Awww, spent a few days away from Hubski and missed this. Hope it went well! I still remember discovering Hubski way back then when looking for something more pleasant than reddit. Glad it's still here and still more pleasant than reddit. Well done mk and everyone! I'm a bit of a lurker but still an appreciator.
No one who might be able to break the spell of Trump seems willing to rip off the Band-Aid. It's revealing that the Republican Party acts around Trump the way people acted around Stalin or Hitler. No-one dares to be the bringer of bad news. Except with these men there was proven reason to be afraid. To behave this way around Donald Trump, of all people, just makes Republicans look pathetic.To sum up the current situation, the U.S. is experiencing a fake self-coup that requires the administration to do exactly the things a regime would do if it were attempting to stage an actual self-coup, with millions of people sincerely believing the stated justifications for the strongman’s consolidation of power and with the regime’s legislative allies playing along, under the apparent belief that eventually the courts, which are stocked with unqualified loyalists, will soon say the game is done.
I'm not sure what you are experiencing, but I just returned to Hubski after an absence and it does not seem to have significantly changed. It's still one of the best places for intelligent conversation in a spirit of kindness that I have come across on the web. If it's never going to be a money maker, have you considered handing it off to someone else or open-sourcing it so a site with the same dynamic could be hosted elsewhere? It would be a shame to see you just shut it down. I am not aware of other sites that facilitate mostly intelligent and respectful discussion like Hubski does. I have always thought the site mechanics are largely responsible for that. In all my years of wandering the internet, Hubski stands out as one of the few best places. I get that it's not free to run, but don't underestimate what you have here, and know that some of us would be quite sad to see it go.However, in all honesty, I am not at a point where I can simply let things be as they are, and keep the will to see that the bugs are fixed, the https certificates are renewed, and the bills are paid.
If what we will have is what we do have, then I think I honestly am. There's plenty of places that accomplish that already.
Why would locking users' discussions (comments) into bubbles of those users they already follow address this? Wouldn't one expect it to make discussion more stale by introducing miniature echo chambers? I actually like the sharing aspect of Hubski - when I submit a post or click the wheely thing to share a post, I feel I'm curating something for others, and that it's my responsibility to share only what's worth their time. Those others, and that responsibility, feel real to me because they have actively chosen to follow me based on the quality of my past posts and shares. So I had better keep the quality up. I have to suspect this sense of responsibility contributes to the higher quality of both posts and debate on Hubski than on reddit. So both moves to me sound like a shift in an undesirable direction. Restricting comment visibility will cause echo chambers, while basing feeds on tags will remove that element of responsibility not to waste the time of users who have chosen to follow you. Please be careful - Hubski is the only general-purpose site I can think of where debate remains intelligent and polite after 10 years. To the users this is worth more than another site with a large userbase, and more than a torrent of mediocre content.The site has become stale, and in my opinion, I have found discussions more predictable and interactions less cool.
Also in the news today: “I am a big fan of yours!” - Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin
That bit is important. A quick glance at Wikipedia: Persuading people to make small sacrifices for the greater good is a crucial challenge of our times, both with pandemics and with environmental problems. Meanwhile, good old Donald continues his streak of coming up with the most damaging policy possible in every department of life: US calls for shower rules to be eased after Trump hair complaintsbuy yea it's not evenly divided.
A mere 0.014% of all water on Earth is both fresh and easily accessible. Of the remaining water, 97% is saline and a little less than 3% is difficult to access. Technically, there is a sufficient amount of freshwater on a global scale. However, due to unequal distribution (exacerbated by climate change) resulting in some very wet and some very dry geographic locations, plus a sharp rise in global freshwater demand in recent decades driven by industry, humanity is facing a water crisis. Demand is expected to outstrip supply by 40% in 2030, if current trends continue.
From the article, there are other costs apart from the amount of water used:This practice requires two scarce resources: water and energy. More attention is given to the showers’ high water consumption, but energy use is just as problematic. Hot water production accounts for the second most significant use of energy in many homes (after heating), and much of it is used for showering. Water treatment and distribution also use lots of energy.
The fear is that when people are starving and competing for scarce resources, there isn't usually much question of remaining "civilized". The fight for survival could become all, and it could be brutal.
A couple I am friends with in the UK had it. He got sick for about a week then started feeling better, but she has been sick for months and is still weak. They were not admitted to hospital so this is still considered a mild case, but it has been quite incapacitating for her. They are in their 40s with young children who didn't seem to get sick (or only got sick very mildly) from it. My uncle and aunt, who are in their 70s, also say they have had it but it did not hit them as hard. I don't know that their cases were confirmed though. They may be mistaking another illness for it.
I feel a kinship with these worms.They wiggle forward. They wiggle backwards. And occasionally they fuck themselves. That’s it.
The fucking anal cleanliness of all pop music production these days. The need to have a Ph.D. in "sound design" to gain entry to the world of music. The need for all music to be so fucking locked down, produced to death, carefully sculpted to the tiniest microbeat and fraction of a kiloherz. The crushing humourless stylishness of it all. It feels so stifling and unspontaneous. That and Post fucking Malone.
