Even if towns had the infra money and political will (they usually don't), where's all this hypothetical infrastructure gonna go? Where I live, there's a main drag which is the ideal location for pedestrian infra, has all the shops, near the one (1) bus route we have. No sidewalks. No room to even put one in, without some massive eminent domain. Literally there are buildings in the way which would prevent any expansion.
cars go on it like 30 km/h cause it's so narrow. No need for any infrastructure.
If the road is wide enough for cars to go faster - it's wide enough to fit pavement (one side at least). Pavement can be very narrow too - 1 m is infinitely better than no pavement. I've even seen 0.5 m pavements but that's stretching it :)
If the road is so narrow you can't fit pavement there - it's probably safe already.
But I've seen roads in USA and I think you just have no comparison on what "no space" means.
BTW: There is work in progress to decentralize modern git based workflows by https://nlnet.nl/project/ForgeFed/ (paid for by the European Union), by decentralizing git not at the client level (which it obv. already has, but most people only use one origin), but also on the code forge level.
> they dont try just creating a mastodon instance but that would too cheap
Nothing there states it will NOT be a Mastodon or rather Fediverse/ActivityPub server. A likely outcome of this is, that their online video platforms will get ActivityPub support as explained here by Leonhard Dobusch, a member of the ZDF Board of Directors that approved this: https://chaos.social/@leonido/109829771565248856 (german)
But you cant start a project to explore Open Protocol options and pre-empt the outcome. The working group on this will figure out the best plan and it will likely be ActivityPub, because what else is there ?
> What a waste of public money.
You have very strong feelings about something you don't seem to know much about.
> Public media in Germany also has a very strong left bias.
*Educated people have a strong left bias.
Also your first link bases this on a poll of "Volontariat" journalist, meaning journalists in the beginning of their career, meaning young people. Congratulations for proving: Young people tend to be leftists. Applause for this groundbreaking discovery.
> The end result seems like it will be no different than Mastodon and email protocol, where a few central players own the majority of the namespace and network effects prevent most users from having full custody & portability of their accounts.
You are correct about Email, but Mastodon ? Instance diversity is alive and well.
People don't choose Mastodon servers by the number of users that are already on it, but by what domain name they would like to have in their identity name.
People join the community they identify with ignoring "network effects".
Instance diversity in Mastodon is that ~2M users or 70% of the network chooses one of 5 main servers. If your account is @foo@service.com and service.com goes in an undesirable direction (it shuts down, or is bought out by a billionaire, or turns on ads or paid subscription) you may be forced to switch to another platform like @foo@alt-service.com. This requires that the service.com continually upholds and honours your redirect, which is to say that your account name was never portable across different and incompatible services to begin with.
Network effects dictates that most of the time you will just stick to the same domain you signed up with, because you don't want to lose all your DMs and posts, and you don't want to start over again with a new name.
Two of the three pillars highlighted on the atproto.com homepage – portable accounts, and algorithmic choice – would require significant retrofitting counter to ActivityPub server customs to achieve.
(And the third, "federated social", is arguably an area that at-proto is erring by staying too close to the ActivityPub approach. We know what happens to 'federated' systems under network-economics: they trend toward semi-feudalism.)
But the fediverse doesn't use any algorithms, it just shows you what/who you subscribe to. This is the way social media should be. If I don't want to see something or someone I can just block them.
It's only gone downhill since the sites started adding algorithmic crap and filtering things out to increase 'engagement'. This made facebook totally useless for me to keep in touch with my friends.
Portable accounts are indeed important and a big thing missing from ActivityPub, I agree there.
But I'm completely over to IM now to keep in touch with friends. Social Media has invalidated its own usecase for me.
The fact they even felt the need to create another protocol instead of using, improving and contributing to ActivityPub makes me think they want to bake a busines modell for themselves into the technology and they can't do that if they don't have full control over the spec.
