Sinclairโs revenues slid sharply in the third quarter, in the same period the TV giant pulled Kimmel, a move top executives deny is linked to the drop.
This is EXSACTLY what we have been saying for the past number of years. Need to start using proper services such as @element.io which is based in the uk and platforms like @signal.org which is what we use.
The #enshittification of I2C sensors is happening too. Bosch has been a frequent offender, but they're not the only ones. The sensor powers up with no internal firmware (an I2C paperweight). You have to load a proprietary binary blob into the sensor before it works. This blob is controlled under a restrictive license agreement. Luckily there is still some competition in this sector, but innovative/new parts try this trick.
A video showing a pastor yelling derogatory bullshit in Sarah McBride's face is going viral at Musk's Nazi bar, boosted by LibsOfTikTok. Groomer libel, deadanaming, etc.
This shouldn't happen to anyone. Not holding my breath for her colleagues across the aisle condemning what happened because they can't even do the bare minimum their job calls for.
These people are dangerous and should be treated as such.
I get the same from The Guardian - 'please come back?!'
Nope, not until you hire back the journo people you let go in order to replace them with AI shit. Oh, and your coverage of last year's general election was embarrassingly awful.
Yeah, I would be more terrified about the condition of the magnetic tape itself.
That stuff doesnโt last forever and itโs probably crumbling. Undoubtably one could use some like real trick medical imagingโฆ and probably not MRI to pull the data off if itโs not preserved somewhere else
We used to use a strange fluid with small, but visible under magnification, iron filings that would align with the magnetic spots on the tape - that way one could actually see what was on the tape.
The super magic folks about this stuff are the guys at the NASA Ames MacDonalds - they re-read the Apollo moon tapes and got better video out of 'em.
Yeah, I think they might have used fluid like that for video tape. That was back in the day when if he wanted to do video editing, it would be similar to film editing, except the video editor would shake the fluid on the tape to figure out where he could slice it on the frame boundary.
Iโve seen no corporate media outlet cover this: โขPost 2024 polls showed that Harris campaigning with Cheney decreased enthusiasm for her by 7% โขPost 2025 polls show that Mamdani running as an unapologetic progressive earned him 9% of MAGA voters who went for Trump in 2024
The lesson Corporate Dems need to learn: You donโt flip votes by compromising on your values, but by unapologetically leaning into them.
The flaw in this argument is that corporate Dems donโt share any values with their voters. Their values revolve around 1) maintaining their power & status, 2) serving the interests of their donors, & 3) keeping the working class and the left as far away from power as possible.
Everything else is negotiable for them in pursuit of those top priorities, including ethics, institutions, and electoral wins against Republicans.
They canโt be persuaded; they must be purged and replaced.
I still blame Biden, not Harris. If he'd not run again and we'd had a real primary and the nominee had plenty of time to campaign, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be in this mess. Harris didn't have enough time.
but they don't want to. When I ask myself why that might be, I can only conclude that they share Republican values. There are real, progressive voices being pushed to the side in the Democratic party because so many rank and file Dems are just as selfish, egotistical, and ruled by a love of money as Republicans. They have to go if we want lasting changes. New York is an amazing, auspicious start.
Except corporate Dems can't "lean into" those progressive values, because they're not progressives and paying lip service to such values/policies will be seen by anyone with half a brain as a bald attempt for votes with no conviction or desire to actually implement such policies when elected. The old guard needs to stand down in favor of new blood with life experiences and perspectives that the electorate can relate too, not some bought corporate shill.
@Fat_Farang Yes, but they were already doing that. Zohran proved that people power can overwhelm establishment corporate power.
I'm sure most of us are old enough to remember when Sanders was the only socialist dem out there standing on a soap box ranting. The cracks are forming, and while many establishment dems won't go full socialist, they are changing their messaging. Sherril and Spanberger ran and won on specific socialist policies, despite being establishment coded figures.
@Fat_Farang Even when socialists fail or stumble, they are shifting the conversation. Things like universal childcare, universal healthcare, public transport etc. are in the discussion because of people like Sanders working tirelessly.
I'm excited to see how Zohran winning with such a commanding lead changes the conversations we have even more, and to see the type pf candidates he inspires to run across the country.
The numbers do mean something nationally. Even here in the deep south, we recently had a candidate who almost tipped the balance and flipped Texas blue, because he was real and sincere, and unabashedly far to the left of our usual choices. Large numbers of left voters are here, silent, in severely gerrymandered red states, only needing to feel like our votes might actually make a difference in order to be motivated to cast them. A strong left candidate exactly has that effect.
@hosford42 I donโt disagree that the Democratic wins are good news. I just wanted to point out that a 7% change in a single poll of โenthusiasmโ just isnโt going to make the news.
The election RESULTS made the news, and they are the true news.
All the Bush-era Republicans endorsing Harris felt like a psy-op to suppress progressive turn out for her as it was happening. The Harris campaign falling for it and enthusiastically accepting those endorsements was a major blunder.
@covercash Which means they'll be easy to primary, so everyone stop standing on the sidelines munching complaints like they're worth something, and find a candidate to win a primary.
You're probably right about authenticity being appealing.
I think both the Trump lane and the Mamdani/Sanders/etc lane appeal to a certain set of populists; they're outsiders, "try something different", very sincere, etc. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanders%โฆ It's a thing.
Even though I would never have voted for Trump even before I saw his fascist side, I have always felt that the interest in both Bernie and Trump was driven by the same underlying dissatisfaction with the status quo. The American public *knew* we were being offered the same shitty, nearly indistinguishable options -- one bought candidate versus another -- and we were fed up with it. We could all sense that we were no longer in control, that something was deeply wrong with our system.
What differed was our understanding of what was causing the problem and how to address it. Some of us recognized that it was the oligarchy and wealth inequality that was at the root of the problem, and wanted a targeted response to that root cause. Others just had a vague sense of shadow actors, the so-called "deep state", and chose a strategy of electing a strong man to tear it *all* down.
So it makes perfect sense to me that there are voters that would have voted for either of these two over establishment candidates. I only wish Trump hadn't been so good at manipulating them for his own narcissistic ends.
A lot of anger here. I'm the old guard that someone mentioned. I read Mamdami's platform and was impressed, not for anything new but the fact that the government of the 60's & 70's was pretty much as he wrote it.There were a few things missing, we were pushing for UBI knowing that computers were going to be a nemesis, mostly trying to spread it around for all. Had Biden/Harris been elected you would have seen much of that come to pass. The failing wasn't Biden/Harris. Whose was it?
Operators pump a sea of โproduced waterโ underground for disposal. Intensifying tremors raise fears that the deep toxic waste pits could intermingle with water used for farming and drinking.
to be more realistic, the corporate dems did succeed, but as with all approaches that disavow ethics, the results are short-lived, and come with severe consequences
Harris faced enormous voter suppression that Mamdani did not. She also faced far more political spending than all previous candidates in history combined. Elon Musk's Twitter purchase alone was $44 billion, primarily devoted to campaigning for Trump.
