to understand how badass the name “talia” is, consider what it means to “retaliate”.
@diniz_bortolotto yeah. i know mastodon is mostly open and public. but if search engines don’t shine in any light, a room can be dark while the door is wide open. google surfaces tweets relevant to a query. why not toots? would the mastodon community want that, or would many consider it a violative form of scraping? is it actively prevented now via robots.txt files?
@stephenjudkins let’s replace them. i think the core should be a public sector, very raw but performant, index, as comprehensive as technically possible. then people can build whatever curation they want on top of that.
does mastodon count as the “dark web”? do any of the major search engines routinely surface mastodon posts?
to do quote toots right, we’ll need to implement air quotes.
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the gas pump printed a receipt.
i saw it come out. then it sucked it back in, and it totally disappeared.
i swear. gone. not a trace.
it makes no sense but now i’m paranoid. it didn’t WANT me to have the receipt. this was no mere accident, out of paper, out of ink. it TOOK it from me.
well mr pump-and-dupe. i’m taking a photograph.
so there.
@isaacs i think we tend to that strategy when we face asymmetrical costs. i arrive at the airport early, because the cost of a missed flight is high relative to opportunity cost of having to spend an hour reading at the gate. even if the likelihood of the “unsafe” error would be low if I cut it 30 mins closer, the high cost times the modest probability outweighs low (but real) benefit to erring less or not at all.
@isaacs if not erring with certainty is an option, yes! but one usually chooses to “err on the safe side” in situations of unavoidable uncertainty, no?
@Intractabilis it's been years since i've felt nondystopian about the internet. but all of a sudden…
“For whatever reason, the old castles are crumbling. Let’s not run to new ones.” @mmasnick https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/21/why-would-anyone-use-another-centralized-social-media-service-after-this/
@Randall So your view is basically "trafficking" means illegal transportation of people. (I think people expect it to connote something more than that, a violation of the human rights of the trafficked as well as a violation of law. But it wouldn't be the first word for which people exploit a more straightforward denotation to smuggle in a tendentious connotation. Call it "meaning trafficking"!)
@darius (in my experience, you just have to resign yourself to a lot of low level guilt. i wrote a library two decades ago people still use. occasionally i maintain it, in a spurt once every few years. i get emails. occasionally i reply. i feel guilty for every nonresponse, for github issues ignored, etc. but i have a life, which the requesters have rarely sought to help support, so i let it ride, but feel guilty. ps i loved your small-social-netwoerk essay.)
@MariNemo (I guess my pedantry was inspired by a radio news story in which interviewed advocates and officials described coyotes as human traffickers, as though that was unproblematically the case. However colloquial, I think coyote pretty straightforwardly means people hired to get migrants illegally across a border. From your perspective, or that of the denotation you are summarizing, they would only sometime be traffickers, no?)
@MariNemo So you propose we define as trafficking the exploitation of vulnerabilities that derive from a person's geographic displacement to coerce them to do what they did not and would not have consented to do. A coyote who strives to provide transportation as agreed is not a trafficker. One who shakes down his deeply vulnerable passengers is a trafficker. It's dishonesty and coercion that turns transportation into trafficking. Is that right?
@maria So what defines "trafficking" isn't coyotes doing what they represent they will and are hired to do, but when they deviate and coerce those in their care. So you'd say that "honest" coyotes—those who do their best to deliver migrants as agreed—are not traffickers, just providers of illicit transportation.
@MariNemo The situation prospective migrants are in is often terrible, stripping them of real agency prior to hiring a coyote. Arguably, it's the hiring that's an expression of agency, a radical, expensive, step to find a better situation. Certainly once in the hands of a coyote, migrants lose agency. 1/
@MariNemo But is this so different from, say, hiring a sherpa at Everest? The situation you've signed up to is in fact dangerous, you agree to put yourself beneath someone's authority as a calculated choice. 2/
@MariNemo Of course, coyotes are an unregulated and relatedly often exploitative market. Obviously if you put yourself in the care of someone incompetent or with no interest in delivering you safely across the border, that's all kind of bad. But it's not the "trafficking" there that's the problem (from the perspective of the client), it's the failure to traffic as agreed. /fin
The word "trafficking" seems ill-defined to me. Between ordinary transportation (I travel to Italy to take a job I'm excited about) and coerced transportation into a condition of plain enslavement sits a very big spectrum. Are "coyotes" at the Mexican border "traffickers", if they are hired voluntarily (by people in great distress, for sure) and work to deliver the (illegal) service they have sold? What exactly renders transportation "trafficking"?
@Big_Worker @phillmv Bare links, no. It's always with a teaser. But good RSS is full-text RSS, you don't have to link out of your reader to, well, read. And good RSS is fine-grained, so you can subscribe to what you want. In the best case, you'll skip much of what you scroll through, but you don't want what you'll read to be buried in oceans of noise. Until Google Reader shut down, the norm was by author or small group of authors ("group blog").
@Big_Worker @phillmv Full text or links? How fine grained? e.g. at The Week, I used to be able to subscribe to individual writers. Then they got lazy, and made all RSS feeds magazine full feeds (to which I unsubscribed, way too much noise).