I think those investing efforts and time developing participatory democracy systems, are trying to solve these kind of communication and reasoning problems.
I'd like to work on something like these, and I didn't know about them--thanks for sharing.
But I don't think the web has the right structure for an app like this. (Decidim seems to be a web app. It's hard to find information about this "Open Insight" thing they're talking about, presumably it is too?)
If you're using the web, somebody controls the server and the others have to trust that person to not abuse their role. It's not exactly primed for democracy.
Blockchains aren't quite right either. You solve the untrustworthy admin problem but you've got this really strong notion of THE official record, which only some people are going to have the ability to update, and that will be used by the powerful at the expense of the weak.
Whatever the right structure is, I think it's partition tolerant. Any party needs to be able to disconnect themselves from any other party such that:
- everything not reliant on that trust edge still works (the web would struggle with this)
- the untrusted party has no ability to censor the revoker, even if they're well trusted by the others (blockchains will struggle with this)
I've been tossing around ideas for what the ideal protocol would look like. SSB is the closest thing I can think of to compare it to, but nothing about it feels very solid yet.
Have you heard of Veilid? It’s sort of envisioned as a framework for building encrypted distributed/federated apps. It’s early days and in active development, but the idea and goals of it remind me of the issues you raised.
Veilid, yes, willow, no. Thanks for pointing that out, I'll read up on it
I'm starting with something that's familiar but not structurally aligned with what I want to do (git+ssh). I intend to make the "backend" pluggable so I can use the same app to evaluate different distributed frameworks (Veilid, IPFS/Ceramic, IPFS/OrbitDB, Holepunch, IPv8, ...)
Otherwise I'll just spend my life tinkering with distributed frameworks and never end up with a distributed app.
You're welcome and I'm glad you appreciated.
Also, thank you for your insights.
About "Open Insight", I think it's not so open at the moment, since I couldn't find any kind of code repository. Maybe it is at an early design phase.
Decidim.org is made with Ruby on Rails (good for fast prototyping, but a questionable choice for a critical system, IMHO).
IMHO the advancements in technology related with industries in which the end product is digital (movies, animation, texts, programs, etc.,) instead of fundamental spatial services like automation of food productions, cleaning, garbage collection, house building, etc., is a direct consequence of physical space being a luxury around the world, with housing and renting prices skyrocketing.
The Garage Culture is a privilege of few.
Most working-class people are accepting to live into small boxes without space for even a table destined to drawing, reading and studying. Instead, they soon will use virtual desktops inside cheap Chinese Apple Vision Pros clones. Life will get harder and unhealthier.
While designers and some scientists know the importance of physical areas for developing certain activities, most people don't and are subjecting themselves and their children to sad living conditions.
To be clear, there is plenty of space for humans on earth right now. I'm not talking about in uninhabitable places, I mean in amazing fertile locations. Real world space is a luxury because of bad regulation in places with good governments and other places having bad governments
(you didn't imply otherwise, but I know there's a common misconception that space is running out and the world is overcrowded. It's largely not true)
Is SF expected to have its people without homes moved somewhere else as a solution to this social problem? What a bizarre notion, unless I misunderstand you.
Even outside of regulations, the biggest issue is access to (well paying) jobs. There may be land available to build affordable estates in tons of areas, but there are no jobs to work there to pay for it.
I don't know about the rest of the world but most Americans live in significantly larger housing than previous generations did (that's part of why it's so expensive). SROs are basically illegal now, and "starter houses" that used to be 800 sq feet three times that size now.
> So, many researchers don't use terms with due care. And many article are rejected by Nature.
The reason is much simpler: many (most) researchers are not native English speakers. For example, my doctoral advisor (who knows English well, but is not a native speaker) could hardly help me with questions concerning more subtle aspects of English terms used in the research area. He told me that hardly anybody cares. Even more: when you look for examples, you always have to consider the situation that a word is used wrongly because the author who comes from an arbitrary country does not know better.
Even more: sometimes I do ask native English speakers about subtle aspects of the English language. My impression from this is: while it is not uncommon among native German speakers to deeply analyze German words, various native English speakers independently told me that doing such an analysis "is not how the English language works" (or how native English speakers think about their language).
> while it is not uncommon among native German speakers to deeply analyze German words, various native English speakers independently told me that doing such an analysis "is not how the English language works" (or how native English speakers think about their language).
I'm tempted to question this idea that English speakers are just unconcerned with their own language, but then I'm not entirely sure what you have in mind when you speak of "deep [linguistic] analysis" (or a lack thereof). Can you provide an example?
My yahoo e-mail account was Yahoo-ed (one day, I logged in on it to find Yahho deleted all my e-mails (some of then important and others of sentimental value), due to account inactivity for a new arbitrary number of days not previously informed.
I fear this for my gmail. I now use mbsync (lieer[0]) to have my emails synced locally on my homeserver, and then browse it with notmuch[1]. It's an incredibly freeing experience to have all your email on your own machine.
For the exact same reason I started using MacOS Mail app with gmail, but I am realising now that it doesn’t download “all” the emails unfortunately. Lieer looks like a good option, thank you.
It's a great tool, it's just agonizingly slow sometimes because Google likes to throttle the connection when you make big changes. The initial download especially is slow, but the small changes thereafter are pretty fast.
Same! Coincidentally, I recently backed up my Angelfire site from the late '90s. A lot of the original links were missing but thankfully they provide a `sitemap.xml` and I used HTTrack to make a local copy.
