Imagine being able to remember every single day of your life, all the way back to when you were a newborn.

Australian woman Rebecca Sharrock is one of only 60 people in the world with a highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), also known as hyperthymesia.

On 28 April 2022, Just Stop Oil supporters blocked the entrances to Clacket Lane Services on the M25 by sitting in the road with Just Stop Oil banners. They also decommissioned the petrol pumps by breaking the display glass and covering it with spray paint. This action was taken in support of their demand for the UK government to end all new oil and gas projects in the country.

In a unanimous verdict delivered today by a jury at Guildford Crown Court, Just Stop Oil supporters Nathan McGovern, Rosa Sharkey, and Louis Hawkins were found not guilty of causing criminal damage.

Any jury may consider that the law itself is unjust. It is an important principle and indicates public opposition to aspects of law, in this case, the 'lawful' behaviour of fossil fuel corporations.

Zoom founder Eric Yuan has big ambitions in enterprise software, including letting your AI-powered ‘digital twins’ attend meetings for you.

Here's some development highlights from the last 3 weeks and who contributed:

Freamon

Markdown parsing improvements and let us use a different variant of Markdown than Lemmy does.
Poll federation - Mastodon accounts can vote on PieFed polls, and receive votes from PieFed users for Polls they've posted into a local community.
PeerTube integration - New channels arrive with 10 recent videos, their player is embedded in the PieFed post, new posts are correctly restricted to channel owners, and arrive into PieFed automatically.
Manual post-retrieval from remote communities function
Improvements to federation that led to an 80% drop in the amount of spam cleanup work admins need to do (some post deletions on remote Lemmy instances weren’t being imported into PieFed properly).

Rimu

A minor dark mode improvement.
Made the Poll UI and database.
Made a start on federation with Pixelfed and Discourse.
An admin tool to list communities that need to be assigned to a topic.
Update translations from crowdin - French is finished thanks to wazaby. Steady progress continues on Japanese translation.
Much better topic list layout.
Imported many PeerTube channels into piefed.social and assigned them to topics.
Top-level topics added to the main menu under ‘Topics’.
Soft deletes - post deletion can be reversed for up to 7 days.

Tallship

Suggested PieFed use 'soft-break' Markdown
Testing User Follows from various platforms
Reporting that the use of Mastodon's trademark was problematic

General comments

We are reaching the end of the initial roadmap I sketched out 6 months ago at the start of development. There are just a handful of small tasks to do before the “beta test” phase ends.

With Lemmy to PieFed federation pretty solid, we are entering a phase of diversifying to other platforms. The first other platform, PeerTube, involved a lot of work that hopefully paved the way for future platforms to be integrated more easily. Pixelfed is going live with Groups support very soon. Exploratory work has been done on integration with Discourse although disappointingly they have implemented federation as an optional plugin so fewer Discourse forums actually federate than I initially hoped. NodeBB looks interesting.

In general the Fediverse has reached a steady state in terms of user numbers which gives us space to slow down and reassess. There is not as much of a sense of urgency or bursting-at-the-seams that there was a few months ago. This might be a good time to start to pay down some of the technical debt we have built up. It’s not that the code is bad, it's just that it’s structured in a way that made things easy in the early days but is no longer serving us as well as it did.

Very soon it will be good to have a discussion to create a roadmap for what comes after the beta ("1.0"). I’m thinking - more platforms (Mastodon, Friendica, etc), community wikis, API for mobile apps, better accessibility and can’t wait to hear other ideas from the community.

Thanks to amazing work by @andrew_s@piefed.social, PieFed can now federate with PeerTube - channels from a PeerTube instance show up as communities in PieFed and each video is a post which can be voted on and commented on.

To get things started I've done a bit of crowdsourcing and added all the interesting, active and cool PeerTube channels I could find! Check these out:

Linux

https://piefed.social/c/thelinuxcast_channel@tilvids.com
https://piefed.social/c/linuxuserspace_channel@tilvids.com
https://piefed.social/c/veronicaexplains@tinkerbetter.tube
https://piefed.social/c/thelinuxexperiment_channel@tilvids.com
https://piefed.social/c/linuxappsummit@tube.kockatoo.org
https://piefed.social/c/hacker_culture@kolektiva.media

Other

https://piefed.social/c/blitzcitydiy_channel@makertube.net - electronics and music

https://piefed.social/c/simon.caine_channel@tilvids.com - general technology

https://piefed.social/c/thunderbird_channel@tilvids.com - thunderbird email client

https://piefed.social/c/ewen@makertube.net - photography

https://piefed.social/c/icesheets_climate@tilvids.com - climate

https://piefed.social/c/shifter_cycling@video.canadiancivil.com - cycling

https://piefed.social/c/transit@video.canadiancivil.com - transit

https://piefed.social/c/urbanism@video.canadiancivil.com - urbanism

https://piefed.social/c/coreyartusimagery@makertube.net - art

https://piefed.social/c/dot_social@flipboard.video - fediverse podcast

https://piefed.social/c/thegiddystitcher@makertube.net - crafting

https://piefed.social/c/linuxappsummit@tube.kockatoo.org

https://piefed.social/c/submedia_channel@kolektiva.media - anarchy

https://piefed.social/c/solarpunk@kolektiva.media - documentaries

https://piefed.social/c/boilingsteam@peertube.linuxrocks.online - gaming

https://piefed.social/c/justsomeguy@comics.peertube.biz - comics and movies

https://piefed.social/c/comicuno@comics.peertube.biz - comics

https://piefed.social/c/blender_channel@video.blender.org - blender

https://piefed.social/c/4742f338-1ded-4798-bd85-93e8de367476@peertube.touhoppai.moe - krita tutorials

In the early days, trance rarely had vocals or if it did they were just another instrument among many. The idea of trance was to help the dancer get into a certain mental state which is beyond words and having too many vocals tends to pull things down into the concrete and breaks the spell. As everything became more commercialized and mainstream, this was forgotten.

Another nice track by Armin from this time is Walhalla - https://youtu.be/hFfdWRvAkpU?si=Mqwil-3GDZaxK_Po&t=313

Any topic!

"We are constantly making decisions with our limited time and cognitive resources and memory storage.

"We're not robots, and the fact that you can seemingly Google your way to anything does not make us smarter."

She was plagued by the idea that while we're living in the information age, life seems to be making less sense.

"It certainly doesn't seem to be feeling any better, even though the quality of life is overall actually improving.

"Our innate irrationalities, that have always existed, are being dialled up to 11 because of the culture that we've created."

Cognitive bias is a mental magic trick that we developed in order for us to make sense of the world sufficiently to survive it, she says.

"The natural world was always too much for us to process, if we had to catalogue the precise colour and shape of every twig in order to understand it, that would take more than a lifetime.

"So, we came up with these cognitive biases, dozens upon dozens of them. And they help us make decisions without our even noticing."

Every human has cognitive biases, but when they collide with digital information overload, bad things can happen

Holy shit!

Original music video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drPZiXn9G3k

The original, longer, mix is more of a journey - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqPAOsIEDcI

Original music video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TA2JRUEmAA

This 2014 remix has a more 'big room', dreamy take on it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHl_uZuSLGc