Notices by Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 (rysiek@mstdn.social)

@cstross nope, "quantum". Already being pushed.

Bubbles of this size kinda need a technology that sounds like magic. Promising, but in a way that nobody really understands it. So that nobody can easily call hype out as bullshit that it is.

"Just one word. Quantum."

@quinn

@pier reminder that Sam "used-ai-salesman" Altman was non-ironically mentioning building a fscking Dyson Sphere to power "AI".

It is all so dumb it hurts.

@cstross @quinn

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@alissaazar/115781985482592177

It's almost as if Bluesky was a Silicon Valley VC-funded startup, with Blockchain Capital among its biggest investors, and thus has to make "difficult decisions" to get that hockey-stick growth and chase the ROI.

And... fascism is on the up-and-up in the land of opportunity.

Reminder that ATproto "ecosystem" is still not meaningfully decentralized – Blacksky users who get blocked on Bluesky learn they can't access their own posts even on Blacksky:
https://plus.flux.community/p/banning-controversy-reveals-blueskys

#Bluesky

@bkuhn I will continue to believe IRC continues to have a future. In the meantime, #HugOps to all the IRC ops out there. This is not the time to be disparaging.

@babe

@lxo

> hosting arrangements and community arrangements don't have to fully overlap

I agree. However, I have not seen it done well so far.

I do hope one day I will see it done well.

@kawaiipunk

@kawaiipunk I used to think the same way – specifically, that community hosting and federated services are only a stepping stone towards p2p solutions. Over the years I concluded that's not the case though.

Mainly because every p2p system I tested inevitably ended up becoming a right-libertarian hellscape.

Humans are a communal, not individualistic, species. Communities are the basic building block of the society. I now believe our tools need to reflect that.

Happy John Mastodon Day to all those who celebrate!

Original, but updated, piece:
https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/hypocrisy-and-fear-all-the-way-down-at-twitter/

#JohnMastodon #JohnMastodon2025 #JohnMastodonDay #Fediverse #Mastodon

@nemo no. It's just a general overview of Signal's safety. It mentions the good (double ratchet, etc) and not so good (reliance on AWS, etc) and generally does it in a balanced, reasonable way.

Again, it is not a bad piece in general terms, but the clickbait is dangerous.

4. "But none of these have undergone the same level of rigorous external scrutiny as Signal, and all of them have tiny user bases by comparison to Signal, which limits their practical usefulness."

4/🧵

The piece itself is relatively ok.

The problem is the burying of the lede and clickbaity title, suggesting Signal might not be safe.

Most people only read headlines and the first few paragraphs of articles, and so what they might incorrectly take away from this piece is that Signal's safety is somehow suspect.

It's not. Signal is safe.

This is outright *dangerous* at a time when effective, usable privacy and encryption tools are more important than ever – and under attack globally.

5/🧵/end

Here are the four paragraphs of conclusion from that clickbaity piece ("Is Signal safe?") by @protonprivacy about @signalapp that is doing rounds.

1. "Signal remains widely regarded as the gold standard for secure private messaging for very good reasons. The Signal Protocol is extremely secure, and unlike most other apps that use the Signal Protocol, Signal collects almost no metadata from the Signal app."

1/🧵

#Signal #Privacy #InfoSec

2. "Signal is therefore vastly more private than any of its mainstream competitors, and with easy contact discovery and a wealth of advanced features, you might realistically convince your friends and family to actually use it."

2/🧵

3. "However, being hosted on AWS servers remains a concern in light of Signal’s reliance on SGX. There are a number of open-source encrypted messaging apps like Threema that try to address this and other perceived issues with Signal — such as its reliance on a centralized server and the need to supply a real phone number— some of which show great promise."

3/🧵

People concerned about the planet boiling to a point of becoming uninhabitable:

- We need circular economy! :blobcatscared:

Nvidia, helping boil the planet:

- Oh, we're way ahead of you! 🫡

#Nvidia #AI #AIBubble

Randomly thinking of that glorious moment in time over four years ago when @jz made a poll with three options: R, G, B, and fedi collectively created a color: Fédi-vert.

https://mamot.fr/@jz/106002949694434169

#Fediverse

This is, of course, hilarious. If a single traffic spike can bring CloudFlare down for hours, and with it innumerable websites and services, what exactly is the point of CloudFlare?

Yes, I understand that a way smaller traffic spike would probably bring any individual website down if they were all hosted separately. Sure.

But bringing them *all* down at the same time would be impossible. That's resilience through independence.

#CloudFlare is a single point of failure, and it keeps failing.

@emilion you do realize that Wikipedia runs on infrastructure – including networking infrastructure – and that infrastructure is run and maintained by Wikimedia Foundation, right?
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_infrastructure

And I assure you if Wikipedia went down that would a global story as well.

@emilion if your argument is that CloudFlare, AWS, Azure had become too complex to be reliable, we can agree.

@emilion I am not surprised. I am saying this is simply unacceptable.

They made the decision to put themselves in a central, critical position for innumerable services, and as you say it is entirely obvious it's impossible to keep being reliable on that level of complexity and scale.

Instead of justifying these failures, we should recognize this and remove them from that central, critical position. Instead of 5 or so huge companies that can't manage their complexity, we need hundreds that can.

@emilion thanks, I've had quite some luck with convincing management not to host stuff in "the Cloud", for years. Incidents like these happen to be extremely effective in such conversations. 👍

Turns out when one actually tries arguing against the cargo-culting in our industry, instead of just throwing their arms and giving up from the get go, stuff like that can happen. 👀

I just wonder what could be achieved if all that energy spent justifying CloudFlare's failures went into that instead! 🤔