ttmrichter

Well, I gave Quanta a go and upon following the user guide to just add a Mastodon account (mine) to follow, having it fail each and every time, I've decided that it's simply not ready for actual users yet.

Problems I noted:

1. My friends list (which should have been empty) was filled with garbage content from a bunch of places.
2. My friends feed (which is different from the "Friends" list—information design is a vital skill programmers suck at!) which should also have been empty was filled with a bunch of crap from all over the Fediverse, about half of it being #MAGA-waving twits.
3. My federated feed was also filled with a bunch of (half-#MAGA thug) content from all over the Fediverse, but at least it was a different bunch from my should-have-been-empty "Friends" feed.
4. I was unable to follow anybody. I tested with my own Mastodon account a few times, and then random other people from the federated feed. The former went through all the motions of following right down to saying I was following ... but then lost its mind when I actually went to check my friends list, insisting that I wasn't friends. WIth the latter it was even worse: I kept getting bizarre error messages about this not being my instance.
5. I was unable to block anybody, which is a problem considering the sheer quantity of #MAGA bullshit on the feeds. Again I got bizarre error messages about this not being my instance.

Quanta is an absolute mess right where it needs to be best of breed: the user experience. I'm sure there were solutions to all the problems I experienced, but I can't be arsed to sit down and debug other people's code when it's so painfully obvious they didn't debug their own. The developer of Quanta needs to gather a bunch of new users from different disciplines (ranging from technical users to non-technical users) and watch them thrash around with his software, taking notes so he understands what the pain points are and why Quanta, as is, will not take the world by storm. Nor even by zephyr.

No. Just bluntly no.

I did try using Dvorak. I got pretty good at it. After about four months I could finally type as quickly and effectively on Dvorak as I could on QWERTY.

On. One. Computer.

I sit down at a friend's computer or a family member's? Newp. I use a phone or a tablet? Newp. I use a work computer (where I'm not permitted to install my own software)? Newp.

So that's four months of reduced capacity to type, plus having to keep QWERTY in my muscle memory anyway (with the attendant confusion and error rate that causes!) all for ... not really getting much more speed than I was able to do with QWERTY in the first place.

Phase 1:

Phase 2:

Phase 3:

And that's where it sticks forever. Longest test run was over an hour.

Indeed whenever I try to upload anything (including the images used in this report that I eventually had to host at imgur) I get this popping up briefly:

That might be a useful data point.

I've been unable to make any posts of any kind today. Was there a server update that turned that off?

Show me now a picture of people walking around public spaces reading papers.

Better workout properly. It makes me feel bad and go all instructor mode when I hear about injuries, since I practice MMA and have my own home gym.

It was a new motion and I fucked up. *shrug* It happens. Since it was a new motion we went with light weight so the damage was minimal.

People not getting to hear more perspectives or positive news creates a disconnect between China and rest of the world.

Almost as if where by design, right? ;)

I think you should at least open the link and check the video description and comments. Probably it might surprise you.

I'll do so when I have some spare time. (Last night was a non-starter. I got injured working out so my night was spent mostly whining quietly in my corner. :D)

Harvard study made that very clear, and to every single person I have mentioned it as a response to “haha but gubmint evil CCP bad no freedom”, each of them has acted like a denialist. I always tell them as an asterisk that CPC does not get to fund Harvard, so they should use better arguments to convince me.

As a general rule of thumb, when I see people use "CCP" I map in "ignorant asshole". It's kind of … ballsy … to claim expertise in a subject when you can't even get the name right, after all.

One more question here. Since Russia and other socialist countries also have “authoritarian” governments yet clearly have had a response failure, why is China so different? Socialist countries generally have people in solidarity, so I want to make sense of that.

Rice culture.

No, really. It's a thing.

