makeasnek

There's a lot of talk about inflation and its causes. Is it corporate greed? Supply chain issues? One clear base cause of inflation less talked about is having an inflationary currency supply. Any other inflation caused by supply chain issues, corporate greed, lack of market competition, etc is just added on top of that. Fiat inflationary currency is a rather new invention in terms of the human timeline. In the US, Nixon is the start of it. Central banks aim for 2-3% inflation in "good years". The money supply expands, the portion of that supply a single dollar represents, and therefore its value, decreases. This isn't a conspiracy, it's government policy, and both parties gleefully support it because it benefits their rich donors.

Think of it: in the last 50 years, everything has gotten cheaper to produce thanks to increasing mechanization, outsourcing to cheap labor/low regulation countries, and extremely efficient supply chains. Yet so many things "cost more" than they did 50 years ago. Even basics like bread. What used to be 5c in the US in the 50s now costs $5.00. How is that the case? Shouldn't it cost less? Where is that "extra efficiency" going if not to lower prices? The answer: bread is the same value it's always been, the money has gotten less valuable. This is how they keep working class people running on a treadmill, never able to achieve economic mobility.

Inflationary currency devalues the currency you worked hard to earn by increasing the supply. It hits the middle class the worst because they have more of their net wealth in cash, often in the form of emergency funds, savings, and putting together enough money for a down payment on a home. Rich people have their money in assets which aren't harmed by currency inflation. Actually, even worse, it inflates the value of those assets! If the dollar loses value (all other things being equal), it takes more dollar to buy a share in Amazon, just like it takes more dollars to buy a loaf of bread. Poor people live hand to mouth, so their net wealth is not impacted much, but inflationary currency prevents them from saving and "moving up". If you want to identify the causes of increasing wealth disparity, the inability of people to save money and theft of value from the middle class via money supply expansion is a major one.

There's a lot of talk about inflation and its causes. Is it corporate greed? Supply chain issues? One clear base cause of inflation less talked about is having an inflationary currency supply. Any other inflation caused by supply chain issues, corporate greed, lack of market competition, etc is just added on top of that. Fiat inflationary currency is a rather new invention in terms of the human timeline. In the US, Nixon is the start of it. Central banks aim for 2-3% inflation in "good years". The money supply expands, the portion of that supply a single dollar represents, and therefore its value, decreases. This isn't a conspiracy, it's government policy, and both parties gleefully support it because it benefits their rich donors.

Think of it: in the last 50 years, everything has gotten cheaper to produce thanks to increasing mechanization, outsourcing to cheap labor/low regulation countries, and extremely efficient supply chains. Yet so many things "cost more" than they did 50 years ago. Even basics like bread. What used to be 5c in the US in the 50s now costs $5.00. How is that the case? Shouldn't it cost less? Where is that "extra efficiency" going if not to lower prices? The answer: bread is the same value it's always been, the money has gotten less valuable. This is how they keep working class people running on a treadmill, never able to achieve economic mobility.

Inflationary currency devalues the currency you worked hard to earn by increasing the supply. It hits the middle class the worst because they have more of their net wealth in cash, often in the form of emergency funds, savings, and putting together enough money for a down payment on a home. Rich people have their money in assets which aren't harmed by currency inflation. Actually, even worse, it inflates the value of those assets! If the dollar loses value (all other things being equal), it takes more dollar to buy a share in Amazon, just like it takes more dollars to buy a loaf of bread. Poor people live hand to mouth, so their net wealth is not impacted much, but inflationary currency prevents them from saving and "moving up". If you want to identify the causes of increasing wealth disparity, the inability of people to save money and theft of value from the middle class via money supply expansion is a major one.

How to contact your MEP: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/portal/en/contact

Source: https://snort.social/nevent1qqsvcedd6dg39eh6633uqqff0p9h2zqyhu3zd6kwyyhzqj7da02x4pszyqe2wpknmwkyd0t295d5ezvtaxr00ngxjtcfuct8pfvyec3snckpwqcyqqqqqqgz2f7lp

Mastodon is a great platform. I have an account there, and I have been using it as a twitter replacement for several months. I have been using nostr for around two months. I have also read fairly deeply into how Mastodon and Nostr work. I think nostr is better. Here's why.

