[-] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

The case "eBay Domestic Holdings, Inc. v. Craig Newmark, et al." in Delaware's Court of Chancery does not support the assertion at all. What the two corporate officers did wrong was to dilute a minority stakeholder's shares for an impermissible reason under Delaware law. One permissible reason to justify such dilution would be if the change was "reasonable to promote shareholder value" (page 49). The two officers could not prove that their actions were reasonable, nor could they prove any other permissible reason, so they lost the case.

At bottom, the major question in that case was whether the corporate officers can conspire with the majority stakeholders to harm a minority stakeholder. It was about two corporate officers that were acting out of self preservation (page 59):

Jim and Craig simply disliked the possibility that he Grim Reaper someday will catch up with them and that a company like eBay might, in the future, purchase a controlling interest in craigslist.

The minor question (whether shareholder value would be promoted) could have been answered in the affirmative and those two would still have lost the case, because Delaware law also doesn't allow harming a stakeholder, violating their fiduciary duty to eBay in this case (page 61):

If Jim and Craig were the only stockholders affected by their decisions, then there would be no one to object. eBay, however, holds a significant stake in craigslist, and Jim and Craig’s actions affect others besides themselves.

The court only looked at the minor question to appeal-proof the ruling, because the two corporate officers had tried to match their argument to an earlier DE Supreme Court ruling.

For the purposes of my point in this discussion, the distinction doesn't matter.

I disagree. Drawing the correct conclusion from the wrong cause is pure sophistry (ie "arbitrary, inauthentic, or deceptive styles of reasoning" -Wikipedia). It is intellectually dishonest to state a conclusion but then decline to support your basis, dismiss your own basis as irrelevant, and then circularly assert that the conclusion stands on its own.

[-] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 13 points 2 days ago

I can agree that corporations are immoral, but no one has ever offered a citation for "legally required to maximize profit". Many corporations have failed in spectacular fashion and yet where are the lawsuits or criminal prosecutions for leaders that fail this supposed obligation?

What does exist is the fiduciary duty to be frank with shareholders, and many corporate officers have been sued for lying by omission. I believe that a corporate officer can choose to prioritize something else besides profit/value, so long as they inform the shareholders. In turn, the shareholders can fire the officer and replace them.

It's no surprise that most officers won't stick out their neck for non-financial causes, but let's be honest if it's simply self preservation rather than some oft-cited but wrong assertion of the law.

3

This offer is for exactly one 8x10 glossy print. Use the code on the Walgreens mobile app and the desktop website to claim the same offer twice!

When uploading photos using the desktop website, make sure to select Full Resolution in the Upload Preferences.

8

Must have exactly “5x7 Cards, Premium Cardstock 120lb” product in cart, quantity six. In the design tool, it will show as “5x7 Flat Card Set, 120lb”. In the shopping cart, the cards should be $23.99 before applying the code, bringing the cost down to $0.00.

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2

This offer is for exactly one 8x10 glossy print. Use the code on the Walgreens mobile app and the desktop website to claim the same offer twice!

When uploading photos using the desktop website, make sure to select Full Resolution in the Upload Preferences.

56
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by litchralee@sh.itjust.works to c/micromobility@lemmy.world

In brief, UK reporting on "ebike" collisions and battery fires confuses lawful, UK/EU-compliant electric bicycles with illegal, unregistered, uninsured electric motorcycles. As a result, public perception is deeply skewed compared to the actual risks posed by bona-fide electric bicycles.

A similar phenomenon can be seen in California, but there is drafted legislation to mandate accurate advertising of "e-motos" versus ebikes, with fines accruing to vendors that fail to correctly represent what they're selling.

IMO, it's hard for me to blame consumers whom, given high gasoline/petrol prices, need some form of transportation that gets them where they need to go and minimizes external harms (eg automobile risk of injury). Evan correctly identifies vendors and importers that flout the law and push the legal risk into riders. At the same time, e-motos are legit for off-road use and here in California, they're great fun in that regard. At bottom, fair advertising isn't controversial; it's no different than wanting to know the ingredients in food products.

