phiofx

@phiofx@hachyderm.io

Φ(χ). A unknown function of an unknown argument.

Microblogging about #opensource, #generativeart, #python, #datascience, #physics, #sustainability, #musictheory, #solarpunk, the #fediverse and random combinations thereof.

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

phiofx, to firefox

I have been using 's for decades. But it now feels that I need to start making contingency plans for the "day after".

Their tainted monetary life-line from is well known and may or may not last. But instead of doing something with it, they squandered their last chance following hypes like the and now . Even the they did wrong, apparently spending big on... running a instance.

Deeply sad, but are there any promising alternatives?

RL_Dane, (edited ) to random
@RL_Dane@fosstodon.org avatar

Dear @mozilla
Please, please, please put the RSS indicator back in Firefox.

People need to know about this technology which empowers users over greedy, controlling corporations.

Update: As many have pointed out, you can use @thunderbird as an RSS feed reader, and there are many #firefox add-ons to restore the RSS indicator (one of which I'm already using). But my point is that Firefox needs to lean into RSS as an answer to all the crap that is the modern web, and help educate users about it

phiofx,

@RL_Dane @mozilla maybe an "activitypub indicator" too? Eg to think what it means to visit a wordpress site that is federating content

gerrymcgovern, to random
@gerrymcgovern@mastodon.green avatar

"Imagine easily replacing batteries and other components yourself, extending the phone’s lifespan without needing specialized technical knowledge. This, coupled with seven years of updates, would truly be a game-changer."

What we need is innovation in order to create a phone where you can remove the battery. This would be true innovation: doing something thought impossible, doing something that's never been done before. What a challenge!

https://www.gizchina.com/2024/02/11/beyond-updates-the-true-value-of-seven-years-of-smartphone-use/

phiofx,

@gerrymcgovern @jackofalltrades @jill_the_pill @FantasticalEconomics

with only mild exaggeration, if you want to isolate true evil in the economic structure of modern societies, its the advertising clan

they are experts in manipulation, triggering base instincts, creating addictions and insatiable demand

think e.g., fashion: the ritualistic churning of clothes every season because "you must"

once they got their hands on tech the dehumanization and mass abuse was inevitable

jonny, to random
@jonny@neuromatch.social avatar

They did WHAT
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/02/05/no-data-no-problem-undisclosed-tinkering-in-excel-behind-economics-paper/

phiofx,

@jonny its wasn't me who did it. It was the invisible hand of the markets

adamchainz, to django
@adamchainz@fosstodon.org avatar

✍️ New post on joining the community on

💁‍♂️ Share with your non-Fediversing friends!

https://adamj.eu/tech/2024/02/10/django-join-community-mastodon/

phiofx,

@adamchainz @paulox there are several django based instances, i think is another. But as far as i can tell alot is still in alpha and none has seen significant adoption. Its a bit of a pity. With the large numbers of python enthousiasts and contributors such a stack could made a difference for building out the

seanpatrickphd, to random
@seanpatrickphd@mastodon.social avatar

It's so nice outside! I wish the Earth didn't have to die for the weather to be nice in February in New England.

phiofx,

@seanpatrickphd

the Earth won't die and neither will we (at least as a species).

But our innocence (or at least the pretense thereof) is already dead.

From now on anything happens to the biosphere we know who's fingerprints were on the trigger.

And that will be a heavy psychological burden that did not exist ever before in our history.

rberger, to random
@rberger@hachyderm.io avatar

“Look, I know that Eisenhower didn't trade cow-lips for alien technology - but our political and commercial elites really did trade national resiliency away for IP laws, and it's a bargain that screwed everyone, except the one percenters whose power and wealth have metastasized into a deadly cancer that threatens the country and the planet.” - @pluralistic

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/07/farewell-mr-chips/

phiofx,

@rberger @pluralistic

"Electrifying, solarizing and adapting the world for climate resilience is fundamentally incompatible with a brittle, highly concentrated tech sector."

I like this sentence a lot. The sustainability transition (which is actually quite a bit more complex than just climate) is on a par with the agricultural and industrial revolutions as how profound it will be. I can only see it happening in a globally more balanced collective. A broad-based silicon agriculture of sorts.

molly0xfff, to web3
@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io avatar

Review: In "Read Write Own", the Andreessen Horowitz general partner and web3 superfan Chris Dixon lays out an unconvincing argument that blockchains are what it will take to fix the web.

https://www.citationneeded.news/review-read-write-own-by-chris-dixon/

#web3 #blockchain #cryptocurrency #crypto #AndreessenHorowitz #CitationNeeded

phiofx,

@molly0xfff what is fascinating (in a morbid way) is that it seems we have entered an era where the nature of technology ideas is no longer particularly relevant.