Background:

Mastodon and Nostr offer basically the same thing: a federated/decentralized replacement to twitter. They share the same basic features: tweeting, following people, a public square w/ trending notes and hashtags moderated by instance rules, DMs.

Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin all federate through an underlying protocol called ActivityPub. You create an account at an instance which you use to interact with these sites. Your instance can push/pull data to other instances via the AP protocol.

Nostr is an underlying protocol, like ActivityPub. The main service is hosts currently, called Nostr, is a twitter clone, but there's other stuff like a video streaming platform. They all federate with each other just like Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin. There is no reddit clone on nostr yet, but I imagine it's only a matter of time.

Instead of "instances", nostr has "relays". The app or site you connect to nostr through will usually connect to multiple relays (just like your mastodon instance will connect to multiple other instances). Relays, like instances, have their own moderation policies and can choose what kind of content they allow.

Here's why I think nostr simply works better:

• In mastodon your identity is tied to your instance, in nostr it's not. If your instance decides to close up? You have to make a new account somewhere else. You lose all your followers, the list of who you follow, your tweets, your DMs, etc. This sucks. This happened to me early in my mastodon experience. It was annoying, but it would be way more annoying if I had spent five years building up that account.
• In mastodon, your instance can stop you from seeing content from other instances and ban users from other instances. It can stop you from following them or being followed by them. While this moderation might be nice sometimes, I'd rather it be opt-in than mandatory. Nostr relays don't have this power. Nostr doesn't allow this because you are usually connected to multiple relays. While a single relay can do this (as each relay sets its own policies), as long as one relay you are connected to lets the data flow, you are good to go.
• In mastodon, admins can read your DMs. If you DM somebody on another instance, that's two instances that can read your DMs, and so can anybody who breaks into their server. In nostr, all DMs are encrypted by default and can only be read by the intended recipient.
• If mastodon and fediverse's goals are to create a P2P or federated network of instances, having users tied to instances is not good. It incentivizes users to pick bigger, more stable instances which will lead to centralization over time.

A question of funding

One question that fediverse needs to solve is: how are we going to fund hosting costs for instances and more broadly, development?

There are many valid options such as: ads on instances, selling "badges" or awards like reddit, subscriptions for extra features, etc. What is not a sustainable plan, imo, is just hoping users donate enough to keep things afloat. Open source and free software projects have a long history of being underfunded leading to them closing up shop or not reaching their full potential. Nostr at least has a potential answer for this, while AP/fedi don't really seem to yet.

Nostr has an optional built-in tipping functionality where you can leave tips for users whose content you like. You can tip a fraction of a penny or $100. And users can tip you. This has a few effects. For one, it incentivizes people to use nostr. Non-profit orgs, for example, can use it to fundraise.

Secondly, it provides a sustainable funding mechanisms for relays and development. When you make a tip, it goes through your "tip pool" and you can select people or entities to give a % of every tip to. So, for example, you can leave a 10c tip on a tweet and 1c automatically goes to the relay operator.

Where Mastodon/AP is better:

• Mastodon has more people I want to follow. There is a greater user base and diversity.
• Mastodon has a more consistent interface. Pretty much every mastodon site looks the same. Nostr has a dizzying array of apps and web portals. That's great for user choice, not great for user onboarding.
• While nostr relays in theory can filter content and cultivate public squares with specific sets of values, I've found in practice this hasn't been done as much, most relays seem the same. I think in time as the user base grows this will happen organically, there's just little reason to separate them out now.
• Password recovery/account loss. With nostr, your identity is a private key generated by your client. This means your identity isn't tied to an instance (yay!). But, if you lose the private key, you lose your identity and have to make a new one. Likewise, if somebody steals your key, they can post as you. And there is no real password recovery functionality since nobody else has your password. There are good technical solutions for this like social account recovery and key revocation certificates but they aren't currently implemented. I imagine they will be with time.
• Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin/etc can all talk to each other through ActivityPub. While Nostr's underlying protocol supports this kind of federation, the twitter clone is the main platform with users on it and it doesn't have a reddit clone etc.
• The AP username format of username@website.com is much better than nostrs long public keys. There are some nostr protocol proposals to make this better, some of which are out there and working, but it's not really standardized yet.

Adding an edit about moderation since there is a lot of confusion about this:

Moderation abilities in AP and Nostr from an admin perspective are identical.