On a separate note, Evan also flagged a case of police misidentification and confiscation of a lawful e-bike. Which I find particularly surprising, given that UK police tend to be more uniformly instructed than their American counterparts. No doubt that Californian police have also confused ebikes with electric motorcycles on occasion, but the result in the UK seems is to go immediately to confiscation and destruction without any meaningful system of review. Which seems problematic, at best

3

This offer is for exactly one 8x10 glossy print. Use the code on the Walgreens mobile app and the desktop website to claim the same offer twice!

When uploading photos using the desktop website, make sure to select Full Resolution in the Upload Preferences.

200
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by litchralee@sh.itjust.works to c/imadethis@lemmy.zip

A few months ago, I was gifted a non-operational DEC VT320 serial terminal. This is a 80s/90s text-only CRT monitor, which was only displaying a thin vertical line rather than a proper picture. I've done some electronics repair in the past, but nothing this old or involving a high-voltage tube. But I figure that it would make for an interesting project over the summer, whether or not I can recover it. If nothing else, it is quite a retro talking piece.

Fortunately, DEC -- aka Digital Equipment Corporation-- made a lot of these things, and also published troves of service information, which was the norm back then (#RightToRepair). Among the documents that can be found online included the schematics, which would be of incredible aid. That said, the quality of the scan is pretty poor, and it took quite a bit of cross-referencing of component identifiers with the parts list to confirm what couldn't be read.

Before opening up the monitor, I did some preparatory research, to identify areas which would be worthwhile to investigate, and also to make sure I'm not going to shock myself in the process. My findings showed that because the CRT was able to display something beyond a single dot in the center of the screen, the issue would not be in the high-voltage generation circuitry, but rather the downstream circuits. Specifically, in the horizontal deflector path; this explains why the only image is a vertical line, because horizontal control was lost.

Using the field replacement guide, I got the monitor open and then discharged the anode using a screwdriver attached to the ground strap. There was no spark or sound, which can happen if the bleeder resistor was still intact. A good sign as to what's probably still working in this monitor, but I take no unnecessary risks around potentially high voltage.

The innards were reasonably laid out, basically existing as components that adorn the CRT display itself. The PSU, main board, and "arc protection" board were all easy to identify, although the latter was more like a connector than a board. I quickly ruled out the PSU by checking its output voltages, so the issue must be on the main board.

logic board of VT320 from above, unobstructed by the picture tube

It took a while to extract the board, since I didn't want to break any of the 40-year old plastic clips. But once out, I began matching the board to the diagrams and examining for any obvious damage. No obviously blown caps, no evidence of thermal events, no components rolling around on the bottom.

At this point, I stopped to do some very thorough circuit analysis of the circuit diagrams, to absolutely understand what I was going to do. This actually took two tries, since each attempt revealed faults in my understanding, and I had to go back to the thinking chair. This part took a few days, until I finally internalized the circuit's behavior. As it turns out, this wasn't necessary, and I'll probably include it as a later comment, just for posterity.

When I returned to the board, I made a plan to solder some trace wires, to verify my expectations when powered on. And indeed, after reinstalling the board, my oscilloscope confirmed that the H sync signal was intact and the power transistor was functioning as expected.

oscilloscope traces, one showing a square wave pulse for 35 ms with amplitude of 4 volts, and another trace showing a single distorted sine pulse lasting 10 ms with peak amplitude of 200 volts

Narrowing the search, I took the board back out and started tracing the lines on the PCB surface -- it was fortunately only a two-sided board -- and then compared my observations to the schematics. This revealed a difference, where the Horizontal Linearity inductor (H-LIN) was not showing connectivity, despite visibly being attached to the trace.

