Notices by blaine (blaine@mastodon.social)

Has Trump announced his candidacy for Pope yet?

Billionaires are the problem, not our neighbours to the South.

So, let's target billionaires with a 30% tax on any transaction by any financial instrument (company, investment vehicle, etc) that's more than 2.5% owned by a billionaire.

It's not even a usurious tax: it's exactly the same as Apple takes.

Not owned by a billionaire? No tax. Easy.

@evan @jcoglan @darius yes! It's e.g. notable that (at least the last time I looked) Mastodon totally lacks a plugin system (front- or back-end, much less an "ActivityPub filter proxy"); such a thing would be amazing for the sort of play and experimentation you're pointing to.

@geoffreylitt has been doing a ton of work in the direction you're pointing, in case you haven't come across his work already!

@evan @darius I'm super here for it! ☺️

In my experience, the coding (though less so software architecture) part of LLMs works pretty well, but my point is really that the hard parts of building software aren't really about the code.

@evan @darius my reference point for this is every non-profit that's interacted with a tech person who's built a tool that "helps" the non-profit. The first pass is easy, trivial even. LLMs are great at technology at that level. It's the long-term social stuff that's hard; "The Team is the Unit of Delivery" and all that.

"sudo make me a magical 500,000 cell excel spreadsheet but no way to manage the complexity"

@darius @jcoglan @evan totally, strong agreement from me.

I'm not a very good programmer in the sense of making types line up and typing the text for functions, but I'm alright at other bits.

The LLMs are transformative for the former, but they're still comically bad at the latter. Which is fun, because now I'm a pretty good rust programmer! 😂

But it's honestly more of a "I have a stutter that makes verbal persuasion hard for dumb reasons" sort of assistance.

@darius @jcoglan @evan _maybe_ there are a bunch of people who are really good at systems and product design and the sorts of things that and just need help getting over the "typing in code into a text editor" part, but my intuition and experience working with many very smart people suggests to me that that's unlikely.

@darius so much this. I would read that book.

Yesterday I had a conversation that concluded, "yes, you _could_ replace an entire product/dev team with bots, but you would also recapitulate all of the complicated bits of having a team in order to do it."

I wonder if God feels this way when looking at the creation he made in his image...

My hot take for the day: Mastodon should implement support for atproto PDSes for every user account.

(on the flipside, I hope that Meta is actually pursuing these things in an honourable way, and just taking a cautious approach to user safety – something they absolutely should do! The line gets crossed if they use their power to force (implicitly or explicitly) everyone else to behave in a way that is primarily beneficial to Meta. cc @evan)

@fediversereport their opt-in requirement is so obviously bogus – if it were something that Meta's lawyers would insist on, then SMTP should also be subject to opt-in policies (sadly, in practice it almost is these days).

It will be a devastating outcome if online decentralization becomes subject to onerous federal / european-level regulatory baseline requirements in order to enter the market. I hope that the regulators see past this attempt at regulatory capture.

cc @pluralistic

@fediversereport my belief is that the opt-in requirement is so that Meta can use their policy clout to ensure that we end up with a "closed open" regulatory regime like the phone networks: you *can* federate, and the system is "open" but so highly regulated "for safety" that only large corporations can even imagine doing so, and in practice the whole thing is run by duopolies or pseudo-cartels (e.g. in the US: Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T).

This would suit Meta just fine.

@fediversereport I go further in my speculation. I think the opt-in requirement for Threads federation stands out as a signal of where Meta is going. I can't find the quote, but Mosseri has said that the opt-in requirement is to protect their users' privacy, security, and IP rights and defend against spam and abuse.

I call bullshit. Meta has always been crap (intentionally and unintentionally) at those things, even on their own fully-controlled platforms.

@mkljczk @rysiek @cwebber @ben that's not unreasonable, but I would ask how is it different to receive a follow request (or follower) from one of Threads' 200 million users different from one of the fediverse's max. 10 million? Especially given Meta's horrendous record of moderation and consistent contempt of their users?

I'm convinced it's Meta's intentional (or, charitably) incompetent attempt to drive regressive regulation rather than an earnest attempt to "protect" their users.

@stefan @cwebber imho, <<they're the same picture>>.

I very much agree with @pluralistic's concerns that bsky need to *actually ship* meaningful, non-reversible federation (but also trust the folks involved to do that. There will be a *lot* of side-eyeing and loss of faith in progressive movements if they don't 😅).

@kissane there are cultural differences on the various networks, to be sure, but negotiating THAT is a conversation that actually goes somewhere.

Being someone who only uses PNG – and only communicates with people who also use PNG – because it's somehow a better technology? The sooner we can get past that particular phase of all of this, the better.

As @polotek started with, the reasons people choose one network over another are just so unrelated to technology it's not even funny.

@kissane 1000% this.

To take a small part of what you're saying and to be massively reductionist, as far as the technical stuff, goes:

RSS = Software-agnostic "what's happening with my website"
ActivityPub = Software-agnostic "what's happening with my website"
atproto = Software-agnostic "what's happening with my website"

It would be way healthier if we framed the distinctions more like those between JPEG, DNG, and PNG.

@kissane @polotek the particulars of a given technology matter, but the best technologies are those that can be invisibly replaced and upgraded.

As someone who's worked on protocols, my biggest feeling of success comes when the thing grows beyond what my original imagination and/or capacity was, becomes something bigger, and no-one but some boffins notice.

Getting excited about technology can be great – getting religious about it? Can we not, please? 😅

@darius nice! The only folks who *I* could imagine insisting on this being opt-in are Oracle's legal team, and they were told in no uncertain terms that this sort of data isn't even *eligible* for opt-out, even in the US of A. 😅

As we (at least in Canada) move towards a situation where government organizations are not* (in general, locally at least) engaged in direct suppression of less privileged people in support of more privileged people (i.e., as things get better), the state monopoly on violence is at risk of migrating to a state monopoly on care. When bureaucrats have jurisdiction over civic things that provide safety and security, a lack of capacity or will in government becomes an implicitly hostile gate.