mamborambo

There is an old joke about the difference between a service provider and a "service preventer". Often the difference is the type of power we allow them to have over the users.

There are many domains of modern society that serve specific service roles, that should never have been given over-reaching power to also monitor and judge outside of a court order, but they do.

Finance used to have secrecy but no anymore, tax is now open book. Transportation and mobility is checked and prechecked. Free speech is being eroded both by snowflakes and copyright trolls. The slippery slope has no boundary and rolls into an avalanche.

In fact human living is basically a type of operating system, as we all juggle on a daily basis tasks, resources, input/output, storage, cache, and states. The concept of dashboard is an essential operating system tool, and on a human scale it is basically your bank, tasks, calendar and inboxes. Plenty of "self improvement" concepts then translate neatly into operating system best practices, such as using FIFO or LIFO to manage allocations, planning ahead to break deadlock situations, managing parallelism, and JIT garbage collection etc.

I fully agree that physical aspects of libraries cannot be fully replicated with databases and searches.

Discovery indeed comes in many forms, sometimes by proximity, other times by serendipity, size of the book, even what sits on the recently returned racks.

In a similar sense, I mourn the death of printed phone books and yellow pages. And printed encyclopedia, dictionaries and atlases.

The loss of the physical formats removed forever, extremely interesting aspects of browsing and learning from these sources.

Japan is a unique world all to itself. Read up on how houses and streets are numbered and you will arrive at a similar chaos!

The Reddit situation reminds me a lot of the China situation:

"A major player, having built a near dominant position in the global flow chain, starts misbehaving. The entire world tries to de-risk by finding or bootstrapping alternatives."

A decade ago probably nobody thinks there is any chance China-derisking is doable, but from today's vantage point it is becoming more and more likely.

In the same way, there appears no easy alternative to Reddit right now, but never say never. Having planted the seed of distrust, an exodus from Reddit can happen anytime the critical mass is achieved.

Perhaps now is the right time to revamp Usenet to bring it up to par with the Reddit of today. I am also thinking that email / mail lists, forums, and even old protocols like finger and gopher are all worthy of upgrades, and these were all small parts of a true proven p2p, decentralized, self-hosted social networking environment and may even enjoy a new popularity, if developers work on modernizing them.

Last year my Samsung S20+ suffered the notorious "green vertical lines" and then soon after the "white out screens" (a pandemic-level hardware failure wave that has been widely reported), rendering it impossible to see clearly what is on the screen, even though everything else was still working.

Luckily because I was playing with scrcpy, I immediately knew it was my solution.

By using scrcpy to connect to a PC, I could still unlock the screen with my pattern or thumbprint, and when the app asks for passwords it is still possible to use the onscreen keyboard.

The only feeling being hurt is Xi Jinping's.

Two interesting points raised:

1) Can a metaverse "digital twin" really successfully preserve a nation's culture and civilization? Beyond just 3d maps and museum artefacts, this goal also needs to preserve languages, ethnic practices, food, music, literature, and a million other aspects of the civilization. Currently Hong Kong faces a similar dilemma of losing its distinct identity pre-1997, because of runaway CCP political-righteousness, and spawns a few efforts to digitally twin itself on the metaverse, but progress is extremely slow and unfocused.

2) Can a sovereign nation that loses its territory and hence becomes diasporic, still function as a government through the metaverse? Can it still collect taxes, issue passport, run embassies, defence, police, operate central bank, and license companies and industries? If yes, then it can solve a lot of the statelessness and displaced people problems of the world, where refugees live in a state of limbo without access to legal protection or right to make their own living.

No I mean the media-specific server app branching like pictures (pixelfed), music (funkwhale), live cast (owncast), video (peertube), links (Lemmy) etc.

How do a newbie to Fediverse sensibly choose the right instance to home on, when he has to decide what media type he publish in, at the time of server instance enrolment?

The "Twexit" event is a huge opportunity for Fediverse to pick up new users, but I fear it will be wasted because the Fediverse software is still not ready for prime time.

The concept of "instances", "federated feeds", "different software for different media types" are all complexities unnecessary for the newbies.

The consumer's dependence on "legit-sounding domain name", a green SSL key, and recognizable corporate logos and website layout as the "proof" of authenticity is passe.

In this era of online ubiquity there should be another layer of opt-in validation, ring of trust, p2p feedback and rating, that can all be plugged into the consumer web experience.

Although the rise of walled gardens was the biggest headwind to more people maintaining their personal websites, I think there is also a lot of issues arising from the underlying technologies of website building relative to the neophytes.

Imagine what an aspiring content creator (writer, photographer, artist, musician etc) needs to master and navigate in order to get his own social network website up: domain names, ssl, html css javascript, image editing, comments, categories and tags, rss, pings, moderating, email, mail lists, analytics, pagerank, seo, search, translate, etc. Each with different backends, different logins, different degree of tech knowledge required.

As walled gardens like FB and Myspace grew in capabilities, why didn't the blog platforms and website builders grow their design to simplify the onboarding as well? This is probably the result of venture money sucking all the best engineering talents away from the open source and free platforms..

I remember distinctly, in early 2000 trying to help a friend to create his own web site to be a museum of his life's work of writing. After trying to teach him all the underlying web infrastructures and technologies, he came to the conclusion he should just hire a web consultant.

Walled gardens simplified the chores of posting online, and they do a very good job for millions of non-techies. Without this huge step, we would have lost even more creative output from the past 20 years.

I see a parallel between Google's pseudo-customer service and totalitarian country's social order system. Both are theoretically based on clear terms and rules, but during execution can be completely opaque and non-intuitive. If you end up as the condemned party, you have no recourse to clear yourself, as the power is unbalanced and your elimination from their user base is just a minor issue. Invariably the users are driven to seek out backdoors and relationships and even unusual channels to resolve.

The fact is these types of information services are utilities, and they cannot be considered just a free market choice to use or provide service.

Super impressed. Amateurs can and do play their parts in science --- there are numerous discoveries made in astronomy, mathematics, and definitely in computer applied sciences that sprang from the minds of amateurs.