Macs are outrageously priced for the hardware you get.

Yea sure, we all know this. But we’re talking about software here. Not to be too snarky, but the part you actually use. The differences might not be worth it to you, or maybe you need a gaming PC, but for some, it’s just fine.

I guess unless you use a Mac or something I don’t know.

Yea … you can just use a Mac.

I switched … back in 2006 after being fed up with MS BS. Haven’t looked back. Since then I’ve had 2 laptops. That’s it.

The current one is getting old now, sadly, but part of the trick with Apple is timing your purchases for when they kinda nail the product in the particular design cycle. Don’t buy when they do something new for the first time, aim for near the end of a design cycle generally. And don’t get base specs, add RAM and disk space (perhaps through extended 3rd party devices). And their machines can be very useful for quite a while.

Of course there’s Linux, but you’ll know if you’re ready for that.

This development worries me far more than anything I’ve read about LLM advancements in quite some time.

Yea. Nice pickup.

Only thing I’ve seen that works for combatting AI slop take over is the idea that the value of doing some things is the doing itself, not the product. It seems to cut through the consumerism and metric driven capitalism that has gotten us here, while retaining an anti-bullshit-jobs position.

yep! I didn’t pick up on any explicit link … but the coupling AI and recall is not coincidence. It’s serfdom.

Big issue IMO. Never touched it for that reason.

A personal knowledge system has to be designed to last the rest of your life.

I’m scared of cults and not ever being truly enlightened is a risk I’m willing to take. Maybe one day.

Seriously though, in terms of longevity, where I want the dependencies of my system to last for the rest of my life and to be easily installed on as many machines throughout the rest of my life, SQLite (and pure Python for the wrapper, using only the std lib) seem like good bets. Better bets than emacs and org-mode, perhaps not, but certainly without the baggage of being bound to a text editor.

EDIT: just clicked the link, lol.

your own hacked together wrapper around sqlite as a plugin for your text editor of choice

Yea it’s pretty popular and generally I like that, especially compared to the whole discord thing (though real time chat is also a valuable platform).

Ideally, I’m with you and IMO this would be something where the fediverse could shine.

It feels to me like many pieces are already in place for some people to come together and create a fediverse space for filling that SO function. Lemmy, NodeBB and discourse (when they get federation stable, however close/far that is) are all there.

What’s likely needed is for the right pieces and modifications to be put together, the right instance, some basic branding and commitments, donations, sponsorships (and even ads would be appropriate here IMO if done tastefully).

But, in reality the devs on the fediverse are spread pretty thin and many developers generally are in a bit of a squeeze at the moment. Financial support hasn’t reached a healthy equilibrium on the fediverse, culturally and probably quantitatively, in that further growth, creativity and adaptation at any decent rate doesn’t really seem viable.

Back in the heyday of the twitter migration to mastodon or reddit migration to lemmy, there likely would have been some dev ready to go out on a limb and try to scramble something together (however healthy that is). That energy has passed and there doesn’t seem to be a more stable substitute set of incentives for new devs to build new things here (though there are of course devs building on the fediverse, lemmy and newer projects like SL, piefed and bonfire included). Instead it seems like the dev community on the fediverse has settled and they all have their work set.

So the best bet would probably be for some eager volunteers to take the best platform for the job (possibly NodeBB ATM) and put up an instance and see what happens. I think there’s been enough interest, including this post, to make it interesting.

And what’s especially interesting is that the SO archive, AFAICT, is open and available for download, so there’s a real possibility of having a live archive of SO for search coupled with new content, right here on the fediverse.

Oh for sure. All of this is clearly a situation where the law is slow to catch up.

There are obvious responses here along the lines of embracing piracy and (re-)embracing hard copy ownership.

All that aside though, this feels like a fairly obvious point for legal intervention. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are already existing grounds for legal action, it’s just that the stakes are likely small enough and costs of legal action high enough to be prohibitive. Which is where the government should come in on the advice of a consumer body.

Some reasonable things that could be done:

• Money back requirements
• Clear warnings to consumers about “ownership” being temporary
• Requiring tracking statistics of how long “ownership” tends to be and that such is presented to consumers before they purchase
• If there are structural issues that increase the chances of “withdrawn” ownership (such as complex distribution deals etc), a requirement to notify the consumer of this prior to purchase.

