maegul

maegul , 3 days ago

I've found a fair amount of strong loyalty to the place from all sorts of people. I was never a twitter person, so I don't understand it, but AFAICT, all sorts of people have a real emotional bond to the place, like for them it's been their main internet experience in life or something.

maegul , 3 days ago

I hear you ... most people are still there (I've claimed in the past that it will be the MS Windows of social media, that no one really openly talks about using but is actually everywhere).

But I feel it may be useful to distinguish FOMO and social media gossip from actual useful information. I'm not saying there's nothing useful on Twitter (I don't actually know). But we're talking about microblogging and social media here.

maegul OP , 5 days ago

Absolutely.

And this is why I'm seeing Google winning this. They've got the infrastructure for both running and training their AI as well as the long standing web scraping for getting in as much data as soon as possible. But they've also got the ads business and the brand and user base. Together, they'll be the first to get AI tech to the point of being able to insert ads or other paid endorsements (however hard that is) and the first monetise that through ads and userbase size. Meanwhile Microsoft (OpenAI's backer) will probably do what MS has often done which is fail to piece together a coherent business model and squander an opportunity on failing to monetise.

maegul OP , 5 days ago

It’s interesting to think that Big Tech might just move on from the Web, leaving it to us ordinary humans to go back to the way we were doing it in Web 1.0 just with fancier tools at our disposal. I quite like the idea.

Yep. The idea has been buzzing in my head since I read Casey's post and thought about it as "Tech moving on from the web". For those of us who like it, we'll just be left to (re-)make it ourselves. It's a weird feeling for me honestly.

It's almost like the eternal September is actually ending.

maegul OP , 5 days ago

perfect!

maegul , 6 days ago

There are obvious responses here along the lines of embracing piracy and (re-)embracing hard copy ownership.

All that aside though, this feels like a fairly obvious point for legal intervention. I wouldn't be surprised if there are already existing grounds for legal action, it's just that the stakes are likely small enough and costs of legal action high enough to be prohibitive. Which is where the government should come in on the advice of a consumer body.

Some reasonable things that could be done:

• Money back requirements
• Clear warnings to consumers about "ownership" being temporary
• Requiring tracking statistics of how long "ownership" tends to be and that such is presented to consumers before they purchase
• If there are structural issues that increase the chances of "withdrawn" ownership (such as complex distribution deals etc), a requirement to notify the consumer of this prior to purchase.

These are basic things based on transparency that tend to already exist in consumer regulation (depending on your jurisdiction of course). Streaming companies will likely whinge (and probably have already to prevent any regulation around this), but that's the point ... to force them to clean up their act.

As far as the relations between streaming services and the studios (or whoever owns the distribution rights), it makes perfect sense for all contracts to have embedded in them that any digital purchase must be respected for the life of the purchaser even if the item cannot be purchased any more. It's not hard, it's just the price of doing business.

All of this is likely the result of the studios being the dicks they truly are and still being used to pushing everyone around (and of course the tech world being narcissistic liars).

maegul , 6 days ago

Oh for sure. All of this is clearly a situation where the law is slow to catch up.

maegul , 6 days ago

Yea, I forget where, but she's openly lamented the rise of ARM for this reason. Not because it's a small blemish on redbean and cosmopolitan libc (what redbean uses to be "universal") ... but, IIRC, x86 had gained such ubiquity that simply sticking with it for the sake of interoperability and backwards compatibility was/is probably worth it. However accurate that is, or viable in today's tech world, I certainly resonate with the sentiment. And given what her and cosmopolitan libc seem to have accomplished (I've never used these things), it certainly seems like one of nice things we could have if we just did things in a nicer way.

maegul , 5 days ago

yea, from what I've seen of her, you could say she's part of or used to be part of a sort edge-lord techno anarchism that involves a good amount of "fuck you" trolling and embrace of the chronically online/urban life style. The "fascism" part here seems to come out of nowhere. The twitter post from Justine that that whole blog post hangs off of doesn't exist anymore (and she's active on twitter). In the end though, if she's a bit nutty on how much better tech governance would be than ordinary government, I don't resent her for that. And the sorts of things she's building technologically certainly align with my interests.

What would "cosmopolitan" and "ape" be dog whistles for? Racism?

maegul , 4 days ago

Hmmm yea. Put together, cosmopolitan and “ape” do point in a single direction. I still wouldn’t be surprised if it were trolling. But yea, interesting. Being hyped on SV as a Googler in 2014 seems to me to have been a thing (you might disagree!), so so that doesn’t surprise me either.

