Recent posts by users in this instance
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Wholeheartedly agree that they're just as legitimate as any other form of telling the story, though.
With the caveat that I am absolutely not a hardware/network person, my guess is that the problem's likely with a modem -- whether on your end or theirs. So far as I know there's nothing special about upload speeds that your computer or the cabling would care about (the lower rate being an limitation of their switching... or more pessimistically entirely artificial) so if there were a physical reason for the drop I'd expect to see 0.06/0.06; since you do have that round-to-zero, I'm blaming software.
...Did someone do some bad math some time in the past year and push an update that can't handle the month getting reset?
On that note, happy 2026! Hopefully this fulfills your quota of things going wrong for a bit, and lets you enjoy a nice month or two of smooth sailing after it. 😉
re: @[email protected]
edit: Oh, and while we never had physical Mindstorms, I remember spending a lot of time with a couple programming-based games on the Lego website during that same general period.
At least you're at the very high end of what was theoretically possible -- 56 Kbps -- rather than the practical max which would round to 0.05 Mbps. So, good job if you're setting up a system via old tech! Otherwise, it's impressive in a very different way.
pass has been the only real reason I'd been maintaining PGP keys myself as well, but these threads have finally convinced me to move off of it for even that degree.¹ Your requirements are probably different from mine, but since I refuse any hosted password managers, still need something I can keep updated for both Android and (2×)FreeBSD (syncthing is wonderful), and especially the Android side of that makes me want Yubikey multi-factor, I've personally just gone back to KeePassXC/DX.² Don't have Soatok's background to be able to say anything authoritative about it, but people seem happy with how it does things and I've not found any red flags in my own amateur research. There already are migration scripts written between the two if you search -- just definitely do your due diligence before running them!
re: @[email protected] @[email protected]
cc: @[email protected] @[email protected]
¹ I probably won't entirely burn my keys just in case I do have to do something legacy over email/git, but I'm definitely not going to advertise them.
² I really do like the architecture of one-password-per-file (even if the public naming is sub-par) for corruption resiliance and Unix mentality, but pass really is the only thing along those lines has a decent Android client... and even its ones are on life support or dead.
The utter rejection of continued covid really is painful; yeah, it's settled in at just a bit more serious than "get your flu shot every year",¹ but it didn't have to be like this, and even with it not having been stomped out in the first several months there shouldn't be so much resistance to the basic humanity of "maybe we don't put it on every individual to make sure they're living and playing in a healthy environment." Yeah, I get that it was a traumatic time; that doesn't mean we collectively agree on the "avoidance" coping strategy. Particularly when illness is already part of the conversation.
Separately, the fact that people haven't moved beyond the 90s in their perception of STIs is... weird. Yeah, we should definitely still be talking about status and being sure we're having sex safely (see above community responsibility), but it's like all the sex-shaming and internalized homophobia/puritanism has crystalized on ~illness~ as the scapegoat for allowing ostracism. Admittedly I'm still very much on the edge of the community, but it does leave me rather picky about how and which groups I interact with.
re: @[email protected]
¹ EDIT: To clarify, it's not covid itself that's "just a bit more serious" than flu, it's the management strategy for it. Long covid and all the other risks are still very serious concerns, and I fully respect anyone who's more cautious than I am, even while I'm often the only one masking in close-packed environments.
However, your blog is public, and your comment section is publically visible, so you can't stop people from just coming along and reading. The fediverse is actually ahead of many of the the old blogs in this regard since instances do have the ability to say "you need to log in to see a centralized view of posts here"³ and at that point they can finally implement the behaviour a lot of people have come to expect where a block means that person can't see you at all... at the expense of making it harder for uninvolved people to see your stuff (for example, I screen everybody I'm considering following based on their rate of posting since I get overwhelmed by a too-busy feed, and anyone on a non-public instance will just never get my follow).
That's all just from the perspective of your own blog/instance, though. Federation is built on letting remote software know you've said something, and making viewing it there a relatively painless endevour.⁴ And as soon as your comment lands on someone else's page, there's no way to (confidently, nor confidentially) control who sees it short of deleting it entirely. That's the level of interaction a lot of the other wonderful replies in this discussion focus on so I'm not going to repeat them; I just wanted to add the feed/blog comparison since that's a subtle but very important shift in how Fedi needs to be thought about.
