Notices by Simon Frankau (sgf@mastodon.xyz)

@malwareminigun @spmatich @jerry Not everything's worth automating, but ppl tend to under- rather than over-automate.

As an SRE, a surprising amount of value comes from looking at what the devs still do by hand and going "Really?!" until they're embarrassed.

It's best if adding automation helps put simple, programmatic interfaces on everything. This not only helps with future automation, but general scripting.

If you don't have that kind of environment, it can be miserable and unprofitable.

@ElleGray Oh, "the mediocrity machine" is painfully accurate.

I mostly see AI being used now by those who can't reach "mediocre" otherwise, or would happily go for "mediocre, but cheaper" over "good".

It just cuts to the core of the current situation.

@andrewt e.g. https://www.goldennumber.net/music/ ! It's one of those things that just gets repeated around by people who don't really get the maths.

To be fair, "black and white notes" are more accurately 8 notes in a tonal scale (really 7), selected from 13 notes (really 12) in the octave. "Black and white" is just explaining that in the context of C major.

@astrid @lily @andrewt What I particularly like is /why/ people get all golden ratio on music (*):

An octave has: Five black notes. Eight white notes. Thirteen notes. 5, 8, 13, Fibonacci, Φ!

Unfortunately, the 8 and 13 double count the first/last note, and it's really about the twelfth root of two.

So you've got a whole branch of musical numerology based on incorrect 1-based indexing!

((*) Sorry, Andrew, if this is what you were referring to, but I didn't see it explicitly mentioned.)

@luis_in_brief @jwz Ironically, the incentives are in the right place for the wrong reason.

Appropriate anti-spam tooling should be built into the Mastodon software, not something that large instance owners should have to roll-their-own.

Fortunately, the owners of mastodon.social are also the Masto devs, so it all works out!

@luis_in_brief Yes.

I think you can make the distinction that Threads might force the issue when otherwise the tooling could grow organically over more time, but given that Masto dev has historically left things until crisis point was reached (AIUI, IIRC, reading how e.g. instance blocks were developed), maybe forcing the issue is no bad thing.

I think https://void.rehab/notes/9ndzk51ttlu6oovn is fascinating because it's both obviously a really bad idea, and something Fedi has no immune system against.

I get the feeling that Fedi hasn't had to face anyone bright and malicious. Despite some crypto, rate-limiting etc. we're still probably at pre-Morris-worm levels of naïvety.

@phiofx @hrefna I'm intrigued by "dwindling former Twitter addict pool" - Twitter still has hundreds of millions of users. Is your hypothesis that they'll *never* leave, that they'll never come to Fedi, or something else?

(My personal opinion is there's huge value growing Fedi to get more humans out of the billionaires' panopticons & I'd much rather do that than simply optimise for the relatively small, techie crowd we have now.)

Either way, I agree the tech needs to evolve.

@eolach A pattern I keep seeing on Fedi is unhelpful "You should do X" posts in response to problems that completely fail to take into account that different people have different needs.

Usually it's "you should run your own instance". Telling a black person to open themselves up to racist abuse and grow a thicker skin, though? That's a new one on me.

And telling a black person to use a "whitelist"? At best, very thoughtless.

@nach Aw, did you get "triggered" by me simply suggesting non-inclusive language is thoughtless? You look really very offended by that.

You seem to have accidentally wandered into mainstream Fedi, and that must be very confusing to you. Don't worry, I'll block you and you won't have to see my scary posts again.

Still, 👍 to all that free speeching you're doing there, with the naughty words and stuff. I bet your mom's proud of that.

@adrienne This is fascinating, because over-engineering. It's kinda "How can you make a chat app into pseudo-blockchain?" & represents FOSS devs solving the problems they want rather than the problems that exist.

At the same time, it reminds me of so much half-assed functionality in Mastodon. For social media, I increasingly believe features need to be fully-assed or zero-assed.

I guess it's an incentives thing - looking plausible goes a long way and is a lot easier than realistic design.

@mekkaokereke I read the whole thing, and without further context I still really don't know what's going on, beyond Kris being accused of something and needing to take a break. Kris seemed a decent person based on pre-Hachyderm Twitter and now seems to be a pantomime villain to half the internet. Not quite sure what to make of it all beyond upping my estimate of "BlueSky is the future".

(Not asking for an explanation, just venting. Will probably read around later.)

I totally love the way VC flavour of the month has seamlessly switched from "artificial scarcity of art, it's all about making sure artists get compensated!" to "free art for everyone, based on all the art we could find, completely uncompensated".