Rudy Giuliani 'may have been compromised' by the Kremlin, and FBI leaders didn't care

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us." - Carl Sagan, 1995

In the world of post-truth drama, it makes sense. Nothing turns around the loyalty he builds when he captures the hearts and minds of his voters. Even if he dies of a heart attack, people will still seek out the kind of attitude he has been iconic for. Eton Musk is 25 years younger, but seems to be following Trump as a behavior model of successful businessman icon.

Do you think I'm opening a bug about Beehaw or something?

This is a technology topic. People discuss when Facebook and Reddit and Twitter have major outages.

"Essentially, they’re saying you can bake up a sample of this stuff, pop it out of the oven, and just sitting there on your lab bench it will conduct electricity without any resistance."

From what I have heard, it's not supposed to be that expensive or even difficult to make. They should have sent actual samples of the material to a dozen different universities from a batch they share their own data measurements about. Save everyone a lot of time about doubts that it's manufactured correctly.

Given the beta status of Lemmy, I don't even think it's a great idea to give the appearance of privacy. I think the core purpose of a webapp like Lemmy is public messages.

I think it's a can of worms for server operators to get into the business of thinking they can safely hold private messages between users/strangers. None of the Lemmy instances I've joined have had a "terms of service" or anything like that on SIgn Up, I really think the message should be sent far and wide that Lemmy is about posting IN PUBLIC and that messages are being FEDERATED to peers, even people that you don't know could be collecting the data for a search engine.

With small-time server operators opening up hundreds of Lemmy instances, without giving away their experience or human identity, how can you have any confidence that someone is properly securing a server they only have part-time job to update and operate? Major corporations are having their database stolen, Valve, Sony, Nintendo, health care companies, mobile network companies (AT&T)... you think a low-budget shoestring server by a hobbyist running Lemmy should be held to the same standards as a corporation who has an entire team and services to defend their data?

There are outright attacks of putting illegal images that have caused major problems the past few days on the biggest Lemmy instances...

Hating Reddit was not necessarily a great motivation for people to create original content here. Hating Elon Musk and Twitter to x, the introduction of Threads generated more hate. It's been kind of hate burnout lately.

I think it's very deliberate, they are getting their audience to flip the meaning.

we aren't far away from easily-made interactive images / video where people will be able to create realistic selfies / video clips of their own self - in famous situations. Like Forest Gump being inserted into meeting historic President. The appeal is too strong and it will likely create tons of highly upvoted/shared social media images distorting the original.

People tend to treat detecting photoshop images as a game of one-upmanship, not as an importance of preserving a documented concept or situation for others to learn and understand.

Beehaw!

I’ve noticed this everywhere on Lemmy

Same here. And it's been wave after wave of negativity of outside events flocking people. June Reddit API change, then Zuck @ Threads hate, Twitter to X shockwaves, and now Trump back on Twitter. It hasn't been people seeking out positive as much as it's been world wide web of anger.

He knew in September 2005 that certain iconic symbols in society can get away with anything: "I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything." ... January 2016 he described the same crowd phenomenon: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible."

Even if people get enough of Musk and Trump, the pattern holds true that if you can get yourself into the right area of the spotlight, crowds will flock like moths and people will be overwhelmed by the media power of a person... and laws, conventions, even murder will be allowed. The rules won't apply. And humanity is playing this pattern out just as it always has. What's new is that in the past 100 years we have had the ability to organize our history from all over the world and see that these social patterns of authority and power happen time and time again... but we seem unable or unwilling to stop from forming crowds and letting it play out.

With Trump, it was all so obvious he wasn't a earnest or positive intending person. He just knew he was in the spotlight that so many people would follow. For all our psychology therapists and other media stars, nobody could stop the crowds from forming for terrible outcomes or reverse the trend of accepting anti-science anti-truth nonsense. His pattern may mostly play out, and his health can't hold up forever... we are still left with the problem of what he has demonstrated is possible.

Front-end developers

There was a posting I saved about some people saying they were going to code on front-end: https://lemmy.ml/post/1199330

It isn't funny. It's exactly how Trump got into so much society power in the first place! "Mock mock mockery" behavior!

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/12/31/bbcs_adam_curtis_on_the_contradictory_vaudeville_of_post-modern_politics.html
On The "Contradictory Vaudeville" Of Post-Modern Politics
What this film is going to suggest is that that defeatist response has become a central part of a new system of political control. And to understand how this is happening, you have to look to Russia...

