javi

javi, 1 month ago to random

I kid you not, I only interacted with boops (besides a first couple of manual ones) via code. I didn't even know that the super boops were done by long hovering until I read someone mentioning it. I have no idea how the evil ones were achieved organically either :D

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9rlzjbyub559ob0g

javi, 1 month ago to random

I fucking lost my afternoon into reverse engineering the boops to create chaos instead of doing my actual dayjob, so today's work hours had been extra stressful while I was trying to make up for yesterday

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9rlzjbyub559ob0g

javi, 1 month ago to random

To be clear: Israel has a LONG history killing NGO workers trying to bring help to gaza.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_flotilla_raid

https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/14/middleeast/united-nations-staff-deaths-gaza-intl-hnk/index.html

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-forces-kill-palestinian-west-bank-clashes-medics-say-2022-08-18/

https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/msf-convoy-attack-gaza-all-elements-point-israeli-army-responsibility

https://www.savethechildren.net/news/save-children-condemns-killing-staff-member-and-family-israeli-airstrike-gaza

The US asking them for an impartial investigation is a fucking joke. They have been doing this since the 00s without repercussion.

You know, if there is public statements from the UN, Doctors Without Borders, even the Save the Children, saying ",Israel has killed our personnel", maybe it's time to stop pretending that the next time the IDF bombs an NGO there is any chance of it being an accident.

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9rm8ywd6ae57xplu

aral, 1 month ago to Israel

World Central Kitchen is devastated to confirm seven members of our team have been killed in an IDF strike in Gaza.
…
Despite coordinating movements with the IDF, the convoy was hit
…
This is not only an attack against WCK, this is an attack on humanitarian organizations showing up in the most dire of situations where food is being used as a weapon of war. This is unforgivable
…
The seven killed are from Australia, Poland, UK, US, Canada, and Palestine.

https://wck.org/news/gaza-team-update

#wck #israel

javi, 1 month ago to random

Biden's government seem to just have approved the shipment of 2000 tons of bombs and 25 new jet fighters to Israel.

As in, yesterday. After the UN security council had mandated a cease fire. After the UN has published a report that says there are more than reasonable data to call what's going on in Gaza a Genocide.

Yeah, now tell me how hard is Biden working for a cease fire. Cool story, bro.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/03/29/us-weapons-israel-gaza-war/

javi, 1 month ago to random

I've just found out that my local aquarium let you spend the night sleeping next to the shark tank for €60.

I must do this at least once.

javi, 1 month ago to random

Happy "we went over 1.5° warming already" day, everyone! We fucked it up, yay! Now let's keep going for total destruction of human civilization within the lifespan of our kids!

thomasfuchs, 1 month ago to random

One of the biggest problems of our time is the inability of people to call things by their name

• Fascism
• Racism
• Genocide
• Fraud

Call things what they are. Everything is so much easier to understand if you do.

javi, 1 month ago to random

the easter bunny is the chocolate thing you put on top of a mona de pascua and eat it ravenously, isn't it?

RE: https://retro.pizza/users/teknomagic/statuses/112175214676474089

javi, 2 months ago to random

The comments on this thread seems to point that a sector of the people in the fediverse who cares mostly about it getting mainstream over it keeping its principles.

According mastodon.social's own rules, threads should be defederated. it's a pretty crystal clear case. And yeah, it may even not be intentional, moderation at threads scale is almost impossible to do without making a social network unprofitable. But that's not an argument for keeping threads federated, that's an argument for no social network (or node in the fediverse) to be big enough to be properly moderated. There shouldn't be any single network with tens, hundreds of million users. That's the whole point of the fedi.

I don't want the fediverse to become mainstream, I don't want it to become the new Twitter. I want it to become something new, what the social internet should have been if it haven't been taken over by amoral corporations in the early 10s.

RE: https://mastodon.ar.al/users/aral/statuses/112168710600332531

javi, 2 months ago to random

This is Spain. Degrees issued by private unis are usually seen with a bit of contempt, compared with the public ones. Usually, because public unis are the first option for almost everyone, and the private ones are where the people without enough academic merit to enter a public one but enough financial means to pay for a Private uni.

