rimunroe

Twitter became a global phenomenon with the same UI and an even slower ruby on rails implementation behind it, despite the constant fail whale.

I’m not sure what this comment is responding to. I don’t want a constant fail whale or a slow experience, and I don’t think a lot of other people would want that either.

As you're already self-hosting ATproto anyway, why not self-host a mastodon instance as well?

Hosting a PDS is free, plus it’s considerably lighter weight conceptually than a whole Mastodon instance!

I don’t think the problem I want solved here is replicating forums, blogs, IRC, Teamspeak, or gaming servers. I want something a lot like Twitter but with some way to take my stuff and leave if an asshole takes control. I don’t want Mastodon, because from what I’ve seen of it when friends link me stuff from it it’s extremely clunky and slow. Plus, whenever I’ve gone to create an account I’ve been presented with a huge list of servers to chose from, many of which seem to be focused on a specific topic, which makes me think I need to pick which community I want to be tied to with minimal knowledge.

I thought Rosetta 2 was a purely software layer

I would think that would be hard to do if you've already seen what appropriate portions are.

This would be true if not knowing what an appropriate portion size is was the one thing keeping most people from losing weight. If that was the case, traditional dieting would have a far better track record with long term weight loss.

Email is very much decentralized.

It looks like about 97% of people use iCloud, Gmail, or Outlook as their provider. That doesn't feel like it's terribly different. The people not using one of those big three make up a comparable percent of the total as the number of Bluesky users using alternative PDSes.

Three providers vs one provider does feel very different if those are the only option, but that's not the case for email or Bluesky/AT proto.

I can set up an email account in a few minutes and by choosing from a list of thousands of providers all over the world.

You can also set up an account on a different PDS and/or use a different app view quite trivially too so I'm not sure that's substantially different.

The thing I was responding to was about pricing policy in general, but I would assume so

Usually the advertised price must be honored, because it may have brought the customer to your store.

This is not the case for groceries in Massachusetts at least. If there’s a discrepancy between the tag’s price and the scanned price the store must charge the customer the lowest of the two: https://www.mass.gov/price-accuracy-information

ATproto does support storing data elsewhere. That’s what a PDS does. I’m not sure what you mean by an offline-first system in this context though or why it’s required for decentralization. Could you elaborate?

It sounds like Blacksky's outage was much more limited and was caused by them missing some spots where their code still accidentally had some Bluesky integration due to it being the default: https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3mjnf6pubr...

If by "decentralised" you mean "0.001% of it is not only hosted centrally"

Sure, much like how email is decentralized in theory but barely is in practice. This doesn’t mean that the decentralized nature is just a marketing gimmick.

It’s unsurprising that almost everyone uses the Bluesky app given that A) the infrastructure for hosting your own relay or app view (I can’t remember which) didn’t have a reference implementation until a while after launch, and B) the user base is much less tech-y than what I’ve seen on Mastodon. Most of the user base moved over in the flight from Twitter/X a couple years ago. I think if it had come out at a different time you’d see something which looked a lot more like Mastodon’s large population distribution.

Also, while this doesn't really matter it looks like the number of users on non-Bluesky PDSes is 1.42% of the total, not 0.001%.

They have designed a protocol that could theoretically be decentralised. Then reality hit, and it was centralised.

Could you explain what you mean by the underlying protocol having become centralized over time? While I can understand arguing about whether or not Bluesky-the-social-network is practically decentralized to the degree of something like Mastodon or that it became more centralized over time, I think arguing that ATproto[1] itself isn’t decentralized would be ludicrous.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03239

The Bluesky app view is centralized in that it can decide which content to show, but A) the hosting of that content is decentralized, and B) alternate app views like Blacksky exist which are fully independent of Bluesky (both Bluesky the company and Bluesky the app view). The Bluesky app view could stop showing users content from Blacksky (or any other) PDSes, but that's it. If you're using the Blacksky app view, afaik Bluesky the company can't do anything other than cut you off from Bluesky's PDSes.

My understanding is that ATProto itself is definitely decentralized but the app view most people interact with using the Bluesky app is centralized ...sort of. The Bluesky app view will read from PDSes hosted by other people, hence people on Bluesky can see stuff posted elsewhere, like users of Blacksky. If the Bluesky app view decides to stop reading from any other PDS (like those of Blacksky, or ones which are self-hosted) they're free to do so. The same is true for alternative app views like Blacksky. Since most people think of Bluesky as the thing you see on the official Bluesky app (which shows the Bluesky app view) an outage of the Bluesky app view will mean they lose the ability to view any posts from any source. If someone's using a separate app view like Blacksky, the most that will happen to them should be that they'll lose interaction with posts coming from Bluesky's PDSes until the outage ends.

I may have the division between Bluesky and Blacksky off, but ATProto does allow this sort of thing. Hosting a PDS is trivial and requires very few resources. Hosting a full app view can be expensive depending on how many PDSes you're ingesting from, but you can decide how much of that you want to do.

Don't the vast majority of young people entering the workforce have no capital gains to deal with at all? That tends to be more of a problem for people who are already well off. Are you talking about a narrower demographic or something?

The amounts you paid in capital gains are about 50% higher than I've ever paid. That was the second year I worked at a big tech company and suddenly had stock, which was about a decade into an my extremely lucrative career as a software developer. Most of my friends don't have to deal with capital gains at all because they're not part of the investor class. On average the rates of trading must be much lower for people in their 20s, no?

I see young people frustrated when their cars get broken into or when they get robbed and criminals are not held accountable.