When the main crop of the bulk of your society is rice, and has been for thousands of years, cooperation is in your genes and memes. Rice is not a crop you can farm large-scale individually. Using ancient techniques, for a village to even farm enough rice to feed itself (not to mention an excess for use in trade) it takes a lot of cooperative behaviour that is not needed if you're, say, farming wheat or potatoes or such. Any person not doing their thing kills the whole. Villages that didn't learn that lesson starved to death and stopped the spread of their genes and their cultural memes. Farming rice turns out to be a powerful vaccination against maladaptive selfishness.

Russia (which is not particularly socialist right now, and maybe never really was) doesn't have that need to cooperate hammered into its very genetic and memetic structure. Japan and South Korea (neither of which is even remotely socialist) both do. This is why Russia fared pretty pathetically in facing a threat that was society-wide and J/SK fared relatively well.

I can only speak for things I've observed or talked about with people, so my perspective is necessarily limited.

What is the current consensus regarding Indians in China?

I suspect that for most it's not given much thought. Indian food is well-regarded as exotic, yet palatable. It kind of occupies the same space as Italian food in Canada (right down to being largely inauthentic). For a long time, Indian soap operas were a major hit on television. Nobody in my household watches television any longer (we've all switched to streaming to private devices) so I don't know if that's the same now. Several of my friends used to go to India once a year and loved it there. One of them wishes he'd stayed in India, in fact, because it seems he'll never get back given the state of the pandemic.

So largely I suspect the opinions, on average, range from "don't know, don't care" leaning toward approval.

What is the consensus regarding topics like privacy, anonymity, Tor, censorship et al, since I advocate privacy stuff (r/privatelife, c/privatelife and also mod c/privacy), and China does not have the kind of privacy/anonymity culture like in Western “freedom” countries? I have never gotten an opinion on it from China’s perspective, and it is just a very odd question.

This is one area where the Chinese are definitely different from westerners. Privacy and anonymity are not huge cultural touchstones. While at the same time they cheerfully use the very kinds of services I'm using to circumvent the Great Firewall because the "Golden Shield" (to give it its proper name) inconveniences them at their work and play.

If you were to go on about anonymity here you'd get people wondering what it is you're trying to hide, likely causing suspicion, not "HELL YEAH!" responses.

I am not a Sinophobe (many know that well here), but I really have trouble believing that there are merely 100K cases among 1.4B people, unless they literally locked people away in their homes. 100K is 0.071% for such a colossal population size.

I am having trouble picturing how China could have only 100K cases among 1.4B people. A 0.071% case rate is just too low for me to fathom it happening unless they literally locked people away in their homes.

That would have been a better start. That whole 'I am not X' construct has been poisoned by literally centuries of bad-faith use of it. Don't use it.

I didn't think you were an actual Sinophobe which is why I put it as a side note and addressed your points directly. (Had I thought of you as a Sinophobe I'd likely have just made fun of you. I'm just oh so weary of those motherfuckers.)

And I saw this before https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46DfBFWxTuM.

Sorry, I'm not going to watch an almost hour-long thing to get maybe ten minutes' worth of actual information. If there's something to read, I'll read it. (I read like lightning.) I do not have an hour out of my day to watch what is very likely a bunch of bullshit (given that it's on Youtube).

Why are the attitudes of people there compliant both on micro and macro scales when compared to rest of the world?

Better education, more trust in expertise (because education is valued), and better government in the experience of an overwhelming majority of the population.

On that latter point, as incredible as it may sound, keep in mind that the single largest source of government interaction most people have is with their community officials … who are their literal neighbours. Keep in mind too that in my lifetime China went from a mostly-agrarian economy to the #2 economy in the world, having switched from (barely) rural majority to full-blown urban majority population not only in my lifetime but in the time I've been here. (It was 60% rural when I came. Now it's approaching 80% urban, if I remember the stats right.)

The government, to the shock and dismay of western pearl-clutchers, has a lot of credibility with the Chinese. As I've heard from quite a few people: if everything changed today and genuine free and open elections were held, the current government would win in a landslide. (This is especially true given the utter shit show that the western world has become in controlling a disease that was almost contemptuously handled by Chinese authorities, not to mention the clowns the "free" world put into power around the world … including India.)

