Lots of lovely laws, none of them enforced. Liberals* are really very bad** at this game.

*in the political science meaning of the word, not the US colloquial meaning

**or good, depending on your perspective and/or the sincerity of their declared intent

It’s like a Calibri-fied version of Trebuchet. You can actually tell the difference between I and l without changing the font to check. It’s an improvement.

applied by centre left and liberals

It’s a term that originates with the left. Specifically, those who broke with the USSR over imperialist invasions, referring to those who did not. More broadly, it refers to the authoritarian left (as opposed to the anarchist left).

I have met enough far-left authoritarians who are openly racist, anti-lgbtq, and who advocated for violence against people solely based on their family background that I don’t think the extreme right has a monopoly on hate.

Yeah, they’re banned from lemmygrad. Rule 5:

1. No capitalist apologia / anti-communism.

1. No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.

1. Be respectful. This is a safe space where all comrades should feel welcome, this includes a warning against uncritical sectarianism.

1. No porn or sexually explicit content (even if marked NSFW).

1. No right-deviationists (patsocs, nazbols, strasserists, duginists, etc).

You missing some context or something?

No zoo does this. She was used for animal testing.

but maybe not something you want to put your life on the line over.

To be fair, their hubris usually only kills poor people so, progress?

I doubt he’s ignoring anything. And I know nothing but I think it’s a little unfair to bash him for this.

Meta does not need the Fediverse to create a ready-populated instance all of its own. It doesn’t need to federate with anyone, it can probably kill Twitter and Reddit with a single stone (if it pours enough resource into moderating and siloing). Just stick a fediwidget in every logged in account page with some thoughtful seeding of content and it’s done.

The danger of federating with Meta is much the same as not federating. It has such a massive userbase it will suck the lifeblood out of everywhere else whether or not it can see us.

The possible silver lining is that there are other very large corporates which can do the same (some of which have said they plan to). We could all end up with multiple logins on corporate instances simply because we have accounts with them for other reasons. And that means a lot of very large instances with name recognition, and easy access, making it much harder for any of them to stop federation and keep their users to themselves.

Being federated with one or more behemoths might well be hell. Some instances won’t do it. Moderation standards will be key for those that do. But multiple federated behemoths can hold each other hostage because their users can all jump ship to the competition so easily.

This is much, much more complicated than just boycott or not. They cannot be trusted one tiny fraction of an inch but this is coming whether we like it or not. We need to work out how to protect ourselves and I’m starting to think that encouraging every site with a user login to make the fediverse a widget on their account pages might be the very best way to do it.

In solidarity with Naples’ economic losses, we must force every port to ban super yachts. Apart from Blackpool, which needs the cash.

That works surprisingly well. Although maybe turn the TV down …

Thank you!

The high rate of failure to replicate is not, in and of itself, evidence of fraud. It’s primarily a problem with low power to detect plausible effects (ie small sample sizes). That’s not to say there isn’t much deliberate fraud or p-hacking going on, there’s far too much. But the so-called replication crisis was entirely predictable without needing to assume any wrongdoing. It happened primarily because most researchers don’t fully understand the statistics they are using.

There was a good paper published on this recently: Understanding the Replication Crisis as a Base Rate Fallacy

And this is a nice simple explanation of the base rate fallacy for anyone who can’t access the paper: The p value and the base rate fallacy

tl;dr p<0.05 does not mean what most researchers think it means

It does make some salient points, but it too is starting to feel a bit like astroturf.

Astroturf is created by billionaires to make it seem like a bunch of ordinary people agree with them. A legit article about several actual instances of corporations killing FOSS does not become astroturf just because a lot of ordinary people found it useful enough to post and cite.

The solution offered is not entirely clear but I read it as “do not federate with huge corporations because they will bury you”.

I’m not on Lemmy. I posted in my kbin instance.

but not needing two hands/multiple clicks

Thanks for that.

Lack of blinding is a serious issue for subjective outcomes but blinding when treatment effects are obvious to both intervention and control groups is dishonest (Pharma does it all the time to make their trials look more credible than they are).

Open label is the norm for cancer trials for exactly this reason. It is important to consider the biases that may arise, in subjective endpoints especially. But it is ludicrous to dismiss research on this basis alone. We can’t randomise 12 year olds to become lifetime smokers or not, let alone use placebo controls, but we do know that smoking kills. It’s just a bit more complicated to prove it when perfectly designed RCTs are not possible.

Also. can we have an option for links to magazines/content opening in a new window/tab? Obviously ctrl-click, shift-click, or right click <…> solves the problem but not needing two hands/multiple clicks to avoid losing the current page would be fab.

There hasn’t even been an injury in 35 years in a non-military sub,”

xkcd has covered this.

Your post has appeared in the wrong sub but the pressure vessel absolutely was jerry-rigged and the viewport wasn’t up to the job: A whistleblower raised safety concerns about OceanGate’s submersible in 2018. Then he was fired.

The report detailed “numerous issues that posed serious safety concerns,” according to the filing. These included Lochridge’s worry that “visible flaws” in the carbon fiber supplied to OceanGate raised the risk of small flaws expanding into larger tears during “pressure cycling.” These are the huge pressure changes that the submersible would experience as it made its way and from the deep ocean floor. He noted that a previously tested scale model of the hull had “prevalent flaws.”
…
A day after filing his report, Lochridge was summoned to a meeting with Rush and company’s human resources, engineering and operations directors. There, the filing states, he was also informed that the manufacturer of the Titan’s forward viewport would only certify it to a depth of 1,300 meters due to OceanGate’s experimental design. The filing states that OceanGate refused to pay for the manufacturer to build a viewport that would meet the Titan’s intended depth of 4,000 meters. The Titanic lies about 3,800 meters below the surface.

As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.

How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)

Voat died because it was landed with a big chunk of the toxicity ejected from reddit. This isn’t the same thing at all.

The risk to the Fediverse from huge commercial players is described well here: How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)

In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore. And started a long quest to create a messenger, starting with Hangout (which was followed by Allo, Duo. I lost count after that).

As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.

And it’s not an accident:

What Google did to XMPP was not new. In fact, in 1998, Microsoft engineer Vinod Vallopllil explicitly wrote a text titled “Blunting OSS attacks” where he suggested to “de-commoditize protocols & applications […]. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS project’s entry into the market.”

Microsoft put that theory in practice with the release of Windows 2000 which offered support for the Kerberos security protocol. But that protocol was extended. The specifications of those extensions could be freely downloaded but required to accept a license which forbid you to implement those extensions. As soon as you clicked “OK”, you could not work on any open source version of Kerberos. The goal was explicitly to kill any competing networking project such as Samba.

This anecdote was told Glyn Moody in his book “Rebel Code” and demonstrates that killing open source and decentralised projects are really conscious objectives. It never happens randomly and is never caused by bad luck.