That’s Romania saying no to MAGA style populism.

Learn about David Lynch`s workaround! Wikipedia editors hated him!

Pros and cons of breadbox? Any paladins out there willing to enlighten us?

No, ZeroGravitas is just my modest tribute to Iain M. Banks.

And fuck no, they’re appalled by the rise of braindead populism. We have a saying in our business: for every complex problem there’s a solution that’s simple, easy to understand and completely wrong. Can’t remember whose quote that is, but it perfectly captures the populist propaganda.

Came here to say this, the similarities to Erdogan’s voters are striking.

In addition, this is a protest vote, very much against something seen by many Romanians as an unholy alliance between a classical liberal party (on paper) and the spiritual descendants of the old communist party. At least that’s what my Romanian friends are telling me.

This is the keg, and Simion’s brand of nationalistic populism is the powder.

And A-women too 😁

Thank you for your service. I mean it.

Nothing personal, I try to correct this view everywhere I see it.

Y2K didn’t happen because a lot of talented engineers worked their asses off to prevent it from happening. It is the bane of IT people everywhere that the working state of the systems they create and maintain is being taken for granted by the public, with barely a thought givem to those who fight bugs, spam, cyber attacks and pure entropy every day. It is in fact a minor miracle of engineering that we’re even having this conversation.

Inside of you there are two wolves. One looks like a fox with owl makeup and the other like a puck-nosed shepherd dog with strabism.

That’s… surprisingly accurate. Every time he sees her, that’s a new instance of the abstract Wife in his head, which is different from the previous instance in small, but interesting ways.

For instance, current_wife.HasFood() returns true.

Which fucker moved the garlic rope and opened the coffin of Nazi eugenics theory?

I’m not even going to pretend that BlueSky is more open than any Fediverse tool designed with federation in mind from the ground up. BlueSky is certainly not Mastodon or Lemmy, but it’s not Meta AI-pushing crap like WhatsApp either.

Let’s do a thought experiment. What if we would get a Wikipedia like NGO with proper funding setting up a EU based BlueSky instance? It won’t be the decentralized dream of Fediverse, perhaps, but it could still prove useful. I think Twitter was successful because of its unified, global reaching platform appeal, not in spite of it, and the fact that users flock to BlueSky tells me that appeal is still there. Having a bit more decentralization in that mix just makes it better, but Mastodon shows that decentralization is not sufficient to give a platform a wide appeal.

As context: I’m one of those people that donates annually to Wikipedia, but I have no interest or capacity in managing a decentralized federation server in my basement. Lots of kudos to the people that do!

Surely that’s a bit unfair to BlueSky.

From my brief lecture of the underlying protocol, public instances could exist and federate, it’s only that they become quite expensive to run if done right.

https://bsky.social/about/blog/02-22-2024-open-social-web

Not to mention that the “more and better teachers” mantra should be applied all the way down to primary education.

Unfortunately our societies prioritise these things differently.

I’m not excluding hiring good teachers and TAs from the picture. I’m not excluding paying them a good enough wage to attract talent either. But that’s another conversation.

In my university days lectures were paired with seminars. And those had a max size of about 30, and a TA who would explain and help apply the lecture knowledge. The lecturer would visit seminars on rotation and ensure the quality of TAs. And the kicker? The whole gang would be there for the (free form) exam, including the grading.

In short: it can be done because that’s where we come from, actually.

And personally I hate multi choice tests, there is no opportunity to see the thought process of the student, or find and be lenient towards those that got the theory, but forgot to carry a 1 somewhere. They simplified the grading, sure, now you can have a machine do it, but thats about it.

Here’s a novel idea, maybe it needs less students per teacher. Or more teachers per student, however you want to call it.

It makes sense that they would go where the users are.

But not having a separate, European instance federated into the BlueSky network, that’s the real wtf.

Hint: only one of these comes with a so-called golden handshake.

I would laugh too if this wasn’t going to be a major influence on US policy towards Ukraine in the coming months.

Cunk on Rome.