These are basic things based on transparency that tend to already exist in consumer regulation (depending on your jurisdiction of course). Streaming companies will likely whinge (and probably have already to prevent any regulation around this), but that’s the point … to force them to clean up their act.

As far as the relations between streaming services and the studios (or whoever owns the distribution rights), it makes perfect sense for all contracts to have embedded in them that any digital purchase must be respected for the life of the purchaser even if the item cannot be purchased any more. It’s not hard, it’s just the price of doing business.

All of this is likely the result of the studios being the dicks they truly are and still being used to pushing everyone around (and of course the tech world being narcissistic liars).

Yea. Along with web rings, human-focused search and just harbouring communities better … we gotta start building people-focused online gardens and ditch this capitalistic hustle shit.

I mean there’s something to the idea of a screen-less device that doesn’t distract you all of the time.

But then this has a projector and a camera and flashing lights and is basically an interface to the cloud and AI which has its own engagement dynamics, so the whole “be present” thing is likely silicon valley bullshit, as you say.

The bit I can’t get over is that they’ve clearly got funding, hype and connections but are selling a wrapper around another company’s new/untested/probably-just-shit AI service that only came out relatively recently compared to when humane started. So what’s this company actually about? Channeling Apple hype?

Too fucking good!

Am I bad for wanting this car?

I claim no expertise here … so take this with plenty of salt. I also don’t know how much of this is specific to the protocol itself or is just the way bluesky have decided to build things.

I see two interesting and nice things here:

• Users and their follows or social graph are portable across the protocol
• The architecture (again, not sure how much of this is a protocol thing) has different levels of centrality or decentralisation for different parts of the system. So you don’t have to pick an instance just to create an account but can instead pick moderation policies and feeds when you want to. The issue is that underlying everything is a big giant server that’s collecting data and spitting it all out as a firehose. There’s only one right now (BlueSky’s) but the code is open and they say that others can start one too (however onerous that would be). The upside is that all the things downstream from the giant server can rely on it and instead make apps, feeds, execute moderation etc … which could be a nicer experience for both devs and users.

In the end, my impression of it is that they’re building more of a framework and ecosystem for others to build social media within. ActivityPub by comparison is much more of a playground of ideas and tools that people can make and host whatever they want with it. So more truly decentralised but also, IMO, puts more weight on the developers and the users to make the ecosystem happen and work well. For instance, we could have more portable user accounts on the fediverse, but we don’t (yet), because that’d have to be built and then implemented by all the platforms.

Once I see another Big Giant Central server running in some sort of sustainable or functioning way, then I personally think it’ll have a lot of promise. Before then, however, a number of developers might get interested in developing in that ecosystem because of how it might allow them to make the thing they’re interested in and not worry about other things.

As for how ATProto and ActivityPub can and should relate to each other in the future … they’re the only two decently sized projects really having a good shot at this decentralised thing (though there a few web3.0 things out there AFAIU, eg farcaster) … and I think they’re better off being “friends” rather than “enemies” for that reason.

If my impression of their differences is accurate, they’ll have different strengths going forward. IMO, ActivityPub will be more of smaller community thing. If all of the neuroscientists want to create a network of forums and blogs, that they’re in control of, around the world that all talk to each other but without being connected to all of the other social media, then the fediverse and its platforms will be the ecosystem to use. If neuroscientists want to talk to the rest of the world but still have ownship and control over their data and maybe their platform or feed or moderation, then AT-Proto will be the place to go. Bridges between the two would complement the flexibility here.

Yea I have. It’s more twitter-like in its vibe. But people seem happy there.

I’m not really a twitter person … so it’s not really my jam. But the AT Proto as an idea interests me and I’m interested to see what happens on it. Big question for is still whether a second (or third etc) relay will every be run.

Oh for sure, and this was known at the time IIRC, when some polling it something revealed that “Bernie bros will vote for trump”. And, IIRC, the mainstream media response was that it made little sense.

Yea. And in a way, Trumps greatest political achievement may be that he proved or materialised the “elitism” facade around US Democracy and Government. While previously, to many, especially urban and higher/“educated” class types, it might have just been a Fox News culture war wedge, with Trump and how “no one” saw him coming or understood his appeal, the whole elitist facade and the safe bubble many had taken for granted was revealed.

