We live in a mid sized city in the midwest, typical city block with single family homes. Folks keep to themselves a bit - not everyone, but enough that you have to make an effort to connect with neighbors.
My son and I had the idea that we should just organize a block party. I think this was in early 2021 after covid was letting up a bit. He was 7 years old and said we should get a food truck to come.
So that's what we did. Made homemade invitations and handed them out to a couple blocks around us and sent out emails to friends.
I think we had like 75 people show up to the first one! It was great. Had a taco truck come, and the local fire station rolled the engine by for the kids.
Blocked off the street so everyone could sit together and the kids could run around without worrying about traffic.
We've been trying to do this every 6 months or so since then. Great way to meet tons of folks in the immediate vicinity and strike up some new friendships - highly recommend it.
They are a consulting company that tries to do some element of product development in house. This is not a new strategy - all the big consultancies, agencies, etc have been on various forms of the path for the last 15-20 years.
The reality is there is sometimes a space for custom product dev, and sometimes better to rely on actual software/product providers that already have scale, market understanding, etc.
For anyone that's been in corp/BigCo land for some time, this is the typical corp reboot playbook.
Pause all hiring, freeze travel and other casual expenditures, relook at all major initiatives/projects/programs, etc.
Definitely something (IMHO) worth doing every 5-7 years in any environment. Can't imagine what it will uncover in government where I'm guessing it hasn't happened in much longer in most cases.
Having worked in big corporations and been married to and friends with a number of NIH folks, I can assure you that the government has 10x the openness of even the most transparent corporation, has a bunch of people trying to maximize the return on all expenditures related to their research, fanatical abilities to repair and reuse equipment for new things, and a base line of people who have consciously dedicated to service for the country rather than maximizing their personal prestige and wealth.
Their budgets are debated in TV. Imagine that in a big corp. it is simply false to say this organized attack on research is anything than a spasm of anti-science ideology.
While I agree with the sentiment that continual evaluation of how any organization operates is a good thing, there is an extensive corpus of studies on the fallacies of treating the management of public services like private business.
There is a good reason why there isn’t much (successful) precedent around this type of thing being done before.
I would argue with that looking at Argentina. I do see however there is not enough data to be biased against any side, but disruptive changes in management are in my perception more effective on changing the status quo.
Achieving change against current incentives with politically mindful measures I'd say is very time consuming and slow.
In regards to your point I agree that treating public services as companies that can't be running at a loss is been demonstrated to be bad, but there is a fine line between trying to make public services profitable VS trying to make them more efficient.
Been in BigCo land for 20 years now, and have seen the rise and fall of quite a few AI/ML/RPA etc fads.
Honestly the whole landscape seems broken and unproductive at this point.
Countless vendors, platforms, cloud environments, industry/technical jargon - all with different pricing models, SLAs, tooling, etc etc.
Getting anything usable is a challenge and most orgs spin in a never ending cycle of data integration/normalization work that produces little business value.
My advice to teams now is simplify, reduce, streamline - get to the kernel of what you think you need and protect it all costs. Most of the shiny new objects being pitched as silver bullets are just ways for other people to make money off your margin.
You don't have to "truly" correct for the room for EQ/calibration to be worthwhile - you just have to make it sound better than it did. I've used the built-in calibration in my WIIM Pro and it subjectively made a massive improvement.
I used to be in-principle anti-EQ, but the AutoEQ project for headphones completely changed my opinion (though obviously headphones are far easier to EQ).
Been in BigCo land for 20 years now, and have seen the rise and fall of quite a few data/analytics/BI/reporting/AI/ML fads.
Honestly the whole landscape seems broken and unproductive at this point.
Countless vendors, platforms, cloud environments, industry/technical jargon - all with different pricing models, SLAs, tooling, etc etc.
Getting anything usable is a challenge and most orgs spin in a never ending cycle of data integration/normalization work that produces little business value.
My advice to teams now is simplify, reduce, streamline - get to the kernel of what you think you need and protect it all costs. Most of the shiny new objects being pitched as silver bullets are just ways for other people to make money off your margin.
I appreciate Mastodon and wish it were growing steadily. Unfortunately, activity metrics (see the second chart on this page, for example [0]) suggest that it's on a steady, slow decline.
I see a plateau after a bunch of churn from large waves of migrations. Would be surprised if this won't be the case for bsky.
Regardless of MAU count, there's plenty happening there to keep me active, and you get to see Threads users who speak ActivityPub as well as Bsky users via a bridge.
I joined Mastodon in the big post-Elon user exodus. It’s great for geeky stuff, but Bluesky is much better for entertainment and news (i.e. what I mostly used Twitter for, pre-Elon).
If geeky stuff is what you’re interested in, you can build that community on Mastodon easily. But if you want more popular content and users, they’re on Bluesky.