NOTHING stops this, because people keep mocking back. And it isn't just one single individual, Donald Trump, but multiple families (Rupert Murdoch, etc) and millions of people who believe QAnon / "Q" without there being any person, just a constant barrage of leadership icons mocking truth, mocking sincerity, mocking the Constitution, it is a media cult of ignorance! NOTHING STOPS IT! 10 years and 10 months of this!

We are in an Information War and I don't see enough peer to peer friendships being made between The People of China and everyday people in USA, South America, Africa, North America, Europe, Australia, etc.

I don't see China people on GitHub and YouTube like I did 5 years ago. Maybe the real war is power over technology and all of humanity isn't winning. Isn't that another way to interpret Climate Change, an education mistake on a global scale? Advertising and marketing defeating science teachers? The love for the singe-passenger automobile 9 to 5 commute job - exceeding the reality of global climate physics?

Like they say in The Orville - Dolly Parton was a hero! she basically turned out to be a great teacher, like Mr. Rogers on the true problems of childhood. 9 to 5 was kind of like showing children what your divorced single mother was having to go through. Not to say that fit the relationships in the film itself, but the office environment of white collar world. The technology of the Office Workplace and the era of typewriters as business machines. EDIT: It's a real War: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6Do6VWUxyg

Anthony’s song is a variant of Springstein’s which criticizes the current festering plight of white rural and lower class American, yet again, as it highlights the wealth inequality which leaves many families struggling to survive.

I'n not sure Anthony's new song holds up to Springsteen's or even Billy Joel's Allentown. Lyrics like: "Well, God, if you're 5-foot-3 and you're 300 pounds... taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds". Yha, and about that "god" they invoke, almost always that means Jesus - and Bible verse "1 John 3:17" says exactly the opposite of what Anthony is saying rich men's taxes should go for.

“I mean, we are the melting pot of the world,” Mr Anthony told the interviewer in the video, “and that’s what makes us strong, is our diversity, and we need to learn to harness that and appreciate it, and not use it as a political tool to keep everyone separate from each other you know?” - except if you are a certain height or weight... he doesn't offer help to a food-addicted person or all the marketing and advertising jingles and images that sell junk-food other than to say taxes should not serve you.

I think it's worse than that. I think they want to destroy democracy by constantly praising nonsense and chaos. They keep practicing chaos techniques and they have cultivated an extremely loyal audience who will willingly die spreading diseases, cheering on climate change, etc.

“Chaos and disruption, I later learned, are central tenets of Bannon's animating ideology. Before catalyzing America's dharmic rebalancing, his movement would first need to instill chaos through society so that a new order could emerge. He was an avid reader of a computer scientist and armchair philosopher who goes by the name Mencius Moldbug, a hero of the alt-right who writes long-winded essays attacking democracy and virtually everything about how modern societies are ordered. Moldbug’s views on truth influenced Bannon, and what Cambridge Analytica would become. Moldbug has written that “nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth,” and Bannon embraced this. “Anyone can believe in the truth,” Moldbug writes, “to believe in nonsense is an unforgettable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.” ― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

I suggest putting bounty awards or running contest (prizes) for open source software related to Beehaw.... even $50 for certain feature, make a dedicated website maybe (Beehaw Bounty .org or something)

the amount of changes in 3 months Lemmy developers managed to do is impressive to say the least.

I'm trying to be nice, but two full time paid people did not manage to do much in 3 months if you mean May, June, and July regarding the Reddit API change period. It seems Rust is their main focus and in the middle of all this they decided to start a new front-end in Rust. When dozens of new front-ends were being developed by eager newcomers, including replacements like Photon that even have admin and moderation interfaces.

I’m not sure if people checked the posts where Beehaw listed features and tools they want and a lot of them are super tailored to Beehaw vision which is not in step with federated Lemmy as a whole.

I've checked their listed features and tools, and I have no idea what you are talking about. They are features that Lemmy needs. What exactly do you mean that Beehaw is "super tailored"?

At some point I was searching for an open source car pooling service.

I have been observing how much as a society we have been relying on route planning software.