ActivityPub is organically grown from a community to serve that community.
Bluesky is created to combine making the profits of a commercial centralized social network + profiting from the investment from crypto bros.
ActivityPub is not perfect and nobody is pretending like it is (there is a big blog post from the co-author about what retrospectively they should have done differently, sadly I couldn't find the link), but a specification is not static !
If you have a suggestion to improve it you can propose changes and a lot of things are left to the implementation, so you can just do things differently than other ActivityPub application currently do.
In fact there are people building the future of the ActivityPub ecosystem right now: https://spritely.institute/
There is no need to create yet another specification.
The only feature this claims to have, that all ActivityPub implementations currently don't have is identity portability and that can actually be implemented without changes to the ActivityPub spec, just no ActivityPub Application has implemented it yet.
'The specification may be terrible, and everything good about it may be implementation-specific, and every touted feature you're looking for may be missing from the only implementations anyone uses, but you can always just break compatibility from all the de facto standards, and so that's no reason to come up with your own base standard' seems flatly wrong, and that actually is a pretty great reason to come up with your own base standard. IRC beat the 'the standard is just fine as it is' drum for many years, and they were so amazingly correct that basically all IRC communities jumped ship to Discord within the span of a few years.
Not to mention nobody uses Mastodon either. Who should Jack be trying to placate, exactly? The extremely few people who were so fed up with Twitter that they left for Mastodon, are they eager to finally start federating with Twitter?
The choices aren't "just break compatibility with all de facto standards" and "come up with your own base standard". You can work on an extension to the protocol that everyone can adopt and move to if it's really an improvement.
> The extremely few people who were so fed up with Twitter that they left for Mastodon, are they eager to finally start federating with Twitter?
I never was on Twitter, but I am a Mastodon and Pixelfed user. I have zero interest in the cesspool that is Twitter joining the Fediverse and if they did I would probably instance block them.
This is about standards and my suspicion, that they want to keep all the control and profits, but now want to call it federated.
> The specification may be terrible
Have you read it ? I haven't, but it is working pretty well for the Fediverse.
And once again: Standards aren't static, if you actually have a concrete problem with the standard instead of a gut feeling, that "it just sucks, don't ask about the details", then formulate it and bring it up to the creators of the spec or try to fix it yourself.
> IRC beat the 'the standard is just fine as it is' drum for many years
Well maybe that is the difference between IRC and ActivityPub. Nobody on the ActivityPub side is delusional enough to think the standard is perfect.
There can pretty much by definition never be a perfect standard. There will always be use-cases that were not thought of during the creation. The solution is not to create one standard after the next, it is to improve existing ones. 1000 Standards are as useful as no standard.
Well there is an IRCv3, so it is evolving. And honestly Slack/Discord don't bring that much IMO, at least for the cost of running on a damn ElectronJS app in a proprietary system. All that for what? Reactions to messages?
The fact is that average users don't make any considerations about privacy/freedom/technical merit: they just jump on whatever is used by their own contacts. Nobody is using Mastodon because nobody is using Mastodon. It feels like one solution to that would be marketing. And given who is behind ATProto, they may have a shot at convincing many people to use their new shiny app.
the gp is not saying discord is a better protocol, they’re saying 1) no one cares about activitypub as a protocol because it has one de facto implementation that deviates from the protocol and 2) making something new is easier when the goal is making something people actually use
the appropriate place to develop protocols is within IETF, W3C, or other open groups which I'm absolutely sure Twitter could have played a role within.
Kind of discouraging to see this PBLLC doing things their own way.
Apple is working with several games developers to get more games on Mac, although that could just be a way for them to boast how powerful their mobile-GPU-turned-desktop-GPU is.
No, they have warned about a situation like we have it now for decades and were ignored by the conservatives and social democrats for the last 16 years.
They were right all along and are now the ones fixing the situation, after only recently being voted into government.
The polls show:
The two most popular politicians in germany are both greens.
