I've finally gone over. Every time these days somebody technical suggests "we could add cool feature X or do something with Y protocol", my first gut reaction, without even thinking about it, is "will this provide the value to the user that the user is wanting and expecting?"
And every single time, the technical proposal needs to be at least packaged very differently than proposed to actually make a difference to the user.
I've become annoying to the geeks I notice. Hopefully less so to users.
How long should social media posts be retained? That's an interesting question.
Facebook, for example, retains everything forever, not just posts, but also searches and private messages. Some newer social media protocols are based on an append-only log (which means old posts can never be deleted).
But much we say on-line -- not all -- is really similar to a conversation with friends over a beer, and we'd be appalled if we'd record each other then and keep for years.
A communication is distributed property. (It's my data and your data at the same time.)
My data, my rules. (Your data, your rules.)
Retention is non-binary. (There are degrees of accessibility and modes of retention.)
I like real-world analogies.
When I send you a paper letter, I choose whether to keep a copy, and you choose whether to keep the copy you receive. Together we agree how confidential it is, whether we should share it or publish it or destroy it. In light of that agreement I decide where to keep my copy, perhaps in my office, or pinned to my front door where any passer-by can read it, or in a vault that will only be unlocked once I die. If we publish it, we accept there's a public copy out of our direct control but still subject to laws and our stated wishes.
Any electronic system should give me and you those options, no matter how it's structured internally, if it claims to be serving us well.
Public townsquare? Permanent record? Full transparency? Bluesky?
Somebody put all of #Bluesky's posts so far in one single database.
Note AFAIK everything that happens on Bluesky is public, and can never be deleted. So this is not a bug, this is a feature, according to their architecture.
@J12t It shouldn't be... I think if your work hard enough on your new code you should be able to get to a point extending it is more pleasant than going through the pain of designing your app from scratch again.
I also don't know of a single company that would pay me to spend that amount of time on my new code. 😕
Only happens when running Mastodon inside a Linux container with recent kernels, which is great for development, but obscure enough I'd be surprised somebody fixed that.
Lots of noisy supersonic planes in the air in the bay area. That is very unusual. What is going on?
If you wanted to train your pilots, wouldn't you find some regions with few people on them, and California has plenty of those. So I wonder...
Travis AFB is in the San Francisco bay area. It could just be standard flight traffic. We get them flying over here in Granbury to and from the Naval Air Station in Ft. Worth and the occasional Chinook fly over.
Occasionally they have craft flying enroute to a deployment, or it's the Air Force Reserve weekend.
@kissane Great post! IMHO we need to do holistic design across the entire #fediverse, not just #mastodon. The larger value proposition is in the overall network, built from many parts, not just one app. Want to help? There's a budding Fediverse Developers Network :-)
Don't you like it when they deprecate your build tools? I'm looking at you, setup.py.
And want you to do something "much better" (hatch) that promptly silently doesn't package one of your files? (test.py -- it's named that way because it's a subcommand and why should I name it something less comprehensible?)
And for which no documentation can be found that addresses your problem? So you get the source, and randomly poke about? Well this random power was successful but can we maybe do better?
In other news, in a long pitched battle between the Postgres permission system and the uneducated horde a the gate, the now not as uneducated horde -- me -- can report to have won the contested territory. I wonder though whether I can hold it, given how things have been going.
I'm still a bit shocked by the -- to me, very unexpected -- insight in the leaked Google #AI memo that the world is now wide open for garage-level ("an evening and a beefy laptop") competitive AI, not just big budget AI, and that #opensource might become common for trained models. That upsets a bunch of assumptions I made about the world -- to be sure, in a good way!
What will we see if garage entrepreneurs can outcompete #Google and #OpenAI, as the memo suggests?
@J12t It is good and bad I think. As with most things.
Now a small group of people bent on destabilizing society can compete with government and corporate sized capabilities in generating disinformation.
On the other hand, we may be able to push AI out to the network edge. In the 1950s we were promised intelligent robots that would live in our homes with us. For a while it looked like they were really going to be living in big data centers and spying on us. That outcome may be averted.
This leaked Google AI document is really interesting. It was clearly written by a very senior person who understands both tech and marketplace dynamics very well. It is coming to the -- to me, entirely unexpected -- conclusion that the only winning strategy for Google is to open-source Google's #AI crown jewels.
Will Google does that? I doubt it, it's now a conservative org and they don't move just because somebody is right. But so intriguing ...
The W3C Social Web Community Interest Group -- the home of #ActivityPub -- has a new chair, Dmitri Zagidulin aka @dmitri! This is excellent news for the future of ActivityPub and the broader #fediverse.
Dmitri has long, broad, relevant experience both technically and organizationally in the W3C and outside, and I'm very happy he stepped up to take on this rather challenging task.
At speed. He's already organizing the first meeting! Let's all help him get the group to accomplish much!
@jwildeboer@J12t I like to think of it as - I'm temporarily helping out, while we organize some calls , get momentum going, and hopefully have a chair election process.