schwax

I was replying to a post claiming Bluesky is centralized, since it's not, really. Maybe I should have left Mastodon out of it :)

I think they're both good, but different tools for different jobs. Mastodon is good for tighter knit community. I think Bluesky has potential to be a decentralized replacement for social media with n >> dunbar's number.

The difference is in the protocol. Bluesky's atproto is IMO very clever and well designed. It's not every day I read something and think to myself, "I wish I'd thought of that!" I'd encourage anybody whose interest is piqued to dig in and read up.

I see why people might say it but "Bluesky is centralized" isn't an especially accurate criticism. The protocol allows essentially any aspect of Bluesky to be decentralized, up to and including starting a competing service that still interoperates with Bluesky users—no permission required.

IMO Bluesky (really atproto) is decentralized along the axes that matter, while Mastodon is decentralized along the axes that don't. It's sort of a figure-ground inversion in thinking about a social media protocol so I think a lot of the criticism is coming from people who haven't taken any time to understand it.

It's an open protocol, but more like the www than email. You can port your identity to another host at any time. You can self host if you want. You have complete control over how your chosen feed algorithm aggregates posts from the firehose. If you want to make a competing service to Bluesky you can even do that, and it will still interoperate with all the Bluesky users.

Whereas with Mastodon, when you pick an instance you're essentially picking which benevolent dictator you want mediating your experience. Mastodon is decentralized in the sense that it breaks the platform up into smaller fiefdoms; Bluesky is decentralized in the sense that you retain control over your own experience.

Some recommended reading on Bluesky/atproto:

https://bsky.app/profile/laurenshof.online/post/3la5j3qgqvo2...

https://fediversereport.com/a-conceptual-model-of-atproto-an...

https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

https://atproto.com/guides/faq

It's great the union was pushing for unscented cleaning supplies.

I have a friend who is very sensitive to scents. She may not be able to work in a typical office again because of it. I'm very sensitive to harsh fluorescent lighting and noisy office environments and get migraines. You can push through for a while but eventually you burn out.

We've also realized we're both "mildly" autistic [1] over the last few years, along with quite a few other software engineer friends. The sensory sensitivities fall under that umbrella.

Tech has traditionally been more accepting of neurodiversity than other careers, so it's great to see a tech union raising issue like this that don't cost much but make a big difference for anyone affected.

[1] Book: Unmasking Autism by Devon Price

Asterisk Mag had a really good look at the state of the research for/against plant-based protein diets

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/02/cows-vs-chemists-the-healt...

On the topic of objective curation, I've been appreciating The New Paper [1] enough that I started paying when they went subscription-only.

Top five or so stories of the day with a few lines of detail so you can understand what happened and why it's important, focusing on the actual events, not the narratives around them.

[1] https://thenewpaper.co/

That would be great to see.

Not exactly what you're describing, but here's where someone did a fairly detailed analysis of which federal, state, and local programs their salary goes to using a Sankey diagram:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/lkfjea/oc_...

https://www.alanarnette.com/blog/2021/01/16/winter-k2-update...

There are around 20 climbers aspiring to summit, and claim a winter K2 summit. Some have acclimatized to Camp 3 but most have only reached Camp 1. Some will end their effort based on today’s first summit, and citing rockfall danger, others will still retain their motivation. We’ll see what the final K2 winter 2020/21 total is in a few weeks.

Along similar lines, this list links to the best MOOC for each course in a core CS curriculum:

https://github.com/ossu/computer-science

Ben Thompson has a nuanced piece on this:

https://stratechery.com/2021/trump-and-twitter/

Apartment List did an interesting analysis examining how rent dropped this year as vacancy rates increased

https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/vacancies_and_rents_2...

Derek Lowe wrote a post this week on the "bradykinin hypothesis," and how it has been gaining traction as a unifying model that can explain many of the observed effects of infection, including sensitivity to vitamin D levels.

[1] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/09/08/br...

A question I'm asking myself is: "What would it take for anarchism to work?"

(See also: "What would it take for capitalism to work for everyone?")

Some ideas to consider:

1. @visakanv on assholes:

Assholes make up about 1% of most groups, cause about 75% of the damage, and ruin everybody’s experience. [1]

2. Dale Pendell on a long-term formulation of anarchism he calls "Horizon Anarchism":

I want to see the president, when it comes time to sign a bill, even if the bill may be necessary, to recognize—instead of being proud of every piece of legislation that’s passed—to recognize that it represents a failure of our collective social nature. And, instead of giving away all these pens with fanfare, he should light a stick of incense and say, “My fellow Americans, it is with deep regret that I must announce to you that, because we could not solve this problem on our own, we have had to enact another piece of legislation. Let us pray we can recover our senses and repeal it as soon as possible.” [2]

3. Another question to ask is "Why are some people willing to cooperate, but not others?"

Theories of developmental stages give us useful models to understand the prerequisites. What cultural, psychological, and physical needs must be meet?

I've found a good starting point in this area in Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux [3], which draws heavily on Ken Wilber's integral theory and other research on developmental stages that came before it [4].

[1] http://www.visakanv.com/blog/assholes/

[2] https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-055-horizon-anarchism/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcS04BI2sbk

[4] https://reinventingorganizationswiki.com/Developmental_Persp...

I agree. I've always been in the camp favoring freedom of speech and the marketplace of ideas. My thinking became more nuanced when I read the book Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tufekci [0].

Changes in technology alter the playing field for culture—and we've seen this in practice as the Internet and social networking have caused a fundamental shift in what it means to censor information. Censorship used to mean putting the newspaper under state control or blockading the radio station to prevent the message getting out.

Today it's much harder to censor a message by completely suppressing it. But it's also much easier to swamp the signal in noise, by flooding the communication channel with disinformation and distractions [1]. A group doesn't need to be large or powerful to muddle the truth of an issue, especially after accounting for the effects of filter bubbles and confirmation bias.

So to preserve the marketplace of ideas, we need more nuanced approaches in thinking about what communication is permitted. One approach that has been gaining support is in making a distinction between "freedom of speech" and "freedom and reach" [2].

[0] https://www.twitterandteargas.org/

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-n...

[2] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-is-not-the-same-as-f... .

The economist Paul Romer has done a lot of work on the idea of charter cities.

https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer

Anybody have a recommendation for an A/B testing service?

We've talked to Optimizely but their pricing was going to come in at the same ballpark as our AWS spend (into the six-figure range), which seems absurd. They charge based on monthly users, but a lot of our traffic consists of organic search bounces.

For now we just want to run ~5 experiments per month, want to record events server-side so we can be sure not to lose any, and are wary about implementing it ourselves since there are so many ways to screw it up without realizing it.

Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Garcia Martinez tells the author's story as his company is acquired by Twitter and he goes to work for Facebook. It's an really entertaining read and he includes a bunch of asides on how the Silicon Valley M&A pipelines work (or at least his perspective on how they work).

https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Monkeys-Obscene-Fortune-Failure...