@julian@fietkau.social
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

julian

@julian@fietkau.social

Human-computer interaction #HCI, computer science & programming, home server & self-hosting, games and other fun stuff.

Increasingly into making tools for the fediverse: FediRoster, Pinhole, more to come(?). See https://fietkau.software/tag/fediverse for project info and downloads. If you do HCI-related research, check out https://directory.hci.social.

He/him. Posting mostly in English, but you might see the occasional German boost.

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

brethudson, to random
@brethudson@peoplemaking.games avatar

Looking for follow more folks doing cool stuff in the game dev space! Who do you suggest?

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@brethudson Game dev, let's see, here are some people I follow:

@brentendo @Tearcell @cosmicvoid @russmatney @AsherVo @Danc @Ridion @mortallymoonstruckgames @kenney @dphrygian @johanpeitz @NovaSquirrel @popcannibal

Didn't check whom you're already following, but tried to skip people mentioned in other replies. ๐Ÿ™‚

I meant to pick up game dev again this year, although it's not looking good w.r.t. free time / priorities. You can check out my old stuff here if you like: https://fietkau.media/games

J12t, to random
@J12t@social.coop avatar

Imagine two identical with mainstream users. Same number of users, same connectedness of the social graph, same demographics etc.

Social network A only has an algorithmic feed. Social network B only has a chronological people-I-follow feed.

What would the usage numbers look like in comparison? Numbers of posts, numbers of likes/replies/boosts, growth trajectory, etc?

I would expect somebody has done some research on this. Anybody know of any public results?

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@J12t I respect the empirical observations, but I think in this conversation it's important that we be tediously explicit about the distinctions between what people want, what people say they want, what they use the most, what makes them happiest in the moment, what leaves them most satisfied afterwards, etc. etc.

Word has broadly gotten around that engagement maximizers cause doomscrolling and FOMO, but I still see too much conflation of "time spent on feed" with "this is what people want".

mpesce, to random
@mpesce@arvr.social avatar

Now it can be told:

While doing some AI engineering work for a client, I developed a prompt - completely inadvertently - that reduced every AI chatbot to gibberish (except Anthropic's Claude 3). I then spent a week trying to alert the LLM vendors to this issue - and largely failed. There is no mechanism to report flaws in these models that are already deployed to billions of users. Read the whole story in @theregister

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/23/ai_untested_unstable/

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@mpesce Do the responses you're getting look like they could be related to the LLM phenomenon dubbed "anomalous tokens"? https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzyva/ai-chatgpt-tokens-words-break-reddit

(I understand this is beside your main point about vendor responsibilities, but if you haven't come across this report, maybe it's illuminating in some way.)

eniko, (edited ) to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

can someone count the number of unique bosses in SMW for me? minibosses count but a recurring boss with slightly different patterns is still just one boss (like boom boom in 3)

i'd do it but i have a headache and it feels hard

EDIT: looks like its 7, thanks!

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@eniko As in SMW on the SNES? Let's see:

  1. Iggy/Larry
  2. Morton/Roy
  3. Lemmy/Wendy
  4. Ludwig
  5. Bowser
  6. Big Boo
  7. Reznor

I just quickly checked an "All SMW bosses" YouTube compilation just to make sure I haven't missed anyone, and they actually showed the Reznor fight four times. ๐Ÿ˜

kerrielake, to pixelart
@kerrielake@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

There's also only 2 days left to get 35% off my itchio packs for my birthday week! I'm at 39% of my goal so it would mean a lot if you can support or share!

Link to my itchio page in bio

image/png
image/png
image/png

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@kerrielake Are you using a crossposter to post the same text to multiple social platforms? If not, I'd recommend putting the link in your post here. There's no penalty for it, and it makes it much easier for people to find. ๐Ÿ˜€

https://itch.io/s/123398/birthday-week-sale-35-off-everything

aeva, (edited ) to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

graphics research lifehack: you can cut out a ton of paywall scams and inscrutable academic wankery by excluding "we present" from your searches

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@aeva IME the biggest factor is that academics are often simply bad at writing. The eternal style guidance by journals and educators boils down to "clarity above all else," but many brilliant computer scientists have no clue how to convey a series of thoughts in a way that makes sense.

Though strict length limits on paper submissions can hurt additionally. I've gotten "your definition could use an example" in reviews, oddly they never seem to say what should be cut in exchange. ๐Ÿ˜

@topher_batty

Dozer, to retrogaming
@Dozer@social.pincade.com.au avatar

Several still frame grabs showing the source footage used for the rotoscoped character animation in the game "Karateka".

Developed by Jordan Mechner and published by Broderbund (1984).

