@alcinnz@floss.social
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

alcinnz

@alcinnz@floss.social

A browser developer posting mostly about how free software projects work, and occasionally about climate change.

Though I do enjoy german board games given an opponent.

Pronouns: he/him

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ajroach42, to random
@ajroach42@retro.social avatar

The problem with federated alternatives to centralized services (and also one of the main problems with centralized services which lead people to look for an alternative) is Discovery.

Etsy and Twitch and YouTube provide an audience, supposedly. With the right pitch (and the right advertising dollars) you can get your own slice of that audience. (For as long as the algorithm graces you, and as long as you're willing to stomach the other things your viewers will be algorithmically suggested.)

poiseunderchaos,
@poiseunderchaos@sonomu.club avatar

@ajroach42 There's also something that looks like "Independent creators who try to co-exist on both are...even more stressed, as it turns out."

ajroach42,
@ajroach42@retro.social avatar

The reason people flock to centralized services is to have an easier time finding the the thing that they want.

They often don't even have the chance to bounce off of indie services, but rather never find them to begin with. When they do find them, the discovery problem creates a high bounce rate.

This is why things like peertube struggle. Creators think their audience isn't there. Audiences can't find creators. No one makes any money.

On the flip side, youtube and facebook are built to maximize engagement, which means maximizing outrage in most cases, which turns them in to machines for turning people in to reactionaries.

ajroach42,
@ajroach42@retro.social avatar

I don't think there is an answer to this question. I think scale is a trap.

I think that the fediverse, a bunch of small neighborhoods through which things bubble around and eventually reach escape velocity, is the closest to a real solution we're likely to find in the real world.

(Hell, I wrote about hyperlocal BBS systems as a potential solution for content discovery 8ish years ago, and then ended up on the fediverse and updated the article to indicate that it was working.)

ajroach42,
@ajroach42@retro.social avatar

I've been working on an article about this for #ImpracticalComputing ( https://impractical.computer ) and ... I can't figure out how to end it.

I don't have a suggestion. I don't have a solution. Connecting people with the things they want to find is not a problem that scales.

The solution is human curation. Word of mouth.

But then how do the people doing the curation find the things? (At digg, it meant working 18 hour days.)

djsundog,
@djsundog@toot-lab.reclaim.technology avatar

@ajroach42

so, hot take, but I think the answer is "other human curators" and I think it can work even though it sounds like an ouroboros type impossible system.

the trick is that the curation focus of one curator needs to source from curators with slightly different yet often (for various definitions of often) overlapping foci, and at least some curators need to be sourcing from direct sources - the people making the thing that needs discovering.

djsundog,
@djsundog@toot-lab.reclaim.technology avatar

@ajroach42

and I think we have to duplicate work a lot to avoid over-amplification of a subset of voices creating a quieting effect on the majority of voices.

if I curate music recommendations, ideally our curation system should not allow my voice, or any voice, to dominate that space. some mechanism to turn off the attention tap once a curator hits some audience size kind of thing.

ajroach42,
@ajroach42@retro.social avatar

Here is the piece I wrote in 2016 about this problem https://ajroach42.com/how-to-fix-new-content-discovery/

I don't agree with everything I said there, but human scale networks have certainly helped the problem!

The issue at hand today is how to facilitate those connections, strengthen them, and make sure that everyone in the chain is being treated fairly.

ajroach42,
@ajroach42@retro.social avatar

@djsundog @whitneymcn dmoz was nice when it existed.

whitneymcn,
@whitneymcn@mastodon.xyz avatar

@djsundog @ajroach42 Pete Seeger once said "normally I’m against big things. I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things."

I think about that a lot these days.

simon, to random
@simon@simonwillison.net avatar

Several of the major social media platforms - Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter - have effectively declared war on linking to things and I absolutely hate it

"Link in my bio" / "Link in thread" / "Link in first comment"... or increasingly no link at all, just an unsourced screenshot of a page

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

One of the things that the Stack Overflow brouhaha demonstrates is that it doesn’t matter if a service was founded by people trusted by the community (Atwood and Spolsky) and was broadly community-led. If it’s a VC-funded startup, they will sell out their users at some point.

timonsku, (edited ) to random
@timonsku@mastodon.social avatar

Yo, if you live in Berlin and have a sunny balcony/garden/window. You can get a plug-in solar setup for basically free.
This city subsidy program gives you up to 500€ for a setup and most only cost you around 300-400€.
Its basically free electricity for your apartment/home.

https://www.berlin.de/sen/energie/beratung-foerderung/foerderprogramm-stromspeicher/

E: Actually a lot more citites and even some states offer similar programs: https://www.vattenfall.de/infowelt-energie/solar/balkonkraftwerk-foerderung

eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

For my birthday, I'd really like it if my beloved fedi could spread word far and wide of Kitsune Tails. It's a platformer with a heartwarming story featuring queer main characters and personal discoveries in classic SMB3 style. You can find trailer, screenshots, and wishlist links here: https://kitsunegames.com/kitsunetails

