Macs are outrageously priced for the hardware you get.

Yea sure, we all know this. But we’re talking about software here. Not to be too snarky, but the part you actually use. The differences might not be worth it to you, or maybe you need a gaming PC, but for some, it’s just fine.

I guess unless you use a Mac or something I don’t know.

Yea … you can just use a Mac.

I switched … back in 2006 after being fed up with MS BS. Haven’t looked back. Since then I’ve had 2 laptops. That’s it.

The current one is getting old now, sadly, but part of the trick with Apple is timing your purchases for when they kinda nail the product in the particular design cycle. Don’t buy when they do something new for the first time, aim for near the end of a design cycle generally. And don’t get base specs, add RAM and disk space (perhaps through extended 3rd party devices). And their machines can be very useful for quite a while.

Of course there’s Linux, but you’ll know if you’re ready for that.

This development worries me far more than anything I’ve read about LLM advancements in quite some time.

Yea. Nice pickup.

Only thing I’ve seen that works for combatting AI slop take over is the idea that the value of doing some things is the doing itself, not the product. It seems to cut through the consumerism and metric driven capitalism that has gotten us here, while retaining an anti-bullshit-jobs position.

It’s brilliant IMO (I haven’t seen the latest season but the one before … season 3 did feel like it was losing its way a bit).

The thing with mainstream super hero stuff is that it seems to very much about supporting the status quo without really examining it. Generally, the MCU has been pretty guilty of this AFAICT. It’s also why Winter Soldier is probably the best MCU film IMO … Captain America becomes “the enemy” by standing up for his principles and destroys shield.

The Boys is about examining the status quo and so stands out massively compared to all of the other mainstream superhero stuff.

I claim no expertise here … so take this with plenty of salt. I also don’t know how much of this is specific to the protocol itself or is just the way bluesky have decided to build things.

I see two interesting and nice things here:

• Users and their follows or social graph are portable across the protocol
• The architecture (again, not sure how much of this is a protocol thing) has different levels of centrality or decentralisation for different parts of the system. So you don’t have to pick an instance just to create an account but can instead pick moderation policies and feeds when you want to. The issue is that underlying everything is a big giant server that’s collecting data and spitting it all out as a firehose. There’s only one right now (BlueSky’s) but the code is open and they say that others can start one too (however onerous that would be). The upside is that all the things downstream from the giant server can rely on it and instead make apps, feeds, execute moderation etc … which could be a nicer experience for both devs and users.

In the end, my impression of it is that they’re building more of a framework and ecosystem for others to build social media within. ActivityPub by comparison is much more of a playground of ideas and tools that people can make and host whatever they want with it. So more truly decentralised but also, IMO, puts more weight on the developers and the users to make the ecosystem happen and work well. For instance, we could have more portable user accounts on the fediverse, but we don’t (yet), because that’d have to be built and then implemented by all the platforms.

Once I see another Big Giant Central server running in some sort of sustainable or functioning way, then I personally think it’ll have a lot of promise. Before then, however, a number of developers might get interested in developing in that ecosystem because of how it might allow them to make the thing they’re interested in and not worry about other things.

As for how ATProto and ActivityPub can and should relate to each other in the future … they’re the only two decently sized projects really having a good shot at this decentralised thing (though there a few web3.0 things out there AFAIU, eg farcaster) … and I think they’re better off being “friends” rather than “enemies” for that reason.

If my impression of their differences is accurate, they’ll have different strengths going forward. IMO, ActivityPub will be more of smaller community thing. If all of the neuroscientists want to create a network of forums and blogs, that they’re in control of, around the world that all talk to each other but without being connected to all of the other social media, then the fediverse and its platforms will be the ecosystem to use. If neuroscientists want to talk to the rest of the world but still have ownship and control over their data and maybe their platform or feed or moderation, then AT-Proto will be the place to go. Bridges between the two would complement the flexibility here.

Yea I have. It’s more twitter-like in its vibe. But people seem happy there.

I’m not really a twitter person … so it’s not really my jam. But the AT Proto as an idea interests me and I’m interested to see what happens on it. Big question for is still whether a second (or third etc) relay will every be run.

Well said.

I’ve said it a number of times else where … but it’s easy to forget that the era of mega corp online platforms was a weird time of rampant extraction and manipulation. We’ve got quite a bit of stuff to unlearn and relearn (like your examples).

And of course now with the big corps turning on us to extract more money and use the data they’ve milked from us build AIs to take our jobs away … we have the final proof of what we should have known the whole time … that social media should have kept its roots in organic human organisation.

Realistically, we’ve seen the dying of the open web.

It may not be dead for good but it’s very diseased.

With LLMs/AIs now polluting all sorts of things with rubbish (the fake bug report for cURL is my “favourite” story so far) that is hard to distinguish from genuine human content …

… I’m now thinking it’s dead. Like, we are going to start thinking about using processes of getting and sharing information that don’t just go over the internet.

Closed online environments with gated membership. In person processes where humanity is physically verified. Live conversation to verify actual human understanding. Static sources of information like books and manuals etc.

Not for everything, obviously. But for some things it seems the open internet may soon have a new cost that undermines its value proposition.

I’m personally not interested anymore in just using the open internet. I’m sniffing for some verification that something is worth reading or interacting with.

Well he’s not alone … a number of relatively vocal “fedi-advocates” are positive about it too, even those who also acknowledge that meta/facebook are fucked and defederating from them would make sense.

Which reveals, I think, a curious phenomenon about tech culture and where “we” are up to.