#retrogaming
#videogames
#gamedev

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@Dozer Obligatory note (for some reason I find myself telling people about this often): Jordan Mechner is on Mastodon @jmechner and posts about his older videogame titles as well as his current artistic work. I can recommend following him. ๐Ÿ™‚

hongminhee, to mastodon
@hongminhee@todon.eu avatar

The max_id, since_id, and min_id parameters in 's Timeline API assume that the post ID is a sortable number. (Is this correct?) , the implementation I'm building, uses UUIDs for post IDs internally, so I'm stuck on how to implement a Mastodon-compatible API.

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/timelines/

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@hongminhee Does it assume that? I don't see it clearly stated in the documentation that the IDs themselves need to be numerically sortable, just that, when given a specific ID, the server needs to be able to retrieve newer or older posts based on it.

Of course sortable snowflake IDs make implementing this easier on the server side.

Jeremiah, (edited ) to webdev
@Jeremiah@alpaca.gold avatar

Hey @MDN, with Stack Overflowโ€™s ongoing community implosion, now would be an excellent time to launch MDN Answers so people have a better place to help each other learn.

https://answer.apache.org/

Edit: Or @nodebb / other ActivityPub-enabled forum/threaded discussion community server software

#WebDev

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@Jeremiah Might not be wise to count on @MDN to avoid similar issues long-term: https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9208

smallcircles, to fediverse
@smallcircles@social.coop avatar

Call to Participate: Help update #WebFinger #RFC with the original lead author at the #IETF

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/call-to-participate-help-improve-webfinger-rfc-with-its-lead-author/4208

#ActivityPub #SocialHub

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@smallcircles The question is, participate where? Is the mailing list still getting shut down soon? Should I reply to the linked SocialHub thread with my WebFinger concerns? I don't have much experience with development mailing lists, and I don't see a straightforward way to reply to a specific email there if I wasn't on the mailing list at the time it was sent...

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@smallcircles I saw the reply button, but that just opens a regular mailto window that would result in a top-level thread reply, instead of the reply to a specific message that I would want. ๐Ÿ˜ฆ

Maybe it's kind of a generational divide, but joining a mailing list just to quickly chime in on an ongoing conversation seems like a lot... but I'll consider it.

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

I want to do a test on how much traffic and resources the Mastodon embed takes on my server, so boost this plz

Edit: all done, you can stop sharing now lol

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/05/steam-deck-most-played-for-april-2024-has-plenty-of-fallout/

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@gamingonlinux @rdnielsen The "Mastodon effect" is a real thing, but its impact will depend heavily on how a site is set up. I'm surprised a news site would struggle with it.

Discussion on the Mastodon GitHub here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/23662 A fix seems to be currently planned for 4.4.0.

andresmh, to random
@andresmh@hci.social avatar

Good morning ๐ŸŒค๏ธ Hanging out in the PNW for a week!

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@andresmh That's a real place, huh? I always thought they made it up for What Remains of Edith Finch. ๐Ÿง
@davidthewid

julian, to fediverse
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

I recently saw someone complain that they missed several recent @itchio game bundles. And I thought, okay, building a notification bot for newly live bundles could be a cool little #ActivityPub side project.

Looking at https://itch.io/bundles I realized that it's (a) not sorted nor sortable by anything that makes sense, and (b) incomplete. The current big Palestine charity bundle isn't even on there.

Is there any way to get a list of all current itch.io bundles? Or a news feed of any kind?

SweetAmelia, to random
@SweetAmelia@sakurajima.moe avatar

im thinking about just going back to using a spreadsheet for non-anime shows. trakt sucks, simkl sucks, letterboxd is hardly worth mentioning. trakt is the one ive used for the longest time and it just fucking sucks. why is the history tab and ratings tab and progress tab and collections tab different tabs?? these could all be put into one. if i want to see the shit i've rated i have to go to ratings and i can go to history if i want to see everything and then i can't clearly see ratings. the site is done in such an obtuse way. you need to pay to use dark mode. you can only use a 10 point scale. it SUCKS. anilist brought anime tracking into the modern era compared to myanimelist (not happy with how the last actual feature release was in 2021 though, their roadmap is a joke). backloggd made game tracking actually good compared to backloggery. we need something like this for non-anime stuff. hell if it included anime too that'd be perfect. i see no reason why anime and non-anime needs to be separated. someone PLEASE MAKE IT AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@SweetAmelia I've been keeping a close eye on the fedi project space and I recently learned about NeoDB: https://github.com/neodb-social/neodb Apparently it's a federated media tracker where you can have a profile with your own entries and be followed from other fedi platforms. I've yet to try it out, but if it's any good I might eventually migrate my own anime list to it. The website makes it look remarkably mature.

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@SweetAmelia None that I've seen. I hope they have a full UI translation into English at any rate.

treyhunner, to python
@treyhunner@mastodon.social avatar

One of these functions prints and the other returns, but they seem like they do the same thing.

Read more ๐Ÿ‘‰ https://trey.io/ibXciv

#python

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@treyhunner I've been meaning to ask you Trey (I hope it's okay to go off-topic), do you have anything written down about how the Python interpreter behind the Python Morsels pastebin works?

