BoringCactus wrote a tentative post-mortem to “open source”/free software (five-and-a-half years ago already?!) that I find/found interesting and somewhat relevant to your question.

1893: the US air force guess back in time to pull the ultimate prank on it’s older siblings

Alternatively, how many of them have invested in one or more of these LLM makers and are ready to torpedo their own business as long as it makes the share price go up/feeds more authentic training data?

Interesting read, but boy does this journalist have a … different read on things than I do.

People talk a lot about the protocols that power Bluesky vs. ActivityPub, because we’re nerds and we believe deep in our hearts that the superior protocol will win.

IMO it’s the exact opposite; we talk about this because we want the best protocol to win, this time, while knowing full well that usually it doesn’t.

Of course search was broken because all OSS social tools must have one glaring lack of functionality.

My understanding is that search on the microblogging side of the fedi is intended to be “broken” (from the view of someone expecting a Twitter-style search); hashtags are for opting-in to global discoverability whilst without them your posts are intended to be stumbled upon and/or passed around rather than sought out.

If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland. We’re not tough enough as a people to survive in Greenland, much less “take it over”.

I doubt that trump supporters cheering on the USA throwing their weight around like the world’s bully-in-chief would be receptive to such a message.

I can’t tell if I’m just too deep in the fedi-culture weeds, or if the article really is confidently ignorant.

not far off, sadly

It’s not chatbot psychosis, it’s ‘math and engineering and neuroscience’

top-tier sneer from The Register

They aren’t fediverse-first, and they’re French-based/French-focused/French-language-only, but Blast is an online, video-first news station that hosts their own peertube instance (https://video.blast-info.fr/) where they upload everything as well as putting their videos on YouTube. They also have a mastodon account where they share everything they publish: https://mamot.fr/@blast_info.

So, it’s definitely possible to have news on the fediverse, but I don’t think we’re at a point where it can be exclusively on the fedi - even if the stations’ website is ActivityPub-enabled, the majority of the people that a news station would want to reach just aren’t browsing the fediverse, let alone have accounts here.

Flashy and pretty, but as a UI I find it places too much visual emphasis on form over function / style over substance. The biggest example I can give us that I don’t think the bright neon blue left border on posts should be so much more eye-catching than the post titles. If I were to change things, I would probably try to find a dimmer shade of blue for them, and/or add some additional decoration to post titles so that they more clearly are the first thing my eyes are drawn to when scanning the page.

Your last paragraph reminds me of the following series of YouTube videos that goes over how to build a “correct” fluid simulation, starting at the quantum mechanical level (iirc): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMoTR49uj6ld32zLVWmcGXaW7w2ey7Vh4.

Multiple scales of complexity and interaction, that’s way too computationally intensive to just directly stimulate how reality works, and so each scale has to be carefully “averaged out”, in a sense, to end up with a simulation that is cheap enough to run yet still behaves realistically and reproduces as many nuances as possible.

You can use me after free() all you want, babe

Yeah, go big or go home with this kind of stuff. Give me some Linux kernel source code, maybe even some well-known RFC!

Kite on a cable seems to require less specialized manufacturing than enormous fan blades on a very tall pole. There’s no fire risk from the blades spinning too fast when no power is needed.

I suppose this introduced the risk of cables getting tangled. I also wonder how high the kite needs to get to reach a layer of ever present wind and avoid needing a human to come spool it back in.

Yup! YAML is defined as a “strict superset” of JSON (or at least, it was the last time I checked).

It’s a lot like markdown and HTML; when you want to write something deeply structured and somewhat complex you can always drop back/down to the format with explicit closing delimiters and it just works™.

Now you’re thinking with portals primes!

From what I’ve heard, Mein Kampf is similarly drivel. Don’t know if that’s comforting or even more depressing…

Wow, how disappointing. The LARB published two pieces on Dune back when Villeneuve’s first movie came out that, imo, absolutely nailed relating Dune to current events: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/heresies-of-dune/, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/race-consciousness-fascism-and-frank-herberts-dune/.

Now I kind of want to save an offline copy of these articles in case the website goes down.

So which is it? Are developers 55% more productive, or are they losing 20% of their time to inefficiencies and burning out at record rates?

The answer: executives are measuring—and reporting—what makes their stock price rise, not what’s actually happening on the ground.

Or if you want to get slightly more conspiratorial: the execs are all buying shares in OpenAI, Nvidia, and the like - so now they’re more interested in ordering people to use LLM tools so that these stocks rise in price, even if it means sabotaging their own company.

Davos, Switzerland
February 8,1996

Thirty years have not been kind

Reminds me of the mutant half-axolotl in season 1 of the Fallout tv series!

I recently read a lovely short story about this: https://sightlessscribbles.com/the-colonization-of-confidence/