Closer examination revealed that of the inductor's three legs -- two for electrical connections, one extra for support -- one had developed a hairline fault. This physical damage broke continuity, likely from the shock of impacting something. I made a repair by constructing a wooden splint for physical support, and then soldered over the leg for electrical connectivity.

a tall inductor supported by wood splints, marked as H-LIN

For good measure, I completed the exercise of verifying all other components, which showed that all other resistors, capacitors, and connectors were intact and likely working. And with that, I reassembled and powered on the monitor to see.

monitor displaying: VT320 OK, Firmware and Set-Up Screens Copyright  C 1997, Digital Equipment Corporation

And it works! In total, I probably spent a week on-and-off working on this. I will say that this is a strange machine to have, since I've been able to hook it up to a modern Linux machine and use it as a serial TTY. I even wrote most of the text of this post in vim.

a VT320 terminal with vim open

0

Use the code on the Walgreens app and the website to claim the same offer twice!

Must have exactly two 5x7 glossy photos in cart.

When uploading photos using the desktop website, make sure to select Full Resolution in the Upload Preferences.

[-] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 75 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I'm going to try answering the titular question, despite the factual situation being wholly divorced from sanity, through no fault of the OP directly. Unless some new convention on the laws of the sea has been enacted vis-a-vis international waters -- which the Strait is -- a nation which provides some sort of service over that area is not entitled to remuneration. It would be gratis.

That said, in the very different context of aeronautical navigation, there is indeed precedence for providing a service to an international zone, but this is agreed to by multilateral treaty, not imposed. For this, we look to the massive area of the north Pacific Ocean, for which there is essentially no radar service available. And yet, to enable civil aircraft to fly without colliding with each other at speed, somebody needs to coordinate the flight routes and provide weather information. Through ICAO, the USA is the contracting state that provides such service over the Oakland Oceanic Flight Information Region. This means most of the Pacific Ocean is not USA airspace, but does follow the American procedures for organizing traffic (which follows from ICAO rules but possibly with small tweaks). This is the distinction between "USA airspace" and "USA controlled airspace". ICAO chose the USA because no other country can realistically perform this service, nor has anyone else put in an offer to ICAO.

To pay for this service, the USA FAA charges overflight fees. Since the FAA is a civil agency, it does not have authority to order a shoot-down of an airline's jets due to non-payment. Rather, the FAA can collect the owed fees through the American courts, just like anyone else would through a lawsuit for money damages. The FAA could also take adverse regulatory action, such as providing less or no service, subject to minimum obligations required by ICAO. The agency can also choose to cancel or disapprove of flights headed to/from USA airspace. If an airliner flies into the territorial airspace of any country without permission, then the air force would respond, not the civil air regulator.

So what does this have to do with international waters and maritime navigation? The air example shows how an equivalent fee for water passage would have to be implemented, when it concerns international waters. Everyone has to agree to the terms, the fee has to be economically reasonable, the contracting state must have some relationship to the area in question, and an international organization must actually contract with a qualified state to provide said service.

The present action in the Strait meets none of this criteria. So yeah, a ship could try their luck and pass through the Strait without making payment. Maritime and international law would not support the USA's claims for remuneration, even if adjudicated in an American court.

1
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by litchralee@sh.itjust.works to c/freebies@sh.itjust.works

This is a very time-limited freebie, lasting 2 hours on 8 July, from 12h to 14h USA Central Time. That's equivalent to 10h to 12h USA Pacific Time. There is less than 1 hour before this offer window begins.

Must have exactly ten 4x6 glossy prints.

~~Supposedly, the code would also be redeemable on both the Walgreens mobile app and the website to claim the same offer twice.~~ This seems to only work on the desktop website.

When uploading photos using the desktop website, make sure to select Full Resolution in the Upload Preferences.

26
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by litchralee@sh.itjust.works to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

The convention in the USA for old urban centers and new suburban sprawl is to construct a street or road with a crown that drains rainwater to gutters along both sides of the road, then have storm drains to convey the water from the gutter to some nearby creek or tributary. But why?

