this, as they said in [this interview](https://www.npr.org/2017/10/03/545635014/live-episode-reddit-alexis-ohanian-steve-huffman). Others [confirm](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24444416) the approach.
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The classic counter-argument is The ecosystem is moving by Moxie: Standardization slows down innovation.

Maybe it is simply too early to standardize on a messenger protocol. XMPP is a proper standard but Big Tech out-innovates it by providing additional features. For example, WhatsApp rolled out voice calls before an XMPP extension was available, if I remember correctly.

In general, I believe federation to be the ultimate sweet spot. P2P is too hard for most people but currently necessary in some cases like whistleblowing. Centralized services provide the best innovation speed. If run as a non-profit it is also ok (e.g. Signal) but ultimately the weak spot is that they are subject to a single nation and especially the US is not the best here with its shadow courts. Another option is to turn them into a government service. That would kill the innovation but something like Twitter does not need no innovate much anymore in my opinion.







Also, sone people like that it stays consistent. In not sure if ribbons actually improve anything.

Maybe a different color scheme and a tad more whitespace would make it look modern enough?




A few subreddits. For some a corresponding community exists but is practically inactive. For example !pkb@lemmy.ml and r/Zettelkasten.

I realized that I mostly subscribe to subreddits which are full of discussions not link sharing. Those are harder to replicate because you cannot just post reddit submissions here. At least, it would be weird to post other peoples questions/opinions. For example, r/bodyweightfitness.

Lemmy just lacks that mass of people to establish the niche communities of reddit here. Especially the OSS and programming related ones.




Another angle is your contacts. Maybe you are clever enough to not be influenced by targeted ads but is everyone in your contact list? Many apps upload that data and obviously Facebook is using it in (arguably) good ways: “Do you know Emma?” (She just uploaded her contact list and you were on there)


I wouldn’t go for illegal things people can do with my data (like scams) because criminals may use illegals ways to get my data as well. We should care more about the legal ways of acquiring data and using it against our interests.


My manager, who is American, once made a comparison that completely blew my mind: we laugh at native Americans handing over their land without really understanding that they’re getting screwed in the transaction, and yet we just hand over our personal data to Google and Facebook without a second thought. We barely even have a concept of data ownership. –u/henrebotha


In theory, lemmy should be able to federate with it. In practice?



As an educator/writer/publisher, you might be interested in interactive fiction, so maybe take a look at Inform 7.

To learn a general purpose language, Python would be my first suggestion.




It doesn’t make the problem clear. Nothing bad happened to John and Emma.



Interesting this hasn’t been posted here already ;)


This is what i remember as well. Free SMS and then free calls was the pitch.


I don’t think the media is the issue here. Do we have any evidence that the percentage of lies and fake news is higher with social media than 100 years ago? Media is just faster and available to everybody now.

I see the problem in incentives: Ads are the big source of income for social media. Thus they are incentivized towards controversy.

I have no solution. As long as people believe that ads don’t affect them that muchpersonally, why not tolerate them?



Dumbledore is actually a Hufflepuff as is hinted by his years-long masterplan for Harry. He rewrote history about him being a Gryffindor for deception.


While I like the fediverse, I don’t buy most of these reasons.

  1. “It’s decentralized.” This is no reason in itself. That description rather says “It’s resilient.” Well, the big social websites have a pretty good uptime as well, so not a good reason.

  2. “It can’t be censored.” The description uses a warped definition of censorship. Originally, it is only about censoring by the government. Banning Trump is actually the reverse and no censoring. The argument is correct that in the fediverse you can switch to another equal instance. Switching from Twitter to Instagram is not equal.

  3. “Free as in freedom”. The description is actually more about public auditing than freedom. This is not a good argument because an admin in the fediverse can patch his instance without anybody noticing. The federation still lowers the impact though.

  4. “It respects your privacy”. Same issue. An admin can patch their instance and no public audit defends against that. The federation still lowers the impact."

  5. “It’s all about the community” Maybe. Maybe the crazy people have just not yet discovered the fediverse in significant numbers. An eternal september could occur. Federation might help. It might not.

  6. “There’s an instance for everyone” Well, there is also a subreddit for everyone and a twitter hashtag and …

Conclusion: 1, 2 and 6 are no reason to me. 3 and 4 are reasons but not strong ones. For 5 there is not enough data yet.


I use the Nitter Redirect and Old Reddit Redirect to “fix” links to the two websites. Also, NoScript to “fix” most random links I follow.


https://unsplash.com/ for a great searchable selection of images to use without any hassle.


One argument would be that it isn’t “terrorism” because it is based on overwhelming military force instead of terror. If Iraq yields to the US, it is a rational decision. Those bombers send a message to the government. If the US yields to ISIS, it is an irrational decision. The message is directed to the citizens.


Ward Cunningham the original wiki inventor has also invented a federated wiki. Seems to be quite dead though.