I think not being able to search for <random celebrity> is a good marker of how mastodon is trying to be something other than just a decentralized twitter clone.
I personally find the twitter microblogging model, wherein most tweets seem to be retweets of high-profile users or comments on their posts, quite unhealthy for discussion among equals.
Twitter is essentially a media site, whereas (I think) Mastodon hopes to be something else, more of a forum for actually taking to people. Whether it can work as/if the userbase grows remains to be seen, but I'm cautiously optimistic.
The other thing to keep in mind is that idiosyncratic norms and conventions pop up that are products of how people use the platform, and these have a way of turning problems into non-problems.
Maybe the network will just evolve to value interactions that aren't centered around brand pushing. Maybe it will let the rest of the social ecosystem take care of that and meanwhile mastodon will do it's own thing.
Or maybe a mastodon instance will seek to distinguish itself by providing this kind of verification and become the de-facto instance for verified brands. (There's already a mastodon that explicitly courts business brands.) Maybe we'll even discover that we just don't value such a thing that much, when it occurs on a network structured to make it easily separable from the rest of social activity.
All of which is not to say we should waive away the problem, only that it need not be a conversation-stopper when it comes to the question of whether mastodon has offers "enough" value in its current form.
Referring to a colleague as a 'milf' is not 'clumsily making a move'. Everyone knows what that's an acronym for. If you start a private chat with a colleague, they tell you to keep it about work, and then you tell them you'd like to fuck them, then you should expect to be fired.
There is no proof that white candidates are hard to interview there.
That quote sounds like the kind of thing that could easily be an immature employee who doesn't like the idea of a "VP of diversity", or doesn't like the tone of the VP's slides, taking something small and blowing it out of proportion.
Like, they tried to recommend a friend of theirs for an open position and the friend didn't get an interview and suddenly that n=1 case becomes "OMG! They won't let us interview white candidates!!"
> If he can achieve his goal will mean that a lot of people could do that and there is nothing special in that project.
I think that's kind of the point of his personal challenges. He's trying to set an example of being intellectually curious, not show off that he's a genius. Wasn't one of his previous projects for the year to learn Chinese? A difficult challenge, but not a superhuman one. Plenty of other people are capable of it.
There are things to dislike about Zuckerberg, but I don't think these challenges are one of them. They're pretty admirable imo.
I like this suggestion. I'm of course very much in favour of streaming as the primary mode of watching TV, but I'm very invested in seeing the BBC survive in a recognisable form into the future. Despite its considerable watering down of its original mission statement, the BBC still remains my best answer to the hypothetical "What's the best thing about being British?"
No I don't think this is quite right. The romantic artistic image of the mathematician is a prevalent one now, and we choose to see examples to fit the type. But it hasn't always been this way. Before the early 1800s the mathematician was scene as a pragmatic, man of the world sort. Or so Amir Alexander argues in his book Dual at Dawn: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Duel-Dawn-Mathematics-Histories-Tech...
I agree with you that sensitivity and complexity are not isolated to artists, and a agree to some extent that mathematics is an art form, just wanted to point out that 'mathematician as tortured artist' is a relatively modern trope.
It's hard for a "man of the world" to make time in the 21st century to learn enough about mathematics to make meaningful contributions to the field which still doing the other things being a "man of the world" requires, except perhaps in a few isolated places that happen to overlap something practical. Or, in other words, we programmers probably overestimate the ability for non-mathematicians to contribute to the field because we happen to be sitting in the very best such place already.
Same reason we don't get true renaissance people anymore; one can not even know everything about genetics, to say nothing of biology, let alone half-a-dozen other disciplines.
Are these traits truly associated with "artistry" and "creativity", or are we simply in a place where we've done so much than moving things forward requires monomania?
Yes, no one is a renaissance person any more. But I don't think that there were as many renaissance people in the past as we think. Admittedly I don't have much evidence for this. In the case of maths, I think our idea that many more mathematicians used to be polymaths in the past is slightly skewed dues to the fact that until about 2 centuries ago, 'mathematician' and 'physicist' were not distinct categories. We think of Gauss and Euler as polymaths, but Euler was by all accounts a terrible philosopher.
EDIT: I just remembered that Gauss was an extremely competent philologist, so maybe the above is no longer valid.
Fair enough. I like to think of math as an art form, and I think on some levels it certainly is (as much as I'd also consider Einstein an artist in many ways). The end product is different than an "artist" but I think a lot of the thought processes overlap and cause similar perspectives.
