angrygoat

oh, thanks :)

hah – yes, it's an old username, it's not possible to change username on here or I would :)

cleric here, so excuse me for getting theological: but there should be (and at times truly has been, even if flawed) a shared understanding of the dignity and worth of every person. if we have that, then when one party or another is in power, they know that they are expected to care for minorities and for the stranger, and for the 'other side'.

we should be willing to vote for that.

that seems to be breaking down, throughout the western world.

we should never denigrate or infringe upon the personhood of anyone. we should take the higher road. and I'm not arguing that the oppressed should accept their oppression: I'm arguing that the oppressors should listen to the oppressed, and change.

I live in Australia – our constitution is a strange mashup of the UK model (which is certainly the primary influence), and things gleaned from the US. Something I observe is that we're more willing to admit the possibility of non-partisan spaces. For example, rather than electoral commissions being bipartisan, they're non-partisan, with partisan input. It is a serious matter if an official of such an organisation is found to have publicly stated political views. We have some people who make it their profession to be boring, and to simply uphold the precepts of society: including the rights of minorities. That's a serious sacrifice, made routinely by judges and senior public servants.

I find myself quite terrified that this is being eroded. I don't know how we turn it around: but I certainly speak up for the dignity of all through my ministry. We all ought to speak up.

thanks to you both, I'll check whenever and Pendulum out! :)

How are decentralised platforms managing abusive content? TikTok had some bumps in the road maybe five years back with this, but got it under control. I know I don't want to be scrolling through video content and see illegal or unethical content.

That compliance aspect seems like one thing that pushes us towards centralised architectures for social media, but I'm guessing that AI models to screen images / videos are pretty widely available now and cheaply deployable?

Some extension of the Patreon model onto decentralised social media could work. I pay a few bucks a month to the creators of webcomics and other content that I enjoy, just because it's the right thing to do, and I dunno, it makes me feel more connected to these people that I've never met but who bring me some joy?

I was taught Biblical Hebrew by an Australian scholar who learned hers in the south of the US, and I picked up from her the habit of translating the second plural as "y'all" :-) You can of course do the same with Greek. For some reason I preferred "y'all" to the more Australian "youse."

"Of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren't?"

"My dear Doctor, they're all true."

"Even the lies?"

"Especially the lies."

What a beautiful use of technology to uphold someone's personhood, and let them know they are loved, despite (and with regard to) a profound injury.

This reminds me of a desire I've had for a long time: a simple, wall-mountable eInk device that could be configured with a URL (+wifi creds) and render a markdown file, refreshing once every hour or so. It would be so useful for so many applications – I'm a parish priest and so I could use it to let people know what events are on, if a service is cancelled, the current prayer list, ... the applications would be endless. I'd definitely pay a couple of hundred dollars per device for a solid version of such a thing, if it could be mounted and then recharged every month or two.

It's pretty heavily used in some on premises HPC contexts... used to run a large supermicro cluster which we would power down when not needed, which saved a fair amount of electricity (and by extension emissions and money.) It's quite solid.

The great thing about Australia/Eucla is that it’s not officially gazetted, and yet there are road signs informing travellers about it. I love that people just do it and everyone goes along