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 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

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

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.

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 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.

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, 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.

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.

SallyStrange, to Economics
@SallyStrange@eldritch.cafe avatar

"Debunking degrowth" or trying to, anyway

"In the degrowth literature, a caricature of the typical economist is presented as believing in unlimited economic growth, and that growth should be pursued regardless of its environmental impact. This is a straw man. It would be a naïve economist who did not recognise that constraints exist. And economists usually limit their projections to a few decades to come, rather than to the infinite future, in which they supposedly believe in unlimited exponential economic growth. Certainly, there are theoretical economic growth models which portray the possibility of exponential growth into the infinite future, but economists have had enough common sense not to assume stylised theoretical models are the be-all-and-end-all when it comes to public policy."

Then why, Mr. Tunny, is it so hard to find an economist who can tell us when the economy should stop growing?

#degrowth #capitalism #Economics

https://www.cis.org.au/publication/debunking-degrowth/

phiofx,

@jackofalltrades @HeavenlyPossum @SallyStrange @pleaseclap @simon_brooke @violetmadder @mwt stupidity is the stuff of humanity. The challenge is when we cover it up (or worse, exploit it for advantage) when we should be admitting the limits of our knowledge and behave accordingly.

phiofx, to rust

For several years it seemed like deficiencies of older ecosystems will usher new takes: #rust fixing #cpp, #kotlin fixing #java, #julia fixing #python, #wasm fixing #javascript etc.

But it no longer feels so. Maybe it was a case of "you have to move fast to fix things" and as incumbents raise their game the window of opportunity closes. The vast investment in established stacks incentivises patching the most egregious weaknesses.

One exception seems #golang, which found a network niche

gyptazy, to mastodon
@gyptazy@gyptazy.ch avatar

's memory usage is really insane - in a very positive way! If you have ever played around with you know how much memory you only need for running all the services... / is not only leightwight in code, easy to compile and to set up but also when running and maintaining.

cc: @stefano @grunfink

phiofx,

@gyptazy @stefano @grunfink being written in C its not too surprising that its economical (though by no means automatic... somebody wrote good code :-) but in terms of easy extensibility using low level language has some drawbacks.

smallcircles, to fediverse
@smallcircles@social.coop avatar

For the question of "Why use ?" has never been answered. There should be clear merits to wade through all the complexity that this choice brings, right?

Yes, its ultra flexible, and you can define your own semantic , and theoretically it could provide a robust extension mechanism to AP protocol. Except that right now it doesn't.

What's the vision of a Linked Data ? What great innovative would it bring, that makes it worthwhile?

phiofx,

@smallcircles @evan @steve the lack of killer app in the / context derives from not having a gee-wow usecase in any context. Bioinformatics is most avant-garde here (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-019-0162-5) and whenever there is a delightful surprise in tooling it is motivated by this niche (e.g https://owlready2.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).

If its good enough for physical health it should be good enough for social health but may take a long while to get there.

thomasfuchs, (edited ) to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

We could have home-use tests like this—for pennies on the dollar—but we don’t because we have utterly corrupt political leadership having bullshitted everyone for decades, purely for personal gain.

phiofx,

@thomasfuchs the amount of talent and knowledge and resources that exists
today in the world are astonishing.

It takes very effective corruption, trickery, lies and fake narratives to hold us back and perpetuate avoidable misery and suffering.

Let us hope (and work) during the next orbit around Sol towards a more empowered world, with more advance warnings and tests against diseases of all kinds.

stefano, to fediverse
@stefano@bsd.cafe avatar

Big Fedi, Small Fedi

https://evanp.me/2023/12/26/big-fedi-small-fedi/

phiofx,

@smallcircles @stefano the unknown factor is the degree and speed of diffusion. Corporate control of tech follows it being the only economic pattern that cajoled enough brains to tap into its potential. The public sector doing the same is (maybe) the next phase. Yet individual digital sovereignty through tech literacy is the noblest destiny of the fediverse. Should be (imho) an explicit human right / UN as this will shape our future more than anything else.