Thanks!

maegul OP , 17 days ago

yea, that's what I'd figure. However easy a GPS setup would be, most businesses are, I'd guess, relying entirely on network snooping/logs. Which, if true, seemed pretty fallible once I started thinking about it.

maegul , 20 days ago

just in case anyone here is confused ... mbin (and its ancestor kbin, which is still running) work just fine with lemmy as they federate with each other. Upshot being that choosing between mbin/kbin and lemmy as an alternative to reddit is not exclusive ... choosing one is choosing both ... is choosing the fediverse.

maegul , 20 days ago

Yep, completely unique aspect of the platform. Some however do find it too complex or confusing, which I say just reassure anyone that that’s not uncommon if you do.

maegul , 20 days ago

Hard to recommend one over the other, especially as I’m not following things closely. mbin is a fork and seems well maintained at the moment while the lead dev and founder of kbin seems to be struggling to keep working on kbin. Things could change though.

maegul OP , 21 days ago

Another nice quote from Alan Kay (immediately after the above):

Think about what literacy actually is. Literacy begins with ideas, and literature evolved as a way of communicating those ideas. Computer literacy, by extension, cannot possibly be about learning how to put a disk in a machine, and it cannot possibly be about learning a spreadsheet.

Computers are really for helping us understand systems that are too complicated to think about in classical ways, such as political systems or the AIDS epidemic. They are really for letting children build models of complicated ideas and understand these powerful ideas in a direct way at a much earlier age than they would have without the aid of the computer.

Which, in the video, is followed by a nice comparison between SmallTalk and a deceptively similar UI in the Macintosh.

maegul OP , 21 days ago

No worries. Many of Bret Victor’s talks are great!

maegul , 22 days ago

Nebula.

maegul , 21 days ago

So is kbin unofficially dead now?

EDIT: Huh, checked the GitHub repo's contributions graph ... and yea, nothing since the end of last year. Is Ernest ok?

By comparison, mbin has multiple significant contributors ... nice to see.

maegul , 21 days ago

Sorry ... downvoted.

The statement in the article had a footnote that provided a link to a 2022 Verge article in which Rochko said on the "BDFL model":

That’s what I would prefer to stick with, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think there’s better ways to involve other people and have better communication.

Moreover his behaviour in maintaining Mastodon is very much inline with this model. It wasn't name calling, it is literally what he is and happy to be described as.

maegul , 21 days ago

You're not wrong, but I think you're missing the bigger picture.

The problems and associated solutions aren't just about being a heroic lead dev. They're organisational now. And so "grandstanding" has its place, especially when it comes to informing people about why they should consider organising together. You may be sick of their articles but many haven't read any of them and I'm not sure there are others out there trying to solve these problems at a system level.

maegul , 23 days ago

If Ghost fulfil their wish to get payments and subscriptions working over the protocol then that would count. They said they think they can in their recent announcement. But then it seems they may have crypto in mind for it.

maegul , 26 days ago

good question ... the devs definitely aim for efficiency in their choices. Their frontend framework for instance is niche but (at least at the time that they picked it) requires only a small size and performs well (though many devs complain about the use of a niche framework).

maegul , 29 days ago

For me, at least, Lemmy comms mirroring HN links are the best of both worlds

Yea I enjoyed it too.

maegul , 1 month ago

Yea. Along with web rings, human-focused search and just harbouring communities better ... we gotta start building people-focused online gardens and ditch this capitalistic hustle shit.

maegul , 1 month ago

fediverse had a strong european presence before the reddit migration too. The Mastodon lead-dev/founder, for instance, is German. And European governments have been far more interested in running their own instances on the fediverse than any other country AFAICT (to the point that I've seen it confuse North-American admins).

maegul , 1 month ago

Yea my take with git for a while is that it is a naturally GUI oriented app/program much like text editors (who uses ed any more?), however much you’re a CLI only person.

maegul , 1 month ago

Because it's for managing code, and the moment you get used to or want syntax highlighting and want to inspect or view diffs/patches, then you're in text-editor-like-GUI territory.

Beyond that, there's viewing and searching logs/history, viewing and managing branches and remotes and generally navigating the history of a repo. Graphical interfaces help with all of that.

A quick example that struck me was viewing the diff between two distant (ie, not adjacent) commits. With a decent GUI, it can be two clicks (with a modifier key). A really nice way of revising the history of a repo especially when there are multiple branches.

maegul , 1 month ago

You can just diff two commits on the cli with git diff commit1 commit2 but I guess that what you mean is that you might not have any specific reference two either of the commits so you have to browse through the log to find the commit message that describes the commit, which I’ll grant you is easier in a gui because you have two variables that you have to copy and paste if you’re in the terminal.