They are the second biggest party in current polls with 22%, 6% behind the biggest party.
In the polls they are the biggest party in the current government (when the current term started a few months ago they were the second biggest party in the current government)
Things are going great for them and there are no signs of that changing.
This is bullsht and i made an account just to tell you why:
- Large parts of the Uranium are coming from Russia
- Nuclear power is not competitive and nuclear power is very expensive (especially if you conside the costs the government will be left holding the bag on, becuase nuclear power plant companies will spin off their power plants to new companies to go bankrupt once the profiting is done and the cleaning up the nuclear remains starts), no matter how much the pro-nuclear people want to lie about it
- Nuclear power is statistically not dangerous compared to fossil fuels, but not compared to renewables.
- The world's uranium supply is running out. Already since the late 1980s, uranium mines have been unable to meet the world's annual demand. The nuclear industry has so far filled the fuel gap with material from military and civilian stockpiles.
- Nuclear waste is a problem no country except Finnland is anywhere near solving. Germany has been trying to find a permanent nuclear waste storage location since 1999 and have not come closer to finding one since then, because every time the current favorites are revealed the "not in my backyard" screeching starts and local politicials force a restart of the search.
- Many of the world's nuclear power plants are old, because hardly any new ones have been built in ages, because ...
- The construction of nuclear power plants is unbelievably expensive and takes decades, and much of the know-how on how to build nuclear power plants has been lost in europe over the past decades because so few are being built, which drives up the costs even further.
- We still have 7 years of CO2 budget in Germany, so why do some politicians talk about building new ones, although they would only be finished in 20 years at the earliest (and we in DE can't even get the berlin airport built in anything close to the deadline, how long does a nuclear power plant take then ?)
- Budgets for nuclear power plants take budget away from renewables
- We have to change from a centralised to a decentralised grid, nuclear power is a step in the wrong direction
- Nuclear power plants make us dependent on dictators
- Climate change has an impact on reactor operations. With global warming, extreme weather events are on the rise. Unlike renewables, however, nuclear power plants are not adaptable. Rather, their danger increases in our changing climatic conditions.
- Our neighbour france has heavily invested in nuclear power and is is a complete shtshow. There are constant headline to the extend of "Low temperatures caused another french nuclear power plant to go off the grid, worsening the skyrocketing energy prices in france" (The same with "too high temperatures" any many other reasons). Even before the war they had an energy shortage.
The 3 remaining nuclear power plants in germany are:
- Emsland (1335 MW)
- Isar/Ohu 2 (1410 MW)
- Neckarwestheim 2 (1310 MW)
All three are pressurised water reactors and thus not as bad as boiling water reactors, but total rubbish compared to liquid salt reactors.
Moreover, all three have been in operation for over 30 years and all three are due for a "periodic safety review" (every 10 years), which was allowed to be ignored during their last 3 years of operation due to a "grace period under the Atomic Energy Act".
If they were allowed to continue running, the operation time extension of the of all three would start with at least one month downtime, because these inspections would have to be started again. These inspections would most likely also reveal necessary repairs, wich would further delay the timeframe.
By the way, all three power plants have not been employing new staff for some time because they knew the would soon be shut down soon anyway.
In short: these nuclear power plants have been preparing for their shutdown since 2011 and have let everything slide over the last few years because everything will soon be demolished anyway. There are not the necessary fuel rods, not the necessary personnel, not the necessary will of the operating companies and no safety checks that would be necessary for continued operation.
Also: Merkel decided in 2011 (one day after the nuclear power plant disaster in Fukushima) to not allow nuclear power after the 31.12.2022. Merkel, famously in the green party . (for anybody with no clue about german politics: Merkel is in the conservative party)
The conservative opposition needs things to disagree on with the government, the current government had no scandals so far and the conservatives are still salty for being voted out of government, so they just make sh*t up and currently that is the myth of our magical saviour nuclear power.
