A well-written post. Some highlights focused on the network angle of things:

The old neighbourhood was not a collection of individuals who happened to live near each other; it was a living organism with its own immune system and its own way of metabolising change. When Moses bulldozed it, he killed a community and scattered the remains.

Jacobs understood that the value of a community isn't in the people as discrete units. The value is in the specific, unreproducible web of relationships between them. You can move every single resident of a street to the same new street in the same new suburb and you will not get the same community, because community is a function of time and ten thousand microtransactions of reciprocity that nobody tracks and nobody can mandate.

What Dunbar's model implies about community is underappreciated. If a community is a network of overlapping Dunbar layers, then each member's experience of the community is unique, shaped by where they sit in the web. There is no "the community" in any objective sense. There are as many communities as there are members, each one a different cross-section of the same social graph, and this means that when you lose members, you lose entire subjective communites that existed literally nowhere else.

I subscribe to Nebula basically exclusively for Jet Lag. I'd quite like a space for memes, clips, or discussions that are not tied to specific recent episodes.

Rule #1 is well observed, and I want to respect that, especially if there is general support for it. So, the safest option appears to be to create a new community for this, linking here for the episode discussions.

However, I also want to avoid splitting communities unnecessarily. I tend to agree with the fedigrow philosophy of posting to more general communities when possible.

What do you think?

I'm a people pleaser. I have anxiety and depression thanks to some trauma. I've been in therapy for a little over a year.

Objectively, I'm doing ok at work. I have always met expectations. However, it takes a lot out of me. I always try to meet people's expectations because disappointing people feels unbearable. Because of the ability to break things, I often shirk responsibility and make myself unreliable in subtle ways

My experience in work has a big impact on my wellbeing outside. Due to forcing my way through the anxiety, I feel very tired and often have to rest (lying down in the dark, not interacting with anyone) for several hours on evenings and weekends.

At the moment, I am lying in bed most of the day and having 2-3 panic attacks per day (by panic attack, I mean that my heart starts beating really strongly and quickly, and my breathing feels like it's running away from me).

I think my difficulties are almost certainly related to the trauma. I have a lot of trepidation around, and fawn a lot with the colleagues that set me tasks, even though I can see objectively that I am not in any danger.

I have been trying to set more boundaries, be more upfront and stop this fawning. I am making some (slow) progress, but I still have a real lack of energy outside of work, and spend a lot of time anxious about the next working day. It's impacting my life a great deal.

Does anyone have any similar experiences, or ideas of how to stop these situations from having such a big effect on the rest of my life?

Invidious

Summary:

• Hislop thinks it is likely that Mandelson will be arrested. (00:45)
• Keir Starmer, his advisers, businessmen are pretending that they had no idea that Epstein was a paedophile, but it was common knowledge - the case was in 2008, and Private Eye ran covers about is in 2011. (01:09)
• The most recent issue of Private Eye has a cover of Mandelson in his underpants, saying "I've let myself down, my party down, and my trousers down". (02:42)
• Hislop says that Keir Starmer showed an incredible lack of judgement in bringing Mandelson back: "there was no justification, knowing what he knew, for appointing him as ambassador" (03:22)
• The amounts Mandelson were offered by Epstein were not huge, but people like Mandelson fall in love with the money. "There comes a point where they believe they are entitled to all of this money, and then, full on, they believe they are entitled to help out their friends". (05:02)
• He says Mandelson has selective amnesia: "he can't remember any of the bits, where he might have behaved very very badly". (05:45)
• "If you're sending documents about which particular assets might be on sale, to a man who boasts about being a financier, it might be something much more serious." (05:59)
• Hislop doesn't think that Mandelson has learned anything. His statements didn't show sympathy for the victims, until he was called out for doing so. He now says he doesn't remember, which Hislop calls out as being says is just a front. (06:41)
• Marr puts it to Hislop that there has been far more response to the scandal in the UK than in the US, with Andrew Windsor losing his titles, and now this. Trump's connection with Epstein seemed closer than Mandelson's, but Trump is undamaged while Mandelson is facing consequences. (07:56) Hislop says:
  • "At least there is still some shame, this side of the pond, and that we are have taken this seriously". (08:29)
  • "Because there is nothing particularly conclusive about Trump, which is what everyone wanted, the story there is not as big as it is here." (08:35)
  • In the UK, people like Richard Branson (who offered to restore Epstein's reputation) are facing reputational consequences, while in the US, the responses is very muted. (08:49)
• Hislop thinks that the Conservatives will be delighted at the chance to call Labour corrupt at PMQs, especially after the PPE scandal. (09:33)

Inspired by this post about W and this post about a crazy person wanting to "make a reddit alternative".

Edit 2026-01-25: and this post about a Palestinian social network.

Hello! I'm looking for a reusable water bottle with certain characteristics, and am hoping for some recommendations:

• Made of stainless steel, or another long-lasting, non-degrading material that doesn't change colour or absorb the flavour of the drinks inside
• You would trust it not to leak in your bag
• Supports both hot and cold drinks
• Has a straw
• Individually replaceable difficult-to-clean parts (e.g. straw, mouthpiece)
  • Bonus points if these parts are sold separately
  • Extra bonus points if there are interoperable multiple vendors for these parts! (not sure if that's realistic, but I'll include this anyway :))
• Easy to clean, either by hand or in the dishwasher
• Sold in the UK
• And of course, that lasts a long time!

I'd ideally like one with all of these characteristics, but feel free to comment bottles that don't match perfectly, in case that's useful to others.

Edit: thank you so much everyone for the suggestions! I ended up buying a Klean Kanteen Classic Water Bottle. It arrived yesterday and so far so good! Will edit again if anything goes wrong with it in the next 10 years :D

I like searching for POIs via a query language on Overpass. My queries tend to be quite simple - "get all amenities of x type, in y area that have z tag". The rendered map showing matching POIs is a nice-to-have, but not completely necessary.

What is the best way to do this offline, on Linux? (ideally using software already packaged for Debian, but that's not vital).

I'm imagining a REPL that I can pass a downloaded map to, and then can query and see the results (in an ideal world, rendering them too).

It seems database schemas are close to what I want, but they seem to be designed more for people doing large scale complex queries and building bespoke databases just with the information they want.

Are these tools a good fit for my use case, or is there is a better/simpler way?

The artwork features a print by Richard Diebenkorn, There is more information on the Wikipedia page for the album.