PupBiru

yeah kinda… you can get private health (but it’s muuuuch cheaper than the US; eg i pay $1200/qtr which is about $800USD/qtr) and over a certain tax level if you don’t have PHI you pay a medicare levy so it becomes more cost effective to have PHI than not

PHI often gives you things like better food in hospitals, private room, cheap/free glasses, better mental health support, massage etc… the stuff that medicare pays for like surgery, doctors visits etc your PHI doesn’t pay for

medicare keeps you alive and healthy, PHI makes things comfier

and i think this is where the conflicting information comes from. i’m australian, but we have similar conversations about our medical system: it’s not that it’s bad, it’s that there can be improvements and since it’s a government system it becomes political so it seems like there’s a lot of fighting, so clearly there must be big problems!

… but the thing is, it’s sooooo much better than private medical: the visibility of the problems is a feature, not a bug. we’re discussing how to improve the system; not how to make it not shit

there are some downsides (eg if you have a boat load of money in private you can probably get whatever you like whenever you like) but overall public health literally saves lives… economic stress factoring into health decisions is such a weird thing

basically the exact same thing than happens in every country with similar systems :( why does the right ruin everything good in the world?

afaik the edges of your vision are better at picking up movement too (for “seeing out of the corner of your eye” kinda things), so it’s possible that while you’re trying to make out specific things by looking directly at them, you’re missing the parts of your eye that can make out the higher FPS?

just a guess though

yeah… you can’t publish a “the best” list like this that doesn’t include the most popular/well-know options without at least writing a little bit about why not those alternatives

to me, it feels a little less like a “the best” and more a “the best that happens to be developed in a reasonable OSS-friendly fashion”

HTTPS is heavy when you’re talking about the extreme low power, bandwidth, and compute devices matter is intending to support

its also not a broadcast protocol - matter intends to connect many devices to many devices

those are off the top of my head; i’m sure there are more. HTTP is great, but new/alternate network protocols aren’t inherently bad: especially when you’re operating in a very constrained/niche environment

i think it makes sense… that’s the pattern with a lot of FOSS but for-profit: make the hard (but generic) functionality FOSS and then make your “skin” that ties it all together, thing that makes it pretty, the differentiator closed and sell that

importantly though Beeper also built a lot of the bridges and maintain a lot more as FOSS

unsure about using a FOSS client with their service, but you can definitely use a FOSS client with their bridges that you host yourself and it’s functionally very similar AFAIK

smart contracts are turing complete… you can allow anyone you like to transfer ownership (including various government departments)… the point of a smart contract isn’t that only a single entity can definitively take action; it’s that all possible actions are expressed as code and queryable by other contracts

you’re totally right that right now smart contracts mean nothing, however we’re talking theoretical applications of a technology

you can write whatever revolution clauses you like into a smart contract: often they have timeouts so that if something goes wrong with the contract execution, at least nothing is lost forever

usually smart contracts like this rely on other things that exist on the blockchain: transferring ownership of something, etc… this way, the smart contract can release funds to the specified parties under provable conditions

these “things” that exist on the blockchain are sometimes representations of ownership (think like a deed for property: it’s just a piece of paper that represents ownership. that could easily exist on the blockchain, where the owner of the property is the person who is assigned the deed on-chain)… the you can have a smart contract that automatically releases funds to the seller once the deed has been transferred to the buyer

there are also things called “oracles”, who are independent, trusted (or sometimes not so independent or trusted; you have to be careful!) third parties who write information to the blockchain… in this case, say for example you make a bet with someone that the global average temperature goes above a certain point between block A and block B: there’s an oracle that just writes the daily global average temperature to the chain. you both deposit into a smart contract that specifies the rules and reads the temperature from the oracle, then distributes based on the results… this situation is less ideal, because it relies on trusting a 3rd party in several ways, however it’s worth mentioning because many people see this as equivalent to the former situation when it’s really not

when it got shut down a lot of commenters referred to it like losing “the library of alexandria of music”

not just hard to get stuff - stuff found in dumpsters behind studios that was never released or copied - but it was all available in the highest possible qualities by people who knew how to copy sound (both in an analog and digital sense in the best possible ways), sorted and catalogued immaculately

yes and no… the browser ENGINE sure, but that’s kinda like saying that brave is just a skin of chrome

the protocol that allows instances to communicate is, but AFAIK there’s an API that apps use… the protocol is kinda just for how to push raw bulk data around, whilst the instance itself does things like filter based on “top”, “hot”, etc

also, in activitypub things like the actor (user), each comment, post, etc are individual objects which must be requested individually (or in a list via a search i think?), so any app that communicates via activitypub would need to make hundreds of requests to the instance to display a single post, comments, and user information!

also as a kbin user

god damn i want a native kbin app!

you’re assuming though that the virtual worlds wouldn’t help to solve (or at least make irrelevant) those things

virtual worlds would likely be significantly more efficient than reality: if you don’t need to make physical products because you only need software and 3d models, manufacturing for most things just evaporates… less extracting resources from the earth, less energy spent refining resources and assembling parts, etc… no need for lighting, entertainment and social venues, office space… people would need far smaller houses so when they do need to travel, it’s probably going to be somewhere much closer to them - and for that matter, why travel?

perhaps lots of our worlds problems fall away when people can have whatever they like - when we aren’t competing with each other, and exist in a (virtual) world of plenty, perhaps some of societies more intractable problems will just cease to be problems. i’m not saying that would happen, and i don’t have any citations, but i’d say it’s certainly possible

what’s so special about the real world? if your experiences are fundamentally the same thing, why does it matter if it’s a real or a virtual experience? certainly there are things we can’t do virtually - scientific advancement and generally discovery likely requires some interaction with the real world, but even than could be done via interfaces to the outside world rather than specifically existing all the time in the real world

you’re missing the fact that google chat and XMPP is a totally different situation… they used an open protocol; they didn’t open their backend

sure, but an open source UI isn’t going to change that… they’d just close the source!

sure you can fork it, but you can also just copy the UI to an open source clone

imagine if twitter were activitypub: kinda like having an OSS backend with a proprietary front end… i’d bet the move to mastodon would be far quicker… network effects keep people on twitter… same here with OSS backend: we can reimplement the UI and people will have the same experience

choice is king

for some things, sure… but for other things i’ll take snapshots, dedupe, etc… i’ll put my system disk on a fancy new filesystem and keep my user data on something more mundane for sure! that allows snapshot and restore of major upgrades with basically no effort

yeah… pragmatism beats purity every time: they’re doing some great work, but to do that great work they have to fund it somehow… i think that open sourcing all of the functional components (the bridges) and keeping the shiny UI closed is a pretty good way of doing that!

i guess i get not wanting to used closed source clients too, but it’s shades of grey: people shouldn’t hate on them for keeping 1 part closed source!