Hi from Lemmy 👋

The author can’t write people very well and if you’re OK with that it’s a series with some great concepts. It was interesting to see how a Chinese author thought the US would act in a global emergency in Dark Forest, it was the reverse of a US author assuming everyone would act like the US.

I was pretty annoyed with the wallbreakers concept as it played out because the idea that you’d have some intricate plan involving details about how things would play out in several hundred years and then when someone guesses it you just say “Whelp, guess I’ll die” is kind of absurd. Surely you’d just invest in tons of technological development first, see how things shake out, and if someone guesses your plan, abandon it for a new one? Same as in the first book, “Physics is weird, guess I’ll die” just seemed bizarre to me.

Copying my comment from the cross-post:

Turns out the blue zone studies have likely just identified hotspots for pension fraud:

The observation of individuals attaining remarkable ages, and their concentration into geographic sub-regions or ‘blue zones’, has generated considerable scientific interest. Proposed drivers of remarkable longevity include high vegetable intake, strong social connections, and genetic markers. Here, we reveal new predictors of remarkable longevity and ‘supercentenarian’ status. In the United States, supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records. In Italy, England, and France, which have more uniform vital registration, remarkable longevity is instead predicted by poverty, low per capita incomes, shorter life expectancy, higher crime rates, worse health, higher deprivation, fewer 90+ year olds, and residence in remote, overseas, and colonial territories. In England and France, higher old-age poverty rates alone predict more than half of the regional variation in attaining a remarkable age. Only 18% of ‘exhaustively’ validated supercentenarians have a birth certificate, falling to zero percent in the USA, and supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on days divisible by five: a pattern indicative of widespread fraud and error. Finally, the designated ‘blue zones’ of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rate and short life expectancy relative to their national average. As such, relative poverty and short lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.

I’ve seen my own posts show up in specific search results based on the transcripts, which is nice to see. Tried searching for “Great Scott! The hatch is opening” on Google just now and it linked to my post at https://discuss.online/post/14315116. That’s probably a bit of an issue actually. The link is for lemmy.dbzer0.com for my user on midwest.social to a community on lemmy.world and I just linked to it from discuss.online. Those might each be ranked independently even though it’s the same content, vs all being ranked together if it’s all centralized on one site like Reddit. Not really that hard to adjust for, but if Google doesn’t care in the first place because they think they’ll get fewer ad impressions out of it then it won’t be changed.

Kagi has a feature for specifically searching the fediverse. It’s a paid search engine, but IMO that ends up with their incentives aligned with mine.

Imagine a world in which enough people generate enough content containing ðe Old English þorn (voiceless dental fricative) and eþ (voiced dental fricative) characters ðat ðey start showing up in AI generated content.

I love the mission. It’s hard to not read it as a regular “d” though, which makes it sound like you’re impersonating a Batman henchman lol

You should post about that over in !ketogenic@discuss.online, seems like the sort of thing @pulsejet@discuss.online would be interested in

Second this 😀

@jgrim@discuss.online has been doing an awesome job of running it, and also created Sublinks as a Lemmy alternative

Neat, are you involved in activitypub.rocks? What sort of updates can we look forward to?

Where were you looking?

Are you maybe looking for flohmarkt?

The name flohmarkt is a german word and translates to flea market or garage sale in english. This is a symbol for each flohmarkt being meant to be a small place for a somehow connected group of people. All the flohmarkts willing to federate make up one big place for small advertisements about exchange of goods and services.

My read of OP’s question was asking about something they could switch the friend group to. If they don’t want to switch to anything else, then they’re stuck on Snapchat because that’s what they’re already using.

It’s not part of the Fediverse, but Signal is a good for group chats. It’s got reactions and gifs and whatnot, and you can also ignore the notifications you don’t care about.

It’s a meme:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/jesse-what-the-fuck-are-you-talking-about

In case anyone hasn’t seen this bit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

Doesn’t really help much. Seems to be some spin on blockchain/cryptocurrency, and doesn’t really do a good job of explaining the value proposition.

Create, enable and scale economic and digital exchange across and between diverse sectors.

Seems cryptocurrency related. Lot of marketing fluff.

Beckn Protocol is perhaps the least well-known project outside of tech circles, but is likely the most impactful of all work Nilekani has championed since Aadhaar

Who and what are those?

The github repo is slightly better, but not by much:

Beckn is an open protocol that allows local businesses across any industry to be discovered and engaged by any beckn-enabled application. Beckn protocol helps businesses co-create solutions for the masses seamlessly, by combining services of any form or provider.

Beckn protocol is a collection of open specifications consisting of protocol APIs, message formats, network design and reference architectures to allow any two entities to execute commercial transactions without being on the same platform.

This server-to-server communication protocol allows any consumer facing online platform to discover and transact with any business with minimal implementation overhead. The server-to-server nature of the protocol allows rich user experiences to be built by bundling services from multiple independent platforms.

Beckn protocol decouples the demand side digital infrastructure in the form of apps and other channels from the supply side service provisioning infrastructure. It does this by making integratedservices available not just on a single platform but potentially on any online consumer interface, (online maps, messaging, wallets, voice assistant apps and devices) that have mainstream adoption in a city.

Beckn is a protocol, not a platform. It adopts a decentralized architecture that obviates the need for creating a centralised platform in order to integrate services from multiple providers simultaneously ensuring privacy and security by design by enabling secure, encrypted iteractions.

The project could really use a “What problem is this trying to solve?” section. Is it aiming to replace something existing like HTTPS/Visa/etc?

Not really sure how that works with federation. You’re not “using” lemmy.world, you’re using lemm.ee, which has a copy of content from lemmy.world.

I have multiple accounts, but only really for moderation purposes. Cross-instance moderation is semi-broken, so it’s easier to do it that way. Other than that, having an alt is useful in case your main instance goes down.

I wouldn’t generally worry about impersonation, if someone tries it you could contact the admin of that instance and they’re generally pretty responsive.

Pixelfed/Mastodon/etc sort of work with Lemmy, in that they can see Lemmy posts. Lemmy can see posts from them if you tag them appropriately, which rarely happens. They only sort of federate properly. And yeah, Loops is like TikTok for the Fediverse.

I’m not saying PieFed is better than Lemmy, just saying that apart from Lemmy, your best option is probably PieFed atm.

Mostly Lemmy via discuss.online, with a little bit of Pixelfed via social.photo and Mastodon via utter.online.

I was using Loops pretty heavily for a while, but the most recent update made it not work right on my phone (and there’s no web version), so maybe I’ll try again when it’s out of beta. It’s also not truly federated atm, so only sort of counts.

I’ve tried out a bit of PieFed and it looks really nice. Probably the best Lemmy threadiverse alternative atm. The dev does some interesting experiments like Private Voting