@bentomn@hachyderm.io
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

bentomn

@bentomn@hachyderm.io

app, web backend lately. #GameDev has-been. enjoyed #PostgreSQL. #infosec voyeur.

he/him in Oakland, California
Cover photo shows a fountain pattern in firework powder by Cai Guo-Qiang from the movie Sky Ladder (2016)

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

ErinSandersNP, to random

So, I just got a new @ouraring to help me better track my sleep and recovery. And I am absolutely tickled by this. I stood in the kitchen to make a smoothie and then sat at my desk. It would be great if these trackers had a “chronic illness” mode lol 😂.

RT @ErinSandersNP
What my “exercise” looks like now…if I’m ambitious, washing the dishes or using the vacuum with ear protection. If I’m doing REALLY well…
https://twitter.com/ErinSandersNP/status/1646664904437317639

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@ErinSandersNP thanks for sharing, sorry you’re going through this.

acdha, to random
@acdha@thepit.social avatar

Question for the runners out there: I have a bit of Achilles pain after an impromptu dog chase a while back. Anyone have a recommendation for comfortable slippers / house shoes to keep the pressure down?

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@acdha vionic has a few choices. suggest slides over flippies to reduce the tendency to grip the sandal. when you’re less inflamed, strength work can help, specifically calf raises. a runner friend or a trainer can help to identify what else to strengthen. https://www.vionicshoes.com/men/sandals.html

mikeyp, to random
@mikeyp@hachyderm.io avatar

Really don't want to spend time spinning up a new CI/CD pipeline, but Unity's new Cloud Build pricing increases costs by 15-20X (!) for me.

Their metered rates wouldn't be unreasonable if the service was reliable and performant. But random failures, unexplained restarts & double-builds, and extremely slow build times don't support the basic requirements of a metered service.

They're clearly working on improvements, but they shouldn't have switched the pricing model until the service is ready.

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@mikeyp why is operating a reliable ci/cd always a thing.

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@mikeyp jenkins and a stack of stale unsupported plugins is offering to help. really tho, buildkite is golang, they do a per user license, and bundle minutes for their cloud thingy. buck2 is rust, bazel inspired, proven and perhaps too new for external users, maybe essential for large scale tho. if you need to output to one or more particular regions, the cloud vendors might be good too. thought this blog was interesting re buildkite on aws at pinterest. https://buildkite.com/blog/moving-pinterest-s-ios-builds-to-autoscaled-ec2-mac

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@mikeyp this is admittedly a bunch of work compared with maintaining a small build machine network, which definitely has its merits. mostly think about rackspace and marginal kWh with the home lab or nearby office lab scenario.

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@mikeyp custom ci/cd are the artifacts of teams over 100 devs aren’t they. gitlab and bitbucket, sensible. jenkins is fine actually. it’s only the don’t touch it, it works, no one wants to upgrade that ci/cd, that i see people mention regularly re running jenkins. unity ios, haven’t done that, can imagine bear wrestling would be easier. getting out to those cloud macs seems way more compelling than operating another lab. best of luck with this!

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@mikeyp noticed another ci had not heard of before, community fork of drone called woodpecker-ci. golang implementation and docker container focus. offers pipelines and build matrix as built ins, and can use drone plugins. setup doesn’t look too scary. may take this one for a trial run. https://woodpecker-ci.org/docs/administration/setup

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@mikeyp went through open issues, and there are signs of unhappy paths, ui quirks that need work, lost agents, possibly no visibility of running steps until ended. this looks like one of those, if the happy path works for you it’s useable and fast. thing with ci software that’s been going for ten or more years with a big community is these issues get found and plugins get written. jenkins wins again?

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

Currently getting a lot of followings by new accounts with no avatar, no posts and no followers, and it's all from mastodon.social.

I wonder if it's the mobile app now defaulting to mastodon.social and suggesting me to follow; or if it's spam followers.

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs imagining these people as partially materialized would make it more sci-fi.

oscarjiminy, to random
@oscarjiminy@aus.social avatar

@bentomn @Jonathanglick @chargrille @CherylRofer Thanks for following up, Ben.

It’s hard to hold fast among all the various dynamics here. I’m very sympathetic toward the principles driving Mastodon and the Fediverse more broadly but it’s hard in the face of so many cultural quirks.

We’re supposed to accept the premise of an inherently safer environment yet every day there’s another case of someone wandering into my feed completely baffled from some Mastodon scold hectoring them for some minor or imagined slight.

This seems to me a carry over from places like Linux support forums where very often people get anything but support for problems they are innocently seeking insight into, often they’re dismissed as the problem.

I have no love for Jack or th VC crew at Post (I dislike the Post interface & BS doesn’t look much better) but in spite of reflecting on how indifferent Twitter have been to people of colour and LGBTQI+, those lessons were understood in the abstract. They are known quantities and it’s been made clear they are expected and that if those expectations are not met then people will bail.

Can BS meet those expectations in a timely manner (and assuage copyright concerns etc)? Maybe not but AOC and Dril have just signed up and seem pretty happy to at least take it for a few good laps. That is more likely to get SM critical mass than any righteous bullshit I’ve seen slung about on this platform, even with the huge headstart and impressive population there is here

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@oscarjiminy @Jonathanglick @chargrille @CherylRofer Np, I’m not sure I found Cheryl’s exact issue, there are many open issues to read through.

Even with new issues incoming, there are these older open bugs that have gone without fixes. It’s a small team making Mastodon. I hope they can add more people to the effort.