There are a lot of factors that play into why China handled COVID-19 so well, and its authoritarian government is probably the least important of them (though it obviously had an impact: building two massive hospitals in under a month is something that could not happen in Canada, for example, because there would be people profiteering from the land sale, people launching lawsuits to block it on stupid grounds, etc. etc. etc.)

Me and my friend discuss things, and we feel Western countries might still struggle with this for a year, and USA for even close to 2 years, at the rate the whole scenario is going on.

A year? You're an optimist. Look at the chart I posted. Two years into a pandemic that has already killed over 5.5 million people and infected over 300 million and ... Europe and North America both are having sudden rapid rises in infections. Two years in and they haven't learned even the basics that China learned in the first three months or so (from the December start date, not the date of the Great Lockdown).

This is not going away anytime soon. Five years from now there will still be outbreaks all over the "free" world and more and more people are going to stack up in body bags.

(As a side note, whenever someone opens with "I am not X, but..." my brain automatically finishes that with "...I totally am X." You might want to work on that.)

If you "know" more than people with boots on the ground there is simply no hope of convincing you. I've learned since the Great Wuhan Lockdown not to argue with people who are convinced and can't be unconvinced. I just break out the popcorn and enjoy their lamentations.

But the fact is that my direct social sphere numbers in the thousands (courtesy of 16 years of teaching … that's a lot of students, and in China students keep in touch). With my family (spread out over about four cities here—including Wuhan), my friends (mostly just Wuhan), my colleagues (again mostly Wuhan), and my former students I know nobody directly who has had a case of COVID-19. None of their family or other people important to them have had cases. And take that another degree of separation and still, thus far, not a single reported case.

I'm also in a few QQ and WeChat groups that have people spread around the country. These groups have participation measured in six figures or more. Not a case reported. My Weibo interaction is smaller, but that's another 50,000 or so people, from a brief eyeballing, that have no reported cases.

Oh and somewhere along the way I also managed to completely fail to fall over the stacks of bodies that would be required for some of the more hysterical death estimates. (Some fuckwits are saying 21 million dead because mobile phone cancellations.)

Oh, sorry. I lied. I do know a friend who got COVID-19.

In Poland.

Not a single person in China.

So … your dad is a doctor, but he's not a doctor IN CHINA. He has not seen what mitigation efforts were used IN CHINA. He has not seen the behaviour of people IN CHINA. He is, to put this bluntly, not a source of information. He is at best a slightly better than average source of speculation.

But speculation don't mean shit in the face of actual information and experience.

Here's a few clues, however, to help you through your confusion.

… unless they literally locked people away in their homes …

When the Great Lockdown occurred in Wuhan, there were no locks. But yes, people were required to remain in their domiciles for all but a very small number of very specific activities. For two months my world was my apartment with my wife, my son, and my mother-in-law. We were permitted to leave only to drop off refuse, and to pick up food deliveries (in timed small batches of people) from the compound gate. When we had a lockdown, it wasn't that cosplay shit the west called a lockdown. It was a genuine lockdown. For two months. Dead streets. Dead businesses. Dead parks. Dead everything. The only things that moved were ambulances, police vehicles, and the delivery trucks.

(The story of those delivery trucks alone is worth a fucking movie. They were the real heroes of Wuhan, topping even the health workers by a small margin!)

Is it because asymptomatic testing was avoided entirely?

The exact opposite. In the summer of 2021 when we had a Delta outbreak in Wuhan, the entire population of Wuhan (11 million people) were tested. Twice. Inside of two weeks. Again, the Chinese didn't do the cosplay shit the rest of the world did in fighting COVID-19. When a case was found (note: A CASE, singular!), a large district of the city was shut down in a mini-lockdown, contract tracing was turned back on, everybody was tested (twice, as I said), and that was kept up for a few weeks until it was clear the Delta spread had been stopped. Then life returned to normal.