Dipped a toe into a standards discussion and I remain convinced that it's not a world for me.
I wish we lived in a world where standards work was done by a wide, diverse, and open community rather than exactly the sort of technologist who loves to bikeshed.
It's such important work, and uniquely creates opportunities for amazing large-scale cooperation to happen. Too often, though, it's a place for insecure people to build little fiefdoms. 😢
The Voyager 1 remote bugfix is especially impressive (galling?) as I'm a few days in and still can't get my microcontroller to talk to this bog-standard RFID reader.
I wonder if the team at NASA could just remotely debug it for me? 🤔
The back-woods, working class, remote rural community near where I live, whose primary employers are a zinc/lead smelter and a pulp mill, just elected amazing queer hero, Birkley Valks, to the local school board of trustees. He soundly won the election against a hate-mongering anti-trans bully. Love wins! 🎉🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️❤️
The real reason to write rust is that sex is good, but have you ever tried a successful build after fighting with the esp-idf+cargo toolchains for 12 hours?
On instagram, which I only use these days to follow friends who are on there, the most frequent "notification" is from obvious spam (presumably phishing) accounts. Meta has thus far been unable to stem the never-ending flow.
Except these accounts are all brand new. I don't know anyone who's not on instagram in 2024 that will decide to sign up and follow me
If Instagram had a flag that said "don't let new accounts follow me", it would stop the spam dead.
I'm not sure if it's new or if I'm just really bad at paying attention, but I just learned about it and I'm so excited about #fedify: https://unstable.fedify.dev/
I think systems that are shaped like fedify are one of the key things needed to really open experimentation and exploration of the possibilities that the fediverse affords.
I feel like billionaires are letting the world down.
So much wealth, so much power, but as far as I can tell there won't be a flock of supersonic jets with transparent upper fuselages following the eclipse.
I mean, there are ~2500 billionaires in the world, and none of them are going to experience five full hours of totality.
Random unsolicited thought (disclaimer: I haven't been watching or participating in the spam response at all):
One of the main differences between social/activitypub spam and email spam is that contact lists are largely open, and programmable querying is possible. What does that mean?
If you see a new follow request or mention, you can check to see if anyone else you know follows that person. If not, the spam propensity is much higher. Email servers can't do this [without centralization].
Offline for a few hours and mulling over all the controversy and ... I think we're going to be okay.
If all of this is just the early stages of disparate and decentralized communities reckoning with difference and growing new political structures to manage and regulate communication despite those differences, then I think it's pretty exciting and I feel immensely privileged to even be present while it emerges.
The insular instinct in communities is something we need to reckon with. Today, a well-meaning person in my community got eviscerated on Facebook for not knowing local folklore.
Meanwhile, one extended community working to give people the freedom to communicate attacked another extended community working to give people the freedom to communicate.
The danger posed by community in-fighting isn't that one side or the other will win – it's that we'll all lose, by losing sight of the real goals.
The rumours about WhatsApp/Matrix federation are very promising, but the suggestion that legal contracts will need signing to federate is worrying. We've done this before, with the traditional telephone network, and we got a cartel.
The first version of Twitter was illegal (or, at least, against telco rules – what's the difference?) because it wasn't "approved" by the telcos. We were only able to launch publicly because of an expensive certification process that skirted the truth.
I've been banging the "usable security or bust" drum for over a decade, but I'd never properly considered the implications of security-after-death. This thread is so critical for anyone building security systems to read: https://hachyderm.io/@shortridge/111772444831050395
I've built production systems for people under direct threat from state-level actors. Your system probably isn't one of those, and if it is, you really know. Building "really secure" systems is a fun technical challenge, but usually Not Our Actual Job.
This is the way forward for Canadian media. Eat Local, Buy Local, Connect Local. Really glad to see @thetyee (which I had a very small hand in launching 20 years ago!) taking open, federated media seriously. I wish more Canadian journalists would make the move, because it's the only way that I can see that we re-build strong Canadian journalism.
While I fully, really, completely get all the arguments on every side around Meta implementing ActivityPub, I'll confess to not understanding the profound concern that this will kill the fediverse.
Federated social media never "belonged" to anyone. Feel free to block Threads. Build disparate communities!
Or federate with them!
The network and power dynamics are not & will not be any way worse than they are now, or before Threaderation, or before Musk bought Twitter. They are only better*.
Putting aside all the ethical problems with Spotify for a moment (cf lack of alternatives), it's shocking that they still doesn't have a way to use an LLM to prompt to help with playlist creation and music discovery. I just asked ChatGPT for some new music recommendations and it's a thousand times better than Discover Weekly, despite only taking 60 seconds of my time.
There are three grizzlies (a mom and her two cubs) roaming around our little town, and everyone is hoping that they're safely trapped and relocated together.
In related news, there was a big crash and what sounded like a roar just outside. I'll keep you posted if I see any picnicking!
