Nick Doty @npd@octodon.social

Why aren't more people familiar with the NATO phonetic alphabet? It would be so useful!

I was just trying to spell out my email address over the phone, the other person couldn't understand it, so I read out the letters as words (november-papa-delta-oscar-tango-yankee), and they were even more confused. Eventually we just texted over SMS to communicate.

and this Prime Minister and his advisers have chosen to repeatedly describe the withdrawal agreement's backstop provision, negotiated by the head of his own party and the elected representatives of countries across the EU, and necessary to maintain the Good Friday Agreement treaty entered into by elected representatives, as "undemocratic".

The unelected Prime Minister, who plans to ignore the will of the elected parliament, chooses to repeatedly call a negotiated agreement "undemocratic".

... and reportedly the Prime Minister intends to pursue this plan after a majority of parliament votes him out of office either by (1) scheduling an election after the departure date and therefore making this unilateral huge policy decision while acting as a caretaker government knowing that parliament has no confidence in him just because of that decision or (2) by refusing to step down as prime minister even if an alternative coalition has more support, triggering a constitutional crisis

The Prime Minister, elected not by the general public but by under 100k members of his own party, a party which came in 5th place in the most recent nationwide election and doesn't have a majority in parliament, is moving forward with a plan to leave the EU without a deal, a plan which a large majority of people in the UK and their elected representatives oppose (and which wasn't part of the campaign in the 2016 referendum),

in large part I made a list of my focuses so that I can spend less time spinning my wheels worrying about the scale of the problem or feeling general guilt/anxiety.

What actions can I take to address the climate crisis? I made a list:
https://npdoty.name/plan/climate/

I have a particular personal focus within each category:
* Reducing my personal carbon emissions
* Building communities
* Raising awareness
* Influencing local policy
* Influencing federal policy

What are you doing? Have you posted your list somewhere?

@emacsen @cwebber and that introduction functionality could be implemented lots of ways: signing other people's keys to indicate trust seems easier to me. (Indieweb's "vouch" was a little similar.)

But ocap URLs would have an additional function: you could cut off an entire downstream set of people by revoking a single URL, if a whole subgroup turns out to be unwanted.

But there are other confusions: if I know you through 7 connections and you cut off 2, my client has to keep a list and retry.

I think what I saw in @emacsen 's paper and in @cwebber 's https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub/blob/master/README.org is adding a primitive of introductions between people. So if you only wanted to receive messages from (roughly) friends of friends, you could hand out special inbox URLs to people you trust, and there could be some UI for passing those along, so that only their subsequent contacts could contact you. And if I didn't know you but wanted to, I could ask my network, "hey, can anyone introduce me to Alice?"

I'm still trying to understand the ocap proposals for spam/harassment mitigation in ActivityPub.

Some of this is difficult to understand because it reads to me the same as proposals for spam-handling in existing systems (like email). Postage stamps, which have their own limitations/drawbacks and would require huge development/adoption, could be implemented in ocap, or in IMAP. Revoking access for a particular URL sounds similar/identical to a blocklist, etc.
/cc @emacsen @cwebber

@emsenn you're based in the Triangle, right? (Chapel Hill?)

I'm newly living in Durham, NC and I'm trying to find environmental activists groups. Would you happen to know where to look? I want to take more direct action on climate change, and I'd like to find others who are already involved.

(It looks like there's no XR group in all of North and South Carolina!)

So, you’re thinking of adding a new permission prompt to the Web platform?
https://www.w3.org/blog/2019/07/adding-another-permission/
Some questions to think through first. We should have fewer permission prompts, and make them more meaningful.

Responsible archivers could also follow delete/tombstone notifications to remove (or make non-public) posts from archives where the user has chosen to delete them.

It would be worth laying out the #privacy impacts and features for indicating preferences about archiving of ActivityPub posts.

I think admins setting instance-wide defaults (via robots.txt) and users setting user-specific preferences (via meta robots noindex) are promising. But those are both Web-only, where we might want something tied to the federated post itself. ActivityStreams has `audience` but not much else.

My letter to WIRED. I'll re-subscribe again if they commit never to advertise intentionally harmful and addictive products in the future.

Biked to the neighborhood grocery store, along a 1-mile painted bike lane. After I got home (safe!), posted 5 reports to 311 of illegal parking in that bike lane. Is this just what 🚴 life is like now?

(That doesn't count the illegally parked police car or the parents trying to grab parking spaces near the schools, where in each case I didn't think I could safely take a picture.)

it's a comfort to know that even in the 17th century people struggled to keep up with their email and felt tempted to blow off work
https://mastodon.social/@samuelpepys/101942547437024766

It is proven! I am npdoty on Keybase: https://keybase.io/npdoty/sigchain#8a5b44c5f58f674d805185f439ed152f360d0a05a821188f9c343e02ef426b990f

(a small subgame at the end: the "free file" software you're using quietly threatens that your state return might be delayed unless you pay them to file it, and, after a few minutes, you give in and pay them because the whole thing has taken too long anyway)