I think social factors for car pooling are far bigger than route planning. Getting a group of people on the same schedule with the same general destination would seem the problem most haven't taken on. The route planning would probably be better done with real-time data once you have identified people within reasonable distances willing to share transportation at a similar time.

There are open source routing efforts: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing

I think people who single out hate and dehumanization and violence in one spot have tunnel vision. Hate and violence is all bad. Hate is incredibly popular in drawing a crowd, but overall it is better to criticize all hate like Martin Luther King Jr. did. MLKJr would emphasize not just hate from white to blacks in USA, but all hate in the human brain in general. Too many people want to use hate as an organization tool, weaponize gangs of hate over something or another, and I'm sick of all the crossfire. With social media, it's everywhere.

All that being said, Lemmy (the software that Beehaw runs on) development is incredibly slow and is riddled with problems

The developers of Lemmy have been running it on the Internet for over 4.5 years, but they only had a few thousands posts in 4 years... it lacks moderation (and spam) tools and it drops and alters data silently that shows they really don't use it or focus on the data.

kbin is newer, but it is only now starting to have an API - so Lemmy has attracted all the app developers because of API - and kbin also struggles with moderation and spam.

we may want to consider leaving the Fediverse for another software platform that does NOT include ActivityPub.

I can entirely understand that. Reinventing the wheel of basic forum features ties up a lot of kbin and lemmy development - and federation is the wild west. People can participate in your forum without having the context or understanding, or worse, to do attacks at an entire server to server level - manipulating votes and having wildly different policies.

Thank you for sharing your thinking.

I’m angry. Everywhere I go on the internet, I encounter some form of prejudice and hate.

What Cambridge Analytica unleashed 10 years ago spread like second-hand smoke to all the platforms and society at large, and it works. There are copycats all over the place now and the whole world has become more hostile. Professional psychologists / psychiatrists endorsing these media techniques was one of the worst things to happen to humanity. The damage may take centuries to heal.

“Chaos and disruption, I later learned, are central tenets of Bannon's animating ideology. Before catalyzing America's dharmic rebalancing, his movement would first need to instill chaos through society so that a new order could emerge. He was an avid reader of a computer scientist and armchair philosopher who goes by the name Mencius Moldbug, a hero of the alt-right who writes long-winded essays attacking democracy and virtually everything about how modern societies are ordered. Moldbug’s views on truth influenced Bannon, and what Cambridge Analytica would become. Moldbug has written that “nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth,” and Bannon embraced this. “Anyone can believe in the truth,” Moldbug writes, “to believe in nonsense is an unforgettable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.” ― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

What’s the endgame, here? We all know there isn’t one.

They've been telegraphing the end game since 2013. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/12/vladimir-putin-conservative-icon/282572/

Trump is an icon of "You're Fired!' angry businessmen. They want a state where business is entirely unregulated and controls all aspects of life, company towns and states, no environmental protection rules, dog eat dog education system and weapons everywhere. Public execution or brazen lynching of non-conforming sexual identity / racial out-groups to cheer on. Freedom to discriminate and threaten people they don't like.

I think this is bullshit.

I think it is exactly how people are behaving. And I can even recall witnessing many people first hand who flip a newspaper to the sports section. Never learning anything about science news, medical news, unless it's some kind of social column about a diet.

People wanting to cut out and block things they don't want to read in a newspaper is what I consider the "default behavior" of most of humanity. No surprise they do not care about the news their friends share. An intelligent computer system that filters out (based on topic/content study) what they don't want to see before-hand is always going to be popular with such people.

“One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.” — Marshall McLuhan.

While yes, we should be able to delete our content if we want, but it’s a bit naive to think there could be true privacy in any decentralised social media platform.

Especially an email or "reddit" threaded conversation systems where quoting of messages is routine. Here I am, quoting you.

You are putting a billboard up in public, on a bulletin board in the center of the Internet, the assumption should be that anyone can photograph it.

Beehaw has been online for over 18 months, it was well established when there were only 30 Lemmy servers and then Reddit API change came along in May... the sign-up page and application process couldn't even cope with hundreds of users per day.

Then 1000 new instance servers went online in just a couple months where your 18-month established presence was suddenly getting all kinds of server to server action.

You have been on the front-line of a lot of people motivated by hate of Reddit. Not love of Beehaw.

Has anyone looked at kbin to see what is different in terms of moderation?

