cabbage

There’s that Al Franklen quote about Ted Cruz.

I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.

Reading this comment section made me realise I feel the same way about Hillary Clinton.

I can’t say I ever really understood what Newsmast is up to, but Channel.org looks pretty nifty. It seems like a good way for organisations consisting of several independent people to get together and present all their federated content in one public channel.

Fellow Dvorak user here. Can’t recommend it enough.

In one of my classes at the beginning of my doctoral studies we talked about parth dependency, and QWERTY was used as an example. All studies showed that even experienced typists would increase their typing speed within just a few days of switching, and that it’s just a superior set-up. But because of path dependency we all write QWERTY.

I changed my layout the same day and I haven’t looked back. If you want to start messing around with your keyboard and you use it for typing, switching to Dvorak should be the obvious first step. Colemak is a compromise solution that is still a lot better than QWERTY and probably quicker to learn.

No need to get a new keyboard. Dvorak is designed around touch typing, you won’t be looking at the keyboard anyway.

New in this release:

• Separate audio and video streams, so that only one audio track is stored on the server even if there are multiple resolutions for a video, and viewers can choose only to stream audio. You can also do audio-only live streams. Cool.
• Browse subtitles, search them, click on them, read them to a friend
• Better video fetching from Youtube channels, in case you post there first
• Smaller tweaks to improve user experience

Cool stuff.

PS: My favourite way to keep up to date on PeerTube content is to go to Piefed, press the search button, choose “PeerTube” under Instance Software and sort by “Recent first”. It shows content from all PieFed channels subscribed to by PieFed users, so it’s a limited scope, but I still think it’s a nice little feed.

The only redeeming feature about this is that it only looks about as awful as any other social media.

Which is not very redeeming at all, of course.

The comments on the post also aren’t from Mozilla.social. It’s not like they would have been happy to see Mozilla as a successful actor on the Fediverse either.

The trolls in the comment section at least hints at the fact that creating a more positive and constructive online space proved more difficult than they imagined.

I was curious, and joined the queue for the closed beta a long time ago. Never heard back. They explored something new in closed channels, decided not to go for it, backed out. I don’t really think they need to justify the decision.

Running a social media is a huge effort, and there’s a lot of trolls out there actively targeting Mozilla. I imagine it’s just more trouble than it’s worth.

The Commission is basically two completely different things. Actually it’s probably more than two things, but the way we often talk about it, it plays two key roles.

One is that of a bureaucratic body that runs the union, delegates funds, oversees the implementation of EU legislation, submits observations to cases before the CJEU, posts content to @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu, and that kind of jazz. This is where there’s a huge number of employees, and it’s where a lot of EU funds are spent. We probably wouldn’t be talking here if it wasn’t for the Next Generation Internet programme, which is a part of Horizon Europe, which is seen as a scientific research initiative. So the Fediverse has a pretty direct relationship to things going on in the bureaucracy that I assume is positioned under the Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth.

This is, however, largely bureaucratic. Doesn’t mean it’s not important, but it’s not where the juicy political decisions are made.

The other role is that of a executive body. In the separation of powers in the EU,

In its executive role, budget and staff might matter less. What matters is the political deals you can strike. Resources might help you craft better proposals that the Council and Parliament then needs to accept before it can be signed off to law, but the relationship to resources here is not that obvious.

Then again, another bureaucratic role of the Commission is when power has been delegated to it to decide on a specific area, for example how to regulate a specific type of products. This is bureaucratic as hell, but it also gives direct decision-making power to the Commission to just decide pretty much as they please within a limited competence. So bureaucrats could absolutely mean power as well, albeit maybe not a very sexy type of power.

It’s not an obvious exercise. How “important” is migration and home affairs compared to the internal market? The internal market is certainly at the core of the competences of the EU, but maybe it’s in the less established areas that more interesting developments are happening. Furthermore, they might suddenly become extremely relevant. Nobody predicted how important DG SANTE would become in 2020, for example.

One indicator of importance might be staff size. I struggle to find a good and up to date figure right now, so I’ll make do with a pretty bad and outdated one from 2020, showing the size of the staff under each Commissioner at that point in time. Johannes Hahn runs the largest operation as the DG of budget and administration. Budget is unquestionably important. Administration as well, but it might produce more staff than power.

The Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth comes in second place. The Commissioner for International Partnerships comes third.