RE: https://sciences.social/users/alfiekohn/statuses/112167780301396511

javi, 2 months ago to random

I'm seeing people around both here and Tumblr expressing dismay at Israel ignoring the UN security council mandate for a cease fire in Gaza.

This is obviously disappointing, but hardly a surprise: in the last half a century, Israel has ignored over 30 UN resolutions (including several from the security council) without any kind of repercussions. So what it would be surprising this time would have been them complying.

At this point, the only external actor with any power to stop the genocide is the US. Israel doesn't have the means to keep going with their ethnic cleansing of Gaza for much longer on their own: the only reasons they have been able to keep a continuous offensive for almost half a year is because the US is supplying them with the ammo, weapons, supplies and money to do so.

The only way to force them to stop this is to either cut that support, or at least clearly threat them to do so if they don't stop the offensive. And up to this point, the US is nowhere close to stop backing the genocide, some Biden PR stunts aside.

javi, 2 months ago to random

Given the current direction of the world, climate fighters blowing up infrastructure is something that will inevitably happen in the next couple of decades.

And do you know what would make a perfectly valid target if you want to blow up something that makes an actual dent in reducing wasteful energy consumption?

Crypto and AI datacenters.

javi, 2 months ago to random

Seriouslyyyyy

look at this disappointed face:

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9rb66jw7o9wpju11

javi, 2 months ago to random

Somehow I've managed to convince @javierarce to make a illustration for Goblin's 'not found' page. Look at this beauty!

And since we are at it, look at @javier's drawings page over here: https://javier.computer/drawings

(I'm super stoked about this addition to goblin, holy fuck)

cate, 2 months ago to random

Started writing an email "unfortunately, I'm in Bali" and then realized that is not a valid sentence 😂

javi, 2 months ago to random

Santa mozzarella! i couldn't have chosen a better day to defederate from threads.

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9r4ku08scjt1c9iq

javi, 2 months ago to random

I finally blocked Threads from federating with goblin.band.

I acknowledge, 100%, Facebook's right to join the fediverse and do whatever their want with the open standards that powers it. That's why they are open, they can be used even by people we don't like.

I also acknowledge our rights to not wanting to have anything facebook-related in our neighborhood. So yeah, goblin.band and Threads won't be playing together.

javi, 2 months ago to random

To be honest, what makes more angry with Automattic is not so much that they chose to sell their soul to the devil but that the company (and, again, as far as I know all of this came from people above / outside tumblr staff) has been trying to be so sneaky about it. So fucking slimy.

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9r260536yc0kp66o

javi, 2 months ago to random

oh.

Remember when tumblr announced the sale of your posts to openAi?

In the staff post that avoided talking about it by mentioned the new 'no-ai' setting they mentioned that if you had your tumblr blog already hidden from search engines, they automatically had turned that setting on for you by default. I remember thinking "well, in this sea of shit, turning it on by default for those who already cared about privacy is at least a decent gesture".

But. But!

I had just been sniffing around a bit (of course I didn't want to copy tumblr's robots.txt to use it in goblin, what are you saying, that's outrageous!) and I just realized about something. This is tumblr's robots.txt (the file that tell crawlers what they can access and what not) when you have the 'discourage external search" on.

Basically, any bot is discouraged from searching any page on your blog. Any bot. Including the AI ones. So if you have the "don't show up in search engines" box, you already were as protected as tumblr can protect your posts from being read by AI trainers. So yeah, that good gesture was basically smoke and mirrors to distract people from the fact they were already selling their data.

But what happens if you want to allow google & bing & the rest to index your blog, but turn on the 'no-ai' setting? Then the robot.txt file of your blog changes:

Yeah, that's a list of known AI services crawlers you gently request to not read your blog. Can you see something missing?

Oh yeah, it seems they have forgotten to disallow GPTBot, the crawler from OpenAi. You know, the company Automattic signed a deal with to sell Tumblr's data. So well, even if you turn the infamous "no-ai" setting on tumblr, tumblr won't block openAi bots from reading your site. They will block all its competitors, but not openAi.