Wouldn't it be easier to construct the road in a roughly canal shape, so that rainwater drains towards a single V-shaped gutter at the road's center? This would cut the number of storm drains by roughly half, prevent leaves from falling directly into a drain and clogging it, make it possible to clear a drain by driving a streetsweeper over it, and also prevent a clog from flooding adjacent properties, since the road itself can temporarily impound more water until municipal authorities can clear the blockage (whereas side gutters would invariably flood the sidewalk and carry sharp debris that would damage tires entering a driveway).

Furthermore, a center drain can be built once and then retained as-is each time a suburban arterial needs expanding -- "just one more lane, bro" -- whereas side gutters are regularly demolished and rebuilt to accommodate additional lanes. By routing water away from the edges of the road, sidewalks avoid freeze/thaw cycles, and the road surfacing can be continuous from the curb: no more bike lanes in the gutter. As a convenient benefit, the "drop" off at a curb-cut from a driveway to street level would cease to exist.

And where required to improve water quality due to runoff pollution, a center drain can be excavated and rebuilt as a linear stormwater retention pond, where moderate stormwater can filter into the local soil slowly, with a predefined overflow level that will drain to the existing stormdrain pipes. This is already done for both surface parking lots as well as Interstate highways, so it's not an unproven design.

Narrow alleyways in older cities do use a central drain, so I can't see why the idea stops making sense for larger streets and roads. The only drawbacks I can envision are aesthetic -- a neighbor's excessive lawn irrigation would draw a wet line across half the street -- and that the center channel would also carry leaves and wayward soccer balls into the middle.

But even still, that doesn't seem worse than the status quo: gutters attract all sorts of detritus, but it's usually hidden beneath the wheels of parked cars until something punctures a tire. And at least in water-starved California, irrigation runoff deserves to be noticed and called out so that it gets fixed. There may even be some small road safety benefit from having a V-shape channel in the center, since it would unmistakably divide opposite sides of the street.

For larger arterial roads that have trees in the center, this seems like free irrigation and water pollution control. It even works when the center traffic lanes are converted for running a tram or light rail train.

What am I missing here?

3

Use the code on the Walgreens app and the website to claim the same offer twice!

Must have exactly two 5x7 glossy photos in cart.

When uploading photos using the desktop website, make sure to select Full Resolution in the Upload Preferences.

1

This offer is for exactly one 8x10 glossy print. Use the code on the Walgreens mobile app and the desktop website to claim the same offer twice!

When uploading photos using the desktop website, make sure to select Full Resolution in the Upload Preferences.

9

Must have exactly five 4x6 glossy prints.

Use the code on the Walgreens mobile app and the website to claim the same offer twice!

When uploading photos using the desktop website, make sure to select Full Resolution in the Upload Preferences.

[-] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 69 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

This is the homeserver written in Rust, right?

A suggestion: wherever a QR code is included, the human-readable content should be included next to it. Not everyone has a QR code reader handy, or their reader has the bad habit of immediately opening links or apps. In this case, I see that it just goes to https://continuwuity.org/ and is benign, but others may be apprehensive at naked QR codes.

(there's obviously an exception for QR codes that are intended to convey machine info, like TOTP codes)

[-] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 74 points 3 months ago

Deflection: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/deflection

The act of attacking or blaming another person rather than accepting criticism or blame for your own actions: Deflection is a psychological defense mechanism.

[-] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 84 points 4 months ago

This is not dull lol, this is awesome

[-] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 84 points 8 months ago

From a biology perspective, it may not be totally advantageous to grow in all three dimensions at once. Certainly, as life forms become larger, they also require more energy to sustain, and also become harder to cool (at least for the warm blooded ones). Generally speaking, keeping cool is a matter of surface area (aka skin). But growing double in each of the three dimensions would be 4x more skin than before, but would be 8x more mass/muscle. That's now harder to keep cool.