Yea, this is what I'm talking about. When all of the visual affordances coalesce into a pretty simple flow.

And to be clear, I'd suspect many like myself end up using both, where there'll always be some shortcoming in any given GUI that only the CLI can fill functionality/power wise. But defaulting to a GUI (or even a good TUI or editor plugin) for everyday usage, like I said, makes sense.

maegul OP , 1 month ago

haha, yea ... for sure too long ... but that's kinda youtube these days right?

I'd add (having watching most of the video ... at 2x) ... that the complete reliance on cloud AI is prohibitively slow and often worse than just a Google (or other specific smartphone app) ... and that its committed to being a standalone device and so doesn't interact with your smartphone or smart watch. Also the battery life seems problematically bad as does the whole projector screen thing.

The thing that gets me ... and I'm a little surprised MKBHD didn't mention it ... is how fragile an attempt at disrupting the personal smart-device market it is. It's basically a smart watch on your chest that talks with cloud AI (with someone's probably irrational love of tiny projectors as a UI). The moment it takes off, the big companies can make an accessory, just like the smart watches, just like it but which integrates with their existing ecosystems.

Now that level of monopolistic control is a problem, obviously, but it doesn't detract I think from what looks like a fairly poor attempt from a strangely well and persistently funded "start up" (I'm not sure being former Apple execs counts as "start up", which is really the problem here I think).

Someone posted on mastodon about this group ("hu.ma.ne" ... cuz meaningless dots are cool?) and how the belief from big-tech-employees that they can transition to independent startup business models is probably a complete fallacy that they wish was true. Instead they're so used to the safety nets, resources and platform security/monopoly of big-tech that they haven't any idea what it takes to lead a startup to success ... but they have the connections to procure funding, hype and attention.

maegul OP , 1 month ago

ha!

Still ... what's wrong with "humane.com"? It's a decent name for a tech company (if somewhat on the nose).

maegul OP , 1 month ago

Fair! The humane AI pin thingy announced sometime last year.

TLDW: AI cloud is too slow and shitty, the projector UI is too shitty, the battery too shit, and it doesn't to anything better than just using your smartphone. Don't buy.

Generally I find the broader picture interesting ... like how are they getting funding and what were they doing before chatGPT?

maegul OP , 1 month ago

Ummm ... I don't think this is clickbait ... at all. The title? Sure ... it's from the video. But this is a big tech reviewer (whom, FWIW, I'm not particularly partial to) talking about a new product that is not only making buzz but, IMO, is somewhat emblematic of where tech is up to at the moment, especially regarding AI. It's, IMO, a fair review from a user's perspective and highlights reasonably enough how rough the idea of taking AI to the consumer market is right now.

Also, looking at the broader picture just a bit as I think I'm trying to, and there's an odd picture here which, again, I think touches on how the tech industry is going right now. Yes it's a 1st gen product, but the company isn't young and the pivot to AI seems glaring to me.

Maybe just scroll and move on if you're not interested rather than posting irritating content policing?

maegul OP , 1 month ago

‘kay

maegul OP , 1 month ago

I mean I guess I see that. But still, the use/abuse of country code TLDs has maybe gotten a bit much hasn’t it?

The hu.ma company from Nigeria?

maegul OP , 1 month ago

Why more of this type?

It certainly seems to be a bit of a fediverse stereotype though.

maegul OP , 1 month ago

Ha!

maegul , 1 month ago

Yea I’ve been on scaled + subscribed as my default feed since it came out and haven’t looked back.

Interestingly, it’s one of those things that should get better the more people use it.

maegul , 1 month ago

Multi communities. They would be a big deal IMO. If you could have multiple saved into a list so that you could check different feeds depending on what you’re interested in, it would be much better. Combine that with the scaled sort (as well as the others), and you’re managing your feed very well IMO.

maegul , 1 month ago

AFAICT, it's been something on lemmy's radar for a long while too. I get the sense the devs never worked out how they wanted to do it or maybe were a bit too ambitious in what they wanted from the feature and so it was kinda left by the way side, unfortunately. If I were to ever start contributing to lemmy it'd probably be the first thing I try to pick up.

maegul , 1 month ago

They have multi communities!? Didn’t know!

maegul , 1 month ago

Just had a brief look ... they seem to be created by the admin and not user defined?

maegul , 1 month ago

Yea. Broadly it's basically everything that's not microblogging and has well organised conversations

maegul , 1 month ago

If we can get Discourse and NodeBB sharing nicely with Lemmy+Mbin+PieFed it could more than double the size of the threadverse. It’s a big deal.

Indeed!

If that all comes together, it'd be like "what kind of forum/reddit platform does the fediverse have" and the answer would just be "yes".