TLDR: A lot of what people expect blocking to do is only realistic on siloed, account-required sites. Meanwhile, Fedi is much closer to a public blog in its capabilities, with all the limitations that brings. Blocking-as-access-control (rather than simply being an inbox filter) is something that is all but impossible in public, federated architectures, and is fundamentally impossible with how ActivityPub was designed; we need to return to the pre-silo understanding of blocks before we have a mental model compatible with it.
I do definitely see where you're coming from, though. Access control is important for modern personal security. It's just unfortunately one of the (few) tradeoffs that we need to make when deciding to sink roots on Fedi.
re: @[email protected], @[email protected]
cc: @[email protected], @[email protected]
¹ Up to the limits of the software, that is. Sounds like Mastodon makes it difficult to remove context posts, but there's nothing inherent to Fedi in that; here on Snac I can simply delete anybody's post I like and it will stop showing up on the local feed views. It automatically does the same for anyone I block... which apparently has the odd effect of removing my replies to them from the user feed but not from the "recent posts by users of this instance" feed (where the context isn't displayed). But going back to the question of scope, that removal only applies to my own instance, not to anybody viewing the thread elsewhere.²
² This could actually be a really interesting feature if we were able to federate which replies are visible, but I unfortunately think it would wind up running into issues of conflicting jurisdiction. So far as ActivityPub is concerned, there's no difference between a reply and an original post that happens to reference something else; socially it's similar, where people being able to control the replies to their posts intuitively leads into controlling the replies to their replies, as well as the replies to replies to their posts. But then you have multiple people all fighting over which posts should be visible on the thread, up to and including giving malicious users the ability to silence voices in support of their victims. If someone can make it work I'd love to see the architecture even just out of intellectual curiosity, but it's far from straightforward.
³ Unfortunately, nobody has fully federated this behaviour, so you wind up needing to log in via an account from that instance in order to browse the feeds there, rather than just being able to use an IndieAuth/OAuth style of logging in via a remote instance. Then again, with a federated login system bad actors could easily spin up a new account somewhere unmoderated to circumvent view blocks, so it's hard to say what the better implementation would be.
⁴ It would certainly be possible to set up a federated system where you don't send out the content but instead have people come to you, it's just that that either requires a lot of Javascript dynamicism and enough network chatter to make your wallet cry with every bill from your host, or a lot of reader effort as they follow static links where each individual comment might be on a separate page that needs to be manually clicked through. The latter does technically work, and it's what a lot of the simpler IndieWeb sites do if they don't have complex enough software/page layous to clone remote posts, but there's a reason that that community is so much smaller than the ActivityPub ecosystem.
Though, I'm sure that even in the world where the corporations behind social media were held responsible, they'd still have found ways to get just as bad. Their rise might have been a bit faster because of Section 230, but it's far from the only reason things are in the state they are. The only way around it would have been to halt capitalism entirely, probably no later than the first half of the 1900s²... say, wasn't there some global movement right around that time...?
re: @[email protected]
cc: @[email protected]
¹ You don't go to Facebook for Aunt Gemma's site, you go to Facebook for the feeds and discussions where she's just a small voice among many. Sure, it's the users providing the content either way, but we all know how vast a difference there is between the small web and the silos. Even if it's a hard difference to concretely verbalize.
² Yeah, that's a somewhat arbitrary date chosen mostly for the joke. Rail barons and other early aristocrats would (and did) certainly fight to maintain it. But I really do think that the 50s and 60s were a big turning point for an average white man thinking of himself as the mythical temporarily-embarrased millionare, and so draining a lot of the proletariat support. Probably no accident, that timing.
Fedi isn't dying, it's vibrant. I'd feel sorry that you can't see that... if it weren't for the fact that I don't want people like you dragging it down into just another insincere hellsite. "Everyone is welcome, and free to say what they want, however they want" are the exact stances that swing the gate wide to Nazis. Blocked, and think about what you're really trying to do here.
Why on earth do you care so much about number-go-up, anyway? Fedi's easily self-sustaining now; we don't need to retain every refugee from every wave in order to keep discussions lively. We've grown our own culture(s) here, where there's no algorithm that needs churning masses in order to boost engagement, and where honest, real interaction matters more than raw numbers (except to people like you, apparently). You want Fedi to grow? It will -- slowly, sustainably, by attracting people who do see our community for what it is and come here of their own volition, or who recognize the more intimate pace and choose to stay when the rest of their wave moves to the next superficially-shiny platform.
¹ The fact that Mastodon doesn't consider replies worthy of inclusion alongside top posts is actively (if minorly) harmful to the community as well, and one of the reasons I don't use Mastodon.
