A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing
!learningrustandlemmy@lemmy.ml
It’s for learning rust (the programming language) and the lemmy code base itself as a sort of “reading club”. If you’re the type of person who might be interested there’s a good chance you’ve heard of it already. We’re currently working through The Book (conventional learning resource) through a couple of Twitch streams and regular posts/discussions.
More collaborative learning activity is plenty welcome!
This is one of my favourite things!
I’ve walked most of it (though I couldn’t find Saturn for some reason … I suspect it was stolen).
And yea … it’s a ridiculously effective demonstration of how hard it is to comprehend big numbers. I knew these numbers, or had read them before hand, and thought about them … but seeing it all to scale was kinda devastating … like the distances between the outer planets are huuuge … you get tired walking them even though the planets are 5cms wide.
And yea, the proxima centauri thing is a very nice touch!
I believe you … gate-keeping types are all over the place really.
But vegans or the “vegan-curious” aren’t one thing or one kind of person, at least not any more. I personally have only ever had positive conversations with vegan types.
This instance, in being insistent on not entertaining any “harm reduction” or “compromises”, makes sense though … because it’s a space for people to talk about that sort of dedicated approach.
they drive away potential allies because the concept of harm reduction is anathema to their binary thinking. If you’re not ALL in, you’re the enemy.
I can resonate with that. But I come back to … “it’s totally ok for people to create their own spaces, especially on federated social media and especially for minority groups/ideas”.
There are likely plenty of other spaces for “potential allies” to engage and talk about veganism if they want to, or plenty they, or you, could make on their own.
Tacitly admitting that vegans are usually antisocial zealots. “It’s right in the name!”
Well, they’re running their own social media platform, so I’m not sure how anti-social they are.
Right. Well, I think the instance name “vegantheory.org” was doing that already, and I’m betting you drew your conclusion from the public description of the place too (and aren’t in the modlog or anything for challenging their ideas).
And what would a non-vegan want to do in there?
What’s wrong with minority views and practices creating their own spaces?
On which, is there any non-vegan/anti-vegan thought or idea that a vegan is likely to have not heard already? How many haven’t they heard relative to the amount of decent “pro-vegan” ideas they also haven’t heard of?
Maybe a specialised space, echo chamber even, makes sense in order to balance against the gravity of the mainstream?
I’ve peaked at that issue a couple of times, but I never worked out what the issue/feature got stuck on. Naively I would have thought it a relatively workable feature to add.
I suspect the basilisk reveals more about how the human mind is inclined to think up of heaven and hell scenarios.
Some combination of consciousness leading to more imagination than we know what to do with and more awareness than we’re ready to grapple with. And so there are these meme “attractors” where imagination, idealism, dread and motivation all converge to make some basic vibe of a thought irresistible.
Otherwise, just because I’m not on top of this … the whole thing is premised on the idea that we’re likely to be consciousnesses in a simulation? And then there’s the fear that our consciousnesses, now, will be extracted in the future somehow?
At this point, doesn’t the whole collapse completely into a scary fairy tale you’d tell tech-bro children? Seriously, I don’t get it?
The problems are wider than that. Besides, relying “individuals just doing the right thing and going a little further to do so” is, IMO, a trap. Fix the system instead. The little thing everyone can do is think about the system and realise it needs fixing.
I’m sympathetic, but to a limit.
There are a lot of academics out there with a good amount of clout and who are relatively safe. I don’t think I’ve heard of anything remotely worthy on these topics from any researcher with clout, publicly at least. Even privately (I used to be in academia), my feeling was most don’t even know how to think and talk about it, in large part because I don’t think they do think and talk about it all.
And that’s because most academics are frankly shit at thinking and engaging on collective and systematic issues. Many just do not want to, and instead want to embrace the whole “I live and work in an ideal white tower disconnected from society because what I do is bigger than society”. Many get their dopamine kicks from the publication system and don’t think about how that’s not a good thing. Seriously, they don’t deserve as much sympathy as you might think … academia can be a surprisingly childish place. That the publication system came to be at all is proof of that frankly, where they were all duped by someone feeding them ego-dopamine hits. It’s honestly kinda sad.
Yep. But that is all a part of the problem. If academics can’t organise themselves enough to have some influence over something which is basically owned and run them already (they write the papers and then review the papers and then are the ones reading and citing the papers and caring the most about the quality and popularity of the papers) … then they can’t be trusted to ensure the quality of their practice and institutions going forward, especially under the ever increasing encroachment of capitalistic forces.
