maegul

maegul , 4 months ago

Ummm ... are you ok?

It's a good point to make and interesting to see how the numbers shake out ... both of which come together to make the broader point that many people probably have bad intuitions for what these numbers look like.

maegul , 4 months ago

The whole webring idea needs to come back. Human curated recommendations of good resources and pages. So long as these pages remain in the control of humans and dedicated to curation and are decentralised, unlike the search engines, then they’ll be reliable.

Plugging in some social and community organisation, perhaps like a wiki, and you could get even more out of it.

maegul , 4 months ago

Seems relevant ... Ted Gioia's article on "Signs you're living in a world without a counter culture": https://www.honest-broker.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-are-living

In general, it's a very older-gen (boomer/x-gen) point to make at the moment, but it's probably one of the nostalgic points worth taking seriously. I'm sure today there are certainly counter cultures. My bet is that compared to the past, they're harder to find, generally more numerous and probably more nebulous and hard to pin down unless you're "in them", and, problematically, I'd imagine they tend to be "thinner" and more fragile ... less "alternative world views" and more "particular vibe specific to a time and place". Genuinely curious topic for me though.

maegul , 4 months ago

As easy as it is to hold contempt for boomers, the hippie counterculture did have a massive impact.

Resonates with my personal critique of my generation (millennial) ... however "unlucky" we are to suffer the transition out of the post-war period and "suffer" the boomers ... we're a relatively ineffectual and entitled bunch TBH, however much that is our fault or our circumstances.

We're the generation that have gone ahead and made a bunch of life decisions because it was what we were "supposed" to do. We're the generation that trusted and to some extent still trusts the system, and, expects there to be a system that is trust worthy ... which aren't bad virtues or expectations, but certainly helps explain how a generation can share a ubiquitous dissatisfaction with how the world ends up working and the future we're heading toward but still struggle to work up the motivation to get up and do something about it. In a way, we've been betrayed by our elders and we don't know what to do about it and how sad we and empty we feel about it.

And simultaneously, we're the generation that's as plugged in to consuming and responding to the input of big giant systems as ever. (Over-)Education^[I've got nothing against education per se, but I feel that a lot of education is rather shallow, manufactured and focused on "certification" rather than useful and meaningful understandings, ideas and skills.], TV, Internet, social media, 24hr news, globalisation. Our attention spans are short, our concerns our ephemeral or fed to us by the mainstream, and we feel smaller and smaller against the great tide of content and input over which have no control and in which even less stakes. We're the "stay in your lane" and doom-scroll generation ... which makes us ill-prepared and ill-suited for changing the kind of systems we rely on. When something feels too big or too hard, we're more likely to sit alone, pick up our phones and doom-scroll for some dopamine than we are to look around to our peers sitting next to us for support and dig in together.

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And to bring this back to the fediverse ... many on here celebrate how it feels like the old internet that the remember (old twitter or usenet). I've always personally found that problematic.

On a basic level, nostalgia can be dangerous in its indifference to the present ... old twitter and usenet and the old internet are kinda dead and the fediverse should lean in to being its own thing, however much that borrows from what once was.

More specifically, social media for the younger generation is a different thing ... they didn't use the internet in the 90s and never will. Some of them have only seen twitter, youtube and tiktok and can't help but compare anything like the fediverse, however much they might be interested in its ideas, to the social media they know.

So for me, us millennials, I think we're kind of broken, and heading into the physical age where we're custodians of our experience and the lessons that ought to have been learnt from it, and no longer "the generation" that the world should care about and be making social media platforms for.

We should be making an internet for the younger generations, one that is better than what our X-gen/Boomer capitalist seniors gave them and gives them a chance to understand and use the knowledge sharing, exploration and independence the technology can provide.

maegul , 4 months ago

Great response!

From a millennial perspective, the next 10-20 years are certainly going to be "our moment" ... and yea, I'm personally interested in and looking forward to seeing how much the vibe shifts from a boomer dominated to millennial dominated world. Without wanting to shit on boomers or anything, I'd guess that it'll be a mixed bag. There will be real sigh of relief as we shake off some simply old, privileged and egocentric perspectives ... but also some frustrations as we have to face our own versions "douche bag" and shitty systems.

maegul , 4 months ago

I've been hearing talk of mechanised coffee makers/baristas taking over for over 20 years now. In this current AI hype environment it's pretty easy to believe that now's the time. And sometimes hype can make that happen if everyone believes it's the time for it.

I'm not in the robotics space but I can imagine that more pervasive ML and/or DL techniques can bring the field forward. Whether they translates to better automatic coffee machines though? I think I'm doubtful just because of how much of the job is random fine motor control stuff. Though, to be fair, so many coffee places, even good ones, have so much variance in the quality of their product that they don't control for because they don't have to that I can see machines doing on average a better job in many cases ... where again, with AI hype, people may just be happy to accept and embrace that. I'd certainly go try coffee from a coffee robot now.

Which of course gets to the potentially oncoming reality for a lot of people ... climate change + job automation ... over a 5-30 year time scale, shit's about to get whack.

maegul , 4 months ago

Oh yea ... and happening more and more.

Just a local burger joint near me started installing automatic ordering interfaces/computers. At first I was confused that it'd be worth it for them as they don't have the most amount of business. Then I realised that their demand spikes massively and is rather variable. So, instead of hiring people for shifts that are too long such that they will just stand around for most of it ... they're investing in machines so that what little staff they can afford can be stretched more during peak demand times.

maegul , 4 months ago

Yep, that makes complete sense.

maegul , 4 months ago

Umm … is so this could be a better way for mastodon users to follow lemmy communities right?

maegul , 5 months ago

Like everyone else you can only hope she’s ok.

It does seem like burnout is a factor here and in such cases it seems, and from my own experience too, that walking away without any contact isn’t an uncommon behaviour. So we can hope it’s that.

maegul , 8 months ago

Ummm … fuck yes that’s awesome!!

maegul , 11 months ago

So, lemmy is an option for running a blog. See it mentioned in the documentation here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/06-other-features.html?highlight=blog#lemmy-as-a-blog.

There would be a few levels of complexity to it. But if you're hosting a lemmy instance already, it shouldn't be any trouble for you ... basically make yourself the only account but allow people to federate with your instance. Add your own modified front end too if you like (as lemmy has separate backend and front end software stacks AFAIU). Interestingly, I think it would be a cool project for people to work on ... a front end suitable for hosting a single (or even multi) user blog on the fediverse.

An additional option would be microblog: https://docs.microblog.pub/. It's a single-user fediverse platform written in python and relying on sqlite (which sounds to me like a nice sweet spot for single-user instances).

maegul , 11 months ago

Yep, totally, there's search, sorting, comments etc, all in one backend.

A neat blog-focused front-end would actually be super awesome IMO. Many want to be on the fediverse but interact just through blogs. A sort of blogo-verse (not sphere). Lemmy might be the best foundation to make that happen.