So growing needs to be done with intention: growing taller nets some survival benefits, such as having longer legs to run. Whereas growing wider or deeper doesn't do very much.

But idk mang, I'm in a food coma from holiday dinner, just shooting from the hip lol

[-] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 77 points 9 months ago

I'll take a stab at the question, but we will need to dive into a small amount of computer engineering to explain. To start, I am going to assume an x86_64 platform, because while ARM64 and other platforms do support hardware-virtualization, x86_64 is the most popular and most relevant since its introduction at the beginning of the 2000s. My next assumption is that we are using non-ancient hardware, for reasons that will become clear.

As a base concept, a virtual machine means that we have a guest OS that runs subordinate to a host OS on the same piece of hardware. The host OS essentially treats the guest OS as though it is just another userspace process, and gives the guest some time on the CPU, however the host sees fit. The guest OS, meanwhile, is itself a full-blown OS that manages its own userspace processes, divying out whatever CPU time and memory that it can get from the host OS, and this is essentially identical to how it would behave if the guest OS were running on hardware.

The most rudimentary form of virtual machine isolation was achieved back in the 1960s, with software-based virtual machines. This meant that the host emulated every single instruction that the guest OS would issue, recreating every side-effect and memory access that the guest wanted. In this way, the guest OS could run without change, and could even have been written in an entirely different CPU architecture. The IBM System/360 family of mainframes could do this, as a way of ensuring business customers that their old software could still run on new hardware.

The drawbacks are that the performance is generally less-than-stellar, but in an era that valued program correctness, this worked rather well. Also, the idea would carry into higher level languages, most notably the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The Java language generally compiles down to bytecode suitable to run on the JVM (which doesn't really exist), and then real machines would essentially run a JVM emulator to actually call the program. In this way, Java is a high-level language that can run anywhere, if provided a JVM implementation.

An advancement from software virtualization is hardware-assisted virtualization, where some amount of the emulation task is offloaded to the machine itself. This is most relevant when virtualizing the same CPU architecture, such as an x86_64 guest on an x86_64 host. The idea is that lots of instructions have no side-effects that affect the host, and so can be run natively on the CPU, then return control back to the host when reaching an instruction that has side-effects. For example, the basic arithmetic operation of adding two registers imposes no risks to the stability of the machine.

To do hardware-assisted virtualizaton requires that the hardware can intercept (or traps) such instructions as they appear, since the nature of branch statements or conditionals means that we can't detect in-advance whether the guest OS will issue those instructions or not. The CPU will merrily execute all the "safe" instructions within the scope of the guest, but the moment that it sees an "unsafe" instruction, it must stop and kick back control to the host OS, which can then deal with that instruction in the original, emulated fashion.

The benefit is that the guest OS remains unmodified (yay for program correctness!) while getting a substantial speed boost compared to emulation. The drawback is that we need the hardware to help us. Fortunately, Intel and AMD rose to the challenge once x86-on-x86 software virtualization started to show its worth after the early 2000s, when VMWare et al demonstrated that the concept was feasible on x86. Intel VT-x and AMD-V are the hardware helpers, introducing a new set of instructions that the host can issue, which will cause the CPU to start executing guest OS instructions until trapping and returning control back to the host.

I will pause to note why same-on-same CPU architecture virtualization is even desirable, since compared to the emulation-oriented history, this might not seem immediately useful. Essentially, software-based virtualization achieved two goals, the latter which would become extremely relevant only decades later: 1) allow running a nested "machine", and 2) isolate the nested machine from the parent machine. When emulation was a given, then isolation was practically assured. But for same-on-same virtualization, the benefit of isolation is all that remains. And that proved commercially viable when silicon hit a roadblock at ~4 GHz, and we were unable to make practical single-core CPUs go any faster.

