skyfaller

Everyone has a limit to how much bullshit they'll put up with. This could be the last straw for some people to finally quit Instagram. I quit Instagram, Facebook and all other Meta properties in 2025, after complaining about various problems for years. Other people may quit temporarily and then return, but any time they spend away from Instagram may give them experience that will help them quit permanently later.

Good news, you can grab the source code and host it yourself on a less troubling domain:

https://git.j3s.sh/vore

It's under the NON-VIOLENT PUBLIC LICENSE v5, which is probably not open source, but should be fine for personal use if you're not an arms dealer or prison warden.

One of my favorite RSS readers is https://vore.website - river of news, no unread indicators, simple. It's a website, as the domain suggests, so no need to install anything.

Such errors can be caught and auto-fixed for now, because LLMs haven't yet rotted the code that catches and auto-fixes errors. If slop makes it into your compiler etc., I wouldn't count on that being true in the future.

One modern approach would be Caddy Server's templates, using Golang templating:

https://caddyserver.com/docs/modules/http.handlers.templates

The "include" function should do the job:

{{include "path/to/file.html"}}

I thought you were just being snarky, but I went and looked, and wow, it really is all "AI": https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=F24

Without looking carefully, I can't tell which ones are generative AI / boiling the oceans to bullshit you; it's possible that some of these are legit uses of machine learning, which existed before ChatGPT and will hopefully continue to exist in the future. But I bet it's all ethically questionable bullshit.

Forerunner AI jumps out as a likely ethical black hole, based on its one line description "Copilot for aerospace engineers making rockets, munitions, satellites." On top of code theft, water use, emissions, and the many other horrors of Copilot and its ilk, we can also add war profiteering.

EDIT: Prediction: YC's next batch will include a startup trying to replicate whatever the fuck this is: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

Not everyone agrees that this is a good place for a mine: https://www.protectthackerpass.org/

"to shut down the tar sands, we actually have to shut down the tar sands, not just blow up other mountains elsewhere and hope that leads to the end of the tar sands."

https://maxwilbert.substack.com/p/the-long-shadow-of-the-tar...

Why Gosub if it isn't written in Go? Should have been called Rustsub ;-)

While I'm not sure I agree with the arguments, I don't think the arguments for starting over from scratch are insane: https://drewdevault.com/2024/08/30/2024-08-30-Rust-in-Linux-...

The core argument is that attempts to convert the Linux kernel to Rust are burning out the people putting in that work. The choice might not be between Rust in Linux or a new kernel, but between burned out devs failing to put Rust in Linux or a new Linux-compatible kernel written from scratch in Rust.

Big tech platforms aren't a viable alternative to big tech platforms, just look at the demise of Andreessen-funded Post News, if you're tired of me mentioning Google's failures: https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/19/24135011/twitter-alternat...

I think the profit motive is literally destroying the world given the climate crisis, as well as destroying everything good or useful about the Internet. So I think figuring out how to do things without the profit motive is the only way forward, as impossible as that might seem. Surviving capitalism with that attitude may be challenging, but we don't have a future under capitalism anyway.

I think that if the value of social media comes from the network effects, then it's not a question of whether you can find some core of users who consider it more than a hobby. (Ugh, you want a network for professionals for whom it's their job?!) For social media to reach its maximum value, it has to reach literally everyone, and at that point you're talking about something that ought to be a government service, like the postal service. For smaller networks that are less focused on reach, maybe hobbyists are the ideal providers.

I'm sure we would lose some people if we switched to mandatory payments. Since this is already a pretty small community (dashboard currently says 171 active users), I wouldn't care to experiment, since we'd risk losing the critical mass necessary to have an active local timeline, which for me is a major reason to run your own server. I'd also hazard a guess that many people go inactive for a while, and then check in again randomly when they need more social media in their life for whatever reason, and mandatory payments might interfere with that movement in and out of inactivity.

Finally, I think pay what you want is better so long as it works, since it doesn't exclude people who don't have money, but do contribute to the community in other ways. The only real reason to move away from pay what you want is if it doesn't pay the bills, and our finances are fine for now.

I can see a place for mandatory payments if you're providing extra services at a steeper price, such as paid moderation, but I think the number of people willing to pay what moderation at a living wage actually costs... is rather small. Perhaps if we made moderation more efficient, e.g. sharing moderation decisions between servers, paid moderation could become more affordable by splitting the cost between more users, but there are several problems with that approach... one being that moderation by members of your community is always going to be more clueful than moderation from outside your community.

I am an admin / mod for a Mastodon server that is supported by donations from the community. I have not put my own money in the pot for a while, because I'm donating a lot of time to run it.

But I would pay if I had to, and I am considering paying for a GoToSocial server to experiment with an allowlist network:

https://gotosocial.org/

https://codeberg.org/oliphant/islands/src/branch/main/ion

My server: https://jawns.club

Our finances: https://opencollective.com/jawnsclub

We're currently paying for managed Mastodon hosting on https://masto.host/

It could have helped their revenue problems indirectly if it meant being able to access more users and content, not only the people who use and enjoy Cohost. People love to talk about network effects, and something like the fediverse means you can start with however many users there are on the fediverse on day one of turning on federation.

