Notices by Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)

IBCK doing an episode on Sam Harris and "The End Of Faith" and recounting their own embarrassing libertarian/aggro-new-atheist phases and _absolutely_ reading me for filth (particularly me 20 years ago).

From Peter Shamshiri: "It is embarrassing. Deep inside every middle-class white boy born in the 1980s is the desire to win a debate on the internet."

bah I forgot the patreon CTA at the end and I'm probably not going to be able to edit this for a few hours, I am so bad at doing this as a job. here's the link so I at least put it somewhere adjacent <https://www.patreon.com/creatorglyph>

The Fediverse MUST grow to encompass all websites and apps that want a future without centralized gatekeepers that are soft targets for authoritarian takeovers.

The protocols are TOOLS for doing this they are not ends in themselves, and they MUST be SECONDARY to the goal of an interconnected, open social web. To do that, we need to find ways to work together and stop yelling at each other so much.

We'd better, or we are all screwed.

https://blog.glyph.im/2024/11/the-federation-deathmatch.html

#fediverse #atproto #activitypub

one of the areas that regulators have been less focused is opening the elements of app store platform security architecture so that third parties, hopefully 501c3s or PBCs, can crack open the API for the app store app on your phone and create alternative frontends to install/uninstall/review permissions. on the one hand it needs to be illegal to sell data like this, but on the other it needs to be possible to automate the *review* of what can access your location
https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/113420239852664505

There are two reasons of course, the first is normative, which is to say that you *should* do these things if you are an American, which, sure, great, love some respect for discourse and for rules rather than cult leaders, but as persuasive writing this is nothing. I cannot imagine who it would be for. Is there anyone out there who wasn’t going to argue something in good faith, then sees this, and thinks “oh I shouldn’t do that”?

When I see a post like this I am fascinated by its function. It is false, of course, respect for the rule of law is at an all time low and my man, my brother, my fellow passenger on this pale blue marble hurtling through the void, you posted this on Facebook™ Threads™, how can you *possibly* say we make arguments in good faith. So why would arguably the most powerful man in the world tell such a lie?

https://www.threads.net/@potus/post/DB6kY9IIcE0

I just can’t reconcile the polls with any understanding I have of reality. I think she’s going to win, and I think it will be close but I just can’t believe it will be the nail-biter we are seeing in the data. It’s not that I think he is so awful that the virtuous American populace will reject him, obviously we are well past that, obviously tens of millions of irredeemable racists will vote for him, obviously it *will* be close

@kati my cousin who is a bit of a stats nerd and a data scientist in training just texted me about this; I don’t think I am going to post much about this until I have had a chance to internalize it and calm down, but my understanding is that it is even better news than it sounds like. Basically this *is* evidence for my hypothesis above, and probably pretty good evidence at that. People are waking up.

I can’t back this up with data *directly* but I have a firm conviction that there are at least 10x as many people like this as there are useful idiots who will vote for Jill Stein or leave the top of the ticket blank because of some esoteric backwards interpretation of Kropotkin. If you want to help in the home stretch then GOTV will be categorically more consequential than yelling at a guy you made up to get mad at (and you probably already know that) https://historians.social/@philip_cardella/113403327384181534

Knock knock, ring ring

https://www.votesaveamerica.com/vsa-2024/

@hynek @brettcannon personally I am _trying_ not to get too mad about the plushies because there is a reading of the Discourse that goes like this: 🧵

@brettcannon bluesky funding, the latest Musk outrage lead to a huge boost in bluesky user count, while mastodon stayed flat. Plus there has been a huge amount of posting about plushes, which comes across as poorly timed at a moment where mastodon is so badly losing the race for twitter refugees

@hynek @brettcannon

nerds: you moron. patreon is unsustainable. you are not raising enough money to fund this site. you will destroy us

eugen: okay how about I sell merch to supplement it

nerds: you absolute fool. fix this bug that *I* care about, that no one will pay you for, instead. your plushies will not sell

eugen: okay I will market it aggressively.

nerds: shut up. i hate seeing these promotions all over my timeline. no one will buy these anyway

eugen: we are selling out immediately

@hynek @offby1 @brettcannon I am still pretty optimistic. About mastodon, anyway. If I'm being clear-eyed about the whole thing, I do not think that any of us are particularly qualified to predict the success of social networks. But we're definitely not in a death spiral yet.

c.f. the old "Linux on the Desktop" joke; on the one hand, a big failure to achieve its stated goals. On the other hand, the Steam Deck.

@powersoffour Thanks a lot for stopping by! Especially with such a small channel as this, every viewer is a huge encouragement :).

Ended the stream a bit early today since I was getting stuck and needed to sit and think about the problem a bit more without writing more code.

Still, nice to have a few folks drop by, and get in the habit again!

A couple of minutes late thanks to all the faff I forgot I needed to do every time, but stream going live momentarily at https://www.twitch.tv/glyph_official

It's Friday afternoon, and that means it's time for an update for my supporters over at Patreon. And I guess I'm finally getting over COVID, because this one was back up over 800 words, and considerably more detailed and (I hope!) interesting than in the last few weeks:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/patreon-update-114717478

You can support this work over at Patreon, here, for which you receive access to my (usually) weekly(-ish) update about what I'm working on and thinking about. This is always a bit rougher and more conversational than "official" pieces at my blog, but folks still seem to like it! <https://www.patreon.com/creatorglyph>

So it's time for another quick self-promo thread. If you weren't already aware, I am an independent open source maintainer and writer working on a variety of projects. Some of these projects are described in my self-promo megathread, helpfully linked here so I don't have to repeat all of them: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/112498550495367755