Basically it’s this system to do all kind of directional acyclic tasks, primarily based around data ingestion. It’s very flexible and powerful, which also means there’s a steep learning curve.

To give an example, you could have a task that gatherers a list of instances and updates the database. It could also spawn a new task for each one to check if the server is up and get the version number, and you could even have it email you to create an account for new instances.

Then from the task that made sure the server is up, you could spawn a new task that gets communities, which then spawns new tasks to ingest posts from it

And when this whole process is done, you could have it kick off a new set of tasks to do the indexing or whatever else on the up to date data set

It has some nice visualization of the process, you can allocate workers across devices, you can kick off the process through an API… You can use it to do anything from monitoring to scraping and doing map reduce on it. You could even federate and wire into activity pub directly, use their apis, or mix and match with scraping

I’ve never worked with crawlers and I’m not sure what angle you’re going to attack this from, but if normal crawlers don’t play well with the fediverse this is an option

I love the idea

I’m starting to look at airflow for my own project, not sure if you’ve heard of it or projects like it, but it seems like a great foundation for a scraper. I’m still evaluating options for that, but so far it’s my pick

Hit me up if you get stuck or make a breakthrough, I’ve got a pretty good handle on activity pub and the lemmy API, and your project would add a lot to mine

I mean… They’re not exactly hiding it. The expressed purpose of belts and roads is to invest in their infrastructure and partner with them to build industrial capacity. Conveyer belts and roads. They openly state they’re doing it to build up trading partners and global influence

It’s literally the same thing… Will they be better partners? Hopefully, it’s not exactly a high bar

They’re not Marxist-Leninists at all though… They’re just a highly regulated form of capitalism.

The government doesn’t own Tencent, they just keep a strong grip on them. They have their own billionaires, the factories have owners, companies bid to fulfill government contracts, you apply for a job and get paid what they offer. It’s just capitalism

Their government does a lot more than in the US and has a lot more influence, and they do influence the market more… But that’s just regulation and public services

They basically do what we did to tik tok. The US government can revoke a corporate charter for any or no reason, China just actually uses this authority actively

Yes, the World Bank and the IMF. I’ve even seen it personally, which is what led me to dig down the rabbit hole - I got interviewed by a world Bank employee to explain why I was installing a system for an airport, and they kept trying to guide me to explain why it was helpful…I couldn’t, because it was only useful if the Internet is down, and if that happens it’s probably not useful because the system had to be taken down if there’s bad weather, and the airport regularly flooded during storms anyways

They were constant protests and news coverage of projects being pushed on them, and it was an open secret for the airport workers. It was for things they didn’t need or want, even though they had plenty of infrastructure in disrepair already

Argentina is the classic example, they resisted and had their currency destroyed, which makes international trade hard. Other countries go so deep in debt they have IMF officials installed in their government to implement austerity measures, some even are forced to hand over their currency printing powers

Sometimes countries get into our good graces, like Peru, and they are let off the treadmill in exchange for beneficial trade deals. That’s after having their resource rights sold off and letting in foreign investments to extract wealth moving forward, but mostly they’re kept in perpetual debt as leverage

It’s a wild and very deep rabbit hole. The information isn’t hidden, it’s just spun in a positive light

Belt and roads is China’s attempt to do exactly what we’ve been doing with the global south, invest for influence and put them on a debt treadmill. Build infrastructure, pressure them to take on more debt with new projects, say it’s time for austerity, open up more foreign investments, use pressure to buy up raw resources, etc

It’s worth mentioning Coca-Cola… You can get American products everywhere, opening them up as a new market isn’t a different strategy, it’s part of the process

No, make the story even more ridiculous. Tell them how you mistook lube for body wash at the store, and while cleaning your ass in the shower your finger accidentally slid inside, surprising you and causing you to slip on the lube, kicking the shampoo bottle into the center of the shower. And in desperately acting to remove your fingers, your stretched your butt cheeks right as you came down on the bottle

Yes, they know what happened. But the least you can do is give them an absurd story, really play it up. Bonus points for giving them all relevant information as another unlikely accident leading up to the event

They’ll eat it up, they’ve seen enough of this to not really care. But a great story will give them joy for years to come

It’s kind of near, because why do they have the same pattern? It’s all code running on cells. Every cell knows how to grow based on the protein structure connecting it to it’s neighbors

Look at the mammal body plan. Look at lizards, birds, and fish - that body plan is coded, the same design tweaked and adapted. Now look at insects and crustatians - totally different body plan

There’s things that are coded, and there’s things that naturally emerge because the universe likes them. The universe likes symmetry, but certain asymmetry is just too practical to pass up

The universe likes the pattern that makes the artichoke and the plates of the pangolin. It’s not body design, it’s something simple to code in our reality

Holy shit… When I got my wisdom teeth out, I literally broke down in tears after being awake for 20 minutes without Percocet

Friend, it’s ok to take opiates sometimes…

Kratom could be an option. You make it into tea, the first cup is a weak stimulant, the second (on an empty stomach) will start to work as a weak opiate. The third or fourth might give you stronger relief. The red strains are supposedly better for pain relief

You can’t OD on it, it’s commonly available in head shops or online. The addiction potential is very low, you’ll make yourself nauseous before getting what you’d get out of normal opiates. It’s most closely related to the coffee plant - the toxicity concerns are all about contamination, the plant itself is pretty innocuous

I can give brewing instructions if anyone wants to go down that path, I drink it for anxiety but others say it helps with pain management

Fuck the webcam, what about the mic?

