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? 🤔
Update: Thanks, NASA! I don't know what you're doing, but 20 minutes of work after posting this and I'm reading RFID cards like a boss. Okay, like, a very amateur boss, but still... It's something!
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.
Obviously, as a growing network, way more people are setting up new accounts on the Fediverse than on Instagram, so "new" would need to be a bit more nuanced, but having an auto-reply that says "hey, if you want to follow this personal account, that's cool, just ping me out-of-band and I'll follow you first."
We could even have a "force-follow" button that makes an attestation that you're not spam/a bot/etc. Spammers that use that mechanism get their server banned. Idk?
I need to read or watch a tutorial on how to send it all (Outlook) to Proton.
I’m still displaying ads on it when I’ve been paying for it for a long time.
I haven’t had anything but various forms of iPads with iOS for 14 years and I still use it.
Mind, when I started using it, it had background templates one could used so emails resembled stationery.
Still need to figure out what to do and how to do it so I can wean myself of it.
My favorite addresses are there!
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].
With ActivityPub+Webfinger, we also know precisely who sent the message, with cryptographic signatures for verification, unlike email where From-address-level signatures have proven an elusive goal. The best you can do with SMTP in most cases is to verify that "a server that's trusted by the domain sent the message" but there are so many exceptions due to SMTP's architecture that it's really a crapshoot.
Put another way, if we get this right for the Fediverse AND upgrade our email addresses to support ActivityPub+Webfinger, a robust response to spam across the Fediverse that takes into account social connections could make [SMTP-based] email much less prone to spam and phishing attacks than centralized server- and content-filtering-focused attempts have been to date.
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.
@rysiek@blaine
I just started my older daughter on Pirx, in French translation, because her teachers said she needed to be reading more in French. I read it in English translation, of course, at about her age (I was fortunate; my father was Lem's North American publisher). This was to overcome her objection that "there's nothing worth reading that was written in French." :-)
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.