That meant that growing compute would come in the form of multiple cores per CPU chip, and this overlapped with a problem in the server market where having a separate server for your web server, and database server, and proxy server, all of these cost money. But seeing as new CPUs have multiple cores, it would save a bunch of money to consolidate these disparate servers into the same physical machine, so long as they could be assured that they were still logically running independently. That is to say, if only they were isolated.

Lo and behold, Intel VT-X and AMD-V were introduced just as core counts were scaling up in the 2010s. And this worked decently well, since hardware-assisted virtualization was a fair order of magnitude faster than trying to emulate x86, which we could have done but it was just too slow for commercialization.


Some problems quickly emerged, due to the limitations of the hardware assistance. The first has to do with how the guest OS expects to operate, and the second to do with how memory in general is accessed in a performant manner. The fix for these problems involves more hardware assistance features, but also relaxing the requirement that the guest OS remain unchanged. When the guest OS is modified to be better virtualized, this is known as paravirtualization.

All modern multi-tasking OS with non-trivial amounts of memory (which would include all guest OS's that we care about) does not organize its accessible memory as though it were a "flat' plane of memory. Rather, memory is typically "paged" -- meaning that it's divvied out in pre-ordained chunks, such as 4096 Bytes -- and frequently also makes use of "virtual memory". Unfortunately, this is a clash in nomenclature, since "virtual memory" long predates virtualization. But understand that "virtual memory" means that userspace programs won't see physical addresses for its pointers, but rather a fictional address which is cleverly mapped back to physical addresses.

When combining virtual memory with pages, the OS is able to give userspace programs the appearance of near-unlimited, contiguous memory, even though the physical memory behind those virtual addresses are scattered all over the place. This is a defining feature of an OS: to organize and present memory sensibly.

The problem for virtualization is that if the host OS is already doing virtual+paged memory management, then it forces the guest OS to live within the host's virtual+paged environment, all while the guest OS also wants to do its own virtual+paged memory management to service its own processes. While the host OS can rely upon the physical MMU to efficiently implement virtual+paged memory management, the guest OS cannot. And so the guest OS is always slowed down by the host having to emulate this job.

The second issue relates to caching, and how a CPU can accelerate memory accesses if it can fetch larger chunks of memory than what the program might be currently accessing, in anticipation. This works remarkably well, but only if the program has some sense of locality. That is, if the program isn't reading randomly from the memory. But from the hardware's perspective, it sees both the host OS and guest OS and all their processes, which starts to approximate a Gaussian distribution when they're all running in tandem, and that deeply impacts caching performance.

The hardware solution is to introduce an MMU that is amenable to virtualization, one which can manage both the host OS's paged+virtual memory as well as any guest OS's paged+virtual memory. Generally, this is known as Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) and is implemented as AMD's Rrapid Virtualizaion Indexing or Intel's Extended Page Tables. This feature allows the MMU to consider page tables -- the basic unit of any MMU -- that nest below a superior page table. In this way, the host OS can delegate to the guest a range of pages, and the guest OS can manage those pages, all while the MMU gives the guest OS some acceleration because this is all done in hardware.

This also helps with the caching situation, since if the MMU is aware that the memory is in a nested page table (ie guest OS memory), then that likely also means the existing cache for the host is irrelevant, and vice-versa. An optimization would be to split the cache space, so that it remains relevant only to the host or to the guest, without mixing up the two.


With all that said, we can now answer your question about what would happen .With hardware extensions like VT-x and SLAT, I would expect that cascading VMs would consume CPU and memory resources almost linearly, due to each guest OS adding its own overhead and running its own kernel. At some point, the memory performance would slow to a crawl, since there's a limit on how much the physical cache can be split. But the CPU performance would likely be just fine, such as if you ran a calculation for digits of Pi on the 50th inner VM. Such calculations tend to use CPU registers rather than memory from DDR, and so could run natively on the CPU without trapping to any of the guests.