A nuclear reactor can be built in three years, though admittedly this hasn't happened in Europe. They are mostly (85%) built in under ten years. Figure 3 shows we should expect around 5 years. https://euanmearns.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nucl...
>- Large parts of the Uranium are coming from Russia
Not immutable. There are other sources that are much friendlier
>- Nuclear power is not competitive and nuclear power is very expensive (especially if you conside the costs the government will be left holding the bag on, becuase nuclear power plant companies will spin off their power plants to new companies to go bankrupt once the profiting is done and the cleaning up the nuclear remains starts), no matter how much the pro-nuclear people want to lie about it
I doubt this hyperbolic assertion. Prove it.
>- Nuclear power is statistically not dangerous compared to fossil fuels, but not compared to renewables.
Again, prove it. This is unsupported, and in fact from what I've seen, false. So provide some evidence.
>- The world's uranium supply is running out. Already since the late 1980s, uranium mines have been unable to meet the world's annual demand. The nuclear industry has so far filled the fuel gap with material from military and civilian stockpiles.
This is again, an unsourced claim. In fact, a quick google shows: "There is not now, nor has there even been a shortage of uranium. Fear about reliability of the supply of uranium has been used in the past as an excuse to get something else done." Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/llewellynking/2020/06/08/uraniu...
>- Nuclear waste is a problem no country except Finnland is anywhere near solving. Germany has been trying to find a permanent nuclear waste storage location since 1999 and have not come closer to finding one since then, because every time the current favorites are revealed the "not in my backyard" screeching starts and local politicials force a restart of the search.
I agree this is a problem, but it isn't one that is unsolvable. It's a cultural issue, not a physical one.
>- Many of the world's nuclear power plants are old, because hardly any new ones have been built in ages, because ...
>- The construction of nuclear power plants is unbelievably expensive and takes decades, and much of the know-how on how to build nuclear power plants has been lost in europe over the past decades because so few are being built, which drives up the costs even further.
This isn't inherent, it can change, especially with political need.
>- We still have 7 years of CO2 budget in Germany, so why do some politicians talk about building new ones, although they would only be finished in 20 years at the earliest (and we in DE can't even get the berlin airport built in anything close to the deadline, how long does a nuclear power plant take then ?)
CO2 budgets are now irrelevant currently. China and Russia do not give a shit about CO2 emissions; their energy and GDP are heavily dependent on them. Globalization was the only mechanism that allowed the world to enforce these two countries to behave with emissions, and with the ongoing breakdown of the globalized system, there's no reason they'll reduce emissions. Why cripple Germany's economy to meet a target that the world's largest emitters aren't willing to get anywhere close to?
>- Budgets for nuclear power plants take budget away from renewables
Possible, but renewables have their own downsides, which are well articulated everywhere.
>- We have to change from a centralised to a decentralised grid, nuclear power is a step in the wrong direction
Why?
>- Nuclear power plants make us dependent on dictators
>- Climate change has an impact on reactor operations. With global warming, extreme weather events are on the rise. Unlike renewables, however, nuclear power plants are not adaptable. Rather, their danger increases in our changing climatic conditions.
This makes sense, but I'd suggest that it's probably possible to take this into reactor design.
>- Our neighbour france has heavily invested in nuclear power and is is a complete shtshow.
Source on this, I don't know much about it. I've heard only good things about France's nuclear program.
I agree this is a problem too, and this is why people point out there is also a physical issue which transcends culture.
In terms of radioactive properties remaining over a period of millennia during which a culture can be expected to have lost its identity, or been forgotten completely.
If the problem is not truly unsolvable, a permanent solution may still not be possible without close co-operation with a future sympathetic culture.
Cars are plain worse. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-transport-mode
> anti car bias on HN
I more worry worried about the anti smashing your fingers with a hammer bias on HN
> It's an empathy gap
It is an infrastructure spending gap.