This was a refreshing read, though disappointing that we let something really interesting get away from us. I particularly liked his comments on science at the end: “The right way is to persuade the public that the scientific process is a normal human activity, that it’s no different from what a police detective does or a plumber who comes to fix a drainpipe. Scientists are considered an elite, because they themselves create that ivory tower artificially. They say, ‘The public doesn’t understand, so there’s no need to share with them. We’ll decide among ourselves what’s right, and then we’ll tell the politicians what needs to be done.’ But then the populist politician says, ‘Only the elite say that, they are hiding other things from us.’ Because there’s a leap to the stage of conclusions and policy. The differences of opinion in the scientific community are what lend humanity to the scientific process, and humanity lends credibility." Crazy world we live in, where the guy who thinks we might just have been visited by aliens is one of the most rational and intelligent voices I've come across lately."The populist movements in the United States and Europe rest in part on the fact that the public has lost faith in the scientific process. That’s why people deny global warming, for example. One of my interviewers in Germany said, ‘There are scientists who maintain that it’s a mistake to go public when you’re not yet certain.’ Those scientists think that if we reveal situations of uncertainty, we won’t be believed when we talk about climate change. But the lack of credibility is due precisely to the fact that we show the public only the final product. If a group of scientists closet themselves in a room, and then emerge to deliver a lecture on the result as though to students, people won’t believe them – because they won’t have seen the doubts, they won’t have seen that there weren’t enough data in the earlier stages.
To pick up on a very old thread... I've been reading David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous lately. He has a chapter in there about how in oral cultures stories are very closely bound up with particular places, so that it makes no sense to tell a story without saying where it happened. The powers of the place are actively involved in the story. Only in cultures with alphabetical writing, he says (roughly), do we find being treated as a neutral setting (space) for action. I wonder if part of the issue isn't a prejudice against science fiction, but that we naturally need to understand stories in terms of relatable places - that we relate better to the story when the setting is relatable and naturally absorb it more deeply? Presumably most of us don't have much familiarity with spaceships and airlocks.
As someone who builds software for a living, it's interesting to see how this is an issue for AI in exactly the same way it's an issue for software teams. If you just build what you are asked for, it will be the wrong thing. And even if you're careful, you will learn what people actually want only from their disappointed response to you actually building something. This is why we build things in small chunks and get feedback along the way: people are not good at converting their imaginative vision into written, spoken or encoded instructions, and there will always be something silently assumed. The AIs have it even harder than the human teams though, since we humans are (for the time being) better at predicting common human oversights and reading between the lines of the instructions. Perhaps one day we'll be able to preprocess our instructions through a "figure out what the human probably meant to say" AI.
Absolutely plausible - thanks. It seems there are only 3 music files in use in the marketing business these days: the one you mentioned, the upbeat quirky fun one with the acoustic guitar strumming and claps, and the one that sounds like an endless intro to a lost U2 song circa 1987 that never quite arrives. Honestly, these folks should have gone with number 2. Or Yakkity Sax.
I can't tell whether the video here is supposed to be absurd or whether people who spend their lives developing a burger-flipping robot have lost all sense of absurdity.
Well, at least I'm not dreaming. Others can see it too.
Also CNN.
You seem to have the wrong link. Maybe you want this:
An alternative would be to charge users for entry to the site. If the charge were set low enough it might work. But I don't know how many people consider social media sites to be enough of an enhancement to their lives to be worth paying for. It's hard enough to get people to pay for music, art, movies, books, etc. Also by charging a fee you'd be skewing the demographic towards wealthier people, which would suck.
Hubski has a better mechanic than reddit: because it's sharers and followers I find it makes me think more about whether other people really need to see what I'm about to share or whether I'm wasting their time. And it's great to be able to remove someone from my feeds without censoring them for others. Then again, I felt similarly about reddit when I first used it back in 2008 or so. Reddit seemed like such a sensible site where people with expertise discussed serious topics, compared to the fluff on Digg. You would think twice before posting on reddit. Things change, and it's still an open question whether Hubski's more civilized culture would survive a huge influx of users. Especially if that growth put it on the radar of the various propaganda "influence" campaigns. But one thing Hubski certainly has going for it is the lack of corporate pressure for growth at all costs. This guy hits that nail right on the head.
Sorry you're subject to his fuckery. I hope you find a way to register. It's terrible the way these Republicans are systematically gnawing away at all the supports of democracy, trying to get the whole system to fall permanently to them. There's nothing they won't stoop to. It drives me nuts just observing from outside the USA, but it must be so much worse to be directly on the receiving end. May all you decent Americans win your country back from these crooks, soon.
There's a lot of confusion about this right now it seems. He may have been fired, or be about to be fired. This page currently says he's expecting to be fired today, and that Mueller's Russia investigation could be at risk. Edit: Obligatory Mueller firing rapid response link.
Time to update those Facebook politics quizzes: Hitler or Stalin, which one are you? Since by the new rules of political debate, anyone to the left of Literally Hitler is Literally Stalin.
Hey, this guy has been through it. He also had to suffer the indignity of being yelled at by his dad while broadcasting a live chat with his Nazi buddy. If only there were some way of not constantly being humiliated for being a Nazi...
That is truly impressive. Particularly how they don't recycle the individual letter images, but use a different one for each instance of the letter. And the meticulous positioning.
Can we contrive for him to have a big public Twitter argument with Donald Trump? I feel it would be entertaining, for a few minutes. Then onto the next thing.
Her whole new album "Shelter" is kind of great.
I think I see the problem here...Trump people
simple bayesian analysis