Joe Roe / is on Nostr

Researcher in computational archaeology at @unibern. https://archaeo.social admin. Wikipedian.

Last Notes

2024-02-13 15:29:13

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I really sympathise with people who shared something with their circle of followers and are now surprised to learn that it might end up on Threads or Bluesky or in some data miner's hoard.
The Mastodon software should absolutely do a better job of telling people that when they sign up (it's in the privacy policy, but you know).
At the same time, nobody is helped by pretending that blocking this or that server will effectively control who gets to access public posts.

2024-02-13 15:13:29

With #Threads and now with the new #Bluesky bridge, I'm really worried that #MastoAdmin s are doing a bad job of communicating what "federated" means.
Your Mastodon posts are PUBLISHED on the internet. As you read this they are being downloaded, legally, by hundreds of other computers. These computers belong to people you want to share with (other fedizens) and people you don't (surveillance capitalists). There is no reliable way to differentiate them.
This is by design. You cannot opt-out.

2024-02-04 10:51:12

This Sunday morning my 18 month old son managed to subscribe to #Netflix.
Their Android TV app makes it so easy that apparently a baby fat-fingering a remote can do it, and that remote has a big red "NETFLIX" button on it that will handily install the app for a fat-fingered baby, and Netflix of course retains my account and card details even though I cancelled 8 months ago...

2023-11-27 11:00:20

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@npub1te7…3dzs I think it's a neat feature and perfectly acceptable. I've done it for example when I've posted about an event, then want to remind people about it closer to the time. Or boosted my introduction post after a wave of new people joined my server. I could have written new posts saying essentially the same thing... but why bother?

2023-09-11 19:59:19

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@npub1te7…3dzs @npub1le7…lv8j @npub1a3r…an72 A really insightful set of critiques.
"We can now say that (some) Mesolithic Europeans (likely) had the currently rare combination of blue eyes and dark skin, although variation existed (Brace et al. 2018; Günther et al. 2018). While Neolithic individuals of ultimately Near Eastern descent had dark hair and eyes, but fairer skin (Krause and Haak 2017, 30) [...etc...] What remains unaddressed, to date, is why we would wish to know this in the first place."

2023-08-12 14:16:05

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@npub1cel…pmxm Nice photos! Just a word of caution: the Bedul Bedouin live in Petra and have done for many centuries. It has never been "abandoned" or "lost", and describing it as such plays into the hands of those who would prefer to see the Bedul and other indigenous people evicted from their lands to make way for Western tourists.