I recently used Pyodide to create a browser demo for one of my old Python projects: https://fietkau.software/timberbot

It was pretty simple to put together, but it suffers from chonky loading and initialization times that I don't see on Python Morsels. Are you using a different engine, or did you create one yourself?

Edent, to random
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

๐Ÿ†• blog! โ€œLazy way to cause SHA-256 collisions for lazy evaluatorsโ€

Humans are lazy. That's why we have computers; to do the boring work for us. I recently downloaded a file. The website said the file should have a SHA-256 hash of: ca978112ca1bbdcafac231b39a23dc4da786eff8147c4e72b9807785afee48bb So I ran sha256 filename on my machine. And then lazily compared the hโ€ฆ

๐Ÿ‘€ Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/04/lazy-way-to-cause-sha-256-collisions-for-lazy-evaluators/
โธป
#cryptography

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@Edent There's a topic in the HCI & security field overlap about hash visualization, saying that software may want to offer deterministic visualizations of hashes so people can perceive and compare them more holistically. The quintessential work is Perrig & Song (1999): https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~adrian/projects/validation/validation.pdf

A few years ago I got together with a colleague to survey the landscape and propose our own algorithm: :fietkau_science: https://fietkau.science/hash_visualization_password_validation See slide 8 for more prior work examples.

Fun stuff! ๐Ÿ˜€

atomicpoet, to fediversenews
@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org avatar

A few influencers, active both on the โ€œregularโ€ Fediverse and Threads, have noted that having a Threads account hasnโ€™t given them a bigger audience even though Threads has a bigger userbase than (for example) Mastodon.

Quite the opposite. Thereโ€™s more visibility here. People are more likely to interact with your posts. Itโ€™s easier to gain followers as well.

None of this surprises me. Thereโ€™s always been two types of people who build content for social media: those who engage with people, and those who game algorithms.

@fediversenews

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@damon That's super cool that you're working on something on that topic, Damon!

Have I ever shown you this blog post by @maya? https://maya.land/responses/2022/11/28/we-live-in-a-society.html It's been hugely influential on my thinking regarding this matter, and it does a great job highlighting consequences of algorithms and algorithm choice that aren't often talked about. Would recommend taking these thoughts into account as you clarify your own.

@atomicpoet

davew, to random
@davew@mastodon.social avatar

Understanding AP and RSS

I've been trying to figure out what ActivityPub does that RSS doesn't.

Off the top of my head, it's not the ability to syndicate, RSS already does that. I can follow anyone on any server.

I think it's the timeline? And the ability to delete posts. Keeping all that in sync is a lot of work, and presumably a lot of traffic?

Also replies. If I reply to a post when viewing it on another server, the reply should show up under any other view of that post.

What else??

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@davew People mentioned social interactions, which are core in AP. I've seen comment submission facilites grafted onto RSS but it didn't seem like that ever caught on much.

Then there's the push-based model, which allows AP to be fast. When a friend posts on social media, I want to see it in seconds, not after 15 minutes or whatever RSS pull interval.

But yeah, "kinda like RSS" is a useful shorthand for explaining AP, similar to "kinda like email" but with a different venn overlap.

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@davew Oh neat! I hadn't seen that. ๐Ÿ™‚ Yeah, at that point you have something very close to ActivityPub.

From a first glance, one difference seems to be that with AP your follower list is based on individual accounts and not servers/aggregators. Multiple accounts can have shared inboxes to reduce redundant traffic, but they're not mandatory. So arguably AP gives you more knowledge of who your followers are. Now, whether that's on the whole a good thing? ๐Ÿคท

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@davew What I'm getting at is, as I understand rssCloud (like I said, very cursory research just earlier), when someone follows you you get an IP address or a hostname. Which can be a server somewhere (potentially giving multiple people access to the feed) or the person's home or their VPN or whatever.

With ActivityPub, when someone follows you, you get their account. Which of course doesn't need to correspond to an established identity, but it still seems like a qualitative difference.

Edent, to github
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

Oh, nifty! #GitHub now allows you to connect your #ORCiD. When did that happen?

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@Edent It's rather recent: https://scicomm.xyz/

julian, to typescript
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

What am I doing this weekend? Learning , , and @hongminhee's all at the same time, for a project which I'm hoping will be used by many people.

What could possibly go wrong? ๐Ÿ’ช

deadsuperhero, to random
@deadsuperhero@social.wedistribute.org avatar

I wonder how hard it would be to write a simple boost bot? ๐Ÿค”

You'd basically just need an API token for your user, and a way to target a specific account you're following. Upon seeing a new status from that account, your own account would boost it.

Seems simple enough?

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@thisismissem @deadsuperhero Right, but you can have the bot account follow the original account and enable post notifications to finagle that.

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