• As a relay operator in nostr, you choose what kind of content your relay accepts. You can block users, filter content based on keywords, de-federate from other instances with weak moderation policies, etc. Same as being an instance admin on AP.
• As a user, you can choose relays which provide you with a good "public square" experience free of bigots, NSFW, or other content you don't want to see. It's your choice, same as AP. Most users are connected to multiple relays. You can connect to only one in if you want.

The key difference in moderation is that in AP if your instance blocks a user or relay, it is blocked for all their users globally. This means you as a user can't keep following or DMing somebody whose username or relay has been blocked unless you make a new account on a different instance and check it separately. On nostr, as a user, this is not a problem. If you disagree with that moderation decision you just add a different relay to your list, as long one relay in your list of relays connects to that user, the data will flow and you will get to see it. It will remain blocked on the relay which blocked them and for users connected to it (if they are only connected to that relay, or if all their other relays also block that user/defederate from that instance).

It's the best of both worlds: relay operators can set their own moderation policies and vibes and choose which other relays they federate with, users have the freedom to use multiple relays to access the content they want and the freedom to choose which relays they use based on what kind of content they allow.

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Nostr and Mastodon have both positioned themselves as "twitter alternatives" and both offer some degree of federation. I have done quite a bit of reading and testing with both and am writing this in case you are curious about which one may work best for you.

I ended up deciding to use both, but I have a slight preference for nostr on the tech side of things. But in terms of user base, there are more people I want to follow on mastodon.

Let's start with what is the same with both systems:

• They are both federated and decentralized, reducing our dependency on centralized services like twitter
• Both are completely open-source
• They are both currently setup to share short messages like tweets, but are built on protocols which can support other kinds of messages and content.
• In both systems, you can "follow" people to have them show up in your feed, and people can "follow" you. You can also browse tweets from other users on the same server or from across the network in a "public square" type setting. Both also support hashtags. Both support "liking" a post, "re-tweeting", "replying", etc.
• They are both similar to e-mail in that any user can send a message to any other user regardless of which "instance" or "server" they are on (there are some exceptions here for moderation/defederation in Mastodon's case)
• They both feature some tools for moderation with more tools coming down the pipe soon
• You can run your own "instance" or "relay" on both for greater degrees of control and resiliency, though in Nostr's case there is very little benefit to doing so.

Terminology

• Mastodon has "instances" or "servers", nostr has "relays", these are essentially the same thing.

How to use

• With Mastodon, you generally sign up on an instance's website and then access it via their website or via an app. You can choose from many different apps and change whenever you like.
• With Nostr, you don't need to sign up at any website, you simply choose an app and it creates your account. You can change apps anytime you like. You can also sign up and access nostr through a website (like snort, which is what I use), but your account is not actually at that website, the website is essentially just your portal to access the nostr network.
• Note that while Mastodon is basically exclusively focused on "tweet"-like messages, Nostr does support a bunch of other types of content sharing with some apps optimized for that particular function. But the vast majority of nostr use/content still seems to be in the tweet-like category.

User base:

• Mastodon has a much larger and more diverse user base.
• One thing people say they don't like about nostr is that there are a lot more crypto bros on it. You can curate your feed as you like just as with mastodon. In fact, when I signed up at snort (a nostr website), during the default sign-up it blocks anything that's crypto, politics, or nsfw related.
• In both systems, instances or relays are often centered around a particular topic. Mastodon seems to embrace this concept more than nostr.

Identity

• In mastodon, your identity (ie your login name, your list of who follows you, the list of people you follow, and your tweet history) is tied to your account on a given instance. This means that if that instance shuts down or decides to kill your account for some reason, you have to start all over on another instance.
• In nostr, your identity is tied to your private key (made by the app you use, you don't actually need to know the key), not a single server or instance. When you "tweet" your message is automatically relayed to several relays. You can move your private key between apps if you want to change the app you use. Nostr is therefore more censorship resistant and resilient in the face of network outages or instances deciding to close.

Moderation and Federation

• In both Nostr and Mastodon, instances can set their own moderation policies to control what flows through their server.
• Likewise, Nostr and Mastodon instances can choose not to talk to other Nostr and Mastodon instances, though this kind of "defederation" is more frowned upon in Nostr circles and less relevant as a choice since an instance can't control who you follow.
• In both systems, you can block users or servers you find annoying.
• Unlike Mastodon, in Nostr you can always follow somebody so long as at least one relay is serving their content. Your relay doesn't control who you can follow. While in Mastodon your relay generally doesn't control who you can follow, they have this ability and sometimes use it for anti-spam, anti-abuse, or philosophical reasons (ie defederating from threads).