Thanks for the personal perspective!

On the new and old problems front, in-line with the article … I wonder how many don’t see it that way. Getting the Supreme Court to take down abortion for instance seems like a big one for some conservatives , like maybe “best president in our life time” big. Not just because of the decision itself, but also knowing that the Court is now on “their side”.

The bar for Democrats to keep states like Iowa blue was so incredibly low, requiring only action.

What would Democrats have had to do? Is there any chance that any sort of Evangelical appeal from a Democratic candidate wouldn’t be appealing to the rest of the democratic voters?

A key line for me …

“Would you rather have someone whose tongue is maybe a little wild, but has incredibly good policies that make your life better?” he asked the congregation. “Or someone who has a silver tongue and says all the right things and has terrible policies which ruin your life and those of your children and grandchildren?”

Partly out of confirmation bias as I’ve been saying this since before his victory in 2016 and highlighting it as the thing lefty/intellectual/“elites” don’t get about his appeal. Trump hits the “right” buttons while his wildness, lack of “refinement” and apparent sense-making are all features. So many want “change” … Trump is “change”, right from his personal nature and demeanour.

Another …

And he said that the decline in church attendance over time had meant that many of those who considered themselves religious were less influenced by spiritual leaders and more by right-wing media and politicians - Mr Trump foremost among them.

Oh … JFC!! I suppose this is a good predictor of how the west collapses. Deepening class separation across all spheres of civil life allowing chaotic manipulation by demagogues. Can’t help but think of the fall of the Roman Republic and Dune here. Also can’t help but think that the whole Hitchens/Dawkins anti-religion thing, which feels like it got a bit old for the mainstream, really has an essentially important fundamental point … as a whole type of institution and cultural phenomenon, it may simply not be worth it on the whole.

Well said.

I’ve said it a number of times else where … but it’s easy to forget that the era of mega corp online platforms was a weird time of rampant extraction and manipulation. We’ve got quite a bit of stuff to unlearn and relearn (like your examples).

And of course now with the big corps turning on us to extract more money and use the data they’ve milked from us build AIs to take our jobs away … we have the final proof of what we should have known the whole time … that social media should have kept its roots in organic human organisation.

Realistically, we’ve seen the dying of the open web.

It may not be dead for good but it’s very diseased.

With LLMs/AIs now polluting all sorts of things with rubbish (the fake bug report for cURL is my “favourite” story so far) that is hard to distinguish from genuine human content …

… I’m now thinking it’s dead. Like, we are going to start thinking about using processes of getting and sharing information that don’t just go over the internet.

Closed online environments with gated membership. In person processes where humanity is physically verified. Live conversation to verify actual human understanding. Static sources of information like books and manuals etc.

Not for everything, obviously. But for some things it seems the open internet may soon have a new cost that undermines its value proposition.

I’m personally not interested anymore in just using the open internet. I’m sniffing for some verification that something is worth reading or interacting with.

Well he’s not alone … a number of relatively vocal “fedi-advocates” are positive about it too, even those who also acknowledge that meta/facebook are fucked and defederating from them would make sense.

Which reveals, I think, a curious phenomenon about tech culture and where “we” are up to.

From what I can tell, mainstream Silicon Valley tech culture has permeated out fairly effectively over the decades such that there are now groups of people walking around who consider themselves “the good guys” and have generally progressive political views and believe in OSS and the importance of community etc but are also fundamentally interested in building some tech, making it grow in usage and effecting some ideology or agenda through creating “significant” technology. Some of them seem to have money, or tech know-how or a network into such things and some experience working in the tech world. They’re all mostly, to be fair, probably middle aged white cishet men.

When face-to-face with the prospect of having “your thing” accepted by and (technically) grown to the size of Meta/Facebook/IG, these people seem to not be able to even think about resisting. “Growing the protocol” and “growing” mastodon is what they see here and all the rest is noisy nuance.

This may not be the full corporate buy out worth millions, because they’re “the good guys” and don’t work for big-corps, but this is the equivalent in their “ethical-tech” world … the happy embrace of a big-corp on OSS terms.

