Alex Schroeder 🐝 @kensanata@octodon.social

Being followed by a faceless and silent avatar is creepy.
Here’s my suggestion for newbies: set a picture and write at least one, preferably four posts that tell us something about yourself, about what to expect.
If you follow me, I will look at your profile and maybe I’ll follow back. But I’m not following a faceless and silent avatar.
Now... how to get this message out to newbies... 🤔

Some pictures taken with the bigger camera. Remember to mute the thread if you have seen enough. Apparently we will get new flowers in March. 😄
#Hippeastrum #Photography

The Latvian Radio Choir singing Rachmaninov's All-night Vigil, Op. 37 "Vespers". The best music for crying and programming, both at the same time. Here I am, tears streaming down my face, thinking about some data import into an Oracle database. And I keep thinking: this is the time we live in. Crying, chagrined, as the world slowly turns into a swamp.

"I’m feeling small because all these giants are standing on my shoulders!" – me, when thinking about copyright

A reminder of why I think deleting old posts on social media is important: "I don’t think they have much value going back months and years. I never read through years of tweeting history! This only benefits your enemies, never your friends." https://alexschroeder.ch/wiki/2017-04-27_Record_Keeping

Sadly, the "The World Distribution of Household Wealth" page has no graphic, and the latest numbers seem to be based on a report from 2008.
https://www.wider.unu.edu/sites/default/files/dp2008-03.pdf
Are there no updated numbers? I guess there's the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report.
https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us/en/reports-research/global-wealth-report.html
"The share of the top decile and the top 5% remains at the same level as in 2016, while the share of the top 1% has edged down from 47.5% to 47.2% according to our best estimate…"
That report looks pretty interesting!

"The Gini coefficient is a number between 0 and 1, where 0 corresponds with perfect equality (where everyone has the same income) and 1 corresponds with perfect inequality (where one person has all the income—and everyone else has no income). Income distribution can vary greatly from wealth distribution in a country (see List of countries by distribution of wealth)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality
Dark green is best.

Switching away from Gmail to a new mail provider: the first thing I notice is that I get multiple spam mails a day, now. (The new email mailboxes have addresses over fifteen years old that just didn’t work for many years. But spammers remember.) Curious, I checked Gmail spam and found a few notifications by Blogspot – some containing spam and some falsely qualified as spam. You give some and you take some. I feel like I’m between a rock and a hard place. Perhaps I need to up the filter level.

And the other site that runs my software: "Welcome to the Rainbow Community for Halifax, Nova Scotia!" http://gay.hfxns.org/

Nova Scotia LGBT Archives Project! How to get involved... https://www.dal.ca/sites/lgbt-archives/getinvolved.html I don't live in Canada but apparently my wiki software is being used somewhere in the process.

If I were a mean one I’d just tell them to use official channels: https://www.emacs.co.uk/contact-us/
But I’m not. In my imagination, though… also talking about it on social media, I guess.

Weirdest email in a long time: somebody sends me a report saying their emacs26-common package doesn't update. When I ask why I’m getting the mail and say that this seems like a typo it turns out the searched for "Emacs email" in DuckDuckGo and got my email address. 🤪

I'm realizing that this is a case study of how people evaluate how much they trust something without actually understanding anything. Before long, I will develop sympathies for homeopathy, vaccination scepticism, flat earth, alt-right and the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.
https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/

Hm… there's more here:
http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/
Searching for "stellar" I find two additional papers in proceedings, and an expired Internet draft. I still don't know what to make of it.

"Stellar is a blockchain, but it works more like cash—Stellar is much faster and cheaper than bitcoin, for example. And it uses far less electricity."
https://www.stellar.org/overview
""The protocol was first proposed by Prof. Mazières. You can read his paper here."
https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pdf
It looks nice but it doesn't look like an accepted and published, peer reviewed article in a reputable journal, though. His Stanford page:
http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/
Should I know him?

People running their own email: do you use DMARC? What for? I added the DNS entry and now I'm getting sent reports which I don't read. That seems stupid. Do I just remove it again, or is there some secret magic I should be thinking of?