But I like the other commenter's idea of just trying it and see what happens.

[-] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 81 points 10 months ago

Even with NA (low/non-alcoholic) beverages, it'd be nice to have third places that don't come with an obligation to spend money.

To be clear, I'm not asking for places that ban spending money, but there are third places like parks (eg NYC Central Park) that are destinations in their own right, but one can also spend money there, such as buying stuff and having a picnic on the grass, or bringing board games and meeting up with friends. Or strolling the grounds astride rental e-bikes. Or free yoga.

Where there's an open space, people make use of it. But we don't really have much of that in the USA, that isn't tied up as a parking lot, an open-space preserve (where people shouldn't tred upon to protect wildlife), or are beyond reasonable distances (eg BLM land in the middle of Nevada).

[-] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 87 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I think we need to start with what Wikipedia is meant to be, before even considering whether it would be aided through federation. By their own words:

Wikipedia's purpose is to benefit readers by acting as a widely accessible and free encyclopedia; a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge.

Encyclopedias are designed to introduce readers to a topic, not to be the final point of reference. Wikipedia, like other encyclopedias, is a tertiary source and provides overviews of a topic.

Content is governed by three principal core content policies – neutral point of view, verifiability, and no original research.

That describes the content intended to go into the Wikipedia, but we need to also mention the distinction between the Wikipedia itself, the MediaWiki software package which powers Wikipedia, and the Wikimedia Foundation.

With MediaWiki, which is FOSS (GPLv2), anyone can set up their own encyclopedia-style volume of articles to host on the web. And that's exactly what many fandom websites or technical documentation websites do, because that level of detail would not be accepted into the general-knowledge Wikipedia. And you can hardly blame the Wikipedia for wanting to avoid scope-creep.

Likewise, if someone disagrees with how a topic is discussed in a Wikipedia article, they can go in and make the change, provided that they follow the same rules and procedures as everyone else. Yes there are moderators, but even moderators can be moderated. In a way, Wikipedia is a collective effort that somehow democratized editorship and it's shocking that it hasn't devolved into major terf wars.

And that's where the Wikipedia Foundation comes in. They are both the charitable foundation that keeps the Wikipedia servers running, as well as administering the collection, much like how a museum protects cultural treasures. Dissatisfaction with the limited role that the Foundation plays can be solved by forking the Wikipedia; they don't assert a monopoly on the collective knowledge, and indeed the entire thing can be downloaded for offline use or to host a mirror under separate administration.

With all that said, Wikipedia as a concept hews very closely to the print version of an encyclopedia. It is functionally a really big book, painstakingly edited by untold numbers of people. The fact that it's not just a bunch of random blog posts is its strength. Wikipedia is not social media; it is distributed editorship.

But supposing you do want a distributed knowledge base, where there might exist multiple versions of an article, please explain why the World Wide Web doesn't already accomplish that. People have been writing their own thoughts since the 1990s. If the WWW is too general-purpose for your liking for knowledge articles, then perhaps something like the DICT protocol is more palatable?

Despite ostensibly dealing with dictionaries, DICT has been used to offer the CIA World Factbook and the Jargon File, which are more like subject-matter specific encyclopedias. As a standardized protocol -- even CURL can fetch DICT entries -- the Fediverse doesn't need another protocol to do the same thing.

I personally think there is value -- a lot of value -- in the Wikipedia, precisely because of what it's not. Wikipedia is not a place to express opinions, it is not a popularity contest of ideas, and it is not a space untethered from facts and logic.

[-] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 68 points 1 year ago

PS: Reddit doesn't allow edit post titles, needed to repost

But this is Lemmy.

[-] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 89 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

OSM can definitely find you a bank near a freeway ramp, but it can also find you a bank near a creek to make an inflatable boat getaway. What it can't do is arrange for decoys to confuse the police while you eacape.

The inflatable boat robber was ultimately caught and sentenced a year later.

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