Also, are you really trying to drag a debate over piracy into an entirely unrelated thread?
re: @[email protected]
re: @[email protected]
cc: @[email protected] @[email protected]
Still, thanks for spreading the warning.
For everyone else who read the post and felt inclined to respond with some variation on "government spyware", deep shame on you. The linked article doesn't even mention anything remotely related to that -- the only references to China are in blocks of stats-by-country, and a very brief mention of a (derogatory) log message the virus output. At least you've revealed yourselves as people who only read the headlines, who are eager to be casually racist, and who can be swiftly blocked.
Adding a contact email that can accept both reports and patches can solve both issues... at the expense of strongly encouraging setting up some pipeline for making the messages public. (See: sr.ht)
I do have a bit more sympathy for people holding that opinion who are also part of the community being advocated for, since things do have a tendency of getting worse for the whole community before getting better, but it is absolutely ridiculous how many people believe activism within the blessing of the system has any significant effect.
If I had to guess, given what you say about the quality of the cut and subs, my answer would be "low-effort cash grab" in this particular instance.
Complaining about AI, but mostly the software industry at large [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
As a professional programmer who takes a positive-but-restrained view of AI code, the industry is in a bad state, but AI is just another step along the path of slop -- and certainly not the biggest one.Most modern¹ languages train us to blindly use whatever packages have been thrown onto the dumping ground of whatever package repo is tied into the build tool without analyzing their performance, security, unneeded-code-footprint, anything beyond (if you're lucky!) the ergonomics of the API. Get the LLM to generate enough code and it just falls into that same mental category of blackbox libraries.
Nearly all professional environments and a good number of the large open-source projects have a highly-segmented model of ownership, where you're responsible for your own code and don't often cross too deep into the other engineers' domains. Even if there is one or two people who nominally control the entire thing, if they try to impose strong standards the perception of their dev community will shift toward "dictatorial" and "elitest" while more casual contributors feel like they're being expected to put too much effort in to submit "just a quick fix".² An LLM is easily personified as just another developer whose code is "over there" and not under your direct responsibility.³
Both of those are exacerbated by a pervasive crunch culture, where deadlines encourage taking shortcuts and making "good enough" releases. This isn't necessarily unique to programming (your example of illustrators is another industry with that root issue), but because there's so much more space behind the curtain to hide those shortcuts, they're able to grow so much gnarlier; if something looks good enough to the customers/shareholders, it doesn't necessarily matter how messy the implementation is. AI is both a very enticing shortcut when there's a deadline on the horizon, and honestly not inherently the worst code behind the scenes from prior crunches.
Growing out of that -- and in turn enabling it to worsen -- is the unique ease of fixing things in post. The vast majority of "release deadlines" are no longer actual releases, they're just marketing milestones. We don't have to finalize the code, send it to the presses, and then deal with customers pulling immutable disks off the shelf; instead we can ship something while already planning the bugfix patch the customers will (automagically) download a couple weeks afterward. If a LLM generates buggy code, then we can just roll the fix in with everything else, we don't have to exhaustively prove that it's actually stable when it first goes in.
And then you have the type of thing @[email protected] talked about where devs might be expected to be polylingual enough to pick up some random programming language (unless it's one of the "weird" ones like Lisp or Perl or Haskell) at a very accelerated clip -- unlike those illustrators who might be asked to pick up a new style (moved to a different project) for something, but who wouldn't be asked to use acryllics when they've so far just been digital (Scala vs. JavaScript, etc.). In that regard, AI becomes a defensive strategy where the dev is indeed better able to judge the code it produces than to write their own from scratch.
All in all, like @[email protected] said, software engineering should be a branch of engineering, and the way we work within it and the way we're now integrating AI into it reflect that -- in broad strokes. However, decades of producing "soft" products, with more mutability than a building's plumbing and less risk than its wiring have eroded that stable engineering base, helped gleefully on by tech bros and investment capitalists only chasing the headlines and jerking everyone who actually knows best practices along behind them. The only reason our sloppy approach to AI is notable is because it's become the headline they're chasing, and so those non-engineers at the head of it all are gleefully crowing about it and accidentally revealing the slop that's already been holding it all together.
re: @[email protected]
¹ This isn't entirely unique to modern languages when even C encourages linking into a system-wide library installation, but vendored code at least used to be a known design pattern with known tradeoffs, whereas nowdays many newer devs would laugh it off as "impossible to keep updated" (as if the most current version were universally a good thing, but that's a separate rant...) Vendoring is still certainly far from a panacea, but at least you have the code right there to at least theoretically look at its implementation.
