jadero @ jadero @programming.dev

Fully retired now and one of the things I'd like to do is get back into hob

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2 yr. ago

I like it on principle, but haven't tried any passkey stuff yet. Truth be told, I kinda liked SQRL, but that is clearly going nowhere.

I agree with you. Everything I've read makes the assumption that we can do nothing in the face of "embrace, extend, extinguish." Anyone who has ever played a multiplayer game of any kind knows that a new strategy can be devastating, but only the first time.

But now we know about that strategy and it has an inherent weakness. "Extend" is only a problem if we as developers, admins, and users accept extensions uncritically. If "extend" is on the critical path to "extinguish," then we can interrupt the process by not accepting or not becoming dependent on extensions that put the Fediverse at risk, no matter who proposes or implements them.

In my opinion, the worst that can happen is that we ultimately find it necessary to defederate from Meta. If that splits social graphs, well, for anyone currently using a Meta property, that is where we are now.

I once came across this massive Excel program. Calling it a macro or even a script simply didn't do it justice. Anyway, I turned it into a script (calling Excel functions and actions instead of doing everything "by hand"). It went from taking a couple of hours to run to taking a couple of minutes. Pissed off a few people, but I got a nice contract out of it :)

I've yet to find a language where "doing it yourself" has higher performance than calling the built-in or library function. There are edge cases, but rarely enough to be bothered about.

I haven't done assembly since the VIC-20. Hand assembled with the Programmers Reference open beside me. (What was that opcode again?)

I understand where you're coming from. Anything looks too easy after that! :)

You'll be fine. Just keep one oar in the water (stay abreast of what's going on so you don't get caught off guard).

Is that not what we are already?

We are skilled in setting out instructions for another piece of software to follow in producing the appropriate sequence of 1s and 0s.

Software development will always be about discovering requirements, reconciling inconsistencies and contradictions, and describing them in a way that comes out with something useable.

There will always be people more or less skilled at that. I'm somewhere near the bottom of mere competence. Despite my best efforts, I'm getting further from mastery, not closer, and I really don't see that changing just because of ChatGPT. In fact , I've looked at the prompts people are using to get useful code and feel even further behind than ever!

This comment started as just little joke, but now I'm not so sure.

Regarding https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

I think it's important to note one major difference between those historical events and today. There were no platforms with the reach of Meta at the time, today we have, well Meta (and Twitter, etc)

What that means is that it is longer possible to really capture our personal social graph. If we are using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or whatever right now, then we've already partitioned our own social graph for personal reasons.

If you are not on those platforms, then there is no social graph to capture except as members choose to disconnect from us.

My reading of https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/ suggests that the writer is not terribly concerned about the presence of Meta.

Anyone who recognizes my username or who digs through what I've written knows that I've gone back and forth on this.

I completely understand the various motivations for defederation and in my heart of hearts would love to just flip them the bird. I also have concerns over the ultimate outcome. But my concern is less over whether accepting Meta is ultimately detrimental, showing that the Fediverse cannot withstand "attack", than over whether rejecting them prevents the Fediverse from bringing them to heel.

You've officially changed my mind.

Up until now, I've been harping on the concept of "controlling interest" in which a single entity is large enough to control the direction taken. But I hadn't considered that the new direction might be one that limits the potential for a negative result.

Personally, I think that a sufficiently large instance does represent a major risk. But now I think it's a risk we have to take. If this federation experiment fails, then what is learned can be used in the next experiment.

Now to track down and add a note to all those comments I made...