local newspaper with an online version. You can then use the online version to try to use to hook the people into some alternative online platform for the community (a mailing list, a forum, something more advanced)
The amazing thing about QuakeLive is that it initially ran in a browser window. I'm not sure how it was implemented, but it was amazing and it supported Mac and Linux as well. I wonder why they then decided to make it into a Windows only desktop app.. :-(
> The amazing thing about QuakeLive is that it initially ran in a browser window.
The performance was complete dogshit. Just simply awful. I had modern hardware at the time which ran both the original Q3A and ioquake3 at hundreds of fps if uncapped but QuakeLive in browser burned my computer up for sub-60 fps even with the graphics turned down. Unplayable. Not to mention they dropped Linux support. QuakeLive made me quit playing Quake. If I sound bitter about it now, you should have heard me then.
The reason I use python scripts instead of spreadsheets for important calculations is that I can unit test the logic extensively and be sure that the code works as expected. This also makes sure I don't break stuff when adding functionalities / refactoring code.
I would never ever use Excel for something important, unless it's completely trivial (e.g., sum/average values of a column).
I assume the same applies to R vs spreadhseets, of course.
what do you use for syntax highlighting? I have tried a few options but can't quite get what I need. I like url hiding (or is it called folding?) that VimWiki does for md files, but I hate that VimWiki's does not really follow the md standard
> Last I read the UK intends to centrally retain proximity-contact data for 20 years. Rather than deleting when it is decided it's no longer needed to deal with the pandemic.
The UK has also refused to legally commit to not sharing the data with other government departments such as the Home Office (immigration and policing) and DWP (benefits).
that's scary..
any chance you can share the references for these?
"Immigration Bill brings surveillance to EU migrants" (This is about exemptions to data protection law for immigration purposes, which affects citizens and non-citizens alike.)
> People don't like being tracked and Facebook has a long history of being deceptive around how and when it tracks people.
you are mixing unrelated things. As an employee of a company it's unlikely you can raise any concern about your privacy when working on the company's main asset.
> Facebook also has a long history of selling the data it collects as a result of tracking even when the people being tracked try as they might to opt out.
Not OP, but I'm also not sure how OP will provide a decent reference of constantly moving goalposts of privacy wrt to privacy implications of the Facebook platform. The default has always been towards public and noisy, even as Facebook has been forced to mature and realize there were privacy implications about things they were doing by default on the platform.
Despite a culture of "move fast and break things," things have never been broken from new more restrictive default privacy settings. Users who signed up in 2005 would still be an open book by default today.
My point was to elaborate on how some other user might feel that Facebook represent a big brother type actor.
However, you have suggested that there is or should be no privacy when doing development, but I'll remind you that not all devs work in large corporate environments and even when they do, they might reasonably expect to be watched only by their employer. It is frankly not 100% clear that Facebook will never have access to telemetry as a result of "improving" this set of plugins. They certainly did not suggest as much.
In my opinion, there is a dramatic difference between what my employer may or may not do to track me and what a 3rd party social media company may or may not do to track my development practices as a result of using a plugin.
While semantically I may have overstated that Facebook "sells" data, they unquestionably considered doing so between 2012 and 2014 despite promises made to the contrary. They also unquestionably shared data with other large data aggregators. Even if USD did not change hands I think we can be fairly certain that Facebook bartered in user data.
Unrelated? How? It's Facebook. They have shown a repeated assualt and disavowement of social responsibility. I wouldn't expect Exon mobile to do very nice things in non oil contexts. Are you saying you would?
Reference? Where have you been? Cambridge analytica? It's advertising arms? It's all selling user data either directly or indirectly. Don't be so naive.
very sorry to hear that. Debit cards are convenient etc, but they don't offer much in terms of fraud protection. The general suggestion is to always use a credit card instead so that you don't expose your own money to theft, but the bank's.
