roastpotatothief

joined 3 years ago
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[–] roastpotatothief@lemmy.ml 2 points 5 months ago
  1. I just assumed that would be easy, that you would have one instance with no actual content. It just fetches the wikipedia article with the same name, directly from the wikipedia website. I guess I didn't really think about it.

  2. I guess that's a design choice. Looking at different ways similar issues have been solved already...

How does wikipedia decide that the same article is available in different languages? I guess there is a database of links which has to be maintained.

Alternatively, it could assume that articles are the same if they have the same name, like in your example where "Mountain" can have an article on a poetry instance and on a geography instance, but the software treats them as the same article.

Wikipedia can understand that "Rep of Ireland" = "Republic of Ireland". So I guess there is a look-up-table saying that these two names refer to the same thing.

Then, wikipedia can also understand cases where articles can have the same name but be unrelated. Like RIC (paramilitary group) is not the same as RIC (feature of a democracy).

I do think, if each Ibis instance is isolated, it won't be much different from having many separate wiki websites. When the software automatically links you to the same information on different instances, that's when the idea becomes really interesting and valuable.

[–] roastpotatothief@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 months ago

Great song that I'd nearly forgotten about.

[–] roastpotatothief@lemmy.ml 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

This is a great project. I had the same idea myself, and posted about it, but never did anything about it! It's great that people like you are here, with the creativity, and the motivation and skills to do this work.

I think this project is as necessary as Wikipedia itself.

The criticisms in these comments are mostly identical to the opinion most people had about Wikipedia when it started - the it would become a cesspool of nonsense and misinformation. That it was useless and worthless when encyclopaedias already exist.

Wikipedia was the first step in broadening what a source if authoritative information can be. It in fact created richer and more truthful information than was possible before, and enlightened the world. Ibis is a necessary second step on the same path.

It will be most valuable for articles like Tieneman square, or the Gilets Jaunes, where there are sharply different perspectives on the same matter, and there will never be agreement. A single monolithic Wikipedia cannot speak about them. Today, wiki gives one perspective and calls it the truth. This was fine in the 20th century when most people believed in simple truths. They were told what to think by single sources. They never left their filter bubbles. This is not sustainable anymore.

To succeed and change the world, this project must do a few things right.

  1. The default instance should just be a mirror of Wikipedia. This is the default source of information on everything, so it would be crazy to omit it. Omitting it means putting yourself in competition with it, and you will lose. By encompassing it, the information in Ibis is from day 1 greater then wiki. Then Ibis will just supersede wiki.

  2. There should be a sidebar with links to the sane article on other instances. So someone reading about trickle down economics on right wing instance, he can instantly switch to the same article on a left wing wiki and read the other side of it. That's the feature that will make it worthwhile for people.

  3. It should look like Wikipedia. For familiarity. This will help people transition.

[–] roastpotatothief@lemmy.ml 8 points 8 months ago (2 children)

For private business the tickets are to fund the business. But for public transport they are never expected to cover the costs of the business.

It is run as a public service, not to make money. The function of tickets is to prevent overcrowding.

That's why in well designed systems, the price is different at rush hour, and for high traffic routes and times.

I don't know anything about montpellier specifically though.

[–] roastpotatothief@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago

Yes that's the value of game theory. It's not really about the silly games. It's a way to understand real life, using silly games as examples. It helps us think of ways to understand our problems and to change the world, that we would not have thought of otherwise.

[–] roastpotatothief@lemmy.ml 0 points 9 months ago

Yes that's it. If we all did it together, we could change the world. But as individuals there is no effective action we can take.

Things like effective democracy, or powerful protest groups, could someday change the rules of the game. They could provide a low effort path for each individual to improve the collective (and his own) outcome.

1
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by roastpotatothief@lemmy.ml to c/ireland@lemmy.ml
 

It looks like the current government will not take action on the urgent issues of our time. The most urgent is climate change but it's not the only one.

Any maybe no future government will take action either. It's the nature of our political system that governments ignore long-term problems.

There is only one way to force them into action.

We must find a single issue with overwhelmingly popular support. Then we organise a national strike over it.

It must be a specific actionable realistic issue. For example

  • A fair sales tax on all products which produce carbon dioxide or methane, in proportion to their global warming effect per kilo. This would include concrete, beef, fertilizer, fossil fuels, steel. The money shall be used to fund a cut in the general VAT rate. So these products rise in price and everything else, every less polluting product, drops in price.
  • A boycott on Israel until it grants non-Jews in territories it controls equal civil rights.
  • A ban on vulture funds owning housing.

First we need a public figure, or anyone influential or persuasive, to spearhead this action.

Who can do it?

 

So there is a name for it. This situation we are in where nearly everyone wants to improve their society and avoid climate crisis etc, but there is no change an individual can make to improve the situation. So everyone keeps doing the same thing, helplessly knowing their strategy contributes to everything being terrible.

[–] roastpotatothief@lemmy.ml 40 points 10 months ago (4 children)

polar bears. it's the only animal that likes to eat people. daily life is just too safe and dull.

[–] roastpotatothief@lemmy.ml 208 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (10 children)

It is useful to have lots of stupid laws. It makes people feel powerless and frustrated. It means the police can always find excuses to persecute you.

The technicalities of the individual laws are not important. It's the psychological effect of the whole body of laws on a people.

[–] roastpotatothief@lemmy.ml 2 points 10 months ago

Yes you couldn't change something so widely used. Look what happened with python 3.

Fortunately there's already a tradition among Git users of building a UI on top of the git UI. My project is just a slightly better version of those. It lays a simple sensible interface on top of the chaotic Git interface.

[–] roastpotatothief@lemmy.ml 20 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (7 children)

Git is a great invention but it has a few design flaws. There are too many ways to confuse it or break it, using commands that look correct, or just forgetting something. I ended up writing simple wrapper script codebase to fix it. Since then no problems.

 

Remember, right wing people are just misguided left wing people. They have the desire and energy to improve their lives, but are going about it a stupid way.

They think that they can improve their lives by taking things from poorer people. Which is a reasonable thought. But it is wrong. If the immigrants are driven away, these protesters will become the poorest people, for others to take things from.

The only way to improve your lives is by improving everyone's lives uniformly, through left wing policies. This isn't just virtuous. It's virtuous only because it's economically sound.

 

with artistic training or brain stimulation we could look beneath the intrinsic nature of qualia to see the raw associations that make them up, just as a musician hears the individual components in what, to most fans, is a wall of sound. “It should be possible to experience parts of those underlying structures directly, just as we can learn to experience the individual overtones of a sound,”

The proposition, then, is that redness, pain, and the other qualities of experience are a blurred view of a dense thicket of relations. Red is red not because it just is, but because of a vast number of associations that we have learned or been born with.

[–] roastpotatothief@lemmy.ml 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Wow I was not expecting that to be so good

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