60 High Quality Unique Wallpapers ๐ โช๏ธwhat you will get-โ ๏ธHigh-Quality โ ๏ธCreativeโ ๏ธVisual Appeal โ ๏ธWide-Variety โ ๏ธTrustwhat you will NOT get-โ๏ธDora-cake , Its my favorite I do not share it with anyone!!THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION ๐[Note- This Producโฆ
Compromising Dems have turned me away from Dems even though I keep voting Dems because the alternative is worse. Chuck Schumer needs to go away. I swear.
My parents would not have. But I still think he would have won. I was raised as a Republican (yes, like religious indoctrination) but had shifted to independent by that point. Bernie Sanders precipitated my final shift to the left. I could never vote for Trump, but Clinton just didn't seem sincere to me, so I voted for a 3rd party candidate. (I wish I hadn't, in retrospect. I would take insincerity any day over what we are dealing with now. But the fact remains, sincerity and commitment to values wins votes.)
Hi Kagi, I've been a paying customer for over a year and I'm happy with the product. But biggest thing stopping me from recommending Kagi to others is the Brave partnership. kagifeedback.org/d/2808-reconsโฆ
I ask you to at least issue a statement denouncing Brendan Eich's public positions against LGBTQ rights.
This looks to be another very worthy and excellent essay from Mike Brock. (Oh baby is it)
Yes, I know itโs substack but if you donโt object to reading a free article off of it have at it. I too wish the author had another medium to publish these articles.
โ But you cannot simulate away your own groceries costing more. You cannot simulate away federal agents conducting warrantless mass detentions in your city. You cannot simulate away ICE deployed to cultural events you attend. You cannot simulate away economic precarity while billionaires build 90,000-square-foot ballrooms funded by oligarchs etching their names into the peopleโs house. You cannot simulate away your electricity bill going up to fund AI systems you didnโt ask for.โ
โ Theyโre gambling with the electrical grid. Theyโre driving up your power bills. Theyโre making massive infrastructure investments. And they admit they donโt know if any of it will work. This is speculative extraction made concrete. Your electricity bill subsidizing oligarchic bets on computational supremacy.โ
We need to also remember that parallel to this is the seizure, the capture of military command and control, as well as most of the information the government used to haveโฆ
We donโt really know, and I suspect we canโt know whatโs going on with the physical remains of the federal government during this shutdown.
One way or another I suspect that the shut down is going to last well into the holidays and probably through January. Does anyone in America believe that they have any interest resuming government?
Do you really think that they arenโt working to dismember the nation called the United States of America? Because I do not. Because that is their stated goal.
Despite the shutdown, I'm guessing that most of the physical evidence in the Epstein files is being destroyed. Michael Wolff is quoted as being shown polaroids of Trump with half naked underage girls. He was shown these by Jeffery Epstein who kept these pictures in his safe.
I really doubt this evidence will survive the shutdown.
I would not doubt they would accomplish it, although I canโt imagine it would take months.
The Republicans are in a politically unsustainable position and they know it. If they relent and swear in as required by law the Arizona representative, the files are released and the issues of healthcare coverage come back onto the table where they actually have to say something about it..
I donโt see how this gets ironed out. People all over the US are coming together to feed the hungry.
Itโs socialism forming at massive scale out of the necessity for survival and the true human sentiment that we exist to take care of each other.
Humans generally despise despotism aimed at them and on the downtrodden usually. This is something men who reject empathy cannot understand, especially when they become convinced that psychopathy is normal.
I honestly do not believe the operators of the Trump regime really have any understanding of how economies actually function, much less of how their actions are actually harming their interests more than those of anyone else.
Yes, they do want to dismantle our society, they are very clear about their goals (if you know how to read between the liesโahemโฆ"lines"), but they are doing so primarily out of incompetence, more than avarice or malice.
I would direct your attention to project 2025 and especially NRx.
The latter are libertarians who see government as an impediment to the natural order with them on top. They are very explicit that they intend to dismantle the state and replace it with a network of city states operating as corporations with CEO absolute monarchs.
AI cryptocurrency, automated, military and police. All of it is the infrastructure they see as a foundation for their libertarian utopia.
Those people are not "libertarians". *I* am a libertarian. The people who authored Project 2025 are literally the opposite of, the antithesis of, "libertarian".
Sure, but people like them expropriated the word and clothe themselves in it in order to legitimize their tyrannical sentiments. This has been a superpower of the right wing in particular.
Libertarian originated as a left-wing term. When the right steals an idea from the left, they do so by shedding the parts that obligate people to respect other individuals needs and interests
Indeed. I would just really like people to stop identifying authoritarians as libertarians.
The vast majority of people in this world who currently identify themselves as, or are thought of by others as, "libertarians" are literally the exact opposite of libertarians.
"Libertarian" didn't just originate as a left-wing term, it is an *inherently* left-wing term, and cannot be made otherwise. "Liberty" is not and cannot be "right-wing".
As a fan of linguistics, Iโll just warn you that words are fluid.
The words left and right have been mutilated beyond their original meaning when they were coined.
For instance, the concept of big government leftist and small government right wingers is wholy garbage. Itโs not the size of government that matter itโs the purpose government serves.
I prefer to embrace the original meaning of left and right, which is solely based on behavior.
I'm not familiar with Galatianism, but I certainly agree with your formulations, as they are the same ones I use: the original definitions of "left" and "right", regardless of what people who don't read history think of those terms, today.
I didn't read it as congratulatory. If you get all the way down to the end, he goes on to mention that the regime will become evermore violent as it falls apart.
Other historians also comment on this kind of process for despotic regimes
The fact that people are not exactly rolling over and dying, but protesting.
The fact that people are protesting, and when they have the opportunity voting them the fuck out of office, put them on notice that their rule will fall apart and house because people donโt accept it.
What we donโt have is what you can see in Europe with general strikes yet and I hope we get there very soon
Wait, so youโre telling me starving, terrorizing and posting AI videos of yourself literally defecating on Americans wasnโt a winning electoral strategy?
Florida Republicans who backed a program funneling taxpayer dollars to private Christian schools are now panicking because some Muslims are taking advantage ...
R version 4.5.2 "[Not] Part in a Rumble" (source version) has been released. You can find it in cran.r-project.org/src/base/R-4/, or wait for CRAN to be updated.
We are going to have to listen to these liars claim these are not concentration camps and the media will take out their calipers to find the exact midpoint on the issue of forced labor camps.
An advocate for the National Homelessness Law Center warned that the 1,300-bed facility could be a "pilot" to put homeless people into similar conditions to Florida's "Alligator Alcatraz."
In this post, guest author Maxi shares her experience in reusing data and machine learning models.
The short version: It's frustrating, because people don't share or don't even respond to a clearly "reasonable request". We cannot build on other researchers' work if they don't share anything. Model weights offer the possibility to share information without sharing sensitive data, but even those are not shared.
AI tech and models research activity done without embracing open science and open data practices will: 1- delay overall progress in the field and 2--eliminate any ethical issues. Most practitioners want both currently for commercial advantage.