So these positions run the largest operations. Linking that to power is probably somewhat misguided - it would indicate that all three of these relatively anonymous positions were more important than von der Leyen. Entering a position with a lot of staff might even decrease your power, as you are forced into a role that might have more to do with management and less to do with politics; furthermore, if the field is already well-developed in the EU, it might not be where central developments are happening going forwards.

A better indicator could be to go through the Directorate-Generals under the control of the different Commissioners. The Commissioner of the Internal Market, for example, is also responsible for for the Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space. That might be important these days.

In the traditional competences of the EU, the DG for for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries would be considered very important. These days, and especially on this platform, people might be more interested in the DG for Communications Networks, Content and Technology.

Wherever Union competences are weak and/or anonymous, there’s greater room to innovate and to surprise us by striking some crazy deal. In politicized issues that we intuitively care about, the Commissioner’s power will also be relatively weaker as they are kept under strict control. So there’s an inherent tension: The fact that a Commissioner is widely considered as being important might actually make them less relevant by making it harder for them to pursue an agenda. They might end up just striking smallest common denominator compromises with all involved actors, and have little to say themselves for the outcomes as such.

So that’s a messy non-answer, and I guess nobody is any wiser. But it’s difficult, in my opinion, to give a very clearly defined answer which positions are important and which are not.

Oooff, that’s harsh. My girlfriend is currently in the process of finishing up her PhD, and my job recently exploded in my face, so I can relate a little to parts of what you’re going through. At least good to hear you’re dealing with the cold efficiently, even if it’s hell while it’s going on!

The owls in my feed never fail to lighten up my day!

I hope you’re doing better, and I’m happy to hear that the community is bringing something positive to you as well! There’s at least no doubt there’s a lot of us who appreciate the effort. :)

The organisation that happily cooperated with fascism in Italy you mean?

The child raping one?

Yeah, it’s not what he’s saying. But the formulation - sending a child away from the womb of it’s mother" - is fundamentally fucked up because it completely removes the mother from the equation. It doesn’t even bother to explicitly deprive her of the control over her body - it simply doesn’t recognise her existence at all.

I think, more than anything, that’s why this line of talking is fucked up. It kind of assumes totalitarianism where no matter what, it’s at least not the choice of the individual women/owners of the wombs.

What moderate Catholics will use as a defence is, I guess, the use of the word “child”. No reasonable person would consider a lump of 30 cells a “child”. But we all know the pope thinks it’s a child as soon as the sperm hits the egg, so fuck that as well.

I’m this formulation it sounds like he’s talking about government mandated abortion - it’s like it’s happening against the will of the owner of the womb.

Clearly that’s not what he’s talking about, but in a narrow charitable interpretation, he would be correct that the government has no fucking business controlling whatever is going on inside women’s wombs.

The official story is that Meta is worried about being sued by people suddenly seeing their content pushed to some random website without their consent if it’s enabled by default, so they won’t risk enabling it by default. At least not before the fediverse is huge enough that everything you post going everywhere on the internet is the expected behaviour.

Fair enough really. I wouldn’t want to be sued for that either, and they obviously cannot expect Congress to understand… anything.

Love the sound of it! Are you making these on commission or just as a hobby?

I can imagine making bows is an incredibly delicate matter - I don’t have time to fall into the rabbit hole of the history of bowed instruments right now, but I can feel myself slipping!

That’s beautiful!

Will you make a bow as well? Would it be possible to get a presentation of what it sounds like?

They define decentralisation as an even distribution of users? Or did I get that wrong skimming the paper?

This seems arbitrary. Mastodon is a decentralised network, no matter how big Mastodon.social is. Lemmy is equally decentralised, even though there’s a dominant actor.

The other hubs in the network don’t revolve around mastodon.social/lemmy.world. they connect to each other bilaterally - if the central hubs disappeared over night it wouldn’t affect them all that much.

I think the notion that decentralised networks can’t have hubs of varying sizes is plain wrong, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what decentralized means.

Pretty deadly for the sherpas though, who have to deal with the shit of the rich idiot tourists going there in massive numbers. So if they want to insist it’s extreme, at least there’s that.

Very cool - thanks for the info!

I’ll probably try to get the body from a flea market, or from my dad’s collection of old junk if he’ll let me touch it. But getting some professional help getting the neck right wouldn’t be a bad thing at all.