Ben Matthews

There’s still thin snow on the high mountains to the NE (checking nasa worldview). Where the main river emerges from them is about 200m lower than Kabul city, but it must be possible to pump some up that much, and bring it thence (about 70km) with a pipe or canal. Probably chinese will do it, maybe bringing stuff via Wakhan, if nobody else helps.
Edit - zooming on opentopomap I see traces of part of such a canal, but it doesn’t get as far (or as high) as Kabul.

Although important topic - many regions already suffer from acute water shortage, at least for half of the year - global aggregate numbers don’t mean so much, as large-scale inter-regional water transport isn’t practical. There are a few exceptions - China has it’s N-S water transfer project, there’s potential for a canal from Congo to Chad. Transfer by evapotranspiration is big, but not really planned. There’s also water (and energy) embedded in food, could be reduced if people care. Anyway what’s new (not this article)?

Well problem with any Lemmy community as such a forum, is that current usage (not necessarily intrinsic to the software) is so ephemeral. So it’s good for discussing breaking news, but not to gradually accumulate discussion of solutions to complex problems, over years. I wish this were not the case, but doubt anybody will even notice this comment, as no longer ‘hot’, and folded away … Rather, a few weeks later the same topic will be reopened under a different post, and we start over again.

I agree with most of what you say. I’m a long-time fan of calculating more complex things client side, as you can see from my climate model (currently all calcs within web browser, evolved from java applet to scalajs).
Also, in regarding social media, keeping the data client side could make the network more resilient in autocratic countries (many), and thelp this become truly a global alternative.
On the other hand, some ‘trunk’ server interactions could also doing more not less, bundling many ‘activity’ messages together for efficiency - especially to reduce the duplication of meta-info headers in clunky json, and work of authentification-checking (which I suppose has to happen to propagate every upvote in Lemmy?).

Thanks, that makes sense if I think about it, but maybe users shouldn’t have to - i.e. the Mdon part-conversation way still seems confusing to me (despite being a climate modeler and scala dev), although haven’t used Mdon much since I found Lemmy. And I still feel that both ways seem intrinsically inefficient - for different reasons - if we intend to scale up the global numbers (relating OP).

Combined with topic of trains, this reminds me of the famous movie Dil Se with the Chaiyya Chaiyya song on the roof of the steam train - itself in the SW, but of which the core plot was also about an rebellion in Assam… i.e. it reminds that this problem is older than current government …
But maybe they will be motivated to catch up, as China will soon have a direct railway from Sichuan to the frontier of Arunachal…

That makes sense, to store only popular stuff, or temporarily - especially for ‘heavier’ images (although as we see with lemm.ee, that leads to issues when an instance dies). Yet I also wonder about the scalability of just the minimum meta-info, whose size does depend on the protocol design.
For example with Lemmy every upvote click propagates across the network (if i understand correctly, mastodon doesn’t propagate ‘likes’ so consistently, presumably for efficiency, but this can make it seem ‘empty’). Maybe such meta-info could be batched, or gathered by a smaller set of ‘node’ instances, from which others pick up periodically - some tree to disperse information rather than directly each instance to each other instance ?
As the fediverse grows, gathering past meta-info might also become a barrier to new entrant instances ?

I don’t think the general architecture scales that well (think of all the duplicate storage …

That’s my hunch too, although haven’t studied in detail - so I wonder how we can fix it ?
Is there an forum that discusses this scaling issue (in general, across fediverse) ?

Oh, it’s designed for a big desktop screen, although it just happens to work on mobile devices too - their compute power is enough, but to understand the interactions of complex systems, we need space.

Indeed, here’s an example - my climate-system model web-app, written in scala running (mainly) in wasm
(note: that was compiled with scala-js 1.17, they say latest 1.19 does wasm faster, I didn’t yet compare).
[ Edit: note wasm variant only works with most recent browsers, maybe with experimental options set - if not try without ?wasm ]

In principle I’d like to see specific permissions - so for example playing with gui enhancements should be a lower trust barrier than adjusting and running code, but afaik (correct me if wrong) neither js nor rust have a built-in security architecture that could implement this. Maybe certain types of extensions could just be custom script language without filesystem access, but that’s harder to do.

About source code linking, last time I heard (maybe they fixed it?) it seemed that trick vscode extensions can link to arbitrary (safe-looking) source repos, which didn’t actually produce the extension.

I’m less convinced about slowly accumulating publisher trust, as this could be a barrier to honest new contributors, while big actors with a longterm profit or geopolitical motive could game such a system anyway (as they do for social media).

I do trust the scala tools (build Mill, lang-server Metals, compiler) which adjust my code, having seen them evolve over many years.
and like the separation of functions (lang-server / editor), so we are less dependent on any one big-tech solution. So I suppose a fundamental issue is what to trust less - big corps with a reputation but lock-in power, or an ecosystem of small contributors which might include tricksters. No perfect balance.

It seems so far Zed is cautious, providing api only for specific extensions - i.e. language servers and gui themes.

add a line … right before you run it

I run stuff from the command line using a trusted build tool (Mill, in scala), or via a local server (where js is sandboxed).
But indeed, a tricky language server or AI tool (I don’t use yet) might inject code where I don’t inspect before running it. That’s a risk even with java-based IDEs - java has security permissions, not in js (vscode) or rust (zed), but are they applied…? As for audits, a problem with vscode is the marketplace got too big, so many extensions, many lookalikes, nobody can check them all…

Such tricks were was predictable, as VSCode extensions, letting arbitrary JS run on your system, are an obvious security risk.
Recently I used Zed editor instead, it’s smooth, but this also has extensions, only these are fewer and in rust ( maybe a higher barrier, targeting less users, so far… ). What’s the solution here - is there some intrinsically safer sandboxed system ?

I’m more interested in distribution of users and local-focus of communities than country-based instances, nevertheless the map does illustrate that Lemmy has huge gaps - no country instance in all of Africa, hardly any in Asia… What can we do to make it a more global conversation ?

So how about the Cahill Butterfly projection, …

Zed, for the last few months, and happy with it (previously vscode) - I code in Scala, so Metals provides the complex hints / actions.

Fine map, good to see the old names. But some of these routes are pretty impassable even today - for example I doubt the Wakhan corridor was ever a major route, even the bottom of that narrow valley rises above 4000m. And note Torugart pass (been there…) is north of Kashgar on the way to Issyk Kul (missing lake), not on the way to Osh. So, considering the mountains, I guess a larger fraction than indicated crossed the steppe further north - horses wouldn’t need roads or cities, but it’s easier.

Thanks for the tips. Indeed i noticed they become gradually more digestible (inulin->frutcose) as spring approaches, but then you can’t store them - they grow…

Does anybody know how to make a brew from topinambours aka sunchokes aka ‘jerusalem artichokes’ (silly name) - that’s all i’ve got too many of at this time of year ?

Strange that Genoa controlled off bits of coast (yellow) all the way to Crimea, Azov sea (is Tana now Azov?) , and Circassia, how did they manage all that? And who’s in that purple-coloured “Theodoro”?