naught101
@naught101@lemmy.world
- Comment on I reckon this is the usage distribution of Lemmy servers that we'll end up with. 4 days ago:
Zipf’s law is just a specific example of a power law. Other power laws exist for lots of different things, just with different exponents.
the jury seems out about cities. This paper suggests they don’t follow a other distributions: www.sciencedirect.com/…/S0264275124002592 , but this one suggests that they do: www.oecd.org/content/dam/…/5k3tt100wf7j-en.pdf - specifically it suggests they DO follow Zipf’s law, within a given country. Inter-country differences are likely due to different developmental trajectories over time.
- Comment on I reckon this is the usage distribution of Lemmy servers that we'll end up with. 4 days ago:
Looks like a en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
- Comment on How do I discover the Pixelfed content that is out there when so many big instances block exploration? 4 days ago:
Are there open bugs/feature requests about it?
- Comment on How do I discover the Pixelfed content that is out there when so many big instances block exploration? 4 days ago:
You can type the hashtag in the URL on the web, and follow it from there.
- Comment on Federated wiki software? 1 week ago:
I wonder if they would be interested in implementing ActivityPub?
- Comment on History is rewritten by victors. How can I find books about actual history? 1 week ago:
There is no way to find text about anything without various biases and values embedded in it. You just need to approach reading with a critical lens. Obviously more critical in some domains than others.
- Comment on Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying. 1 week ago:
Awesome! Ping me when you’re done, if you like. Happy to chat more.
I agree heuristics are a good approach, but I’m not conviced maths people are the ones to do it - at least not alone. There is too much messy sociology at the edges of the problem to ensure good problem specification. Some interdisciplinary approach could kill it though. If you get through that intro article, there’s a short article in the same journal that gives a neat intro the Critical Systems Heuristics, which seems like an excellent wrapper around this kind of approach.
- Comment on Federated wiki software? 1 week ago:
Thanks, I saw that flohmakrt link in another comment too. Excellent!
Does that yrpri site work well?
- Comment on Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea! 1 week ago:
That’s true of lots of non-federated sites. Anything with an API…
- Comment on Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea! 1 week ago:
Oooh, awesome, thanks for this link!
- Comment on Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea! 1 week ago:
A version of this focussed on a gift economy/trading platform (e.g. like freecycle, or the buy nothing groups on facebook) would also be cool.
Also person-to-person buying/selling, rather than business-to-person would be nice to have, like reverb.com, or used items on ebay.
- Comment on Federated wiki software? 1 week ago:
Also:
- gift economy/trading platform (e.g. like freecycle)
- buying/selling (e.g. like ebay)
- local community/bioregionalism networks (e.g. what nextdoor should be)
These seem kind of ideal for a federated network, IMO.
I actually think Lemmy would be a pretty decent format for something stackoverflow like - just maybe needs to UI tweaks to minimise the visual space that replies take up, plus maybe answered post flair
- Comment on c/drm: a community for topics surrounding DRM, digital rights management 1 week ago:
At first I was like “why?”, and then I saw the last word and I was like “Arrr” 🏴☠️
- Comment on c/complexity - a community focused on Complexity and systems thinking on Lemmy.World 1 week ago:
There’s a pretty decent broad overview of systems thinking (aka complexity theory, the study of complex adaptive systems) in the wikipedia page linked in the sidebar - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_thinking
I’d say it’s more of a way-of-thinking than anything (so I guess philosophy?), kind of a counterpart to reductionism. In practice, it applies (and has been applied) to basically any field, definitely including physics - early work was very physics focused, but later on the field expanded to include economics and other social science questions. There are models that do use maths/computation (especially some of the earlier approaches), but there’s also a lot of qualitative work associated with it as well.
So I guess the answer to all your questions is “yes”? :)
The first two posts on the community are good deeper introductions to the field.
- Submitted 1 week ago to newcommunities@lemmy.world | 3 comments
- Comment on Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying. 1 week ago:
Me too, but I’m not paying enough attention to reddit to make me a useful moderator…
- Comment on Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying. 1 week ago:
I have a maths major, and think in networks, same as you. I agree that that’s a good start to thinking about the problem. It’s basically similar approach to Jay Forrester’s World model, that used system dynamics to model the global economy.
