Yes, they are intelligent in some ways and must be to survive, but just looking at the steady long-term depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer [0] and the actual squandering of water as mentioned by GP, where spraying it in midday results in massive evaporation, they are clearly being stupid about usage [1], time-of-day optimization, etc. and dooming the area to soon become a barren wasteland.
The lack of drip irrigation used in more arid areas, jsut because they have water today, is kind of shocking, and stupid.
This isn't the 50s anymore, it's not mom and pops anymore.
I stand by what I say, 90% are brain dead, have 0 understanding of sustainable practices, only care about their bottom line, use absolutely outdated ways of managing and growing crops. They're basically brute forcing life with technology, destroying their own source of income year after year.
I worked for years in small scale bio farms, I can certify most farmers are clinically retarded
Smaller communities. You generally knew what kind of community you were participating in.
Focused discussion. A forum was usually about a specific subject, rather than one account participating in dozens of completely unrelated communities.
Your identity was more compartmentalized. What you said on a linux forum didn't necessarily follow you into a motorcycle community.
Moderation had different incentives. If you ran a forum, you needed people to actually want to come back. Moderation that became too heavy-handed could kill the community you were trying to maintain.
Reddit essentially turned the forum model into one enormous site with thousands of sections, sounds great but broke more than it fixed.
Your Reddit account becomes a single identity spanning everything you do. Someone can look through your activity in completely unrelated subreddits, form an opinion about you based on that, and potentially use something you said somewhere else against you... no matter what the culture/norms/rules were of the other community.
A traditional forum depended on its community surviving. On Reddit, a subreddit can become extremely valuable simply because it occupies a desirable name and has accumulated a large user base. The underlying platform is doing most of the work of bringing people there. The moderator can be "all powerful" and heavy handed because they know rarely do competing subreddits actually work out.
>Unfortunately XMPP is an absolutely terrible protocol
Can you provide more details here? I've never seen an issue with the protocol at all, more issues with feature difference between servers depending on what they have decided to implement or not.
Most times I've seen complaints about it, it boils down to "XML being yucky" and the extension component model being difficult to write clients for, which is true but not really a fault of the protocol, it's more of an inherent tradeoff of supporting opt-in extensions at all
I don't have that many problems with XML myself, but XMPP is weird even in XML land, because it tries to do XML all the way.
For instance, it works as a constant, uninterrupted stream. You never close the document until the disconnection. Which means you absolutely have to parse it with a stream parser.
It could have been something sensible, like a document per message: "Here's 300 characters of XML document: ....". But nope.
What’s so complex about it? From what I gather (after skimming the document just now), you attach an extra element to a message which says how to style which parts of the message, from codepoint n to codepoint m, essentially. At least conceptually, that seems really simple and straightforward.
Are there more elegant or natural ways to do it? Probably. But when you say ‘extremely complex’, saying ‘codepoints 7 to 15 should be bold’ is not what comes to my mind.
* It's not standard. You can't plug in some normal formatting library there and be done with it.
* You'll probably end up having to write conversions back and forth.
* It's fragile -- if anything gets misaligned it'll break
* It's tooling unfriendly. Think things like Nagios, Grafana, etc sending formatted notifications. Everything can do this or this, but practically nothing is set up to accommodate this format.
* It leaks into other subsystems. You can't eg, just search/replace/insert/delete words if you need to for any reason without breaking this.
Is it the worst thing ever? No, but it seems to go with the pattern that nothing in XMPP is normal or comfortable. Everything has this weird particular flavor to it and more complexity than necessary.
If it were up to me, my option would be to support 2 things: Markdown for simple cases, and embedded HTML for when you really have to get fancy. Each of those can be handed out to existing code and you don't ever have to keep adding extensions because what if people want colors or something now.
None of this seems particularly different from doing spans inline (what if you forget to close one? or they overlap?), but it has a major benefit of being very backwards compatible, supporting future variants in parallel for gradual migration, and doesn't require any changes to search tools. And separating markup instructions from content is generally a very good idea.