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

Few people know this, but USB is the successor of USA

phiofx,

@thomasfuchs alas almost completely dominated these days by USD

dansup, to Pixelfed
@dansup@mastodon.social avatar

After some careful consideration, I have decided to block threads.net on pixelfed.social and .art by default

However, users will have the ability to unblock the domain

Soon we will be selectively enforcing authorized fetch for accounts with domain blocks so as to provide the best of both worlds.

(I'm also shipping a command for :pixelfed: admins to easily add user domain blocks for all local users)

I'm eager to hear your feedback!

PR: https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/pull/4834

#pixelfed #userDomainBlocks

phiofx,

@berkes I am convinced that if people keep building in line with the human-centric values of the fediverse there is nothing to worry about (no real threats from threads). Adtech based of profiling user behaviors has been an all dominating force not just in social media but almost all personal computing experience, but it has saturated and is end-of-life because thats how capitalism works: no growth = death.

Meta/Threads wants to cannibalize Twitter? Be my guest.

@dansup

phiofx, to random

@smallcircles @astrojuanlu @daniel

They could indeed hijack the technical developments. When you print billions per quarter you can attract serious technical talent (though obviously low on moral values). Open source projects like react for frontend or pytorch for ML have redefined the respective domains.

But their commercial interest is fundamentally misaligned with a (re)democratized web. Not clear how they could extract rents if they support building the tools that empower people not to.

phiofx, to Wikipedia

has changed the world and is written in (at that point of "fractal of bad design" fame).

has changed the world and is written in .

is on its way for similar impact.

The choice of tech platform doesnt seem to have much correlation with whether a project will have impact.

There is an abundance of practically equivalent ways of implementing the same old ideas but a scarcity of really good new ideas...

phiofx, to ai

On the occasion of the fiasco Simon Willison raises the debilitating issue of (lack of) in the so-called industry.

I think he is being naive about the amount of spying that goes on on mobile. Maybe Meta doesnt do it in the in-your-face way others do, but most people have dozens of popular apps from various operators (I have witnessed first hand live conversation showing up as ads minutes later).

The "tech" industry right now is a moral cesspool.

https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/14/ai-trust-crisis/

phiofx, to cpp

Wow, TIL that , the powerful library for all sorts of numerical computing started as a project to support visualization. Eigen is now a building block in various efforts.

The magic of development is that pieces evolve, recombine and are re-used in novel contexts, almost like a biological process.

sb, to python
@sb@fed.sbcloud.cc avatar

I'm several decades familiar with many, many programming languages, but have about a half-dozen that I'd consider daily driver languages. is not one of them.

I'm writing a lil' thing in , and have to keep looking up what modules to include for basic things... and every single time, the answer is exactly what I would have intuited.

"What would I call my datetime module if I were me? I'd call it datetime." It's datetime.

"If I wanted today's date, I'd want 'date.today()'". Yup.

I guess that's why it's so widely recommended as a starter language. Not starter because it's lacks advanced features, but because it lacks unnecessary confusion!

phiofx,

@sb Its now mostly a distant memory but the first impression of after a lifetime of c++ etc. still lingers in my mind.

It was: wow, is it legal to have such an easy time, and dare I say fun, getting things done? :-)

phiofx, to sustainability

For the entire period we call "History" humans lived unsustainably.

Good example is , an ongoing project since 3000 BC. Its only the rate that accelerated in the industrial era.

While people are not "anti-nature", living in equilibrium with it is not deeply and irrevocably embedded in cultures and economies.

is not a return to something, its something we need to invent: an exciting, beautiful, future. Unlocking a new level.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3A8000_BCE%2B_Loss_of_forest_and_grassland_to_grazing_and_crops.svg

phiofx, to fediverse

Some confused and naive human made the terrible mistake (i suppose around 10000 BC) of domesticating some feline species or other and now the has to endure on an recurring seven day pattern.


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