[pic-of-Automattic's CEO smiling at the camera next to OpenAi's Sam Altman a few months ago]

Nice, uh? nice.

javi, 2 months ago to random

And to be clear, this is not just about React, or Facebook. This is about the entire industry going wild with accepting stuff that made everything more complex just because it was cool to play with.

Take webpack. Ten years ago, when it launched, you didn't care about bundling your code in dev environments. You just loaded the .js and .css files from an html root file and go from there. Sure, once your code got to production, then it would got minimised and bundled during the deploy.

Now the standard is to use a webpack dev build and a webpack production build. We require nodejs running to be able to run pure client-side apps IN YOUR COMPUTER. You made a change in js or css and YOU NEED TO WAIT UNTIL THE BUILD ENDS to test it. Ten years ago, you would make the change and reload. And what are the gains? Even if webpack is a better bundler than everything we were using in 2014, why don't just use it for production builds? Why do we organise entire our projects around how loads and build files nowadays? The end users gained nothing by us doing so. We gained a significantly more complex project standards. We gained everything being more obscure and hard.

And yeah, I know some people are going to read this and comment "dude, wtf, you need webpack-style dev build to do X. And yeah, I'm aware. I could say at least 5 different things that could go in that X without thinking too much, and yeah, you need dev builds for them. But before you comment about it, please, consider my point is not that webpack is bad per se, my point is that none of the things webpack is needed for actually made the web better. And they didn't even made our job simpler, but the opposite.

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9qyaoxpilruusopk

javi, 2 months ago to random

Actually, let me use this as an example of how everything has gone wrong with web development in the last decade or so.

Dan Abramov is a very brilliant guy who is part of the Facebook's React team. He has been the most important name in the team working on React for years. And now, they are pushing for changes in React that would make it consume streams of data that updates the UI before the entire data request is completed, instead of just requesting the data and then 'painting' it once they get the reply for that request.

This is nuts. This is a micro optimization. 95% of the users won't ever notice, and those who do (people using extremely bad connections) would be much better if the site wasn't using React at all. At the same time, I'm sure half of the websites in the World who currently uses react will jump to implement this, making their code way more complex, brittle, sucking their productivity down, and in the long term, being worse for the users. Just for absolutely not even a short-term gain at all in their products.

Then why these kind of things keep happening? Because Facebook is too big. And somehow they ended being the ones in control of the most popular web-app framework used by most of the sites nowadays.

The state of the current Javascript ecosystem is what happens when you get companies with hundreds, thousands of engineers, to build sites that 15 years ago would have been built by 1/10th of that number of people. What you get is a lot of people working on a product that's actually mature already, and whose job end being going after that extra 1%, that last micro optimization that could make your site better in a very narrow set of cases. And they don't care about the complexity, because they are part of an engineering organization with literally thousands of hands to throw at any problem. Setting up your code bundler now takes hundreds of lines of code that need constant maintenance to achieve just a 5% improvement over gzipped plain JavaScript? No big deal, they have 6 people working full time on that. React switching to a different programming paradigm each two versions? Nice, now the 900 devs working in the web version has something to do for a few months.

But then small to medium teams adopt these tools. And suddenly you have a 5, 20, 50 devs team having to do the same work the Facebook web team does. Without any of the problems Facebook has to solve.

What's worse: a big share of the current JavaScript ecosystem exists just to solve problems introduced by the previous iterations. Think about it from a user perspective: does the web work any better, does Netflix, Facebook, twitter, tumblr, etc load faster, perform better than they did ten years ago? On the contrary, most of us have more powerful computers, phones. We have significantly faster internet connections. But sites are, at best, as fast as they used to ten years ago. In most cases they are even slower.

And from the engineer perspective it's not better: web development is significantly harder, more complex, slower nowadays that what it was ten years ago. Things that were trivial are now complex. Things that were complex still are. Product-wise, we are not doing anything more complex than what we were doing in early to mid 10s. But somehow now everything is harder, involves more code, everything is now orders of magnitude more complex. And it's not even making the web a better experience.

We made this mess. We made the web worse for everyone. We made our jobs harder for ourselves. It's so stupid.

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9qyaoxpilruusopk