Kbin is a newer app, but it isn't any further along than Lemmy in terms of moderation tools. It is only now just getting an API to allow any kind of automation tools. For the past month spam has been a problem on the main kbin instance and the developer has openly said he hasn't been able to keep up with it.

The problems I see with Lemmy performance all point to SQL being poorly optimized. In particular, federation is doing database inserts of new content from other servers - and many servers can be incoming at the same time with their new postings, comments, votes. Priority is not given to interactive webapp/API users.

Using a SQL database for a backend of a website with unique data all over the place is very tricky. You have to really program the app to avoid touching the database and create cached output and incoming queues and such when you can. Reddit (at lest 9 years ago when they open sourced it) is also based on PostgreSQL - and you will see they do not do live SQL inserts into comments like Lemmy does - they queue them using something other than the main database then insert them in batch.

email MTA apps I've seen do the same thing, they queue files to disk before putting into the main database.

I don't think nginx is the problem, the bottleneck is the backend of the backend, PostgreSQL doing all that I/O and record locking.

it looks like there is no reddit alternative to a reliable subscription feed right now.

Lemmy was not built for scale, and the everything from large-community moderation to federation message copying is going through problem identification and optimization.

The Beehaw.org website is regularly malfunctions for me, showing the Lemmy 0.17.x problem of getting the wrong voting data on postings. Hopefully the forthcoming 0.18 removal of websockets will eliminate a lot of that.

Lemmy, as it stands today, really isn't ready for anything near like the activity of from page /r/all community on Reddit.

Anybody else feel like Lemmy is like 60% Russian trolls lately?

China and Russia both

I'd say the debate about using a strongly typed relational database and ORM is probably more of an impact on end-user turn around than typed language.

My problem with laws is that people rarely pay attention to their growth and creation, and if they do, it's often with the intention of adding more.

There never was supernatural laws, yet people still largely want to regulate how their neighbors dress, marriage approval, etc. I really don't think religion came from the sky, I think it absorbed what people already wanted. And I think there are modern-day meme systems that are just as much a force as any classic easily-identified religion from 1500 years ago or older.

Try without being logged in, incognito or private and see if it all appears. Almost always this problem comes about when someone fiddles with their language settings and Lemmy doesn't show the rest. Or some other setting like not showing already read posts. The apps really need to say "5xx posts not shown due to your preferences".

Rumors, happenings, and innovations in the technology sphere. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

This fits with the "Rumors" of technology company of this community.

Lemmy.ml became totally unreachable 15 minutes before Lemmy.world went all "Error" page. Distant Early Warning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrDj5XvZXX4

The scorching of previous content I also found rather destructive... people were deleting 10 years worth of posts and content.

This is a video from 2018, so it’s a post-mortem of Trump’s election, and at the time was very incisive analysis, but retrospect has made it even more interesting to me and I am curious what people’s thoughts are here.

Essentially the death of euphemism should be taken as a warning sign that the far-right feels more confident that they no longer have to hold up a mask and that, rather than having to court moderate republicans by giving them plausible deniability, they are going to get to dictate the terms for the party going forward.

This 2018 video pre-dates what we now know from the October 2019 books about Cambridge Analytica and their endorsement of this kind of aggressive approach. It's worked, and I see no evidence that people have lost faith in strong hate as a motivation technique - the copycats of what Cambridge Analytica seeded on the Internet and in society-wide culture have grown and it's become standard technique. It was already in play in 2014 bottom-up on social media and few people noticed, they just started adopting it, and then 2015 Trump started echoing it from top down.

What a non-story.

Lemmy project set wild unrealistic expectations on GItHub project: 1) "high performance', maybe the Rust code but PostgreSQL logic is the ORM madness. 2) "full erase" while sending all your public comments and posts to ActivePub without agreement on concept of delete.

This is a technology topic. People discuss when Facebook and Reddit and Twitter have major outages.

I doubt it is anything that level. The problem is the data itself, in the datababase.

A reddit-like website is like email, every load from the database has unique content. You really have to be very careful when designing for scalability when almost all the data is unique.

As opposed to a site like Amazon where the listing for a toothbrush is not unqiue on every page load. There aren't new comments and new votes altering the toothbrush listing every time a user refreshes the page. And people aren't switching brands of toothbrush every 24 hours like the front page of Reddit abandons old data and starts with fresh data.