hendrik

Haha. But seriously, what’s your problem? You don’t even use the software?

Of course. I’ve had a glimpse at the changelog every now and then and there’s a lot of substantial changes in there and multiple new features. I can understand how that makes it a bit more involved to get a release done.

Not sure if Lemmy admins are adventurous like that. From where I’m at, I can see exactly one instance running 1.0.0 code and that’s voyager.lemmy.ml

It’s difficult to discuss development in public places like here. There’s always a hundred things on the backlog. People want this, other people want that and someone needs exactly the opposite if all of it. There are a a bazilion ways users can annoy each other and all of it needs fixing. Then a project needs to be stable and reliable. It also needs new features. Performance needs to be right… It’s a proper nightmare job to balance all of it and maintain a mid-sized project. On top of it people will feel entitled, send in security vulnerabilities, complicated stuff that needs review and messes with things, other devs want something to be cleaned up, changed around, want someone to write more or less unit tests… and that also needs time for a plethora of good communication. And then there’s the actual architecture design and coding, which isn’t easy to begin with.

I didn’t study the code. But I’d bet the representation in the database stays the same, no matter which way it’s phrased on transport. It’s some sql relation between answer and post either way. A UI will also want to know how to style a comment at the point it processes that comment, so it makes sense to have it there. On the other hand it makes more sense for the semantics to have it attached to the post. Then there’s who can edit it. We need to trust incoming notes from third parties anyway. And maybe admins or mods can change it as well. They might be on arbitrary instances. So I’m not even sure if it changes anything with security.

And then there’s always many ways to skin a cat in software development. We can have long meetings to write specifications. We can choose to be a bit more explorative and figure things out along the way. We can even choose to make mistakes and fix them later. I think that’s a great thing with computer programming. Fixing mistakes is usually very cheap compared to for example a mechanical engineer who maybe likes to avoid wrecking a $1m piece of equipment. But that also means software developers have the opportunity to work a different way. And there’s a time for each of the methods. The trick is to apply the correct one at the correct time. I really can’t make a good statement here, I’d need to read the code and judge based on all the nuances I just mentioned. It’s regularly not as simple as something appears from the outside.

Ah thanks. I wrongfully assumed alpha meant alpha testing version. But seems there’s still a lot to do before that.

Good thing we have both development models and people can just pick what they like. I know which one I prefer. 😆 And seems Lemmy is approaching a release with their efforts of the last years as well, they’re at alpha.17 these days…

Yeah, I wish there was a good technical solution for this baked into the Fediverse. PieFed has some of that, you get some features for migrating communities there. But all of this is integral part of this place. We also have like 10 technology communities. It’s not obvious what to subscribe to. Some formed due to growth and changed dynamics. Some because someone was against AI and someone else pro AI, and they split off and made yet another community with the same name. None of that is intuitive to newbies. You can of course subscribe to all of them but then you’ll regularly get the same post 5 times in your timeline because it also leads to cross-posting and all kinds of things… This is by design, though. And it’s difficult to design online platforms to be easy to use, cater to all people, grant freedom to everyone… I think we still got some room for improvement 😉

Yes. Entirely different software. Different programming language and tech stack. Also different system requirements and feature set.

Not sure about the developer spirit. PieFed development has traditionally been moving crazy fast and it gets like several new features every month. I think that’s a matter of focus. It comes with consequences, though. But I think overall the project is doing a good job with trying to be compatible to other software. Prioritizing important stuff and doing the right thing. Sometimes some things get done, rather than be 100% perfect. But past experience tells me things often get fixed or changed around once necessary. Not sure if that’s a wise decision here. The JSON exchanged between the servers is probably extra work if changed around later.

I use LibreWolf on the computer and IronWolf on the phone. Both modified versions of Firefox, both Free Software. Not sure what they do with AI, but as they’re both aimed at privacy, I’d expect them to disable AI features which send data to external services.

Grok is tuned to view Elon Musk as its God, Lord and Saviour, source of truth… And deny the holocaust. So naturally it’d say things like this.

Edit: And grok.com doesn’t. It says it would NOT flip any switch to kill 16M innocent people. Maybe this is just the persona it assumes on X… If someone doesn’t like it, I’d recommend to quit X. Try Mastodon or Bluesky instead.

I think the entire origin story of Amazon and why they outcompeted other bookstores, online- and mail-order companies was automation and their more streamlined processes. Afaik they’ve made sure to implement it as an entire chain from end to end, and that’s been their huge advantage from early on.

[…] said the company has now been able to mitigate the serious mental health risks and […]

Wow. So they don’t just ignore all the warnings about detected suicidal thoughts any longer? As far as I remember from the news stories, that specific teenager got flagged hundreds of times by their systems for spiralling towards suicide. It’s just that OpenAI didn’t do anything…

The question is unclear to me. You mean phone apps to access it? Other server projects with the same idea and they’re Free Software?

Idk, does AI have anything to offer on the empathy side, except sycophancy and repeating what I just said, and then repeating itself three times before slowly steering towards a reply?

I believe my WebOS version is so old, they stopped any update or data collection servers. I had developer mode running before. That’s perfectly alright. Just a bit annoying to constantly refresh, and somehow my attempts to automate it failed. So one day I rooted it and now I have full ssh access, a homebrew channel… And I would have liked to use that to run an Ambilight, and that requires root. Sadly it requires a newer operating system version so I still don’t have any LEDs in the background.

Youtube-webos is the single reason why I’ve resumed watching YT in the livingroom. I had stopped when they introduced the second pre-roll ad and a lot of things became unskippable. Now my old TV is rooted, it doesn’t really phone home, it doesn’t show ads and it’s a breeze. Let’s hope it stays that way, because Google is already trying to fight the adblockers for some time now.

I used to run such things on my NAS/Server at home (And I still do, though I’m currently changing some things.) But in addition to the 4.50€ for ~20W of electricity, it was maybe 600€ for the machine, so another 5€ a month over 10 years. And then my internet contract is a bit more expensive because I need an IPv4 address which can do port forwarding… On the flipside, I can just attach a 10TB harddrive and have it available everywhere. And that’d be very expensive with a cloud service or hoster.

Yes. I also have my own small VPS doing this (Piefed), Peertube, eMail, Nextcloud… for myself and family if they want. And that’s $8 a month. I wonder why it doesn’t scale down drastically with more users. I mean sure they generate a lot of requests. But then you only need to cache an image or pull in the posts and replies once for 12.000 users, while my server does that just for me. (Albeit for Lemmy, which is way smaller than Mastodon).

Wow. That is a lot of server power. And these things ain’t cheap.

$5000 a month sounds a lot for forwarding text messages and images. According to the Fediverse Observer they have 12,000 active users (boils down to $5 per user a year), but still… Is it that much storage or computationally so expensive to federate posts?

I don’t think that’s affected. It sounds more like political propaganda which gets allowed. I bet this will still be censored and lead to demonetization just as it is today.