² I have mixed feelings about this, but ultimately probably do fall on the side of "this is an engineering discipline, and should be held to engineering standards". The junior devs deserve help and support, definitely, but just being junior and eager shouldn't justify loosening the standards of quality their code needs to reach.
³ I think this is the worst offense of the ecosystem around generated code. By virtue of being "niche language expert" I am one of the primary reviewers of a lot of code where I work. I don't have any problem with people submitting stuff from our LLM subscription, and would feel the same if any of my OSS side projects gained public interest and PRs. However, I will hold it to the same standard as human-written code, and hold the author equally responsible for the contents. There's far too many people in the industry at large who instead see AI as a way to shed personal responsibility of what's generated, rather than seeing it as just another tool that (should be) under their full control.
re: @[email protected]
The only meaningful difference between AI and classic speech synthesis techniques are that intonation and diversification are now happening automatically rather than needing to be painstakingly coded in. There's not any stolen-work concerns in the YouTube examples¹ since it's not like anyone human is realistically going to enter a partnership with a small channel just to read a prepared script. This is a wonderful example of the democratization AI allows: letting people easily create content without needing expensive microphones, complex processing software, and a well-practiced broadcaster voice² so long as they have good speech-writing skills and can grab something to use for a video track.
And just because it's being implemented by the same companies as the crop of LLMs and image diffusers, people call it equally "AI slop" (I really hate that term) and violently boycott it on principle. It's not taking a coherent position, it's not based on personal preference, it's just grabbing the torches and pitchforks to continue the witch hunt.
¹ There are issues with using AI voices in commercial projects, particularly for animation, but so far as games go I'd personally only be concerned about things coming out of big studios -- what fraction of a percent of indie game devs would have hired voice actors to begin with, rather than just sticking with text?
² No, those aren't optional. I'm personally happy to put up with a lot of amateur production values if I like the content, but far too many people aren't, and a fuzzy mic or (to a thankfully lesser extent) a thick accent are very real barriers to building an audience. Microsoft Sam doesn't cut it on YouTube anymore, either. Vocaloid tech might, but they're expensive and a lot of work to use to their fullest extent.
Like, "He has even considered pulling the United States out of NATO" bridges a vague "allies are our strength" into a screed on Ukraine, where the only foundation for all of that being good is that three quarters support NATO and two thirds support continuing to arm Ukraine. Sure, it's a great illustration of the president not respecting the will of the people, but that's not what the author is using it for -- it's just "Trump bad, majority opinion opposing him good". All very liberalism-does-no-wrong, horseshoe-theory-esque, leaving no room to say that aggressive power projection for neocolonial interests might be a bad thing, actually.
It's certainly good that he's losing his base. That's not the article I'd have chosen to illustrate the point, over one which actually has a coherent thesis.
meta, vaguely about CWs, generally about community [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
And as we saw, it's not just about your followers -- you're also needing to keep their followers in mind. Maybe you have it unboostable,¹ great, that doesn't mean some software won't decide to pull it in as part of a thread view anyway if your friend decides to comment on it. Maybe you have it private, but that only affects people viewing things from your own instance. Like everything on the internet ActivityPub is inherently public communication, and should be treated as such.The wonderful thing about the Fediverse is that we can all find (or spin up) an instance that fits the specific culture we're looking for, without cutting ourselves off from federation more broadly. The flipside of that is that we can never assume we're cut off ourselves. No matter how small the instance, ActivityPub is never going to be equivalent to a personal blog. No matter how personal you consider something, you are part of a community and you do need to consider community safety and health.
I'm far from perfect, either. Despite boosting several things to this same effect recently, and writing several concurring replies myself, I barely have to look through my history to find quite a few things I should have CWed better. I've snapped at people on here recently out of proportion to their (perceived) slights. What I do do is try to make things right when I'm in the wrong, and if you call me out on something I do try to take a step back and see if I am in the wrong.
¹ Which is itself purely convention; ActivityPub is entirely honour-system for pretty much all of its visibility controls, and someone could very easily be using software which doesn't disable
Announce activities based on that flag -- particularly since I don't see however it's marked being declared in the Mastodon docs, and the closest FEP I could find has been withdrawn.Kids aren't homogeneous. Left to their own devices they will spin off following their own interests and skills. The top of the class in math might know they'll never make much use of history (not being someone to go into economics), and so not feel any need to burn themself out trying to ace that class. But because of the "anyone can be anything" variant of the american dream myth, they're forced to try to be everything anyway. The hyper-focus on testing is simply the best way to browbeat them into compliance. After all, it's a lot harder for the system to treat people as interchangeable cogs when it has to acknowledge people have their own specialities.
