> but still - is that the consensus now? That federated protocols are dead and "no longer have a place in the modern world"?
Having see what has happened (is happening?) to Mastodon, I can see where Moxie is coming from; as much as I hate to accept it.
Moxie also doesn't seem particularly happy with the situation; notes in the same post:
"Truly though, I wish you well in the endeavor, it's something that I'd love to be proven wrong about."
He notes two issue in particular:
- Degradation of UX
- Loss of development effort
From what I've seen, Mastodon suffered from similar problems (certainly as a user, I can attest to the first one). It seems those are inevitable consequences (along with performance/scalability issues) of the loss of control that comes from federation. Personally, I don't think those are necessarily insurmountable, but they are non-trivial, and will require effort and commitment -- including from the end users -- to resolve.
All other things being equal, a project focusing on federation will be at a disadvantage compared to a centralized one when it comes to delivering good UX. So lamentably, I don't see a federated platform becoming mainstream outside tech culture, and that is what Moxie's vision for Signal is...
Perhaps because your goal isn't blanket, end-to-end privacy?
To work on end to end privacy one really needs to control the experience end to end; trusted clients and a solid protocol, plus trusted discovery.
Email is not that thing. Email is postcards.
At a technical level, email works well from the perspective of "the mail must get through", although practically speaking, spammers ruined things to the point that most people are feudalised because defending spam raised the bar of technical expertise too high for most people.
And the small number left who can run their own infra are often locked out by the feudal overlords (big 4 + every isp ever) because an untrusted ingress is basically a spam loophole.
Ironically the closer you get to spam free the more you have to police, because the value of a spam injection point goes up commensurably when most people are no longer exposed to it.
Overall, the war on spam was won, but at the cost of freedom for the people who would like to run their own infra but aren't technical and patient enough to do it in today's environment.
> Ironically the closer you get to spam free the more you have to police
The root problem of bare-bones email is that user identity and user-agent address (mbox) are conflated. (A social layer would effectively address this fundmental flaw.)
Moxie is talking specifically about making a secure (particularly, end-to-end secure) federated communication protocol. Making insecure federated communication protocols is pretty much a solved problem, yes.
(And I'm sure some people are very happy GPG users. But the majority of email users are not and will probably never be)
Been working on a mail.ru pet projects in my teens (Moikrug), people were telling that PGP/GPG adoption was at around 8-9% in Russia in 2006.
Among corporate users, there are some rather big companies with 100% adoption. How they achieve it? With a simple policy "anybody sending unencrypted email is fired," and training to make sure that even least technically literate people on the company get it (a person is not let to handle anything until he is examined by a specialist).
What is the problem with Mastodon? It is the most populus federated network I have seen. (Other than the Internet, if you count it as one) It's striving among several interest groups around the world.
> It is the most populus federated network I have seen.
Yes, same; but that's kind of the point. Mastodon is the best effort I have seen so far; which is why it was disappointing to see it falter shortly after it started to really pick up.
There seem to be a mass exodus from Twitter (at least, among the people I follow), precipitated by Twitter's latest unwelcome UI tweaks. Initially, it seemed really cool -- it was specifically addressing Twitters biggest pain points (longer messages, chronological timeline, saner threading), and was OSS and federated to boot.
However, quickly the veiner started to crumble, with there appearing to be an increasing number of issues, such as undelivered DMs, scrambled threads, dropped mentions. A lot of them seemed specifically related to interactions between federated instances. To make matters worse, the UI seemed to be getting increasingly slower.
Eventually, the combined frustrations, and to some extent perhaps network effects, resulted to gradual return back to Twitter.
This is, admittedly, a skewed view based on the observation of the small slice of Twitter community that I follow, and my own limited experience with the platform (spanning a few weeks).
I am still hoping that Mastodon (or something like it) makes it, but I'm not holding my breath.
First of all, thank you for sharing your experience. It was insightful, and I completely agree with your criticism of the article.
I would like to make a small, and perhaps somewhat pedantic comment regarding your last statement:
>In my own humble opinion the only "science" that matters on this subject are the opinions of those whom have lived it and recovered. Go survey the opiate addicts that didn't end up dead and find out what worked for them.
There is a problem of silent evidence and survivor bias here. What is important is not what they did that led to their recovery, but what they did differently (or, more generally, what was different in their circumstances) from those that tried to recover, but didn't.
So, IMHO, what is needed is not _just_ the opinions of those that recovered, but a longitudinal study to identify which, out the many factors that were involved in the recovery process, have been the most instrumental.
