Pup Biru @ pupbiru @aussie.zone

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2 yr. ago

(i’m an aussie so i have no place to actually comment on lived experience in the US)

… but i will add, because this is similar in most places i think:

• Public activism and willingness to volunteer is frequently redirected by capitalists to spoil outcomes or just waste activist energy.

on the rare occasion that activism is getting somewhere, they’re very good at giving just enough to make just enough people stop participating that it falls apart, and the “just enough” that they give are short-term concessions that they claw back in other ways (or sometimes not even in other ways: just straight up revert)

They don’t care if you play on steamOS, Windows, or a steam powered adding machine.

i think yes and no: they make their money from selling games, so they want more people to buy more games from them

… but, SteamOS achieves that in a multi-faceted way:

• it provides a fit-for-purpose platform for handhelds and consoles which previously steam didn’t have any market share over, and if that’s in SteamOS they have a massive advantage
• it gives valve some leverage over microsoft (if MS controls the platform that you depend on, they can do some pretty wild things and you have no recourse). in this case, they definitely care about bumping their numbers - more on SteamOS means less power microsoft has over them
• it creates competition, which forces microsoft to invest in making their own experience better, and better experience anywhere means probably more people game more often

i think that last point in particular is critical: every $ valve spends on steamos is multiplied, because microsoft has to spend their own money to keep up, and it propels the whole ecosystem forward

imo bsky is not 100% of what we want, but it has roads out of their system… its not decentralised exactly, but you can build bridges and that’s super important

the main reason people stay with facebook, twitter, reddit, etc is what’s called the “network effect”. for social media, it’s hyper important to get people onto the platform, otherwise it’s not social (reddit and lemmy a bit different: you still need a self-sustaining amount of people, but the more you get to the “people you know” platforms, the more you need as close to everyone you can get to keep people there)

now, twitter, facebook, instagram, etc have no functionality to allow people off-platform to contact people on-platform (and visa versa), so if you leave the platform you loose all those connections - the first people to move have a terrible experience because the platform is pretty much useless (there’s no social in the social media)

bsky at least changes that part so now we can bridge: bsky users can interact with mastodon users, which means that in the future it’ll be much easier for people to make the choice to leave, if they choose to: they don’t have to give up the creators they follow, or family and friends… there might be a slightly degraded experience, but i’d argue that’s pretty negligible

heck, i’d even prefer to trade twitter for threads at this point: imo facebook as a whole company is worse that twitter, but threads at least allows that off-ramp

if facebook itself were federated, who knows maybe one of these days i could convince my parents to move to friendica

i don’t think it “just works” on windows, but people (even regular people) are used to the workarounds that you have to do to get windows to work as they want

essentially rather than generating a reply meant for a human, they generate a special reply that the software interprets as “call this tool”. in th same way as the system prompt where the model operator tells the system how to behave, you tell the model what tools and parameters are available to it (for example, load page is a common one)… when the software receives a call for the tool, it calls real code to perform an action, which then responds to the model with the result so that it can continue to process. in this way, the model may kind of request access to limited external resources

This is why documentation of business process and methods is so important

absolutely not… if you think that random code from 10 years ago is difficult to figure out if it’s still needed, try that with documentation!

IT systems are living, dynamic beasts… they should be built in such a way that makes them comprehensible with relatively minimal effort, on their own, because the code is the only source of truth and everything else may as well be a lie

I’m not interested in punishing anyone for past decisions or mistakes

right so you think our decisions were mistakes rather than at best suboptimal but reasonable given the information at the time? how arrogant

explain what the higher ups want and listen to their ideas on how to get there

absolutely this… engineers want to help you design solutions… if you come to me and ask me to explain something so that you can design a solution that i’m then told to build you’re removing all the fun out of it and i ain’t gonna help with that

there’s a few things here that trigger red flags for me:

not worry about getting too detailed

oh good! because it’s probably ill-defined and nobody really knows and figuring that out involves a lot of reading other people’s shit code and we have work to do

because I need a very thorough understanding

oh you mean do worry - you want to know exactly how it works… sorry bud, no time, that’s a lot of energy

thoroughly documented

ugghghh documentation is for people that don’t understand that documentation is out of date the second you write it: don’t drag me into your futile attempt to make a static artifact that i’ll need to maintain in the future when i update a living system

eliminating all the uselessly disparate systems that people are trying to stitch together currently

okay but that’s really dismissive… this is work that people have put in - even if it’s shit and everyone knows it’s shit, it’s disheartening to have things thrown out… and what they do now they know how it works, they know the caveats… you’re talking about coming in, getting a cursory understanding (what you think you can understand everyone’s problem when the people that built the thing don’t have the full picture?) and then planning out and telling them what to do

if you want help from engineers, ask them for help to build a new thing: don’t ask them for help to explain something so you can tell them what to build. we’re creative, and we love solving problems and we hate robotically implementing someone else’s vision

individuals create echo chambers: if someone spouts intolerant garbage, and the people who fight that garbage block the speech, there’s nobody to oppose it and without voices speaking out against it, it becomes mainstream

if society doesn’t enforce rules around hate speech, it places a burden on minorities to defend themselves from hate, otherwise hate becomes the mainstream viewpoint

that’s all not necessarily true

for starters: https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/

but also perhaps more academically because signal (i believe) doesn’t do this, so it’s more a comment on the information that the server “must know”

signal uses the double ratchet protocol to derive shared keys between users already. if we extend this a little further to exchange a separate shared identifier for use in retrieving conversaiton data, and a place to store that data the the only information that the server gets is a couple of initialisation messages, and the rest is entirely opaque - there’s no way to know (other than tracing e2e messages based on IP address, and there are mitigations for that too) who is communicating with who, at what rate, etc

there are other ways to validate things like rate limits, etc that don’t involve identity directly, or at least don’t trust any single party with all data

okay, but reproducible builds solve the rest of that problem

https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/

i think the only way it could work is with the community notes model, but perhaps with more of a “your choice” fediverse flare: perhaps your instance can bless specific users whose notes get higher pirority etc

lately

it’s possible that the grok model was trained or fine tuned somehow to help with moderation. in that case, it’s possible that things like these bullet points are somewhere up it’s context chain, or in its training data in a manner that it can relatively accurately recall

i’d imagine using it would be in a similar category to an emergency exit: don’t unless it’s an emergency; the choice is yours and there are consequences for misuse

as long as they don’t use a logitech controller i’m sure it’ll be fine

lots of leopards though

there are many groups to blame

i mean, the sea level doesn’t have to be a limit… people edit wikipedia etc or contribute to reddit just because they like their number to be higher or their community reputation. i get that it’s meant to encourage contribution, but i think you’ll get more contribution by people just wanting to make the information better