I don't know if I could be considered a socialist. I see the goal not as getting paid (as an artist or anything else) but having the opportunity to do something I love and not -have- to be in it for the money. Sort of a post-scarcity, post-necessity, even post-economics type of status quo. I really don't care if the means to that end are socialist, antisocialist, hybrid socialist-capitalist, or even mystical. But I would rather not achieve it by authoritarian means.
if you believe that a better world is possible, you may be tarred as a doomer, because achieving a better world involves calling attention to what is wrong with this one.
your very optimism is called pessimism, particularly by people for whom the current world is more than comfortable.
Donald Trump's DOJ has recently started treating doxing as a crime, charging at least 4 people in SoCal with it. Which makes it all the more corrupt that Juicebox Janine memory holed Trump's own doxing that led to dangerous stalking of Barack Obama. www.emptywheel.net/2025/10/30/j...
Among the things Trump's DOJ excised from the sentencing memo of Tayler Taranto yesterday is Trump's own role, by doxing Barack Obama, in getting Taranto to stalk Obama's neighborhood.
Insurance paid their portion of a bill and โwrote down" a portion, and showed my responsibility on my EOBโ Provider sent a bill that included my portion PLUS the write down amount. The difference was only $15, but it bothered me. I called providerโs billing dept, explained, and they were โTerribly sorry for their error.โ I should just pay โMy responsibilityโ. So a win. ๐
Iโm certain they were hoping I wouldnโt notice. The errors almost always favor THEM.
my basic thesis of how the AI bubble works: it doesn't work on market forces at all or it'd be dead already. it's an industry-wide Enron scam. they will all put in whatever money is needed to keep it afloat as absolutely long as possible.
(hence me picking 2027-ish for the final collapse)
@GossiTheDog fair enough, but enron otoh needed way less cash ingress to keep up the appearances, the slop people can't get away with just some creative accounting and fraud, enron style, they need money and with first signs of people with money trying to dump their future losses on retail investors already here, I don't think it will take five years until the end-game content.
I believe so. Arthur Anderson LLP (at the time the world's largest ever partnership) engineered Enron's finances by gaming partnership law to the max, by creating convoluted layers of dummy partnerships. The "A" "I" industry is also built on self-dealing, but seems to be structured as "strange loops." "Computer aided drafting" of contracts (boilerplate in general) and legislative language (cf. ALEC) is a pretty lucrative industry, as it's a LOT easier to obfuscate information than to unravel obfuscation. I suspect that >90% of what is called "consulting" is basically optimizing business processes for minimal compliance. I even suspect there may be some malice motive (as in malicious compliance) along with the profit motive.
The question is, assuming they are optimizing for bubble expansion time, how does one strategize against that? That someone wouldn't be in government, of course (at least not the US federal government). Someone who has resources to strategize against advanced optimization, but also has independence. Resources vs. independence has always been a harsh tradeoff, but the P25 clique of course is finding ways to make it harsher, raising the price of entry into cognitively powerful fields of work.
Restrictions on liquidity forces even more to resort to shady private credit schemes & risky tokenized financial instruments, also funded by fossil fuel fascists.
@Npars01 i see e.g. Exxon Mobil made $33b profit a year recently. That's a lot, but just OpenAI needs way more than that just to keep its *current* promises. Can fossil fuel move the needle?
Good place to start when a govt says it's running out of money to pay for food aid for the poor is to demand it stop paying massive subsidies to the world's most profitable companies.
The subsidies violate capitalism's most basic theoretical tenet, they are blindingly expensive, they underprice a dwindling asset whose use is destroying the planet, and deprive govts of aid needed for worthier and, ironically, more economically efficient goals.
#WordWeavers 29 Oct Pick your preference: drafting, editing, formatting, or marketing
What?
No.
You write because you write. You then edit to polish the rough edges, to remove inconsistencies, to improve the quality of the prose. You don't write because you 'prefer' to write. You write because the narrative is coming through you.
I don't manually format at all. I have stylesheets for that.
I am sorry, I am personally unable to help you. I have a small number of families in #Gaza I'm supporting regularly, and that is all I can do. I have boosted your message, however, in the hope that some of those who follow you may be able to support you.
Thank you, my friend, for supporting my people. I hope you can help me too someday. You are our only hope. May God protect you and bless your wealth.๐๐ค
I've been listening to an interview with Joe Ament on the Economics for Rebels podcast. In it, Joe claims that the origin of money cannot be in barter, because a fisher cannot catch fish until they have a fishing pole, and so, to obtain the fishing pโฆ
Not many people see things the way you do, my friend. Can you imagine someone telling me they'd rather burn their money than donate it? It's so disheartening. That's why seeing kind and generous people like you gives us hope.โค๏ธโค๏ธ๐All respect and appreciation to you, my friend.๐
@baraa1998 I wish you a good meal before you sleep tonight, and that you and all of your family can sleep safe, warm, and undisturbed by noises in the night.
#USPolitics The bigger threat to the country, bigger than Trump [who's brain is nearly dead, but he looks better on Ozempic], is the people who have power [GOP] and let it happen.
Because they will let it happen again.
They wanted power specifically to let this happen.
Yo - if you get a follow request from a profile named - Matasoft - block it. It's an AI industry pushing bot account. I denied follow request from it & got another follow request immediately after. Not a legit account. I'm recommending a #Fediblock to reduce shitty polluting trash bot accounts here. #BlockThisShit
A shout out to you - yes, you! - for being here on the Fediverse, helping to build truly decentralised democratic social media; part of the solution rather than the problem.
Explaining why I push back so hard on the question: "Why do you want millions of people on the Fediverse?"
If I ask people "Are there racists on Twitter?" People will say "Yes, lots!"
If I ask, "Does the owner of Twitter have the power to define moderation rules that allow racism but ban criticism if they choose to do so?" People say yes.
If I ask people, "Do the owners of Twitter have the possibility to algorithmically control what people see, and what gets amplified / shadow-banned?" People will also say yes.
If I ask, "Do you believe that the Fediverse offers an alternative to centrally controlled, algorithmically defined, social media?" People agree.
If I ask, "Do you think Black people that don't want to be on Twitter, deserve access to a better form of social media than what is available on Twitter?" People agree.
So far, so good! ๐๐ฟ
But then when I say, "Are you aware that at peak, 1 in 5 Twitter users was Black, and 1 in 5 Black people in the US was a monthly active Twitter user?" Fewer people know that stat.
There were ~300,000 Black trans Twitter users that used the service monthly. Almost none of them are on the Fediverse.
Black people deserve safety. Black people deserve access to more choice in social media.
Decentralized social media is not zero sum. Adding Black people and making the Fediverse safer for them, does not need to take away from your experience.
Your instance doesn't need to go from 100 people to a million people to accommodate the influx of new users.
That's the logical explanation of why we should make the Fediverse safer for everyone. But... why push back so hard?
One of the problems with the world in general, and the US in particular, is that we often prioritize white *feelings* over Black *safety*. I am not gentle about pointing this out. Tiptoeing around this phenomenon is tiring for Black people, and I won't do it.
Black people are not safe on Twitter or Mastodon. The difference is that we as a community of people of all backgrounds, have agency to improve Mastodon.