How often are your peers experiencing these crimes? Assuming you're in the US based on your comments, crime rates are much lower now than when in the early 2010s when I was a young adult and quite hopeful despite thinking my job prospects were bleak and that I'd never be able to afford a home.

[...] I'm personally stronger than that.

Respectfully, I think all of your actions here contradict that claim. It's easy for a person to mistake having a temper with strength. It doesn't take strength to get pissed off and lash out at someone who is angry at you. That's something most people naturally want to do, and it's something which we work hard to teach kids to resist. It takes a lot of strength to try to put aside your immediate, gut reaction and attempt to deescalate. Your statements elsewhere in this comment section and in the blog post give the impression of a person who feels entitled and is angrily rejecting taking responsibility for the negative consequences of their actions.

Ah gotcha. That seems much more reasonable!

How can people be so naive as to run something like Claude anywhere other than in a strictly locked down sandbox that has no access to anything but the single git repo they are working on (and certainly no creds to push code)?

This is absolutely insane behavior that you would give Claude access to your GitHub creds. What happens when it sees a prompt injection attack somewhere and exfiltrates all of your creds or wipes out all of your repos?

I don’t understand why people are so chill about doing this. I have AI running on a dedicated machine which has absolutely no access to any of my own accounts/data. I want that stuff hardware isolated. The AI pushes up work to a self-hosted Gitea instance using a low-permission account. This setup is also nice because I can determine provenance of changes easily.

A heat pump house uses perhaps 40-50kwh in deep winter.

Over what time period, and where? My geothermal system draws about 1200 watts when heating our large house on the coldest days of the year

No idea. I was just chiming in to say that is indeed the case with YouTube for some people.

To elaborate, I think experts usually use these terms as follows: an addiction is something where you have a continuous and difficult to resist drive to keep doing/using something due to it being inherently rewarding. A dependence is something where if you stop regularly doing/using something you’ll experience some sort of withdrawal.

I knew someone who had exactly that feeling about YouTube. It was a genuine struggle for them to stop even though the amount of time they spent on it was negatively impacting their life and the content was making them more anxious.

You can inject these things pretty easily. They're about the size of a grain of rice, and pretty popular in some circles.

They waited on the line until I said I'd deleted it and then immediately reactivated my connection.

Funnily enough the only time I ever got in trouble for torrenting anything was when Cox was my ISP circa 2009. I'd been torrenting some PSP game and my connection went down. When I called the helpline they explained what happened and said they'd restore access once I confirmed I'd deleted the downloaded file.

Thanks! I forgot that article, but now I remember that I read or skimmed it when it made the rounds last year. It's actually where I first learned that the aqueducts were uncovered!

I was surprised to find out it was largely uncovered, though I guess it probably makes it much cheaper to construct. I usually think of aqueducts as pipes or tunnels, like Persian qanāts. I wonder how much water is lost due to evaporation.

If wife and husband are home during her most fertile time window in a cycle, she will instinctively “find him” [...]

Have you known many couples who had trouble trying to conceive? There's a reason fertility monitoring strips, apps, etc. are such a huge market, and it's not because people are trying to avoid pregnancy.

[...] for some magic moments that may not be particularly planned or even romantic, rather more characterized by a delightful and clumsy urgency.

I guarantee that if you interviewed couples who had been unsuccessfully trying to conceive for a long time a large number of them would strongly disagree with using "delightful" to describe the urgency of sex during the fertility window.

I worked for five years at a shop where a few years in we started pair programming aggressively. One of our most experienced engineers was really into XP and agile work (in the “purer” meaning of the term). He often suggested pairing when thorny problems came up, and eventually it spread. It often took half or more of the available time for programming each day. That was by far the best working environment I’ve been in. The team was excellent and it seems like we all improved in our skills when we started doing it more. We cut down on how long it took to get in while managing to produce better code. It made planning features and adjusting to unforeseen snags in plans so much quicker. I can’t emphasize enough how much of an impact it made on me as a developer or how much I miss it.

The biggest downside to me was that it forces a level of engagement exceeding the most heads down solo work I’ve done. I’d come home and feel mentally exhausted in a way I didn’t usually.

I'd say this is the crux of the matter.

That's why my opening paragraph and final paragraphs were devoted to it :)

I feel like a lot of the things I hear from other folks is that I'm missing the possibility of programming the way I used to, rather than being sad that it might no longer be practical within the constraints of my life. Even if I did start doing it on the side, going from eight hours a day programming to squeezing in one or two would be quite the change.

You could perhaps even start your own company if it's that important to you.

I have no interest in ever starting or running a company. Every person I've known who does it has it consume their life. I'd rather spend time with my family and do stuff which doesn't involve a boatload of stress and additional responsibility. Not to mention that in the case where I'm no longer able to find a job programming the way I used to then I don't think it's likely a company where people did that would be competitive enough to survive, at least not normally. Also, one of the reasons I rarely program on the side is that I don't often have ideas for things to make. I just don't feel the need for much software in my personal life, and certainly don't think of the sorts of things where there's a market for them.

Having a lucrative job where you do something where you find great satisfaction in your daily work isn't the norm and is the privilege of a lucky few, but that doesn't mean they aren't justified in feeling sad at the prospect of it going away.

Exactly. I said this elsewhere in here, but I’ve felt extremely lucky that for the last 13 years I’ve gotten paid to do something that would otherwise have to be a hobby. The problem is that I have other hobbies already and am a parent with limited time to devote to such things in the first place. It’s valid to miss things you were extremely lucky to have in the first place.