Which in many ways makes sense, except in the case of social media so much is about culture and values and trust that sheer “growth” might completely miss the point especially if it’s by riding on the back of a giant that would happily eat or crush you at a whim and has done so many times in the past.

And this is where I’m up to on this issue … both sides seem not to be talking about it much.

What is the “emotional”, “social fabric”, “vibes and feelings” factor in all this … that a place, protocol and ecosystem, predicated on remaking the social web with freedom, independence, humanity and fairness at its core, openly embraces the inundation and invasion of the giant for-profit evil big-corp social media entity this place was defined against? How are we all supposed to feel when that just happens … when Zuck and all the people on his platform is literally just here, not with some consternation but the BDFL’s loud gesture of welcoming embrace? I’m betting most will feel off … like something is wrong. The vibe will shift and fall away a bit … passion and senses of ownership will decay and we may even ask ourselves … “what was the point of coming here in the first place?”.

Now, to be real, it’s not like a big-corp connecting over AP can be prevented, it’s an open protocol after all. But the whole thing would be different if there were open discussions and acknowledgement from the top about the cultural feeling of the disproportionate sizes and power here and the possibilities that it won’t be completely allowed without a more decentralised model. Maybe Threads would have to create their own open source platform which people could run instances of themselves? Or maybe Mastodon could wait until the user sizes are more equal (though that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, which is kinda the point here in many ways right? … that Mastodon is kinda giving up and saying it’d rather be a parasite on a big-corp in order to be significant than just own its niche status?)

Eitherway, it seems clear that many of the power brokers over on mastodon are there to create their own form of influence and this sort of deal with the devil is exactly the poison they’re willing to drink for their ends.

For my purposes … I don’t think I’ll want to hang around mastodon much after Threads federation happens … the embrace from the BDFL and a number of users is just off putting and the platform is too crappy to care about it … I’d rather just go back to twitter than suffer through that swampy egotistical place.

All good!

I rather like this idea.

Basically take all of the “let’s all write parsers now” work of handling the plain text output of *nix coreutils and bundle all of that work into a single tool. JSON is then the structured output data format, which should then replace all of the parsing work with querying work, which should be nicer and easier.

Backwards compatible, kinda unix-y, optional and should play nice with existing tooling. I hope it works out!

Totally fair!

From the OP’s comments it seemed that they felt like there was pressure in their environment, in which case the relative aggressiveness makes a bit of sense. Otherwise maybe they were just trying to be edgy or misread their environment with some misplaced priorities.

Either way, I was personally happy to read it as a personal rant and take away whatever made sense to me. A more polite and logical rant would have been nice and better though, for sure, except that that’s also harder to write and can prevent people from just sharing their thoughts in a “raw format”.

someone else’s hobbies are “pointless” and “fucking stupid”.

I don’t think that was said. The whole thing was a subjective description of their reasoning. Couched objective reasoning in an attempt to justify themselves, clearly, but also from a clearly subjective and emotional perspective.

I’m exhausted. I’ve been guilted/peer pressured into participating in the AoC for at least 5 years. I’m tired, I’m defeated, I’m unable to meet its weird expectations

I feel a working fallacy in conversations like this (maybe amongst tech people in particular) is a presumption of absolute objectivity. Their opinion makes sense to them and others who understand (the voting is fairly split) but is also equally inapplicable to others.

Instead of fighting over what’s “true”, the more interesting discussion IMO is mapping out where boundaries and spaces are and what the different perspectives are. In this case, the chief boundary seems to me to be between “youthful hunger” and “more mature/experienced broader outlook on what the ‘craft’ is”.

Sorry. No. They’re here because they want to be. If you can’t fathom exactly why, that’s your problem. Asking why anyone is “here” in a social media space often implies that they shouldn’t be here. This is clearly the case with your statement given the context of the original post being about quitting tech things.

If you find it inconsistent that they don’t want to do AoC but do want to hang out here, ask specifically about what you find inconsistent. It will avoid gatekeeping insinuations, but more importantly, actually force you to articulate your point which may often be too vague or incomprehensible to glean from implication.