We can make Mastodon safer without breaking the experience for existing users.
plus thereโs the inherit problem of being an open protocol allowing anyone to harass. Every now and then a Nazi will pick up one of my posts, boost it, and then Iโm just inundated with Nazis that I have to clean up from a variety of instances they prop up to do these sorts of things after their old ones get more widely blocked.
The fact that there can be no subscribed to, dynamic blocklist is a safety issue in of itself, and an impediment towards wider adaption.
@me There was a big discourse on Bluesky about these communal blocklists being more harmful than helpful. I don't disagree with some of their points, but I think overall I fall on the side that they are a useful tool.
IMO, most of the arguments against are solved by (like many other things in life) being mindful of what blocklists you participate in.
@rapscalorie @me I just feel they're too easily weaponized. The ever present question of who decides what's on the block list and the criteria for being added gets complicated quickly with no good answers. I'll keep my own council on whom I block and I won't impose that on anyone else.
@mike @rapscalorie you are free to not participate in them. Iโm subject to harassment by mere existence, so blocklists are invaluable to me, and I donโt need strong criteria as per who gets on there so long as the maintainers of the blocklist is trusted and I can override them, which I can by unsubscribing to it.
@me @mike Exactly. As a cishet yt dude the blocklist discussion is mostly conceptual more than anything. *I* am not largely a target for harassment. If you are, you're far less worried about the "free speech issues" of an occasional account "not deserving it."
@rapscalorie @me @mike The Twitter block used and promoted by Wil Wheaton was started by a terf and had loads of trans people on it, including me. Half of left wing twitter vanished from my view the day I was added. Wil Wheaton promoted the list so convincingly to his hollywood buddies that some trans women working in the entertainment industry had to change careers.
Shared block lists are a great idea and I support them as long as they have transparency and accountability, which the Wheaton list didn't.
A *lot* of fedi early adopters were on Wheaton's list and this is part of why so many fedi users are extremely cautious and react badly to being systemically silenced as a ' free speech issue '. This nervousness is very easily instrumentalised by racists. I've seen people who are usually comrades fall for it. If we're acting in solidarity, we need to be conscious of everyone's needs and fears. White trans people have some power on fedi, but virtually no other institutions. This is tricky to navigate and requires trust.
Again, I want to reiterate that a problematic block list destroyed careers. And yet, a lot of people on fedi rely on collaborative blocking, so there's a way through this.
@mike @me This is the main point I agree with. I agree that I'll "keep my own council," but I'm also a cishet yt dude with no major hangups or social traumas or whatever - so this is all more of a "conceptual" issue.
I can understand the allure of a blocklist if you're in a marginalized group though, even if there's a price in maybe not EVERY account being bad enough to warrant it. That's why I mention being diligent in choosing blocklists to engage with.
@rapscalorie @me Well said. I haven't walked a mile in the shoes of the marginalized. Just be aware of who maintains your block lists and the policy for being added and if they have an appeal process for being removed. We're already an incredibly silo'd society I'm not sure arbitrarily blocking helps.
There is more than just a *possibility* that shared blocklist will be weaponized. It's as close to a certainty as we can get. And the weaponization of blocklists are paradoxically most often targeted at marginalized people. ๐คท๐ฟโโ๏ธ
Because of this, some very smart people oppose shared blocklists. The people that oppose blocklists are not irrational or selfish or uniformed. I just happen to disagree with them.
Because there are more choices than: a) No blocklists b) Blocklists that people agree to without thought
BlueSky has shared Blocklists. I've been the target of weaponized blocklists over there. Happens. One example: Inauthentic accounts pretending to be trans, got me added to a transphobes list. I was on that list for a few months. Then a real trans person with moderation experience saw what was going on, and got me off of the list. โฅ๏ธ๐๐ฟ
I've also been added to blocklists by good faith people that were confused. A Ukrainian person didn't understand that I have a bunch of Ukrainian relatives, and thought that I was disparaging Ukrainian drone units by saying that most of the casualties caused by Ukraine were by artillery. They are. I got added to an "Americans that don't care about Ukraine" or some such list. I think I'm still there. Similar happened when I said that my Haitian friends should be granted asylum from war the same as my Ukrainian friends.
I still support shared blocklists, because the benefit outweighs the harms, and many of the risks can be mitigated. And right now, it is way too hard and too expensive in terms of time, for a small Fediverse instance to be well moderated.
A bunch of government accounts joined BlueSky, and many users just subscribed to blocklists that included them. They're now the most blocked accounts on BlueSky. ๐คท๐ฟโโ๏ธ
@mike @rapscalorie @me this has been percolating in my head for a while , we need something better than a person who knows you luckily being a moderator ..
got to be a better idea than this but it seems like we could use a blocklist judiciary ??
what happens with shared blocklists when the data is contradictory and the moderators curating those lists disagree ?
mind you i think the concerns i have are not immediately important , so maybe not even worth thinking about ..
No, your questions are immediately important and spot on! ๐๐ฟ
Creating a blocklist process is not as interesting or difficult or as important as defining the appeals process, or the mechanism whereby something can get off the blocklist.
Another approach would be to publish and manage each Communal Blocklist that aims to gain a wide following as a GitHub-like project, with discussion, proposals, and deliberative approval of small โ or large โ batches of blocklist changes. This would make it possible for a blocklist to maintain a public reputation for fairness, prompt action, and topic focus. Change volume would likely be a challengeโฆ
Maybe a better approach would be a way for a Fediverse server to be able to nominate and mark itself as as โShared Blocklistโ source, then host discussion of moderation decisions, and share its current net Blocklist. It would need a TBD simple and efficient way for each Shared Blocklist server to periodically accept or reject proposed changes from Shared Blocklist servers *it* referencesโฆ
Yeah, there are lots of ways to improve the state of the art with blocklists -- and also it's worth thinking about shifts to models that involve allowlists. "A Blocklist is a Boundary" has some excellent perspectives on this in section 5 -- really worth reading!
Nope. It's certainly not a Twitter-like town square where everybody including Nazis is welcome, so if that's what you're looking for than an allow-list system isn't a good choice. And nobody's put a lot of effort yet into solving some of the usability challenges of a mostly-allow-list system. Still, it's the same social media software whether or not you default to letting new instances of Nazis harass you before blocking them.
I had people making similar arguments about leaving Bluesky. "Well nobody is on Mastodon!"
Maybe the metric for "good" social media should be something other than critical population mass? I don't *need* everybody. I don't *WANT* everybody.
I chose my instance here cause I'm techy, and now I get techy posts. I'd be fine without nazis potentially invading that. I understand an allowlist system isn't for everybody, but it could absolutely work for me!
@rapscalorie @thenexusofprivacy @Roundtrip I'm just wondering if it's really social media when it's so heavily fenced. Do we really need more silos? The cool thing about Mastodon is you have the tools to make it what you want it to be.
Curating your internet exp. isn't a "silo" anymore than not hanging out with the local bigots is a "silo." If I accuse you of being a p3do, should I be entitled to access to your posts to spread that rumor?
This insistence that intolerance of intolerance is worse than the intolerance itself is why we are where we are.
> cool thing about Mastodon is you have the tools to make it what you want
Then why argue against a new tool that people would find use in?
