Interesting Links for 24-11-2022

[andrewducker]

1. All You Need To Know About Scotland's Legal Bid For An Independence Referendum

(tags:scotland law independence )

2. COVID-19 vaccination associated with 15% reduction in stillbirths

(tags:pandemic vaccination death pregnancy )

3. The influence of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies on cinematic portrayals of ancient Greece and Rome

(tags:rome greece lotr movies )

4. Turns out that dreaded pit beasts are a lot like cats

(tags:funny fantasy comic cats )

5. How much does it cost Facebook to look after your cat pictures?

(tags:cats facebook storage )

6. Lugo, the only town with fully intact Roman walls

(tags:history rome Spain architecture viaDanielDWilliam )

7. Where are all the heat pumps?

(tags:electricity heating UK viaDanielDWilliam )

8. If you're wondering how SpaceX coped with Musk, this will fill you in

(tags:ElonMusk Spacex management )

9. Fossil fuel power plants kill 35x as many birds as wind turbines do per GWh (and nuclear power is twice as deadly as wind power)

(tags:birds death nuclearpower coal gas environment windpower )

10. European Parliament declares Russia a terrorism sponsor, then its site goes down

(tags:web russia europe terrorism )

11. How much trouble are GPs in Scotland in?

(tags:healthcare scotland )

12. Sponsian: Ancient Roman gold coins thought to be 'fakes' reveal long-lost local emperor

(tags:rome Romania archeology )

Comments

[autopope]

There's an error in the Facebook data storage piece (ironically published on Livejournal): 3 billion people a month use FB, and it spends $30Bn a year on infrastructure ... but there are only 0.33Bn people in the US: realistically, the USA accounts for about 200M users, around 5% of FB's usage. So if it was run as a public service the cost to the US government would be closer to something on the order of $1.5Bn a year, which in US government terms is peanuts -- less than the production cost of a single SLS rocket or B-2 bomber.

(The point about it being private and very dangerous still stands, but it's annoying to see such an obvious error in an otherwise solid argument.)

[danieldwilliam]

I could get excited about a mutual or co-op social media industry but I think we'd need to rebuild the co-op movement much more before it starts buying server racks.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, at the moment Mastodon.scot, like many instances, is being run by an individual mostly for fun, with people chipping in a bit of cash. Setting upa mutual/co-op organisation would be more useful if you wanted longevity.

[danieldwilliam]

Longevity and a better chance at some democractic oversight. (Although the record of mutuals in recent decades is not great in practice.)

[andrewducker]

Part of the problem is funding things, and that mutual organisations are regularly made up of people who don't have large amount of funds to put into things.

I can think of many organisations which coalesce around a single aim, but nearly all of them have some kind of issue with money.

[danieldwilliam]

I'm struggling to get Mastodon to work for me and I can't work out what exactly is not working for me.

[andrewducker]

By "Struggling to get Mastodon to work for me" do you mean "I have hit a bug" or "I am not enjoying the experience"?

[danieldwilliam]

Definitely the latter, perhaps caused by the former but I think it's more to do with the UI than a bug.

[andrewducker]

Happy to sit down with you and try to better understand at some point. Or wander about :-)

[poshmerchant]

If you are using the mobile Mastodon app, it's missing a lot of the desktop browser features. Tusky on Android and MetaText on iOS have a more full experience.

Otherwise, the Mastodon loop is:
- Post an intro about yourself
- Explore some hashtags (e.g. #illustration) and follow anyone interesting that turns up
- Explore the federated timeline and follow anyone interesting that turns up. This is one of the bits missing from the mobile Mastodon app

[danieldwilliam]

Thank you for taking the time to help out.

I'm using the desktop app but the reminder that different platforms will yield different experiences is helpful.

I think fundamentally my problem is that I'm trying to do the thing you (and others) have suggested but I just can't get it to "work" and I realise when thinking about your comment that part of the problem is that I'm not sure exactly what I mean by "work". So that's been a helpful step forward. I think I'm not sure what I'm epecting to see or meant to see so I'm not sure if I can't see it because I'm pressing the wrong buttons, or if I'm pressing the right buttons but for the wrong thing or if the thing I want doesn't exist.

[andrewducker]

I would also suggest importing your "friends" from Twitter.

Go here: https://fedifinder-backup2.glitch.me/

And follow the steps through. Basically, you give it permission to look at your Twitter details, it checks your friends to see how many have mentioned mastodon IDs in their profile/pinned tweet, you can then take that info and save it as a file, and then import it into your own account, which follows all of those people on Mastodon.

That way you'll be looking at what people are sharing over there, rather than at a blank screen.

[danieldwilliam]

Aye - I got the download from Twitter and I've not got round to uploading it.

I do expect that will help greatly.

[dewline]

As a subscriber/member/co-owner of the National Capital FreeNet, I'm naturally interested in any internet infrastructure that can be similarly organized.