It's coming out this year and the team and I have been working hard on it for several years now. Most of the team is queer in some form so by boosting you'd not only be making me happy on my birthday, but supporting a bunch of queer creators making queer art as well

yuzu kitsune tails, a purple haired fox girl, picks up samurai armor in a tower that's rapidly filling with lava. she jumps away from the rising lava and sticks her spear in the wall, doing a dashing twirl to get on top of it. she walks off the spear and into a new scene, fighting a ghost fox with armor and spear. it stabs and she jumps over, but is caught by a follow up stab. the ghost fox over extends and its ghostly powers wane, giving yuzu a chance to bop on its head

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

As folks discuss the pundering of the open internet/sharing economy by the data-hungry LLM trainers, it seems like a good time to remind ourselves to find something other than "the tragedy of the commons" as a metaphor. On the racist, terrible origins of that phrase:

https://discardstudies.com/2019/07/15/the-tragedy-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/

matthiasott, to random
@matthiasott@mastodon.social avatar

By the way, do you have a personal website and does it have a home page? (I’m pretty sure it does… 😁)

I would love to know: what’s on your “home” and why?

Feel free to share a link, of course. 🤗 As always, I’m also asking on behalf of my newsletter subscribers.

stefan,
@stefan@stefanbohacek.online avatar

@matthiasott Mine (https://stefanbohacek.com) has quotes from other people about my work to, hopefully, give me some credibility.

Seirdy, to random
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar

An incomplete list of expensive fads in Silicon Valley:

  • Tablets will replace PCs en masse instead of complement them (the “Post-PC era”).
  • Blockchain (cryptographically-verified, decentralized pyramid schemes) will replace databases.
  • Prompt engineering would replace creative labor.

What came before the Post-PC era?

janriemer, to rust

Practical suggestions for building around borrow errors - by quinedot

https://quinedot.github.io/rust-learning/lifetime-intuition.html

If you're struggling with the borrow checker and lifetimes, this is an excellent resource!

In some past toot I've said that Rust lends itself very well to intuition-based learning...

https://floss.social/@janriemer/109415274612140073

...so this learning resource takes the same line (according to its title)! Nice!

inautilo, to business
@inautilo@mastodon.social avatar

“The simplicity of HTML and CSS now feels like a radical act. To build a website with just these tools is a small protest against platform capitalism: a way to assert sustainability, independence, longevity.” — Jarrett Fuller

#Business #OpenWeb #IndieWeb #SmallWeb #Website #Blog #WebDesign #Development #WebDev #Frontend #Quote

interfluidity, to random
@interfluidity@zirk.us avatar

For learning about products, Mastodon "word of mouth" seems very definitely superior to search and reviews in the usual (far from credible) places.

Asking about travel laptop backpacks, I learned about, got feedback on the following brands that did not appear prominently when Googling (or Kagi-ing or Amazon-ing) laptop backpacks generically:

Jandd
Nomatic
Osprey
Quechua
Rickshaw
Tom Bihn
Tatonka

Also Targus, which does show up more easily. Plus, I got a kind offer of an extra!

interfluidity,
@interfluidity@zirk.us avatar

@trochee it’s weird how instantly we’ve transitioned from Google organizing the whole world’s information to a kind of premodern only word-of-mouth can be trusted.

AnimatedShortOfTheDay, to Korea
@AnimatedShortOfTheDay@socel.net avatar

Dear Girl (2018) [5 min] by Choi Jieun and Cho Hyojeong |

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpmUKaqex4A

typeswitch, to random
@typeswitch@gamedev.lgbt avatar

Where can I apply for some grant funding for an elaborate PL-based shitpost. I need five years to develop the ultimate C/C++ replacement language. Its killer feature is no optimization, because real programmers don't trust the compiler to write highly optimized machine code.

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Over spent the past year I explored how I'd build a browser truly from scratch, hardware on up, over the next month or so I'll explore tooling to help us build this!

Can we self-host the development? Without pulling in other OSs, being self reliant?

Not for the AI models (text prediction, speech recognition, machine translation, etc) since that would require faster hardware. The AI coprocessor I described would get worn out training itself.

1/3?

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

And not initially: Before we can write software on our device we'd already need most of this software already running on it! Unless...

The easiest way to get started is probably to hook the device up to external hardware or (ideally) software terminal (via RS232 over USB?)! Giving us text entry & rendering (with retro flair!) as well as the ability paste text from the web, filesystems, or text editors before we reimplement these things for ourselves as we gain self-reliance!

2/3!

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

In designing these dev tools I'll strive to make the software easy to study & (minor caveats) modify on-device, whilst hindering the ability for others (whom you interact with over the internet) to claim that control for themselves.

I won't extend the hardware to aid implementing these dev tools, since they're not the main point of the device. Though at times I will discuss "clever hacks".

3/3 Fin for today! Tomorrow: Introduce compilers & code-runners.

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