[new tech notebook entry] Scripting Mastodon in Scala tech.interfluidity.com/2023/07

Meeting fixed overhead, with special attention to price discrimination, dominates how firms think about prices and wages, rather than the marginalist analysis of economic theory, writes arnoldkling.substack.com/p/the

when you are failing at things, you get angry.

This is not a test.

This is only a test.

i’ve seen older millennials describe themselves as Xennials. do younger ones go as Zennials?

I've received a kind of e-mail that I can't decide whether to think of as helpful or dangerous. A person—but the style and form of the mail makes me think mb a bot—writes he has found a broken link on my blog. He's chased down a current link to the same resource (an academic paper). The new link is to a page on a rather random server. I wonder whether the plan isn't to point the link elsewhere once I've "fixed" it. (I found a more reliable link, used that rather than the suggested destination.)

@John@masto.host I love blogging. But I do think the very granular, low-barrier-to-contribution form of deliberation of which Twitter at its best sometimes served as prototype had a lot of value. The idea isn’t that single remarks are “for the ages”, but that conversations — not individual brilliances — are the relevant unit of deliberation (in the blogosphere too, which has made that enterprise much less meaningful than it once was).

@John Twitter was never a formal deliberation platform, on which things would conclude with a vote. And contentious subjects yield camps and multiple consenses, unless some institutional form demands some compromise “win”. But on Twitter, within broad camps rather than between, there was a kind of consensus-forming process. Things would be hashed out, conclusions would become conventional wisdom, the past could be carried forward by backreferences to older conversations. 1/

@John Not wonderfully! Twitter was not designed, was poorly designed, as a deliberation platform. There is no convenient, reliable, way for example to find and follow all the branches of rely chains. Like Facebook, a lot of record can be submerged to the point of disappearance. 2/

in reply to self

The claim isn’t that Twitter is (or Mastodon or anything else merely social-media-ish should) adjudicate between deeply opposed camps. Shouting happens more there and more destructively of goodwill than ever here. But the notion of constructing something that will survive and inform the future within conversations among people considering and disputing in goodwill is very valuable, but hard to do here. /fin

in reply to self

We need to distinguish when thinking about social media between simple conversation and public deliberation.

Conversation is intended to be ephemeral and, while not necessarily private, not part of a permanent public record or evolving intellectual edifice.

Deliberation needs to be more formally public, searchable, evolving in form and surfaces and outcomes but backed by a permanent record. 1/

Both are really important functions!

Mastodon is tailored more to conversation than public deliberation. Twitter is flawed but a bit better structured for deliberation, unfortunately poisoned by engagement then Elon. /fin

in reply to self

i'm not so sure about this project of veniforming terra.

While all these supercompelling writers and actors are on strike and perhaps able to devote some of their talents to not their day job, imagine if we had Hollywood quality wit and production values explaining, for example, why Taft-Hartley is such a shitshow and needs to be repealed.

[new draft post] Degrowth for Whigs drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/

A philosophy/self-help book:

“The Way of the Dodo”

Let me just put you on hold.

guys, what if we did, like, a gofundme for our billionaires’ mental health?

cf salon.com/2023/07/17/billionai

ht @xerophile @uspolitics@sdf.org

Session expired.

young millennial journalists had their own peculiar argot. "crushing it", "epic", the use of "everyone" as a weird pronoun describing the very narrow sort of everyone who was them and their readership.

will gen Z bring its own way of speaking? what are some gen-Z particular idioms?

"Why they're smearing Lina Khan" @pluralistic pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/mak

This virtual event, featuring Rohan Grey, begins in about an hour, on Rohan's privacy-preserving government-issued eCash proposal. It will likely touch upon CBDC, cryptocurrency, and other such goodies (or baddies, adjust to taste). meetup.com/ethereumsiliconvall