I remember I accidentally come to know about Masters of Doom which got me interested in Game Programming. Googling around I found a number of interesting articles such as "1500 archers on a 28.8: Network programming in Age of Empires and beyond", and I eventually stumbled upon Fabien Sanglard's site. The guy is great and I waited eagerly for the release of his book (hopefully the first of a long series) :)
what leaves me skeptic about these kind of alternative services like GNUSocial and Diaspora is not much when, if ever, or how they will be able to attract the necessary critical mass of users that makes them relevant. Instead, it what would happen after that. The main two questions I would be interested in would be:
(1) do they scale to the size of, say, Twitter (~400M Daily Active Users, Facebook ~1B DAU)?
(2) what would be their business model?
The thing is.. hypothetically GNUSocial is very nice. It's free software, it's an open protocol, you are supposedly in perfect control of your personal data. In theory, there's no reason not to prefer it to the current state of things (if only you could make it appealing to your grandma or 14 years-old cousin).
However, when, for instance, the Justin Biebers, the Lady Gagas, the Obamas join it together with their hundreds of millions of followers, or simply when the tweets per minute reach hundreds of thousand or even millions, can the GNUSocial protocol ensure a reliable and responsive (~ real time) service? And if it does, what's the maintenance and hardware cost for the confederations? And how are they supposed to financially cover for it?
Sure, there are services based on open protocols that have been extremely successful at scaling (e.g., email, or bittorrent), still, they have different requirements than a social network. Can we make an open social network of independent confederations scale? Probably yes, but whether GNUSocial is ready for it or not is an open question (as far as I know..).
In any case, take the example of the email. The protocol is open, there's a "confederation" of independent providers taking part to it. It handles a massive amount of data every day. You don't even have necessarily to store your data on a cloud server. That's great.
Still, at the end of the day everyone uses free mail services (GMail, Yahoo, you name it), heavily maintained by hundreds/thousands of dedicated (and skilled, and expensive) engineers, storing gigabytes of your data (backed up and redundantly replicated over different geographical areas), and financing themselves using targeted advertising. Sure, you can pay your own, trusted, mail provider an annual fee and have (apparently?) complete control over your data. But how many people actually use these services outside of the work environment (where your employer actually covers the cost)? And I'm not talking about the community of hackernews readers. I'm talking about your non-techy friends, your relatives, the random guy/gal you meet at the pub, that is, the people that ultimately are necessary for your service to reach a critical mass.
I think the world needs more intelligent folks like yourself who have a healthy amount of skepticism. I myself actually consider myself a proponent of these decentralized social networks, and I'm placing plenty of faith on these open networks...Though i don't go in blindly assuming the entire world will eventually adopt these. For me, if i can get my family and friends at least interacting with me - whether through my network or through a pass-through between the 2 systems - that's enough for me. Much like your email example i agree that most will use some free offering because of ease of use, etc. However, there are folks like myself who do wish to host our own...but the expectation - much like email - is to ensure interaction is as seamless as possible between the proprietary and the open networks. I use Gnu Social for now...my hope is that if this stack (Gnu social) fails, i hope it fails fast, just so that the next evolution - whatever that open platform might be - could iterate and progress faster, again with the goal of ease of use/implementation, more seamless integration (between networks), etc.
"together with their hundreds of millions of followers"
For no particular reason I can determine, we've temporarily merged the cultural / social automation technology for personal friendships with fanboy relationships with social status signalling. Future systems are unlikely to be identical clones of past systems.
This seems usable for personal relationships. Quite possibly automation for fanboy relationships might be a totally different service and technology. Maybe in the future people won't do geolocated at all. Or maybe status signalling will go out of style in the larger culture.
Sometimes coincidences don't matter.
The rest of your argument is the eternal wheel of IT which never stops rotating between centralization and distribution. Much as we had mainframes in the past and have centralized social media today, the wheel will rotate thru yet another decentralized phase soon enough. It never stops rolling.
I think GNU Social should be pretty scalable, and that's because it's not a centralized paradigm with all users in one titanic database. Currently I'm running my own instance (one user on the server) and then federating with the rest, so that kind of setup should be scalable to the size of the web.
I posted requests to my Twitter, FB, and G+ accounts for people following me there to also follow me on my GNU Social account - it seems to be working because I just made a bunch of new GNU Social connections in the last hour.