Modern day academics are damn well lucky that they inherited a system and culture that developed some old aristocratic ideals into a set of conventions and practices!
Yea, academics need to just shut the publication system down. The more they keep pandering to it the more they look like fools.
Youre right about lemmy-ui, unfortunately it doesnt have enough contributors. I dont know why that is, you’d think a project written in a popular language like Typescript would easily find contributors.
Random thoughts:
More generally:
Absolutely!
The bit I’m conceptually stuck on (not know much at all about how a good plugin architecture would work) is how a plugin can surface or affect the UI, especially in an ecosystem with multiple UIs/Apps/Frontends, and, a federated ecosystem at that.
Given the apps, I figure it’s not possible without a convention of plugins providing APIs which apps can then implement against when available, which adds a good amount of complexity but should be viable for popular/useful plugins. Though, tangentially, this does affirm for me that the whole native mobile app expectation is a bit of a trap for a social system like the fedi (as webUIs are naturally more universal and maleable).
So, for immediate results, I can see only two options:
Is there something I’m missing about how a plugin system could work?
I hear you for sure on this.
I personally appreciate the push the core devs make for a “less demanding” relationship between users and open source devs. I think they have a point and it’s good for long term sustainability and I’ll probably find myself defending it.
But I like you’re framing, and in retrospect it seems (as is usually the case) that some people organising was what was missing just to get everyone helping each out as much and efficiently as possible. While any member of the community can (and should) do that, at some point it makes sense for the core devs to take on a task like that, I agree.
Should there be something like a lemmy admin’s community for talking about the ins and outs of running a lemmy instance? Something like that over time can be some sort of band-aid for missing documentation (it’s searchable etc).
I’m aware that there’s the matrix room and a lemmy support community … but maybe just opening things up to any chat about hosting lemmy in one place could actually help (in part because you can easily search specifically within one community).
but we’re at a critical point right now. It’s no longer software that is just fun side projects and building stuff that looks cool, it has some real issues now that it has a real userbase. I’m definitely one to say “But it’s FOSS, and other people can pick up and submit a PR” - but it also says something when the head devs just completely ignore a massively huge issue with it.
This is a general issue I think, not just for lemmy but the whole fediverse (whatever one’s opinions might be on particular priorities).
It’s all non-profit and being run and built at a much smaller scale than many users would appreciate (I think). Sure there are plenty of people here, but not that many. Combined with no obvious revenue streams, such as ads or subscription fees, there really is only so much that can be done. Some time last year even the Mastodon team (by far the most successful fediverse platform) admitted that they didn’t have the capacity to work on new things for a while … they were just busy keeping things running. And they are (apparently) notorious at being slow to ship new features. Meanwhile platforms like firefish just straight up died last year.
So yea, it might be a critical point, for sure. But putting more on the core dev teams may not be the answer for the simple reason that it’s just not viable in the long run.
If we enjoy the bigger community focus and open and non-profit organisations that makeup the fediverse, the “answer” at this critical point might be to find a way to give back somehow … to organise, build communities, run fund-raising campaigns, think of ideas for more sustainable funding, find devs who can help etc etc. It’s perhaps onerous and annoying, even to read perhaps … but this is likely the tradeoff we have to make for a place like this.
The introduction of a plugin system seems interesting here, though it’s still alpha and basically looking for feedback from would-be plugin developers
AFAICT, there’s no established way for a plugin to surface affect the UI, which would be a somewhat unwieldy problem anyway due to the apps and frontends ecosystem. Probably the best path for any plugin that provides a UI would be to have a system for aggregating links to plugin UIs.
With something like that in place, plugins and other services that just use the DB/API, could really go a long way to filling these holes, if they haven’t already.
So it seems that the work needed here is perhaps “distribution” work … where there’s a more “plug and play” Lemmy distribution with plugins etc bundled?
The internet cannot fit so much awesomeness … JFC that was awesome!
Yea anything big and mainstream just seems super shallow.
I’m not on top of things to compare accurately, but it was always kinda like that (and is like that here sometimes too). But whenever I’ve gone back, I’ve definitely felt like it has gotten somewhat worse. Some of that could easily be a shifting standard from spending more time on other less “mainstream” platforms though.