What is critical is to have tech talking points, some seed of a technology to spin a narrative. But it cant be anything humble: it must be stretchable into an "X will eat the world five times over" kind of level. will run everything, will account everything, we will all be 24/7 in an infinite etc.

danhulton, to random
@danhulton@hachyderm.io avatar

My timeline is split evenly between two camps:

  • "I don't know why ANYONE would use an Apple Vision Pro. It's stupid and anyone who likes it is stupid."
  • "Huh. This is actually pretty neat."

Look, I don't think the AVP is for me, probably, but if I had to pick a camp to hang out in, it sure wouldn't be the first one. It's an entirely optional tech gizmo; it's not worth villifying people over.

phiofx,

@danhulton there will be some people who will like VR goggles. But it doesnt feel that its going to be a mainstream UI - in the short term at least. The backlash is probably due to Apple fanboys overstating the case as they usually do.

phiofx,

@danhulton hmm, I don't really know. There is strong tech backlash in various quarters (imho broadly speaking justified) but whether thats what you are seeing in this specific case is another matter.

wagtail, to fediverse
@wagtail@fosstodon.org avatar

👋 Fediverse folks, what do you think of adding support in or ? See discussion: https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/discussions/9732

It’s a neat idea, a few other platforms have it as a package, we’re wondering how much interest there would be

phiofx,

@wagtail its a great idea as it would make potentially any django / wagtail installation a first class citizen of the fediverse, expanding functionality in various novel ways

There are already several django based activitypub servers (I am aware of , , ) and related projects (, ) but it seems there is zero code re-use among them.

phiofx,

@wagtail @paulox lots of options indeed. Picking the brains of the maintainers of these projects probably advisable as a production ready activitypub implementation (that would federate properly e.g. with opinionated mastodon servers) seems to be a decent can of worms :-)

cc:
@andrew
@cda
@alain

phiofx, to foss

My unscientific, high level, impression from (virtual) attendance of is that we are entering a third period of the "movement".

The lone hacker years are fading away, the embrace is currently very dominant but we are slowly getting into yet another era where the public sector is involved.

We might call it the or era.

In the end code, being a form of cultural expression, will reflect more or less the structure of society

manlycoffee, to fediverse
@manlycoffee@techhub.social avatar

Ideally, at the bare minimum, ActivityPub should have explicitly specified the "shape" of JSON (not JSON-LD) documents.

For example, the spec could have stipulated:

"An Actor document MUST contain the following fields, and MAY be extended via JSON-LD contexts"

And then also stipulate:

"Clients SHOULD expand incoming JSON-LD documents".

This way, applications could skip the expansions step for significantly large subset of the Fediverse.

This is important because not all environments (languages, runtime environemnts, etc.) have the luxury of expanding JSON-LD documents.

phiofx,

@smallcircles @manlycoffee

It might be useful to define what different levels of interoperability mean as more diverse implementations with very different motivations and use cases enter the network (that can never fully interoperate and would not need or want it)

There is probably something like the "minimum" interoperability that is required and useful but this is not jumping at you from the specification. Maybe thats why conformance testing is still lacking?

phiofx,

@smallcircles @manlycoffee what I would ideally like to have is a layered approach (its core, mantle, crust if we use a geological analogy) where each additional layer provides enhanced functionality and eventually things split into continental plates that do their own specialties.

At the very core it could be something very simple, e.g., servers ping each other, exchange actor lists, basically just establish what the network is. Next level support type notifications etc.

davew, to random
@davew@mastodon.social avatar

This is a tiny little text box. My goal is to eradicate these beasts.

phiofx,

@devnull

a quick UI win would be if mastodon fixed its little threads problem (the capital Threads problem is a different story :-).

People were pointing out to me that Pleroma and others have done this already.

@david_megginson @davew @evan

phiofx,

@devnull @david_megginson @davew @evan its when the neat, sequentially linked comments become a bushy tree if somebody replies to a comment higher up.

A busy "discussion" (that may last days or weeks) with many participants in different branches of the tree is very cumbersome to get an overview of. Like parallel, non-interacting universes.

Not to mention that every new joiner in the discussion reduces your available reply text length, but maybe that is a feature not a bug :-)

phiofx, to random

There seems to be a trend of people declaring on the profiles what shade of / they feel attached to. A sign of our times I suppose.

My sense is that this more an emotional / character aspect than any purely rational argument.