¹ There's certainly room here for a debt-based conspiracy here. I do definitely blame capitalism, but rather than anything organized in this case, I think it's more just that capitalism breeds competition, and according to that social model if you aren't leading the pack then you're effectively worthless except for how others can use you. It just so happens that the group of people who gained power were in fields where higher education proved important, so the wages in those fields rose out of all proportion in response, and now not following in their tracks is willfully making things harder for yourself.
I build stuff for me mostly and if other people don't like it that's fine.To that degree, I'm in full agreement. Someone's building their personal site, they're the only person who gets a say in how it's done. I think where the conversation went wrong was talking about this in terms of "UI designers", "front end devs", and apps vs websites -- all of those bring in the idea of there being money and corporate interests behind the site, and when it becomes someone's job to build and maintain the page, then it stops being their perogative to build something that makes they themself happy, they need to build something that works for their audience. I don't remember what blog it was on any more, but something that's stuck with me was a blogger describing how they watched someone in a waiting room navigating a government benefits page on a PSP, because that was the only mobile browser they had access to.
We might also be talking about different degrees of "support"? If I've disabled JavaScript, I don't expect to get animations, I don't expect to have everything working perfectly, I don't even expect to have everything look coherent. If there's some side content like posting comments, I really appreciate being able to use it, but that's so far above and beyond the cratered standard of the noscript web that I don't even expect that. What I do expect is to be able to read the majority of the main content and to limp through the navigation.
HTML is for your content, CSS is for your style, and JavaScript is for making it come to life. For the vast majority of sites it's not any harder to embed the content in a placeholder HTML div than it is to embed it in a JS file; document.getElementById(id).childNodes and you're good to do whatever you want with it. If you're serving dynamic content then it's a bit harder, sure, but just a document.getElementById("placeholder").replaceWith(generated) and you're good. Meanwhile since it's all in the DOM at the page load, it's so much less likely to break to the point of unreadability.
If you're building an app, then sure, not coding for Web 1.0 is a valid choice. The vast majority of sites aren't apps. Mastodon isn't an app; it still follows exactly the same page-and-load model as a traditional site. And if you're not building an app, and you're not just putting something self-indulgent together for yourself, then there's no reason to break everything for the small benefit of having one less tab open in your code editor. "You can't capture the nuance of my form fields" doesn't just apply to interactive elements, after all.
Side note, I think you're conflating a few things. Nearly every task can be accomplished without JavaScript, so long as you build your backend properly to serve complete pages, as demonstrated by Web 1.0 having solved those tasks decades ago -- maybe an interactive mapping site is implausible, but most pages don't have nearly that level of need. Where you're talking about what "most people expect", you're looking more at the polish of the modern web. An infinite timeline isn't a critical component of any user's requirements. Nice, sure, but that's one of the enhancements JS allows.
The problem is when someone/some company has decided to turn their website into an art piece, and write the entire thing in JavaScript without any thought about the base rendering. You want to know why we hate JS? It's because when we do decide to disable it, whether due to privacy/security concerns, limited data alotments, etc., so many websites utterly break. Not in a "I can see this was meant to do something fancy" way, in a "there's no text at all now" way. To whatever extent we hate UI designers (and it's not as much as you make it out to be -- exasperation, certainly, but hate only in the most egregious examples), it's not due to the gendering of the work, it's due to the lack of consideration for anyone who doesn't follow their blessed path.
The web is viewed through a vast range of devices, in a vast range of environments, by a vast range of people with different accessibility needs. Treating responsive design as "Chrome on desktop vs modern smart phone with unlimited data" actively ignores many diverse needs. A competant UI designer would be sure that those are being met; maybe JS is needed to provide the "intended" experience, anyone who disables it knows we're opting in to reduced functionality, but if something is important, then it's specifically the designer's job to make sure everyone can access it in one way or another. I'm sure I'm not the only person who, contrary to your characterization, feels a strong surge of appreciation and respect when I come across a site whose designer clearly took the time to make it work no matter who's accessing it how. It's only the incompetent designers, and particularly the frameworks and tooling which actively push them toward incompetence, that are the target of disdain... though I will admit that our aim isn't always precise when sending that disdain off.