Biggest gripes with defederation block lists? Aside from a modest starter package we imported, it's just tedious work, because there's never a clear definition of what is blocked and why exactly, so you can't just blindly go for it.
Splitting it up into clearly defined categories would help, at least. Probably some shit holes would show up on multiple lists for all sorts of reasons, but that would be the least of my concern, because you can only block each domain once anyway.
If I understand it correctly (and I may not), Oliphantโs page below offers (among other links) also a permanent link to an automatically updated blocklist.
@nellie_m @tiotasram those lists exist as static files that need to be imported by the server administrator. What Iโm asking for is the ability to maintain lists that are then subscribed to, so that the administrator and users arenโt stuck manually uploading CSVs and periodically checking them themselves.
@me @nellie_m @tiotasram so the issue isn't so much the lack of appropriate lists, as the lack of an automation process to make the use of a list easier and less time consuming?
@cy@fedicy.us.to
Stuff like
1) Shared blocklist of known abusive instances
2) Make it easy for admins and mods to subscribe to blocklists
3) Make it easy for Join Mastodon to programmatically verify that a given instance uses a set of blocklistsโฆ
I'm with you. Would love to see it. I wonder if maybe Mastodon isn't the software platform to get what's needed done. I keep looking at Bonfire and wondering if something modular like that isn't a better place to experiment with moderation, trust, and safety features.
My take is: If a thing works to connect the hyper-marginalised in a good way, then it'll also work for me, the privilieged white male hetero GenX German. Except that my experience is going to be a lot more interesting and insightful by having folks NOT like me around.
So why would I ever be against that?
Give us everything that will help black, trans, neurodivergent and everyone else to feel welcome and safe!
There seem to be at least two opposing views on what โsafetyโ should mean in the fediverse that Iโve seen. 1) being able to control who can see and comment on oneโs posts 2) being able see and point out posts that attack one
From the technical point of view - what features could enhance safety? What can be added or is there and need to be made more user-friendly so people can feel safer?
Is the problem the federation? The lack of control or knowledge to block users / servers / hashtags? That anyone can be online on multiple servers? That mods do not do their moderating tasks?
I read several toots saying "Mastodon isn't safe for us", but I haven't heard yet of what features need to improve. And I'd really like to know!
๐ฏ I am surprised at the pushback but I guess I shouldn't be. If you stand for the ideals of the fediverse I don't see how you'd be against more users.
It's more than fine if changing Mastodon (or anything else) to increase Black safety disrupts the experiences of people who don't care about Black people
There are Mastodon instances that operate on an allowlist-only basis. While that can stave off a lot of harassment, it's got obvious downsides too, unless maybe you can expand the network of allowed instances to sufficient size. But could we use filtering to screen out harmful posts (or even just content a given instance chooses to disallow) in a more fine-grained way? It always feels like there's an enormous void in the tools we have available for this sort of moderation, just begging for someone to develop a better way.
Until then, I guess we all get to work at changing things culturally here.
We need a superblock. i.e. Block this account on my personal deny list, and also nominate it for inclusion on these shared deny list subscriptions: [X] Racist (@haters@fubu.party) [ ] Sexist (@misogyny@gurl.club) [ ] Horny on Main (@nsfw@super.gay) [X] Fascist (@thefash@antifa.io) [ ] Yucks Others' Yums (@downers@funhouse.lol) [ ] Fedi HOA (@squidwards@nerdwords.net) [ ] AI Scraperbot (@ai@opsec.tech) [X] Replyguy--Creepy (@stalkers@furry.win) [ ] Plagiarist (@stealers@dadjoke.org)
I have been here a long time, long before the mass exodus from Twitter and the big boom of new users on the fediverse. There has been an echoing refrain from the beginning which is that the fediverse doesnโt work for black people.
It triggers so muchโฆI donโt knowโฆeverything. Guilt, shame, anger, whatever. Itโs a rainbow of emotions every time someone posts something about it.
But then thatโs it.
Bit of shame and anger and on to the next thing.
โBoost Black voices, I did my part.โ
I see so few people who seem to genuinely want to do the work to understand what that *means* when someone says that the fediverse doesnโt work for them and itโs maddening. It feels like a very real reflection of reality most of the time though. Not at all in a good way.
@Theresacityinmymind Enshittification happens when a platform owner stops buying customers with VC money because they've hit a monopoly state and they can start charging higher and higher rents with lower and lower services because customers are locked in.
The Fediverse has no owner. That's the whole point.
Everyone deserves access to this platform. No gatekeepers.
The Fediverse, like Linux, doesn't have good UX. Because most open source projects over-value the technical skill of coding, and undervalue the technical skill of User Experience Research (UXR), User Experience Design (UXD), Information Architecture (IA), and Visual Design (VD).
And no, it doesn't require billions of dollars or VC money to not suck at UX, or to have an onboarding flow for users, admins, and moderators that isn't terrible. It just requires focus.
I've pointed out how Inkscape is a positive example of an open source project that treats UX as seriously as a highly funded VC startup does. Any project can do this. It just requires the will.
Mastodon is improving drastically in this regard. Some really strong UX folk have conducted interviews, designed features, gotten feedback, worked with Mastodon Engineering to build it, and shipped. โฅ๏ธ๐๐ฟ
Mastodon is not more complicated than a car. And yet, any model of car is easier for a driver familiar with other cars to step into and operate, than Mastodon is for people that have spent 20+ years on other social media platforms? That's because more UX work is needed on Mastodon.
"Paralyzed by choice anxiety" is a very derogatory way to say that for a Black person joining the Fediverse, if you join a good instance you have a good experience, but if you join a bad one, you get sent animated gifs of Black women being murdered in snuff films with racist threats, and it's up to you to try to figure out which are good instances and which are bad ones.
"Angry at no algorithm," is a very derogatory way to say that Mastodon has not yet put enough thought into the onboarding experience, so the few Black users that do join have a harder time even finding and following their own friends than they do on other platforms, even those with strict reverse chronological show me everything feeds.
@Theresacityinmymind in a way, Mastodon has concentrated on building better engines, stronger chassis, and interoperable rails for its trains. But it leaves the seats and the car interiors as a basic, I guess? Not to mention stations where you can get aboard.
@Theresacityinmymind Problem is there can be pile-ons from NAZI-instances that only the victims see, because those instances are poorly federated. Nazis only @ their targets, so there are no witnesses. @mekkaokereke
Thst would be taking the easy way out, and is why there are no Black people here.
The harder way is to mitigate this attack vector with better tools for both users and admins. There are several proposals in the works for addressing hidden replies, so progress is happening. But the current experience gaslights many Black people, in particular Black women, that try to use Mastodon.
Most excellent concept and post. My spouse is in frequent skirmishes on Facebook with RW donโt-know -their-ass-from-their-elbow minions shouting about Humptyโs rapture. โWhy do you bother?โ I ask, โcome join me in the peace of the reverseโ I smile. ๐
I agree with all of this & SO MUCH this part: "we as a community of people of all backgrounds, have agency to improve Mastodon". It could be better here, if we push it and make it better
IDK if you saw this paper I wrote about harassment here, from the perspective of an individual (not server- or blocklist-level). TLDR: this place has loopholes the size of semi trucks that harassers can exploit, which ofc Black folks have warned about. In case of interest: openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/indeโฆ
(English): This paper explores the potentials and perils of alternative social media, through a firsthand account of targeted harassment on a prominent decentralized social media network, Mastodon.