But what you’re doing is building a model, and then proposing using it to make decisions about how to run the world. This would be sensible, except that any model is necessarily a simplification of the real world, and that simplification process is subjective. What you value and care about and think is important defines what you put in the model, and also what you optimise for, and how you interpret the outputs. So your decisions ultimately end up being subjective too.
There are other issues too, such as the fact that any dynamic model like this exhibits complexity, which makes it analytically unsolveable; and chaos, which means numerical predictions will suffer from in predict ability due to the Butterfly effect, and the Hawkmoth effect.
If you want to get a deeper understanding of this stuff, systems thinking is where you need to head. I would recommend this paper as an excellent introduction to the field as a whole: www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.54120%… (Open access, about 50 pages)
For the first wave/system dynamics approach, this article is worth a read too (IMO it presents far to simple a picture though): donellameadows.org/…/leverage-points-places-to-in…
- Comment on IRS braces for $500bn drop in revenue as taxpayers skip filings in wake of DOGE cuts 1 week ago:
So… you think that: a) you can’t change the way government spends money, but b) you can change the way government receives money?
That’s an interesting world view.
- Comment on IRS braces for $500bn drop in revenue as taxpayers skip filings in wake of DOGE cuts 1 week ago:
How would you fund federal services?
Seems to me the problem isn’t taxation, it’s the process for deciding how that government spending is distributed…
- Comment on IRS braces for $500bn drop in revenue as taxpayers skip filings in wake of DOGE cuts 1 week ago:
Yes, but you CAN have taxation without funding the military. You’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I don’t think taxation is the only way to do this, but you do need some kind of process for ensuring common social services and infrastructure exist and are maintained. Taxation is what we have now. How would you support those services without it?
- Comment on Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying. 1 week ago:
I don’t think this is a maths problem. It’s a social problem. Monkey brain combined with internet communications is still not a solved problem.
I think part of this is figuring out the values you want to express in the format of any given service (Marshal McLuhan style). You need to figure out what it is you’re trying to build for, and then build systems and tools that optimise towards that. (Corporate social media is failing because it’s only optimised towards profit, and that approach eats itself in the long run).
I posted an issue for mastodon on this recently. I think Lemmy should be asking the same questions.
- Comment on Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying. 1 week ago:
What was the picture?
Maybe we need a shitRedditBans community here to repost all the stuff that get banned for bad reasons there? Could be risky, I guess, but could be great with some good moderation.
- Comment on IRS braces for $500bn drop in revenue as taxpayers skip filings in wake of DOGE cuts 1 week ago:
That’s just an argument that the military budget should be dramatically reduced (absolutely agree!), and that taxation is a problem in general.
- Comment on Top Tesla shareholders selling off stock 2 weeks ago:
Birth rates are declining, so it’ll be becoming more common.
I think not many people have a really good understanding of rates of change. The actual impacts are pretty stochastic, so even if things get 10x worse there’s lots of places that will remain unscathed.
- Comment on Labor’s committee says JobSeeker must be raised, but will it? 2 weeks ago:
No
- Comment on Top Tesla shareholders selling off stock 2 weeks ago:
You know… Selling properties at risk of sea level rise to climate deniers would solve a lot of problems.
- Comment on Why can humans seemingly only imagine like 3 different forms of government in different flavors? 2 weeks ago:
Yes. Perhaps fairly chaotic for a decade or two, but then much better 😅
- Comment on Why can humans seemingly only imagine like 3 different forms of government in different flavors? 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on Why can humans seemingly only imagine like 3 different forms of government in different flavors? 2 weeks ago:
Have a read of Wengrow and Graeber’s The Dawn Of Everything. It’s a re-examination of the political implications of archeology, and it’s pretty inspiring. Definitely dispelled me of any notion that capitalism or communism or totalitarianism were the only plausible systems.
- Comment on Why can humans seemingly only imagine like 3 different forms of government in different flavors? 2 weeks ago:
Vendor lock-in.