It feels like a wasteland. But then the tech accounts all left for mastodon. All I am left with is weird cycle rage cringe. That I try so desperately to not interact with.
+1 for Kagi. It's been my default search engine since Jan '22 and I'm very happy with it. On the rare occasions when I use Bing or Google I'm reminded all over again why I'm happy to pay for search.
I don't know how deep copilot delves, and if it has access to all repos, but I am not comfortable with that. I am not even comfortable with a major player such as MS having access to intellectual gold.
I have no clue which previous server I signed up to. And looking through themed servers I found one with an interest, but it's hardly my only interest and was met with welcome text saying post something interesting.
I think GP's comment about reach runs in the other direction:
If someone tweets about an issue, it is trivially discovered globally and readily embedded on news sites with arbitrary volumes of traffic (or shown on TV).
They often do not verify if whatever someone wrote in a tweet was made up, and seem to forget that most people are not on twitter, and if twitter agrees on something, that's a very small part of the population.
If that happens, I mute and move on. As a result I only see the work of proper journos on my TL, not people writing 500 word hot takes on some Netflix show for Buzzfeed.
>Email is run just like this and it has plenty of reach.
The "reach" in gp's context is "audience reach". A measure of "audience size" in a broadcast type of medium. It doesn't mean reach in a technical sense like "reachable ip address or DNS resolution".
Email is more point-to-point and 1-to-1 rather than 1-to-many. Yes, the concept of "mailing lists" could arguably be described as "broadcast" but it requires explicit subscriptions and is not the same "reach" as Twitter tweets acting as global "billboards".
E.g. this HN site often has user-submitted Twitter tweets on the front page. In contrast, it's very rare to have a mailing list mirror post to HN. The reach is not the same. (E.g. last week, the thread on front page about "Adobe removing Pantone colors" was referencing a Twitter post.)
Another example related to HN... the creator of this site, Paul Graham, created a Twitter account in 2010 (https://twitter.com/paulg). It has 1.5 million followers. Clearly, the Twitter platform gives him exposure that his existing email address (and his web blog at http://www.paulgraham.com, and this HN site ycombinator.com) -- does not.
Nobody uses email to discover new email addresses, outreach is direct. Discoverability is a massive part of social media platforms and is hindered by the isolated pod structure that Mastodon supports
Discoverability and onboarding and authentication is hard.
I remember the fluffy days of Facebook, where almost in an instant there was a wildfire of 'you might know' suggestions, from harvested addressbooks and cross referencing.
I found, and find discoverability hard on Twitter. My follow list rarely gets bumped and I am pretty clueless as to who and what is in it. I have to make an effort to grow the list.
Tweet reach may be massaged by favs, comments and retweets. Not totally sure how this is different in Mastodon.
Are we talking timeline/search promotion?
I remember email round robins pre Facebook and you did add people if you recognised them.
Directory services just got pulled as they were harvested by spammers. Not that I think this would help. You need some nudging.
If I read an article and the author had an easy lookupable and addable feed, I might note it.
Can we stop pretending that email is a great example of decentralized networks? Modern email is extremely centralized with most people on either Gmail, Apple, or Outlook. No one rolls their own server.
Email on the other hand is a great example of how decentralized things become centralized over time due to the network effect. There's even a weak network effect with email and it still happened.
This is the same flawed logic that claims that Bitcoin is really centralized. You are looking at the wrong properties when you call email centralized. With email, as with Bitcoin, you can participate in the network and roll your own if you so wish, and no one can prevent you from transacting. That doesn't mean most should roll their own, but the fact that it's possible is a vast and fundamental difference. I really don't think most people understand what decentralized means. We are talking about the protocol, not the implemented topology.
Same as democracy in the US. Even if for the most part policy is set by centralized interests, just having the populace believe that it's a democracy and they have the agency to change things makes the system function in a fundamentally different way. The ruling class can't just cart blanche do whatever they want like in China, even if they are the ones holding most of the levers.
> This is the same flawed logic that claims that Bitcoin is really centralized.
Except it isn't because centralization-decentralization is not a binary discrete variable but a continuous one. There's a reason the trilemma exists and you score on each axis. No coin is at any extreme.
There’s probably a good test for competing products that one could apply. Between my daughter, me, my mother, and my grandmother, how many of us can or will want to switch to the competing product? If it’s too hard for at least two generations, you’re probably not going to meet success because you’ve already lost a large chunk of your potential user base before we even begin discussing if the users want your service in the first place.
That's an unfair comparison though. What about someone that never used either of them ? Like someone that just hit 13 (or whatever the minimum legal age is). (See also : TikTok.)
You could also probably ask how many of those people used Twitter to begin with? In my own experience, most of my friends and family don't use Twitter at all, especially if they don't have a business or creative hobby to promote online
You might be joking but metal spoons are ridiculously good at not letting bacteria grow on it. A quick wipedown of any sort is basically all that's actually necessary.
The likelihood of a meltdown that causes contamination into the atmosphere at that facility is extremely unlikely even if the reactor is bombed.
If power is disrupted, there is 2 weeks of fuel to power the cooling mechanism. If that fails there will be a meltdown inside the reactor but unlike Fukushima there is no possibility of a hydrogen explosion in this type or reactor. The meltdown will be contained in the reactor. If now the reactor is bombed there is a possibility of radiation escaping but it takes a lot. Additionally the winds blow towards Russia so this would be a very foolish endeavor and everyone knows it.
The Ukrainians are bombing it because Russia is using it as a launch pad but they also know that a Fukushima or Chernobyl is almost impossible.
“ Strontium-90 and cesium-137 have half-lives of about 30 years (half the radioactivity will decay in 30 years). Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years. High-level wastes are hazardous because they produce fatal radiation doses during short periods of direct exposure.”
Go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You see people. WEIRD!!!!
> Of course we have to hope for technical advances to convert it to a more manageable form
What do you mean by that? Dry-cask storage is very manageable and have been used for decades.
> radioactive waste will have to be stored for a million years
Uranium-235 is a naturally formed isotope of uranium, and it has a half-life of 703 million years. In a nuclear reactor, U-235 is split into many different fission products such as Caesium-137, Caesium-135, Zirconium-93 and many others. The longest living fission product is Iodine-129, which has a half-life of about 1.57 million years.
In essence, we have high-radiation and high half-life isotopes naturally formed everywhere on earth. Once they are mined and burnt in a fission reactor, these stable isotopes are split them into many different isotopes, which last for a shorter amount of time. It is a little bit nonsense to say we need to store it for a million years. It would be the same as saying we currently need to store U-235 for 703 million years.
It is all about concentrations and the type of radiation that is emitted. Nuclear waste is not "a problem" - it is a process. Right not it is safe, relatively cheap and somewhat efficient.
The earth has stored nuclear elements for millions and billions of years. It is thought that in some places naturally occurring nuclear reactors have happened.
Of course, the civilization needs more orderly storage and disposal, and nuclear waste can be polluting but it is also the thing that is produced by completely natural processes. Some places have higher levels of radioactive radon gas produced by radioactive decay of elements deeper underground.
Or, ahhhh go away. Run for the hills.
Or, what's with the lack of fur, what a freak.