For instance, in this case, the difference between social media and competitive coding/puzzles are pretty clearly significant (ie it’s the difference between a hard piece of work that feels pointless and casually talking shop that may also be conducive to actually pleasurable hobby projects). I personally find it hard to believe that you couldn’t imagine AoC and hanging here are different activities in terms of the original post’s statements. If true, bluntly asking “why are you here” is a poor bullying gatekeeping argument. If false, please refrain from asking people why they’re here. It’s gatekeeping or too easily construed as such and be more precise with your questions about such broad topics as what one enjoys in tech culture.

Yea sorry that’s some potentially toxic gatekeeping.

Yea I mean, it’s almost like humans actually enjoy and learn from the process of communicating and expressing their thoughts and feelings.

Sometimes communicating feelings and sentiments with others can be rather meaningful for some. Reading someone else’s articulation of thoughts and feelings that you share or resonate with but haven’t formed a clear picture of can be rather useful.

Well, if you don’t like their reasoning or rejection of AoC … you can ignore it too. I think you’re taking this a bit too seriously, it was never intended as a grand thesis on dev culture. It is a statement of a relatively specific sentiment that some agree or resonate with and some don’t. You’re looking for logic when there’s just opinion.

Well they state elsewhere in the post, rightly or wrongly, that they don’t think these are fun puzzles but instead promote a problematic junior dev ego thing. Beyond that the main thrust of their reasoning seems to be the whole developer “culture” of “needing” to do work outside of work. If you come to oppose this and don’t find the problems/solutions edifying, then “fun puzzle” is no longer an apt description and I think it makes a lot of sense to see the whole thing as relatively “dark” compared to what a nice or fulfilling “third place” can be.

While grandstanding might be a bit odd, it seems to me the broader point is about tech culture in general and what else it could be.

The point about the dark third place resonated with me for instance, where fruitful and fulfilling third places can be quite hard to build and find IMO.

savior complex

I don’t see that at all.

It’s about making a language that the maximum amount of cultures can see themselves in, can have at least some familiarity with, and feel like they’ve been acknowledged in the making of a global language … all of which is intended to get maximum buy in around the world to establish a truely international language rather than a Lingua Franca derived from hegemony.

Maybe China was interested in Esperanto for a bit, but I’m betting like most stories like that it’s heavily exaggerated or outright bogus.

Sorry to say, but once I realised how euro-centric, and to my ear/eye, latin-centric esparanto is I completely lost interest.

I don’t know if anyone has tried, but something which similarly draws influences from the languages that the vast majority of the world speak would be wonderful.

Otherwise, realistically, I’m prob the worst of all worlds … the procrastinator waiting/hoping to be the pair programmer that has hopefully remembered to just be the thief.

I’m not really on discord (occasionally have gone on there) … but generally the whole fedi, IMO should probably be taking notes from them because they’ve obviously done a few things right which also seem to be exactly the things the fedi definitely doesn’t understand.

On the small subscription fee for the fedi, I think it would work best for specific instances. Here, decentralisation is a strength (again), as the small instance/community approach is well suited as the alternative to the large-with-a-small-subscription model and should provide a diversity of options for different kinds of people.

As for Twitter, right now a bunch of takes are floating around about how dumb the fee is (at least on masto, which has a huge bias against twitter) … while some will definitely leave I do wonder whether it actually makes sense for a lot people. How many principally lurk and would prefer their feed were “better” and are willing to be on a platform that requires the subscription for this? I wouldn’t be surprised if down the line we here takes from people who don’t pay but stay on Twitter because they like the feed better.

Honestly don’t think it’s an insane idea. Not sure how effective $1 would be against bots, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea makes sense: basic and low friction to deter a large amount of spam. Maybe it’s $5 a year or whatever.

Of course there’s an equity issue for those who can’t afford this, especially if it goes mainstream and every online thing requires similar and we get Netflix -> Cable all over again.

But here on the Fedi I can see the idea working if applied to some instances that have set up the governance (eg co-op) and services (committed moderators) for it to make sense.

I think it would be cool if being an admin and moderator could genuinely be a side hustle or more without sucking away at someone’s passion.

Thanks! Seems interesting, especially to see what federation looks like with their more centralised model.

Personally I hope it goes well. 1. Because I think the Fedi could do with competition. 2. The idea of having relatively centralised services complementing the distributed network makes a lot of sense I suspect, with similar realisations percolating around the Fedi over time, and it might be fruitful to see it succeed instead of the usual Fedi snobbiness around not being a “real” federstion.