For me, lack of federation meant they were dead on arrival, just like every Google product can't be trusted to keep existing (and I would never start using a new Google product). Any individual fediverse project could shut down, but the fediverse continues and is probably unkillable like IRC or RSS at this point, even if it's not as widely used as one might like.

I would have been more interested in Cohost if they weren't actively hostile to federation. Their eventual shutdown always seemed inevitable to me, and without federation + account portability, there would be no easy offramp when they failed.

You could say the same of almost all corporate social media, and I am phasing them all out too.

I miss the JPEG-XL art page, which once read: "JXL art is a form of procedural image generation that exploits the powerful meta-adaptive context model of JXL to produce interesting-looking images that are tiny jxl files." Sadly the page on the Internet Archive doesn't seem to have any of the JXL files, some of which looked pretty cool: https://web.archive.org/web/20210521120114/https://jpegxl.in...

Happily, one of the software packages they used to make tiny jxl files is still online here: https://jxl-art.surma.technology/

It has been parked right next to an IKEA for a while, where it is prominently visible from the IKEA cafeteria windows, as well as the parking lot.

Two Boeing whistleblowers: https://www.npr.org/2024/05/02/1248693512/boeing-whistleblow...

The "end of the world" could be a local phenomenon. I like my headcanon that in Mad Max it's just Australia that's fucked, the rest of the world is fine.

If there are functional societies elsewhere in the world, then help in the form of food could be on its way. The question is, will it be distributed efficiently to the people who need it? Something like Food Not Bombs could respond quite effectively to such a situation.

Yeah, both my parents have/had practical skills, like woodworking and gardening, and completely failed to pass them on.

Part of it is that they pushed me towards skills they thought would help me more, like computers... my dad liked to brag he had one of the first computers on the block, and that he put me in front of the computer as soon as I could sit up. They pushed me towards getting good grades instead of knowing how to work with physical objects.

Part of it is interest, like I wanted to do my own thing instead of my parents' things, once I had the choice. That's partly because my parents just weren't very kind or patient teachers, they were hypercritical, exacting perfectionists. Partly because my friends weren't working with physical objects much, so it didn't seem like a good way to connect with my peers.

But yeah, my parents were extremely present and they still did not pass on their knowledge.

What constitutes a small pond rather than a mini pond in your opinion? Like, what do you think is the minimum size for a stable pond ecosystem? Does depth or surface area matter more?

I really want to make a tiny pond at my house, but I'm afraid of the mosquitoes.

My native plant supplier encouraged tiny ponds, saying that while you may need mosquito dunks to kill the larva at first, once wildlife is established in your pond e.g. dragonflies will control the mosquitos just fine. I believe him (or at least that it worked for him), but I feel like I would need to do more research before putting it to the test.

I have to disagree that the Republicans do not have a plan. They have a very clear and public plan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025

Yes, they spend a lot of energy on obstructing the government from functioning, and creating a naked kleptocracy to use the government to funnel money into their own pockets. But they are also moving openly towards a fascist dictatorship with very specific ideas about how society should function, and how (and when) people should be permitted to live.

I've been using viu, which is also written in Rust: https://github.com/atanunq/viu

How does imgcatr compare?

Viu was last updated 5 months ago, imgcatr 3 months ago, not a significant difference. imgcatr is a longer name than viu, requiring more keystrokes to type.

One problem is that cars take up the space that other transit options need, or alternately, cars themselves are the reason other transit options are unattractive.

For example:

- many people are afraid to ride bicycles because they are (justifiably) afraid of being run over by cars

- separated bike lanes cannot be created because the space is already used for parking spaces for cars

- street level trolleys or buses can move people very efficiently, but when cars block their path, they are slowed to the same pace as the traffic jam

I could go on and on and on. Unless you take back the space used for cars, it is very difficult to make space for anything else.

There are people who say JSON is better: https://www.jsonfeed.org/

I'm not sure I agree.

What does HN think of Naomi Wu's far-UVC lights? https://cybernightmarket.com/products/mini-far-uvc-lights-se...

I just ordered a set to check them out for myself, although I don't know how I could possibly measure their efficacy in killing pathogens or their risk to humans.

Paging Low-Tech Magazine! I wonder how they feel about these partly wooden turbines:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/reinventing-the-sm...

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/how-to-make-wind-p...

I expect they would be disappointed that it's not all wood, and also skeptical of these being mass-produced with engineered wood rather than made by local artisans out of regular wood. Can the wood parts be recycled or composted? What happens at the end of life?

To quote Low-Tech Mag on composite blades, "The environmental damage of the carbon-epoxy spars can be viewed as acceptable, if compared to the larger damage done by conventional wind turbine blades. However, the waste problem would not be solved, and further growth in wind power would still result in ever larger waste streams."

But how long until this archive also joins the Google graveyard? If it were another company aside from Google, this might be more encouraging.

"I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further."

I think a lot of these could be used for building construction, or for smaller wood objects, if we were sufficiently motivated.

For example, here is an MIT team experimenting with using forked tree branches in construction: https://energy.mit.edu/news/using-natures-structures-in-wood...