Privacy/Security

• Mastodon has some confusion among users that DM's weren't actually as private as they were used to based on using twitter previously. This is really more just incorrect user expectation, not a flaw or problem with mastodon.
• Mastodon instances can see your DMs between you and other users.
• Nostr has the ability to send encrypted DMs, so the relay cannot read your messages and they truly are private. Though I believe the metadata (who is sending messages to who and when) is not private.

Micropayments

• Nostr has built-in support for micropayments or "tips" via Bitcoin lightning. This means if you like a tweet, you have the option to give a small monetary tip to the author. You can tip what is essentially a hundredth of a cent or $100, it's up to you. Likewise, other people can tip you if they like your tweets. You don't have to use this function at all if you don't want, it's not turned on by default.
• Mastodon has no support for micropayments

Other

• Mastodon has some ability to integrate with other services like lemmy/kbin since they use the same underlying protocol. How and when to do this integration seems to be some matter of debate at the moment.

Conclusion

I like nostr's design better mostly because it gives me some more autonomy in a few key places:

• In nostr, I am not dependent on my instance. I imagine mastodon will fix this issue in the future and make it easier to recover from situations where your instance decides to close up shop, but as of right now it's an unsolved problem. I had this happen early in my mastodon experience and it was pretty annoying, I would have been even more annoyed if I had spent years building up tweets, followers, people I follow, etc. Mastodon offers more portability than traditional social media sites, but nostr goes even further than Mastodon does in this regard.
• I like that my instance can't choose who I follow or talk to.
• The encrypted dm and tipping functionality is interesting but I don't think I'll get much use out of it. I tried tipping just to try it out, and it works smoothly, but it just doesn't appeal to me much. And if I really want secure communications I'd probably use a different system for it.

Mastodon has more people I want to follow, that for me is the main reason to be on mastodon.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/6469594

How to contact your MEP.

I am working on a new django project which will use a MySQL database. Obviously there are several tables and attributes items in those tables have. I realize I could just document those attributes in the code itself, but more than one codebase may be accessing this database. I would rather have a more comprehensive solution to document relationships, expected CASEing of the text, allowed characters, etc.

I know UML exists, but it seems there are 1,000+ tools which do UML modeling, not all of which will gracefully do an SQL database.

Examples of things I want to document:

• For a "user profile" there are various attributes: username (primary key), friendly name, etc
• For a "task" - id (primary key), name (letters numbers and spaces only, max 56 characters), owner (a single username (foreign key(), assignees (zero or more usernames (list of foreign keys)), etc

Here's what I need:

• GUI for building flowchart/model/whatever you call it showing each table and each attribute in each table, with ability to add notes to table or attribute. Attributes must have ability to be relational just like in a database.
• FOSS only, must run on Linux. No "free" web-based garbage that will end up behind a paywall 5 years from now ie draw.io
• Must store source files for this model in a text/xml/json/something file which can easily be put into our git repo
• Must not be so tightly coupled to MySQL that is requires a database connection to work or couldn't be used if we switch to a non-MySQL backent. If it has templates for and knowledge about MySQL databases that's great but it shouldn't require them to be useful.

What do you suggest for this?

I LOVE this app and have it running on several old devices. Their total computational power may not be massive, but every bit helps. Android devices are some of the most efficient devices in terms of compute-per-watt and will blow any laptop or desktop out of the water on this metric.

Researchers use BOINC to distribute massive computational workloads like searching for genes related to cancer (World Community Grid) or finding pulsars (Einstein@home). There are over a dozen BOINC projects so you can pick and choose what to contribute to. You get fun stats about your contributions and some projects will even credit you in their scientific papers.

BOINC live in F-Droid because it's not allowed in the regular play store. This is because it downloads binaries and runs them, which is a big play store no-no. Be careful to remove your battery and/or use the in-app settings to keep temps low to prevent battery swell. I wouldn't run this on my daily phone, but on spare devices it's great! Some of them I have run for years. Removing your case can make a big difference with temps.

Relevant lemmy community: https://sopuli.xyz/c/boinc