And you could use markdown. Just get the rendered spanned text result and transpile it. This would be true for any editor as well, just get convert it to spanned text, edit, convert back.
And with HTML you'll still have to specify what subset you support, and many tools won't support that either. Markdown suffers from this too, by supporting embedded HTML, though at least commonmark is pretty baseline and well supported.
AFAIK, it's Matrix markup, the idea is to make plaintext easy to extract, so you can send plaintext notifications, keep it simple. Markdown is fragile too for some reason. You can't use normal libraries with untrusted messages, because normal libraries work only with trusted data. HTML sanitization works like conversion between different formats.
Since the whole thing takes place in XML land I think there's no excuse for making clients implement markdown parsers as well. Bold should be or or at least or . Embedding markdown in XML is silly.
There is zero baggage on NOSTR regarding identities. An npub became the non-ambiguous way to reference anyone regardless of where they are writing from.
Thank you for the reference to that project called anproto, never had heard of it and I'm still without understanding what problem it really solves. Seems to encrypt texts but then contains zero outside metadata to route it somewhere. The website is very scarce on details for someone unfamiliar the scuttle-something they mention.
The nostr baggage I referred to is the crypto culture on the network. I appreciate nostr for being sparse as well. ActivityPub doesn't feel approachable re: understanding the protocol.
There's an example ANproto in use at https://wiredove.net it's pretty clean but not very active, yet another experimental social network playground!
NOSTR notes are very flexible. For example you can have the json include metadata which is essential to know where it should be going, or you can encrypt everything and send what looks like "garbage" to an open relay that can only be fetched by anyone with a key.
There are dedicated profile notes which define which relays that account/identity prefers to send their messages but everything is flexible. It does forego much of the routing metadata, which in my opinion is an obstacle when you don't know which stations/relays are placed on a given geography but you want the message to "navigate" (sometimes quite literally) to a place/region.
For that type of things I'm a biased fan of https://xprs.dev because it bridges NOSTR identities/signing/encryption with APRS that can use store/forward and the routing follows any possible method include USB drives.
* It's hard to even parse, XMPP uses an uninterrupted XML stream.
* The contents are often baroque and complex
* Standards are a mess, and stuff that should be in core isn't
* Data loss is possible
* Protocol wasn't made for mobile devices
* Multiple devices are terribly supported
* Data loss is possible
From my attempts long ago, and other testimonials, writing an XMPP client is a full time job of solving weird problems that shouldn't exist in something better designed.
> We hear this too often: “XMPP uses XML. It should use JSON—it’s more modern.”
I can't take this write-up seriously if it starts like that. I still read the whole thing though and I couldn't find any solid argument as to why someone would prefer XML to JSON for XMPP.
> This is especially true in browser environments, where XMPP streams run over WebSockets, which naturally frames the XMPP protocol. That’s why you are never actually working with XML trees consuming large chunks of memory. Modern implementations like XMPP.js go further and use LTX—a lightweight parser built specifically for XMPP’s streaming model—rather than the browser’s DOM parser. The result: developers work with JSON-like objects anyway. The wire format becomes invisible to your application code.
That to me, is an argument for using JSON, not XML. XML is strong when you have elements referencing other elements in your document structure or DOCTYPE for grammar defs. I might be missing something but I don't get how streaming XML is to be preferred over JSON for XMPP.
If it was actually using XML as a markup language then that would be a reason to stick with it. But XML seems to be complicating things much more than it simplifies.
>> XML remains the best format for representing trees—deep hierarchies of nested data. JSON handles flatter structures well, but good messaging protocols are extensible: extensions can be embedded at different levels and composed together, like Lego bricks. That’s where XML shines.
Anything reasonable you'd be doing with messaging protocol is pretty flat.
It should be JSON with embedded XML for message text markup, playing to each ones strengths... not combining two sets of weaknesses by framing in XML and then using Markdown to format the messages.
I will say that the middle layer is not great. I have an XMPP bot and the "interaction with the network" stuff really is ugly and unfun.
