Libya after the flood. It’s like a piece has been cut out with a very large scalpel.

The most significant news in #Apple 's event today wasn't iPhone or such, right? They didn't say many exciting things there other than that some Silicon structures on their new chip are only 12 atoms wide. But instead the news was that they want to be #carbon #neutral across the entire company and all of their products in 7 years. That sounds extremely unlikely to me. But then, 12 atoms wide also sounds extremely unlikely to me. What do you make of this?

Thinking of the beautiful tour we got of the abandoned Kasbah in the beautiful Atlas Mountains by the most friendly self appointed tour guide ever. Not far from the center of today’s #earthquake in #morocco.

Linked from my site's moderators,: making sense of interaction and discussion patterns, healthy and unhealthy ones. I like this a lot!

XXIIVV

discourse

By Devine Lu Linvega

Russia is resurrecting Stalin as a positive figure.

The Special Ideological Operation Going According To Plan

Andrei Kolesnikov writes about the ideological foundation of the Putin regime, the most important part of which is the destruction of the memory of...

374 automated tests pass. Phheeewww. Time to cook dinner. How's homemade spaghetti with homegrown zucchini? Sorry, it's a closed family event.

#threads is beginning to do some new stuff that I hadn't seen anywhere, neither in Twitter nor Mastodon nor anywhere else. Like this: sort posts by engagement.

Threads

Tom Bender (@tb_99999) on Threads

on mobile, we're rolling out a richer view of post activity. tap the like count on any post to see quotes and reposts. this will also be on w...

(Now you may not care about this feature. My point being is that they are innovating and going beyond the Twitter baseline, which in many ways, Mastodon is shooting for.) How do *we* innovate in the Fediverse? Driven by user wants or delight? (I don't think I have access to it yet; rolling deployment I guess)

What’s the fediverse app closest to what Usenet was in its prime? I remember hierarchical discussion trees with unread message nodes in the tree in bold. I think.

Occasionally, you pull back the curtain just a tiny bit and it's still the medieval ages. Like that apparently, there is exactly 1 computer science prof at a top-5 IITs in India who is from the lower 40-45% castes. And this one, in Toronto, felt the need to hide his caste until he was granted tenure.

On (My) Caste

The mind boggles. P.S. I know it's not "occasionally", unfortunately, and of course not limited to India-related issues.

The world is not lost yet. USENET is back!!

USENET, the original social network, is under new management

Alive and still quite vigorous considering its age

Amazon claims that air filters of sizes 10x20 and 20x20 and 30x20 are frequently bought together. I am prepared to seriously doubt that. How many different-sized furnaces do people have? Which means that the "frequently bought together" phrase is bunk. There may be something that's "frequently together", like they showed up in search together, but "bought" it ain't. (And if it is search, their product categorization is seriously flawed, too)

The smoke season is finally upon us. Couldn't see the hills around the Bay today from the car. The graph backs this up.

If the water rises by 9 feet in 2 hours … https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=tae&gage=stif1

What do you all think we do here in the #fediverse? Is it “#social #media”? (It doesn’t sound quite right to me: I post “media” only rarely) Is it “social #networking”? (Not sure, it’s different from offline networking, and I feel networked already even without the fediverse) I’ve been playing with the term “social #communications”: I’m here to communicate with you all, but not 1-on-1, but socially, where everybody else can overhear what’s being said. What to you think of the term?

I hear there are a few minor fires in Canada this year … maybe not!!!

Just remembering a quote by a college professor from a long time ago. Something like: “Some people have a mental horizon of radius zero, and that they call their point of view.”

Here's an interesting question. To me, anyway :-) As the #fediverse grows, and an ever-broader set of apps talks #ActivityPub and extensions to #ActivityPub, how do we ensure that the overall architecture of the system remains consistent? Example from the past: WebDAV used HTTP extensibility as it was intended, but arguably they deviated from the architectural principles. (A consequence: it remains a niche and many apps that could've used it don't) Who else is worrying about things like that?

They have given up, and it’s not just Elon. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/08/25/political-conspiracies-facebook-youtube-elon-musk/

SQL must be one of the largest time sinks ever invented for software developers. Whatever you want to do, it feels like you have bring a Rube Goldberg machine to pick up a pebble.