But I am justifying my own (mostly) optimistic stance by stealing Pascal's timeless argument:

Even under the assumption that there is no hope, the potential benefits of thinking there is hope are so vast as to make betting on it rational.

darnell, to threads
@darnell@one.darnell.one avatar

So is slowly killing off , & Shop is spamming users to the point they are reopening ‽ I can not wait to introduce people to ! 🕺🏾

👉🏾 Instagram Threads triples downloads in December, reaching the top 10; X falls to No. 36 https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/30/instagram-threads-triples-downloads-in-december-reaching-the-top-10-x-falls-to-no-36/

phiofx,

@notroot

Yeah, I am thinking along the same lines. The fediverse as composed from various activitypub implementations is basically an upgrade of the entire web to make it more interactive.

The other day I spotted somebody working on a extension. Its literally a leave-nobody-behind kind of transformation.

Mastodon is a pioneer, the way the first websites were pioneering. But in few years there will be thousands of specialized alternatives.

@darnell @badtux @DopeGhoti

phiofx,

@danjac

Yes, we need more of everything: libraries in all languages, documentation, best practice blogs, "learn the fediverse in 24hr" type books, evangelists, UI experts, artists, communication psychologists, complexity science specialists, users that dont just complain but raise specific issues in repos etc :-)

Above all imagination, a positive 'can do' and cooperative ethos and an understanding that its all still being built on zero or tiny budgets.

@notroot @darnell @badtux @DopeGhoti

isagalaev, to random
@isagalaev@mastodon.social avatar

I never heard the term "evolutionary design", although this is apparently the way I design software (and try to teach others to do it). Here's a perfect, short and to the point, explanation of the concept by @CodingItWrong: https://codingitwrong.com/2024/01/29/brief-summary-of-evolutionary-design

Also a good reminder of what the word "refactoring" actually means, despite it being widely used to refer to any arbitrary reshuffling of code.

phiofx,

@isagalaev @CodingItWrong evolutionary design makes a lot of sense, except when it doesnt and it needs to become... revolutionary? :-)

I mean this dreadful moment when after many incremental changes that worked okayish you realise you have been under-engineering things and you must make major and costly revisions.

phiofx,

@isagalaev @CodingItWrong but thats just ex-post semantics. You only know that it was a shortcut rather than the simplest future proof solution when a requirement comes in that reveals that this is the case.

phiofx, to fediverse

With exploring support the plot thickens.

Many people use for visibility and discovery of their projects. Alternative patterns that make network effects of "winner-takes-all" centralization less oppressive are great.

Another win is simply more eyeballs and brains to push the federation vision technically.

Maybe most importantly, this trend will help expand the beyond meme sharing echo-chambers into meaningful, long-term valuable content.

Real stuff.

avhuffelen, to random Dutch
@avhuffelen@social.overheid.nl avatar

https://www.nu.nl/tech/6299220/staatssecretaris-van-huffelen-digitalisering-stopt-met-x-vanwege-wanbeleid.html

Ik ben gestopt met het platform X en blijf mijn activiteiten hier en op LinkedIn voortzetten.

phiofx,

@avhuffelen hopelijk komt er ooit ook een open source linkedin alternatief

johncarlosbaez, (edited ) to random
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz avatar

If our civilization collapses, extraterrestrial archeologists can look at this and be impressed. Three satellites following the Earth in an equilateral triangle, each 2.5 million kilometers from the other two. Each contains two gold cubes in free-fall. The satellites accelerate just enough so they don't get blown off course by the solar wind. The gold cubes inside feel nothing but gravity.

Lasers bounce between each cube and its partner in another satellite, measuring the distance between them to an accuracy of 20 picometers: less than the diameter of a helium atom! This lets the satellites detect gravitational waves — ripples in the curvature of spacetime — with very long wavelengths, and correspondingly low frequencies.

It should see so many binary white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes in the Milky Way that these will be nothing but foreground noise. More excitingly, it should see mergers of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies as far as... the dawn of time, or whenever such black holes were first formed. (The farther you look, the older things you see.)

It may even be able to see the "gravitational background radiation": the thrumming vibrations in the fabric of spacetime left over from the Big Bang. These gravitational waves were created before the hot gas in the Universe cooled down enough to become transparent to light. So they're older than the microwave background radiation, which is the oldest thing we see now.

It's called LISA - the Laser Interferometric Satellite Antenna. And we're in luck: ESA has just decided to launch it in 2035.

phiofx,

@johncarlosbaez so far gravitational wave detection and black hole astrophysics do not seem to change our (broad brush) views on gravity and cosmology. Is there a chance that LISA will actually shake things up a bit (or a lot)?

Aka, our civilization collapsed, but for a brief moment our silly putty brains reflected the true nature of the Universe...

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