I am in agreement with your thoughts.

There is a gap between what resourced social can deliver in terms of quality, and all of the smaller upstarts can do with smaller budgets.

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@oscarjiminy @Jonathanglick @chargrille @CherylRofer There is a motivating activism animating a portion of Mastodon concerns. It’s not that atypical for open source or the inside of software product teams to have these passionate posts about why we should care. It’s how we argue for the relative import of doing B before A.

I think it’s great that there are so many choices.

That Mastodon and Fedi enables some to potentially run their own socials for small groups is a welcome development.

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@oscarjiminy @Jonathanglick @chargrille @CherylRofer The moderation concerns of medium and larger servers, say over 1500 users, I’m less certain about the future of volunteers handling that well for long periods of time.

It takes considerable organization to operate above 50k users well with Mastodon as your software. And then there is the moderation and volunteer turnover.

It’s all a big experiment when we’re used to commercial companies operating these details for us.

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@oscarjiminy @Jonathanglick @chargrille @CherylRofer I’m hoping for the scenario where we pay for Mastodon like we pay for email, or Wordpress. It’s just something we can choose to operate for an org or group, or there are several vendors that can operate it on our behalf.

There will continue to be these commercial entities competing on new social and attracting communities for specific kinds of interaction.

Those firms will lead on usability, and may exhibit familiar periodic collapse.

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@oscarjiminy @Jonathanglick @chargrille @CherylRofer Well, I like people, and we’re drifting into generalities.

Agree with the sense there is an audience problem here, cultural gaps, there is something problematic with who’s not here.

I think this hinges on usability. We’re only hearing from the people that clear the usability hurdles to find some of their parasocials from the bird site. Topical interests aren’t busy enough. The feed doesn’t bring lively conversation forward.

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@oscarjiminy @Jonathanglick @chargrille @CherylRofer I agree, cultural touchstones like BBC or NPR might be able to pull together communities. There was a specific article I saw about FT considering it and they backed away from the liability. Nonprofits and coops may prove to be better vehicles for limiting the liability of these places. I think we’ll end up with something smaller like email, clubs around an interest, or regional non profits operating these spaces.

chargrille, to random
@chargrille@progressives.social avatar

Why would anyone go help JACK DORSEY build a new social network?

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@Jonathanglick @chargrille BlueSky has made questionable choices around moderation and safety. You can mute but not block people today. Harmful posts are feature you can turn on, no idea who categorizes harmful posts. It sounds like onboarding, top posts, finding each other, and search is better than alternatives, and that’s why people are enjoying it as a bird site replacement.

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@chargrille @Jonathanglick agree, what I’m hearing is lesser of two evils rationalizations as people try to pick from available options. invites are also scarce, and I suspect driving the interest.

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@chargrille @Jonathanglick yes, and admittedly, choose your server, and bring a csv of your friends, is a rough way to start a network. I can understand people not wanting to bring their friends to that particular experience.

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@chargrille @Jonathanglick what I’m also hearing is “black Twitter” needs a home, to paint with too broad a brush, and has some clear ideas what they want to see in moderation. It’s work to change culture at a few instances, to make everyone feel comfortable, and that takes doing the work to change minds around certain moderation actions.

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@chargrille @Jonathanglick so today as a block, they are excited about bluesky, and swinging weight around, getting everyone excited because onboarding works better, you can find your friends and so on.

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@chargrille @Jonathanglick exactly, I find it fascinating on a social cultural level and a technical one as these product teams all had to decide which features mattered and choose which to do first. We’re choosing among a bunch of half baked efforts, and each of them could improve in months.

MadMadMadMadRN, to random

I appreciate that Mastodon provides users a chronological timeline but at this point the lack of any other way of exploring (even posts in lists only show up in chronological order) is holding the platform back. As with quote boosts, the solution is to give people the option to opt out of algorithmic timelines, not eliminate the feature entirely.

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs @MadMadMadMadRN enabling a few common feed patterns in a settings panel makes sense for those that want it. making that pluggable sounds good in theory, but most would likely be fine with less. The willful gaslighting early fedi tried that algo feed = bad, discourages most from trying to fix it at all. What I’m seeing is people manage to join Mastodon, but don’t find one of the better clients. I think that’s also a usability problem, so I try to talk up better clients when I see it.

bentomn, (edited )
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs @MadMadMadMadRN Mastodon can support instance search via an elasticsearch plugin. Hachyderm had it working for a time, and shut it off.
I didn’t hear the exact reason why, but I can imagine it’s a combination of operational complexity and moderation concerns.
Quote posts are moving forward, it’s just unevenly implemented. It’s in some clients today.

Thinkish, to animals

, amirite?

image/jpeg

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@Thinkish Wow yes some love to get out only to get into more trouble. It’s yard season here too, with weeding to catch up on.

bentomn, to random
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

Caught a positive antigen test result today. Had each shot on time. Working on getting antivirals, if permitted. It was likely via a friend that visited another friend outdoors for lunch that was “recovering from a cold”. The other friend did not test or did not test twice, unclear, then negative on their day nine or so, no surprise. People don’t understand testing, and don’t want to know. I should have masked. Spring break and one of our nearby sewersheds jumped higher. Careful out there.

bentomn,
@bentomn@hachyderm.io avatar

@Thinkish Thanks Erik, yes finally tested negative twice! What a ridiculous time it takes to recover. Finding I can do a bit more each day now, and surprised at how tired I am doing things over even short durations. Hoping a few walks and sleep and this will improve.

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