Rotundus.com

I figure my Reddit usage has dropped 50% or more since they started blocking apps like BaconReader (which was the one I'd opted for).

Read limits on twitter might be even worse though:

To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:

- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

I use a lot of Instapaper for tracking twitter threads, often summarizing articles, and this seems to at least make doing that quite risky. Platforms like that seem almost desperate to get rid of me these days, though I'm not sure yet whether or not it'll mean more posts here.

zeynep tufekci on Twitter

"Linus Pauling won the Nobel twice: one for science and one for his brave activism to limit testing and use of nuclear weapons. They tried to fire him from Caltech. US withheld his passport. Threatened with jail. He kept up even when many scientists were afraid to do so."

Political Conservatives’ Affinity for Obedience to Authority Is Loyal, Not Blind

"Conservatives have the more positive moral views of obedience only when the authorities are conservative (e.g., commanding officers); liberals do when the authorities are liberal (e.g., environmentalists). The two camps agree about obeying ideologically neutral authorities (e.g., office managers). Obedience itself is not ideologically divisive."

Demographically diverse crowds are typically not much wiser than homogeneous crowds

Interesting to see this from the author of The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently - and Why. The paper's conclusion: "Will a search for diversity likely pay off in increased accuracy? Payoffs can be maximized by using stronger correlates of cognitive diversity than demographic variables."

It's not really a secret that the "main" site doesn't get a lot of traffic here. What's mostly kept the site around are various other subdomains here that I host tools on for my own personal use.

At the moment it seems that things are getting closer to the eventual deadline for updating or shutting down (or generating a (more) static version of the site:

Drupal 7's end of life is January 5, 2025

On February 23, 2022, we announced that we would be extending the End-of-Life for Drupal 7 until at least November 1, 2023.

Today, we are officially announcing that Drupal 7 will reach its end of life on January 5, 2025.

... This will be the final extension.

I've generally been using Softaculous to keep this site up to date which will alert you when updates become available and makes updating pretty painless. That said Softaculous doesn't really seem to allow for major release updates to Drupal so that'll require a different strategy.

That said there is another way to semi-automate the updates via using drush, but which would also require evaluating the plugins in use and how replace them. That said, think I'm only using disqus and recaptcha here for the most part, as well as a markdown filter for writing up posts. I'd guess that the latest Drupal likely has native markdown support, and figure that both recaptcha and disqus are still active enough that it probably wouldn't be too difficult to upgrade.

Will have to see if i eventually get around to updating or not, but at least there's now a breather til early-2025.

Why Are Plants Green? To Reduce the Noise in Photosynthesis.

"Plants ignore the most energy-rich part of sunlight because stability matters more than efficiency, according to a new model of photosynthesis." Food for thought on solar power?

Why women need male allies in the workplace – and why fighting everyday sexism enriches men too

Overall a silly article, but this was kind of interesting: "Our study found men and women often have differing perceptions of who is an ally. For example, 37% of women whose male colleagues saw themselves as strong allies disagreed with that assessment. And just over half of the men who were perceived as strong allies by women didn’t see themselves that way."

GDPR & European Innovation Culture: What the Evidence Shows

This sounds about right: "The only thing Europe exports now on the digital-technology front is regulation". An example.