Conflicts of interest. Sometimes illegal, but not nearly as much as they should be (almost always)

Like congress members being allowed to trade stock, which can then be affected by their vote

Or one of the specifically carved out exceptions to the medical kickbacks laws is for the people who negotiate drug prices for pharmacies

It’s structural - you can be open or locked down, and it’s hard to decentralize if you’re not open

You can make it easier or harder to work with that data, but ultimately it’s obsfucation - you could make it hard to parse and obscure details, but ultimately if you want decentralized federation you can’t hide too much

Wait… Y’all regularly leave your shoes in a normal place?

In our current economic system? Absolutely, declining population is a huge problem.

As far as physics? The world doesn’t care about imaginary human numbers. Production continues to soar through the roof

We made all of this up. At any point, we could say “hey, this is a dumb game that’s making people suffer, let’s figure out something else”

Ditto. I’m not going to put in the time to clean up a project working fine for me just to have it ignored or complained about. It’s all expectation, very little reward

And even if I did get volunteers, I’m not coordinating people on my personal projects. Sounds like a great way to take all the joy out of it…

Open source is just broken right now, it runs by draining the passion out of people

This is exactly why HR departments exist. Had OP collected evidence, told management with a paper trail, and they failed to stop it? Or worse, told off OP because they don’t want to deal with it?

The jerk could maybe get charged with a misdemeanor related to harassment or misuse of technology… Maybe the UK has something harsher or more specific, but at the end of the day it’s a bit extreme to put someone in jail or pay OPs wages if they were forced out of work

The company on the other hand? They have a legal obligation to maintain a safe work environment. They also have deeper, easier to access pockets. A lot easier to get a lawyer to pursue that, which is expensive even if they win in the end

If they’re clearly shown to have not taken reasonable action, they’d at least be on the hook for any lost wages or medical costs (not sure what decent therapy runs over there, less than the US I’m sure but I’m guessing not cheap). Even if OP quits or decides not to show up, it could be until they get a new job at similar pay with some extra thrown on top

HR’s job is to cut this off before OP needs to be paid off, or much worse finds a lawyer. They don’t care about the employees, so safest could be to fire the guy - the least they’re going to do is officially reprimand the guy and follow up with OP to make sure it’s not worsening and OP isn’t feeling litigious

Imagine if phone manufacturers asked the public like this…

Here’s the thing… Money is just a points system after you get into the .1%. A billion dollars, with 5% non-compounding interest (ridiculously conservative) would yield $50 million a year. That’s a metric fuckton of money, I can’t imagine a luxury (not based on rarity or shaping society) that you could personally enjoy.

So I agree, we should take all their shit, except a single home and personal possessions, and give them a $50 million dollar stipend each year. Let’s pin that to the minimum wage and call it absolute rich. Hell, let’s let them divide it up between their children… Their family would be set for generations, and any of them could go for the prize to add another one time prize to go even higher. Let’s make it fancy as hell, give them a special card or a jeweled broach they can pull out and buy anything without seeing a price… And let’s make it not roll over, because we want them to be post-money

Now, the finances work out easily if we let the government invest money (crazy that we don’t use that instead of taxes at this point), but the trouble is it’s not about money, they need a new game to play. We want to make sure they fuck off and measure dicks with each other in a way that doesn’t use our species as the playing board. They want to compete with each other for rank and social status, and we want them occupied

I don’t think there’s a one size fits all solution, so I’ll throw out some ideas. A children’s card game, next level Pokemon go battles, a monthly token that can be granted by anyone (with physical proximity) to signify they were helped by an unbillionare, unbillionare exclusive sports (I’d watch), maybe even points for how much of their stipend they don’t spend in a year

We can even let them prestige, and see if with a small gift of $5 million dollars they can do it again… By that point I’m guessing their brains have probably rotted, but I’d like to give them the option

Maybe we give them nicer badges that they can whip out based on points, maybe we make a points store where they can use the emergency alert system or rent out monuments for a pizza party… Just things that money can’t buy and don’t meaningfully hurt the rest of us

Personally, I really love the idea of video game duels and MMA matches (either we laugh or they improve themselves to a point it’s actually impressive, win-win. Let’s stream it)

Let’s bring back the nobility, but in a way that’s fun for us and doesn’t include ownership of people. Hell, let’s add in titles, and let you get in through capitalism, scientific breakthroughs, or social change

Hundreds. Thousands. Probably not more than a few hundred million

If we could sync memories, I could do everything at once. I could do anything each day. I could learn everything, I could do everything. My sense of self is flexible enough to see my clones as me… In fact I’ve had existential breakdowns over only having the one body. We’d be a single person from day one, hell my morality is based on “if the world was made up of only copies of me, would it be a better place”.

I’d start with a dozen, then scale up as I get more jobs (I could handle 12x my food bill for a while, I mostly eat beans and rice already). I’d rotate between jobs and time the memory syncs to give myself work-life balance.

So my answer is basically “how many can I get?”

It wouldn’t be a black hole, it’d be like pushing concrete into a slab of concrete. It just would take an insane amount of force to compress, and you’d have no leverage

Conversely, what’s the range for taking things in and out?

What if you brought in extremely pressurized liquid air? Could you just take 1cc and release it next to someone’s head? If you took open cones of tungsten in, you could probably abuse it to shoot them like a bullet

What about thermal properties? If the space wraps in on itself, there’s nowhere for the heat to dissipate. You could fill it with extremely high temperature plasma, then take out a little at a time to melt/explode almost anything.

That all depends on the distance - you could fill it with thermite and burning magnesium for a trigger to fill it with extremely hot pressurized gas, but if you have to touch to take it out you’d destroy the body part that took it out… You could sacrifice a finger to blow up someone’s head, but ultimately your power would stop at being a suicide bomber

Personally I wouldn’t do any of that. It’d ruin the outlet