From what I can tell, mainstream Silicon Valley tech culture has permeated out fairly effectively over the decades such that there are now groups of people walking around who consider themselves “the good guys” and have generally progressive political views and believe in OSS and the importance of community etc but are also fundamentally interested in building some tech, making it grow in usage and effecting some ideology or agenda through creating “significant” technology. Some of them seem to have money, or tech know-how or a network into such things and some experience working in the tech world. They’re all mostly, to be fair, probably middle aged white cishet men.

When face-to-face with the prospect of having “your thing” accepted by and (technically) grown to the size of Meta/Facebook/IG, these people seem to not be able to even think about resisting. “Growing the protocol” and “growing” mastodon is what they see here and all the rest is noisy nuance.

This may not be the full corporate buy out worth millions, because they’re “the good guys” and don’t work for big-corps, but this is the equivalent in their “ethical-tech” world … the happy embrace of a big-corp on OSS terms.

Which in many ways makes sense, except in the case of social media so much is about culture and values and trust that sheer “growth” might completely miss the point especially if it’s by riding on the back of a giant that would happily eat or crush you at a whim and has done so many times in the past.

And this is where I’m up to on this issue … both sides seem not to be talking about it much.

What is the “emotional”, “social fabric”, “vibes and feelings” factor in all this … that a place, protocol and ecosystem, predicated on remaking the social web with freedom, independence, humanity and fairness at its core, openly embraces the inundation and invasion of the giant for-profit evil big-corp social media entity this place was defined against? How are we all supposed to feel when that just happens … when Zuck and all the people on his platform is literally just here, not with some consternation but the BDFL’s loud gesture of welcoming embrace? I’m betting most will feel off … like something is wrong. The vibe will shift and fall away a bit … passion and senses of ownership will decay and we may even ask ourselves … “what was the point of coming here in the first place?”.

Now, to be real, it’s not like a big-corp connecting over AP can be prevented, it’s an open protocol after all. But the whole thing would be different if there were open discussions and acknowledgement from the top about the cultural feeling of the disproportionate sizes and power here and the possibilities that it won’t be completely allowed without a more decentralised model. Maybe Threads would have to create their own open source platform which people could run instances of themselves? Or maybe Mastodon could wait until the user sizes are more equal (though that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, which is kinda the point here in many ways right? … that Mastodon is kinda giving up and saying it’d rather be a parasite on a big-corp in order to be significant than just own its niche status?)

Eitherway, it seems clear that many of the power brokers over on mastodon are there to create their own form of influence and this sort of deal with the devil is exactly the poison they’re willing to drink for their ends.

For my purposes … I don’t think I’ll want to hang around mastodon much after Threads federation happens … the embrace from the BDFL and a number of users is just off putting and the platform is too crappy to care about it … I’d rather just go back to twitter than suffer through that swampy egotistical place.

The cost isn’t the software, it’s the time, energy and risk involved in using it.

The combativeness was deployed to fight off combativeness.

It doesn’t help that Mastodon has very little design considerations for dealing with popular accounts, treating every account as if you’re only following your friends and family. (Emphasis mine)

Came to the same realisation myself. The whole “just friends having lunch together” vibe that mastodon aims for simply breaks down at a certain scale, which means is essentially unsuitable as a Twitter replacement for all that looking for that.

The lack of any feed/notifications management then means that you get subjected to all the annoying randos as though they are your friends or neighbours.

Which, coupled with a culture of purism and gatekeeping and HOA-ing leads to what can be a genuinely toxic culture. Not for everyone all the time but enough of the time for some to have found it awful and left.

But not enough talk about this. It’s designed as a suburban social media where you chat to friends and neighbours. Push it beyond that and you’ll have problems.

When I can I try to bring up the idea of “pro bono” developer work with employed developers I know.

Outside of FAANG it garners confused looks because it’s so alien. But the argument never gets any logical pushback because the industry is culturally sick on this issue:

“ Do you use and rely on open source software?

If so some percentage of what your employer gains from that should be provided back, not out of some morality but to keep afloat the open source software ecosystem you and your employer are benefiting from.

What’s more, you and employer will gain more expertise in said software and can even ensure it is more reliable for your purposes.

All employers of developers using open source ought to dedicate a certain number of developer-days per month to open source maintenance and proudly make this number public.

Also, this idea isn’t new, lawyers have been doing this for decades. See this info graphic from a major Australian Law Firm showing off how 1/24th of their work is pro bono.

That’s right, the sharks might be better people for society than your industry is for itself. “

Good to hear. I’ve been on exa for a while now and would hate going back.

Sad to hear of the original author’s disappearance. Hopefully they’re ok!

Overall it’s probably a good thing that it happened on a single instance so it’s easy to identify …?

This is an important point. What cloud providers are flexible on engineer working conditions? I’d imagine they’d all be smaller scale providers?

Oh my that comments section is a tad toxic, and not just because it’s critical of lemmy, that’s fine, but forceful and presumptuous.

Yep I’ve been watching more nebula lately just out of principle frankly … I’ve also been subscribed for a while.

As I see it, it’s the model the really needs to come to the foreground (even here on the fedi in some ways).

Even beyond that, once a technology and platform has been “innovated” and established by big tech or whatever, there should be an immediate push to democratise it as a public good and take it out of big-corp monopolistic hands as all they’ll do is sit on their gold mine extracting as much as they can for as long as they can.

Best part about this is I’m really not sure how close or far from reality it is. Like, this conversation may as well have happened as far as I know.

Sorry this is more of a rant than a real post

Rant my friend! Preach! I feel you on this.

Yea … you have to go the original mastodon instance where the posts originated.

It might actually be a bug that the thread didn’t end up here as comments, or at least something went wrong.