I think the protocol itself is... I mean it's fine, I guess? Protocols are tricky because a lot of stuff is bolted on and it's not really super stateless as a protocol. But like all the Python XMPP client libs (for example) are all real janky.
The protocol is complex enough to where the "simple and easy" client libs require way more up front design.
Are you not describing perfect as the enemy of good?
A product doesn't need to serve EVERY human on earths needs, just enough of them that it can become large enough that established legacy solutions need to adapt.
I get why you might think this wouldn't be a fit for YOU but rather than argue against it from a niche viewpoint instead maybe look at how if it did exist it could be good for many.
Candidate A - will do X, Y, Z all in ways I think are the best
Candidate B - will do A, B, C which I prefer less than X, Y, Z but in the grand scheme likely impact my day to day life little.
Candidate A - also supports (or is supported by) people / movements that actively make my life harder and piss me off.
That's not cutting off my nose that's deciding I can live with a less optimal solution to some problems to avoid something that pisses me off massively from growing more powerful
I don't know how you can say it's a straw-man argument when you qualify the the statement as "typically" increases the value of the land... that indicates you KNOW at least occasionally it doesn't increase and instead decreases, and if it's a real possibility (even if the % is low - 10-15%) then it's not a straw-man argument to be concerned about it, it becomes something that should be risk weighted and explained to mitigate the concern.
No - it means that Charles III is an independent monarch for two separate nations.
The monarchy is 99% ceremonial in Canada but it's important to note that the Canadian Crown isn't the UK Crown... Canada is not a dependent of the UK in anyway, simply the person that wears the Crowns is the same person.
>the Crown has had both a shared and a separate character: the sovereign's role as monarch of Canada has been distinct from their position as monarch of any other realm,[n 4][16][65][66][67] including the United Kingdom.[n 6][69][70][71][72] Only Canadian federal ministers of the Crown may advise the sovereign on any and all matters of the Canadian state,[n 7][70][73][74][75][76][77] of which the sovereign, when not in Canada, is kept abreast by weekly communications with the federal viceroy.[78] The monarchy thus ceased to be an exclusively British institution and, in Canada, became a Canadian,[40][79][80][81] or "domesticated",[82] establishment, though it is still often denoted as "British" in both legal and common language,[40] for reasons historical, political, and of convenience.
It's not just theoretical -- IIUC, if Charles, William and George get hit by the same bus, Charlotte would become Queen of the UK while Louis would become King of Canada.
I'm sure that in that scenario Canada would quickly update their primogeniture laws to give Charlotte primacy over her younger brother, but at the moment the primogeniture laws of the two countries are different.
The monarchy is essentially ceremonial in the UK too - the position gives the monarch a platform for advocating for inoffensive things like the environment, and the pomp of state visits is perhaps sometimes useful, but the monarch really has no wield-able political power despite technically being the boss and inviting the winner of elections to run the country.
As an ex-Brit I was always pro-monarchy, enjoying the pageantry and historical continuity, although the current crop of royals don't have much going for them. Perhaps William will turn out OK.
I guess if going in the UK gets tough the royals could move somewhere else to reign. Sigismund was king of Sweden and Poland, though he couldn't maintain both. Maybe we'd need some drama with usurpers and uncles and so on to keep the populace entertained. Without the civil war part...
From what I've gathered it's pro-censorship however since the user is entirely mobile and can change relays at will without friction that the power still remains with the user... the relay doesn't have much power in anything they can't keep their users from finding you, and they can't keep you from publishing elsewhere they can only choose to not accept your posts.
When I setup my account I list 3-4 relays that will host my content, if any one relay decides they dislike me and bans me no big deal everyone who follows me already knows to check 3-4 different servers for me and will find my content on the others, and I can update that list at any point in time just as quickly as I'm banned... so unless you can get every relay (which ideally are all individual groups with likely different rules / regulations) I publish to to ban me at the same time there is no real way to "censor" someone in the way we are used to currently.
Which is the point of free speech, right?
You should have the ability to say whatever you want, people just don't have to listen to you or be around you.
Yawn... every time people make claims like this the less and less I care to hear their concerns.