Old Twitter was _so_ much more diverse than the present Fediverse. Especially if you made a conscious effort to connect with people outside your bubble. Which I did, and I learned _so_ much.
In contrast, the Fediverse is its own bubble. People who hung out in their own bubbles on Old Twitter won't notice much of a difference, even if they believe themselves to be progressive and open-minded. But if you actively tried to cultivate diversity in your own timeline, the difference is brutal.
I used to have no difficulty finding lots of people from Africa, South Asia, and many other regions in the world. And I miss that.
A question for the "The #Fediverse doesn't need to grow" crowd:
Do you _want_ commercial platforms to dominate social media around the world - and allow them to manipulate the algorithm in order to promote unchecked #Capitalism, #fascism, and everything else that is currently wrecking the planet? Not to mention handing over sensitive personal information to authoritarian regimes.
I don't see social media going away. But the Fediverse currently represents our best hope of getting away from _commercial_ social media, and thus we need it to grow.
Thus, if you don't want the Fediverse to grow, you want #Meta and #X to win. Unless you have a _better_ noncommercial social media alternative than the Fediverse, in which case I'd love to hear about it!
I can not accept your binary options there. It is perfectly reasonable to not want a behemoth fediverse and not want Meta or X 'to win'. Not least because they've kind of 'won' already, but also because alternative routes, accepting that being marginalised and outside of the mainstream becomes massively preferable for some, rather than being part of a 'win' here, given what that might look like.
I definitely want neither some massive fediverse nor Meta or X.
I want them to have a social medaia platform that works for them. I want it passionately. And I will do every thing I can, as an ally, to make that happen.
But: I find it a false boolean to say that if I (and it was a personal point) do not want a bigger fedi I want Meta and X to succeed. I can say definitely that the statement is just not accurate nor persuasive.
I worry a lot about the disaster which is .social and that model of bigger fedi 4eg.
@juergen_hubert I'm unhappy that about 3/4s of the people I used to follow on BirdChan did not come to the Fediverse. I am perturbed at many of those that remain on BirdChanโtheir presence there providing revenue and undeserved legitimacy to Musk's dumpster fire platform.
I am, however, happy that the MAGA influencers and their apologists have remained on BirdChan and have not come to the Fediverse.
But here's the coolest part: they *have* come to the Fediverse! They're already here! They've always been here! ๐๐
There are more virulent nazis on the Fediverse than on Twitter. There are more super MAGAs on the Fediverse than on Twitter.
Truth Social is on the Fediverse. All those nazi instances are on the Fediverse.
The point is that with sufficient safety and moderation capabilities, like defederation, well trained moderation teams on well run instances, shared blocklists, etc. we can have a great experience on some parts of the fediverse, and let them play their nazi games on another part.
This is where the pedants will have a clearer answer than me.๐
If a Fediverse instance defederates, is it still on the Fediverse? Is the circular definition of Fediverse that at least one other member of the Fediverse federated with you?
If Truth Social chooses to change one config and federate tomorrow, did they "join" the Fediverse? Or were they always on the Fediverse, but defederated?
@Enema_Cowboy @juergen_hubert I'm worried that I'm being "the Pedants" that you're talking about, but I don't think Truth Social are currently federated using any definition where you could reasonably have them defederated? Nazis on the fedi are a big problem, but I think it's important to not to blur the distinction between Truth Social, (big, high profile, contains Trump), and the tiny whack-a-mole free-speach instances that are actually difficult to block
No, don't be worried! Sincerely! This type of pedantry is important. When pedantry is important we call it "being precise with our definitions."
My point is that I'm not worried about bad faith instances joining the Fediverse, because if we have the correct moderation tools we can manage that.
I am worried about mega instances getting even bigger, because my belief is that moderation of large instances becomes prohibitively expensive, and impossible. So we need more, smaller instances with a consistent bar of being safe from the worst actors. We don't currently have the tooling to support this, but we are building it.
The mega instances make it much easier for bad faith individuals to join good faith instances, and cause trouble from within. The answer for that is not "keep Mastodon small," so much as "Keep instances small."
The economics of small instances are also still upside down. It must become cheaper to run a small, safe instance. I should be able to support a community of ~500 users for $20 a month, and < 1 hr a week spent on moderation / administration, with no technical background, and no experience in moderation or dealing with threat actors. We are very far from that today.
Mastodon.social is effectively "too big to block" for most other instances right now, which is problematic. We need the Fediverse to spread out more, which will encourage better moderation - with the right tools, of course.
This makes sense. On the other hand, large instances have advantages too.
I wonder how hard it would be to add a level of user grouping within an instance. Like a virtual instance, for moderation purposes, within the physical instance.
Only one modern Mastodon is literally Mega (>1M users). In the rest of Fedi, Threads, Truth and Bluesky could be Mega but none have that reach here due to gaps in federation.
Agreed that Mastodon doesn't work well for Mega scale, but it also doesn't work well at small scale. It seems its place is at the Kilo scale, perhaps? @mekkaokereke @JamesPink @Enema_Cowboy @juergen_hubert
Mastodon lacks tools to do effective local moderation at scale, while "mega" servers are difficult to moderate at network level (defederating m.s would cost a lot of broken follows). 1-100 user servers are easy to moderate but when intentionally unmoderated, turn into whack-a-mole for everyone else. @expertenkommision_cyberunfall
What I'm trying to say that if we had to build fedi exclusively out of Mastodon, 2000 servers with with 2000 users each would work better than one with 2 million plus 20000 with 100 users each.
@ZDL @JamesPink @Enema_Cowboy @juergen_hubert I think this is a bad policy for the same reason it's bad for a school or town to be "everyone knows each other". It fuels making decisions that impact other people's lives and ability to participate as equals based on personal feelings about one another rather than on justice.
@JamesPink @Enema_Cowboy @juergen_hubert From the way the term "Fediverse" is used, I think it makes more sense to apply it from a social / network graph approach than a technical tool-based one. Taking a network view, the Fediverse is the conglomerate of interconnected, independently owned+operated services. Nothing in the Fediverse is connected to every single other piece of the Fediverse, but there's a difference in degree (not kind!) between being part of the Fediverse (connected to a bunch of other Fediverse pieces), connected to the Fediverse (connected to one / a few Fediverse pieces), and disconnected (not currently connected but theoretically possible to do so).
This isn't *the* definition of the Fediverse, but I would argue it's one of the more *useful* ones. Definitions are like models - all of them are wrong, but some are useful.
I think we have enough of a mass of instances that don't connect to the Nazi instances that it's worth drawing a distinction between the clusters, even if there isn't a clean air-gap grade separation.
"Given our location close to the mountain, sometimes animals enter the garden. Sometimes, cats and weasels step on the stones, causing us to have to redraw the patterns. Today, the cherry blossoms are beautiful. But later, the maple leaves will be a beautiful deep red. But those leaves will fall, requiring me to clean up the garden. I hope the garden is here for many more hundreds of years."