I would use PiHole, but them using Github is just a nonstarter (notably because that might be one of the websites I'm considering blocking, catch22 for blocklist updates). Or have they finally moved somewhere else less morally bankrupt ?
A lot of free services would disappear if they were unable to make some sort of ad-based income. Some people would be unable to do anything except whatever was provided by their government without ad-supported services (thinking Google products, YouTube, etc.) It would eventually go back to the way it was in the old days - a few actually-useful-but-struggling sites, a few paid-for services that might or might not survive, a passel of vanity sites and some incoherent cranks and weirdos (Time Cube, etc.).
Heaven for some, but mostly boring for everyone else after an hour.
It's not like storage is particularly expensive unless you start to have hundreds of hour-long videos...
Speaking of, one of the things that the 2012 Twitter APIpocalypse killed off, was Flattr 1.0 (with its buttons on websites to Flattr stuff so at the end of the month the sum of money you set away would be spread over all the Flattrs you made).
Probably not. Each server has its own moderation, and servers that tolerate bad behavior from their users get blocked by most other servers.
I'm not sure the current model would do well against a large coordinated manipulation campaign, but it handles isolated trolls at least as well as corporate social media.
No corporate control. Server admin block nodes they don't want to see, so it is important to join a server with similar views as your own, or run your own server.
It's probably a bit more work than a lot of trolls are willing to put in. Trolling doesn't require a lot of thought or creativity, but setting up the infrastructure does.
I signed up to Fosstodon and then followed a bunch of Python and Django folks. This has been great so far, and my feed is full of relevant, interesting posts. I see a lot of posts complaining about Mastodon and pointing to its decline, but for my use-case, I get a lot of value from it and am pretty happy. I'm not sure what benefits I would get by moving over to Bluesky?
Good solution. Problem is they have chosen a 'default instance' in the app which goes against the idea to encourage federation of the platform and instead accelerates centralization and there was backlash over that change. [0]
mastodon.social will only get more centralized and is the only one that is benefitting from that change.
I consider myself a technical person, perhaps not social media savvy anymore, and Mastodon confused the hell out of me. I don't think it stands a chance with regular Joe.
And beyond that, the federated aspect makes it very different from a global site like twitter. It was aimed at having control but in doing so you feel disconnect IMHO.
Good question. When you say Mastodon, my answer is 'which one' or 'which instance'?
That basic hurdle is the reason why it is a barrier to many potential new users and it has traded complexity over ease of onboarding when trying to sign up new users (who are not techies or sys-admins).
One solution is to set a default instance. I.e 'mastodon.social' and tell users to sign up there. Again, that increases the issue of centralization. To prevent that, you close sign ups and tell users to sign up elsewhere. Then the issue continues on other instances.
Along side other issues, that is why new users just went to Bluesky or Threads instead.
Its fundamental design lacks the ability to provide features that many people want, because the developers see those features as anti-features to be avoided.
Bluesky's AT Protocol was developed specifically to address what they saw as shortcomings with the ActivityPub protocol used by Mastodon and other similar services.
It's fundamentally reasonably capable of things like full text search and better discovery, which its lead dev and much of the community see as anti-features. There has been some recent progress on search, but being searchable is opt-in only because many users are opposed to search.
I think decisions like that are an active choice not to become popular.
My impression from conversations here is that the AT protocol largely came from the developers being unaware of how they could've achieved the same thing with no or minimal extensions to ActivityPub.
There may or may not be actual benefits to the protocol, but they could have achieved a far smaller delta and largely kept interoperability without any major sacrifices.
It's not idiot-proof. Common-denominator platforms where you're expecting the general population need to be intuitive and work like people expect them to. Mastodon doesn't and their federated model is a pain in the behind.
It's a worse experience for posters for two major reasons: blocking is not as effective (blocked people can still read and respond), and there are too many weird scolds who yell at people for not adding content warnings for trivial things.
I don't post so it doesn't affect me directly. It affects where the people I follow choose to post.
If anybody is wondering what sort of political viewpoints quantadev is talking about, one example is they posted that The Onion and Alex Jones are the same
This site doesn’t have followers but if you see somebody POSTING in the VOICE of a guy wearing a sandwich board that says CHRIST WAS A LIZARD it only takes two clicks to see the other stuff they voluntarily posted publicly here (username -> comments)
A big driver of the right tool is your overall send volume and customer record count. Both of these will also influence pricing.
Even for smaller shops, would recommend checking out some of the big players (eg Adobe, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Eloqua, Twilio, etc) as they have entry level lower tiers that may end up costing less over time than some of these startup focused solutions (which all seem to nickel and dime you and hit you up with various types of overage charges), and will get you much higher deliverability, automation, and integration capabilities.