> There is a problem of silent evidence and survivor bias here. What is important is not what they did that led to their recovery, but what they did differently (or, more generally, what was different in their circumstances) from those that tried to recover, but didn't.
That's assuming they did anything different at all. It could just be that there is not a one size fits all treatment for this problem, and part of the solution is to match the right treatment for each particular addict.
While I agree with your points about collecting empirical and unbiased data, I want to point out that when it comes to opioids, "Science" is moving the goal posts. They are measuring social acceptability of a subject while under the influence of doctor-prescribed dope, while ignoring the numerous addicts who maintain similar levels of social acceptability while using Street dope, then declaring their method a "success".
Yes, fair point. This is a common problem for social studies. One must keep in mind and be explicit about the population the study sample is drawn from; and very cautious about extrapolating the findings to other populations.
Not only what they did differently. It might be something they didn't do as well. Since data is laking any personal effort might be completely irrelevant and only the environment might make the difference. I presume there is a large personal effort involved but we don't know.
On survivorship bias: the B 17:s in 2nd world war that generally are used as the practical example of this principle had bullet holes exactly in those parts of the plane that were fine. The parts that had not taken a beating in the survived planes were the ones that needed more armourplating.
So, where are the psychological bullet holes in those who've not beaten addiction?
You are right, the authors of the paper only claim that their results demonstrate a); they are, however, assuming b) based on previous studies.
What the Professor is arguing, as I understand it, is that those previous studies do not necessarily warrant the assumption of b), and thus the paper's title "A female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics" is misleading -- there has been a confirmation of "female", but not of "warrior". Something like "Skeleton, that some evidence points to being that of a warrior, was confirmed to be female"; but that's not as pithy or sensationalist.
Those not reading the paper sufficiently carefully (or at all -- only limiting themselves to the title and the abstract) will end up drawing conclusions unjustified by the paper. Which, given the political implications, may be undesirable.
In that case, surely the professor should be commenting on the original assessment, not any paper that accepts the published literature? I still reckon it's a misunderstanding.
I don't know what the "political implications" means. I think I've missed something. Did Trump tweet about it or something? I don't know why this would have any political implications at all.
> In that case, surely the professor should be commenting on the original assessment, not any paper that accepts the published literature?
She does. Most of the criticism in the blog post is directed towards the findings in the previous studies. The professor explicitly disqualifies herself from discussing the findings of the current study, as they are outside her area of expertise. The criticism of this paper is that it fails to distinguish sufficiently clearly its a priori assumptions from the conclusions drawn from the present findings.
> I don't know what the "political implications" means. I think I've missed something. Did Trump tweet about it or something? I don't know why this would have any political implications at all.
I meant gender politics, rather than the US national politics.
It's nice to see something like this being proposed, but, the NHS probably have a tonne of bespoke software running on top of Windows, all of which would need to be ported. And given the fact that they don't have the funding to even keep their existing systems patched and up-to-date, a full-on migration is out of the question, unless the cash is raised...
True, but it's a long- vs. short-term cash problem. The new system would cost a lot in the first few years, but less on the long term as MS licenses won't have to be paid.
I do not know how people can entertain this myth that linux support is as expensive as windows. The stability of linux applications is incredible compared with the brutal changes of windows (xp -> vista/7 -> 8 -> 10). Remote administration is far more easier and deployment on many machines is trivial. Machines rot is a lot slower, reducing the cost of machine replacement.
IMHO, the main cost is replacing the old window support guys by linux support guys because people a rarely competent in both and erasing the windows way of thinking is very difficult. The new team has to learn the specific needs and manner of NHS. Once they have the same experience as the previous team, the cost should melt.
It's nothing to do with the support guys. It's do with the support by the vender.
When you deploy an os over something as large as the NHS, your going to hit a few snags, perhaps at the code level. You will need somebody who you can phone up, who will then go bug fix those issues.
Vendors like redhat have support licences that support this. And those licences are still fairly expensive.
If NHS was going to deploy a Linux Distribution, they will have to bring a Linux distribution vender onboard which would take the role Microsoft does now.
here was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian
literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced
rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and
astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and
sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special
kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.
It's misalignment of incentives rather than stupidity (well, in some cases, maybe also stupidity). Governments make decisions from one election cycle to the next. So taking on debt that will be some future administration's problem in order to finance public projects now, and increase the current administration's popularity makes perfect sense.
> I don't know what the bias is called but there is this belief that many successful people have or try to bestow that they "did it all themselves" and "you can too".
This is a combination of egocentric bias[0] and post-hoc rationalization [1]