I had the opportunity to film the raking wave patterns in the sand at Ryoan-ji Temple, the most famous Zen Garden in the world.โก Ryoฮฑnjihttp://www.ryoanji.j...
@JamesPink @Enema_Cowboy @juergen_hubert I define "fediverse" by a graph of actual federation, not protocol compatibility divorced from policy. If an instance is defederated from the vast majority of the graph that is "the fediverse", it's not part of "the fediverse". My usage like this goes several years back: hachyderm.io/@dalias/111021524โฆ
In the three years or so I have been on the #Fediverse , my stream and my experiences have been largely free of Nazis and other bigots, which is a _very_ different experience than the one I had on Twitter (and X). This means that moderation on the Fediverse works largely as intended _for me_.
In the meantime, many Black Fediverse users have reported a _lot_ of harassment, which means that moderation doesn't seem to work for _them_.
So, when learning that the lived experiences of others differ from our own - what do we do with that information?
To use psychology terms, the unsophisticated approach would be "Assimilation". In this approach, we see the new information as a threat to our worldview, and are looking for ways to dismiss it. "This is just an outlier!" "They are using Moderation tools wrong!", etc.. Since the Assimilation approach requires less mental energy, this is what most people default to - and you can see this in the experiences of Black people on the Fediverse, where too many people dismiss their concerns or even become confrontational over it.
The sophisticated approach would be "Accommodation". In this approach, we recognize that our preexisting worldview (or "schema") is insufficient to explain the new information we have received. Thus, we need to tear down some of our assumptions and build a new understanding of the situation on which we can build if we want to reach our goals.
At least, if the goal in question is: "How can we increased the participation of marginalized groups who are massively underrepresented in the Fediverse?" And I do believe that this goal is _very_ important for numerous reasons.
Thus, when figuring out how to improve the moderation on the Fediverse, there is little point in listening to those who are already pretty satisfied with their experience. Instead, we really need to listen to those people who are _not_ satisfied with their experiences on the Fediverse. And there is no shortage of those.
Yes, and they were in the Fediverse before Mastodon even started. In The Gnu social fediverse of 2016 I quote somebody who was there at the time describing GNU Social's late-2016 culture as "a bunch of channer shit and blatantly anti-gay and anti-trans memes", and notes that "the instance we saw most often on the federated timeline in those days was shitposter.club, a place which virtually every respectable instance now has blocked."
The 2016-7 wave of people coming here because they were sick of the harassment on Twitter led to the development of defederation and local-only posts -- which were significant improvements from a safety perspective. Of course there's still a lot more to be done in general, and especially from the perspective of Black people ... but yeah, we really do have to make fedi safe enough for the people who Nazis target. And if we do, well then it'll be a lot better than any corporate social media platform, so then there will indeed be millions of people here -- and that's a good thing.
Mekka you have to be my favorite poster on the fediverse
Every post you make makes me think
I take it is as a dear conviction that the fediverse should grow. And so at your first sentence I'm feeling antipathy. But by the end of your comment, I'm agreeing with you. You're challenging me in the best of ways
We need growth, but at what cost? And you make me consider the costs. And they cannot be denied, and they must be addressed before any growth
We apologize for the long performance degradation today. Finally, we identified all of the 'tricks' that AI crawlers found today. They no longer bypass the anubis proof of work challenges.
A novelty for us was that AI crawlers seem to not only crawl URLs that are actually presented to them by our frontend, but they converted the URLs into a format that bypassed our filter rules.
By the way, you can track the changes we have been doing via
this arms race is so bizarre and absolutely horrendous for our historical record of the evolution of human information technology. The fact that robots txt is the only defence (that mostly does not work) is maddening.
ML companies are basically injesting work they do not own and without permission. DDOSing the creators, hosts and providers and then selling that information.
Surely there should be a universally accepted way to signal no scraping by now???
I'm going to try a normal, respectful, old fashioned crawl and see if that's possible. This is the search engine for indyradio, it has documents google won't find and for me usually works better. excuse the plug. I'll let you know what results I got. lookdown.org
I think your langue here is way to soft. Itโs not crawlers what found it, but some company actively worked on breaking the mechanisms. Itโs nothing else than malicious cracking. Behind every such incident is someone who made the decision to crack you.
As a next step, AI companies are now offering "their" browser (read: Chromium ever so slightly themed with some company bullshit built in)
In part, this is certainly done to have yet another way to crawl the web, but this time user-directed and indistinguishable from actual human requests.
@claudius Frankly, I'm kind of half-OK with that one: There's still the troubling copyright aspect, but at least being the browser and loading nothing but user viewed content at least gets their load off our servers.
@claudius If there's actual page-consuming users behind every single request, it'd take a colossal effort to pull of DDoS. Cloudflare (whose business interest admittedly is to over-report DoS attacks) clocks even 2010-level attacks at 600k requests per second, so even with low-attention-span users (maybe 5s/page), that'd take 3 million humans for the duration of the attack. If someone can just so convince 3M people to constantly click through slow-loading pages, we have bigger issues than DoS.
@claudius Of course, if their browsers load content *beyond* what the viewed page is including and the explicit preload links, then those users turned their hosts into part of a botnet willingly, and need to expect blocking like any other botnet.
@claudius At some point we're going to start paying a lawyer a few dollars to send the AI companies a registered return-receipt-requested letter saying "You are denied access to my web site. I have taken every step possible to prevent you from accessing it. If you continue to circumvent these measures and access my site anyway, you will be billed $1000/access. This fee will take effect 14 days after you receive this notice."
@claudius More folks need to begin adopting ... unorthodox solutions for those groups which have been so wonderful as to ignore robots.txt. Disguised petabyte ZIP bombs. Poisoned pages. Image folders chock full of Nightshade.
The legal argument to be made and adopted here is that if the companies weren't willfully breaking the law, then they wouldn't have subjected themselves to those attacks. It certainly doesn't even fall under entrapment in most cases.
I would like to believe that if the US federal government weren't completely fucked up right now then OpenAI and the other AI parasites with a nexus in the US would have been criminally charged by now with violating the #CFAA by actively circumventing the crawling protections added recently to websites specifically to block them. Alas, the government is too busy engaging in vindictive prosecution of #Trump's enemies who aren't actively bribing him. #infosec #AI Ref: darmstadt.social/@claudius/115โฆ
I look back at the good old days, when one day I client asked me to bulletproof their websites and computers so they could never steal something, and I went under the desk and unplugged their first computer. They learned.
this explains why I don't see y'all in malware either ๐ซถ
# Codeberg is not a CDN. Less than 0.1% of the requests (500K req over the last 6 days) looks non CDN related.<br> @cloudstream expression path('/cloudstream/*') && path('*/raw/*')<br> respond @cloudstream "Codeberg is not a CDN." 403<br>
how about forcing the user to login to see any repos, otherwise just display the homepage?
unfortunately we have to take a page out of paywall tactics and make it so that only logged in users can view public repos. otherwise its a cat and mouse game
easy to rate limit and ban individuals too when theyre logged in
In the first seven years of my life, there was no daylight saving time chaos. But ever since they introduced it back in 1977 (I am Dutch), there have been discussions about getting rid of it again. Which of course never happened. The promises of the DST lobby (better use of resources, less costs for the economy) have however also never materialised. The whole DST thing shouts emperor's new clothes and a political inability to act on facts to me :)
I wouldn't mind abolishing #DST . But when we abolish it, then I hope that most (maybe even all) of Europe stays in the same time zone. Otherwise #crossborderrail becomes a huge headache.
