Looks who is trying to be a bit more casual and *social*: https://signal.org/blog/introducing-stories/

And I'd rather see a future where we give each other more pleasant surprises, create more opportunities for surprising convergence on CHANGE.

While Approval Voting helps that candidate that is the most widely just-barely-tolerable option.

For those who haven't yet filled out their ballots for #SeattleElections - please vote for 1B #RankedChoiceVoting

RCV helps that candidate you WANT to support, but aren't quite sure you won't be throwing your vote away.

Morning folks, time for my first Mastodon thread (!)

Ahead of the #midterms tomorrow, I want to talk about the tragic politicisation of science in the US.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the Republicans became the anti-science party, but the process probably began in the 1980s, when the Christian right first emerged as a major force in conservative American politics.

Since then, the journey has been smooth and swift, and there is now a stunning partisan divide on confidence in science 😥

@vrandecic @randomwalker Fuck it, let's just aggregate toots into a local Maildir and let notmuch sort it out.

I have a strange confession? This morning when I woke up, before getting out of bed, I reached for a piece of technology on my bedside table, and it wasn’t my phone. It was my mom’s old slide rule (pictured below). Recently I became obsessed w/ these analog calculators. So here’s a 🧵 on how to make one (so you can see how they work). First, two things make slide rules possible: (1) you can add by stacking rulers; & (2) you can multiply by adding logs, that’s because log(x) + log(y) = log(x*y)

@offby1 Tickets for Kat and myself to SDCC next year, all 4 days + preview night.

I'm really enjoying following @Curator because they deliberately boost stuff from a bunch of different people, which means I get to see new content even though I'm on my own instance (a lonely situation)

What other good accounts are there that do this kind of thing? Feels like a particularly useful genre of account given the federated nature of this place

@threddyrex Also, resisting the urge to hack the install instructions toward serverless cloud deployment using technology from my day job.

Mastodon.social was a good landing point. If I still use this after another week or so, might move to a more specialized server.

Mission Accomplished.

OK, it looks like this is really happening. #SDCC

OK, this might just barely work?

"Your estimated wait time is: more than an hour" - so, not very likely I'll grab Saturday. MAYBE Friday. #SDCC

And I'm tangibly seeing the difference between watching a real-time hashtag on the billionaire's hellbird site and trying to watch it on the fediverse.

In the #SDCC open registration waiting room. We already have Sunday and Thursday from returning registration; hoping to pick up the other two.

(not sure if mastodon does threads but we're gonna try it)

What food scientists actually do all day:

-Make stuff shelf stable

-Fool around with frozen pot pies to make sure they get cooking instructions that cook them all the way through, in every conceivable kind of oven

-"at X acidity and Y salt content, how hot & long do we have to pressure can the salsa to keep it from spoiling & exploding under the pressure of its own fermentation gases"

@randomwalker I'm imaging an alt-timeline view that amounts to "show me toots from my home timeline (or local server or other?) over the last $TIME_INTERVAL, ranked by $CRITERIA, which may be evaluated over local context (boosts, keyword/hashtag-assigned bonuses or penalties, etc.)

Unsure if I would need deeper context (e.g. level of prior engagement with authors of those toots).

@randomwalker I'm tempted to relax for a while, get a better feel for how this will work, but eventually I may need to find/build a hackable client that has some sort of configurable tuning parameters for boosting and pruning a timeline view.