@luminos thatโs gonna be a hard decision to make, and which time are we going to hop on? Belgium, NL, Spain and France are geographically in the UK timezone, and Germany, Italy, Austria and Switzerland in the next one. Iโm all for getting rid of DST though. Science also says itโs the way to go.
And yet, the whole EU (except Portugal and Greece) gets by on a single timezone, CET. So what you really want is to use the removal of DST to add more timezones ;) @luminos
@haploc @luminos Adding time zones creates new problems and will not adequately compensate the lack of DST. Take Germany for example: abolishing DST means that in Berlin sun sets in summer no later than 20:35. If Germany instead were to opt for permanent DST then people in Cologne would have sun rise in winter around 09:30. Either of the two variants will be unpopular when they suddenly become reality. Unfortunately, the talk about abolishing DST never takes this in consideration.
@haploc We should not forget that CET/CEST is a compromise, for some more so than others. People in western continental Spain have solar noon around 14:30 CEST, sunset on the summer solstice at 22:16 CEST and sunrise in early winter after 9:00 CET. Some people would like to institute CEST year-long. That would mean that they have sunrise after 10am on Christmas Day. So, better to keep CET year-round if one wants to get rid of DST.
Calculations of sunrise and sunset in Santiago de Compostela โ A Coruรฑa โ Spain for Oktober 2025. Generic astronomy calculator to calculate times for sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset for many cities, with daylight saving time and time zones taken iโฆ
@haploc @luminos I donโt have an issue with lots of timezones, but Iโd actually prefer we follow our local daylight cycles so that weโre not constantly pushing our bodies to exist in states that are out of sync with local sunrise - daylight - sunset - night
in winter, letโs do shorter hours ๐ฅถ ๐ฆ ๐ด
in summer, longer hours โ only some of which are for work, the rest for recreation ๐ค๏ธ ๐ถโโ๏ธ ๐ดโโ๏ธ ๐ฆฎ ๐ท ๐ฆ ๐ฆโโฌ ๐ฆ
Iโm sure this breaks down a bit as you get nearer the poles, but folks in those region had their own traditions & cycles that they could revert to ๐โโ๏ธ
@itgrrl That's what my grandfather always said (he was a farmer): "We start working when the sun comes up and we end when the sun goes down. That's why we love working in the winter." :) @haploc @luminos
@haploc @luminos it may be more complex though, there is a meta review that argues that precisely the combination of DST and normal time brings benefits: medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/20โฆ
Background Whether to maintain biannual time transitions or adopt perennial daylight-saving time (DST) or Standard Time is widely debated but health impacts have not been comprehensively reviewed.
"It ... has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice." As I see it, this preview refers to the study by Neumann+Blankenburg.. In various places, the scientists point out that reliable facts in certain areas of life, including long-term studies, are still pending in some areas. I think it really makes sense to compare this preview with the very comprehensive and well-founded study by the two scientists: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.11โฆ
In 2018, 84% of European citizens were in favor of abolishing the practice, but Antรณnio Costa was among the people who wanted to continue. This week, Spanish PM Pedro Sรกnchez tried to recommit the current @EUCommission to finish it. xcancel.com/sanchezcastejon/stโฆ @jwildeboer
I personally wouldn't want to live without the extra hour of light in summer that makes life in the northern part of Europe bearable, especially with the long, dark winters we have.
i doubt this is a realistic option. One reason why large parts of continental Europe are within one timezone is precisely to have synchronized working hours. Why would individual companies/organizations now change their working hours and loose working hour alignment with everybody else? If this were a realistic scenario then we'd likely have already seen this applied by now, given how much everybody seems to dislike DST
@Tjal In most larger enterprises (those that would benefit most from a single timezone) business units and partners are already spread around there world, so meetings and other calendar-bound events already have to take in account different timezones anyway.
@gvlx Yes. And it works perfectly fine, especially in those weeks where one region already did their DST switch but the other one does that a week later or earlier ;) @Tjal
@gvlx of course they do align calendars, but I doubt that except for very specialized services there are any enterprises in Europe that have their workforce shift their entire working schedule from 9 to 5 to let's say 12 to 9. Something like this would definitely not be seen as a "workplace benefit".
@gvlx Likewise people will not be happy about working one hour earlier/later just to align their working hours with the neighboring country. So companies will likely have to bear this disalignment. My goal is not to advocate companies' interests but I do want to point out, that it is a misconception that abolishing DST is a no-brainer then everyone lived happily ever after.
It can also be argued that the problems were caused by the *introduction* of DST and that abolishing it โ while causing problems of its own โ would also solve problems DST created (train/flight etc schedules when switching so summer time, where you "lose" an hour, the one hour waiting someplace when switching back) @gvlx
I would argue that the introduction of DST *solved* some of these issues. And as for train/plane schedules - I don't see how biannual time shifts caused by DST are fundamentally any different from a plane or train crossing time zone borders. Plane and train scheduling software has been coping with this for decades successfully and if there are cases where this fails related to DST then I would think this to be a quality assurance problem
@arrakeen_urbanite I'd put the biggest part of the blame on the fossil fuel cartels :) The whole unifiation and shift with CET/CEST is in my opinion the driect result of the 1973 oil crisis. @Tjal
Hah! Like the Brexit benefits we Brits voted for, on the promise of "sunlit uplands". We have instead plunged deeper into the twilight zone, but embarassment obstinacy & inertia dictates that we are forbidden to put the clocks back.
policy is only added to, never removed. I'm afraid we're stuck with little weirdnesses like DST and representative democracy until some war, AI apocalypse, disease or other catastrophic revolution cleans the slate.
I moved to a country with no daylight savings, and I would never again accept an argument for it. Life goes on just fine without your sleep pattern being disrupted twice a year, there is no reason for this stupidity.
As far as I know, the idea is that you save a lot on candles when people work 6-22.
These days, it makes absolutely no sense to make it artificially dark longer in the morning to have more light after people close the curtains to avoid sunlight reflecting in the TV screen.
In the first 20 years of my life, there was no DST (it was introduced in Germany in 1980), and I (L) have been enjoying the later sunset in summer ever since. My partner (R) only came here in the 1990s and also loves it.๐
We are soooo tired of the discussions about abolishing it.๐คฎ
What big discussions will evolve if it is abolished and then people start missing DST?๐ก
free speech issue 
Lorraine Lee
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keith
in reply to StillIRise1963 • • •I get the same from The Guardian - 'please come back?!'
Nope, not until you hire back the journo people you let go in order to replace them with AI shit. Oh, and your coverage of last year's general election was embarrassingly awful.
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Je suis contente
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StillIRise1963
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