Notices by Felicitas Pojtinger 🌅 (pojntfx@mastodon.social), page 2

Matrix (specifically Element with Spaces) is the only platform that will one day provide an experience similar to what Discord provides today on an open, federated, secure protocol.

Everything else is a distraction in my eyes, even if there are still some rough edges here and there today.

American solutions will not solve problems caused by Americans

"Americans pivot from American platform #1 to American platform #2" really isn't news anymore at this point

(Posting this from said Palm) I wonder if people would like actually use their Palms if this existed. Feels like in 2025 there might actually be a market for a semi-online device that like this that can sync via e.g. their Linux phone or desktop at home

I've been having so so so much fun hacking on my Palm

Here is Heffalump, a PalmOS fediverse client, running on it (emulated for now). I'm writing a new conduit for it (in TypeScript with palm-sync, but I might port that to Go). So much fun. Posts the responses when you sync back on your computer, so it's actually kind of "interactive"!

RE: https://techhub.social/@rayckeith/115818529643049094

Not open source:

"Open Printer will use the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license for all of its files, including electronics and mechanical design files, firmware code, and the bill of materials"

So it will be illegal to manufacture it for a friend, manufacture replacement parts and sell them etc. ...

Openwashing should really be fought

@dansup F-Droid? Hell yeah!

https://digitalrechte.de/news/palantir-beim-digitalgipfel-am-tisch-mit-merz-und-macron

Pathetic

The more I hear about the digital sovereignty summit and the people involved in it the more I think the whole things is an astroturfed scam

Something I'm noticing with a lot of the new astroturfed "open" social media projects (the kinds funded by big, opaque foundations/billionaire's passion projects) is that their view of a region's policy priorities isn't what that community itself wants to do, but what Americans _imagine_ the community wants.

It's always very visible based on how the branding works. Some of them are branded genuinely like how someone trying to lobby the commission or trying to resurrect GAIA-X would design it. Or how eIDAS's current branding looks like. It's very weird to someone who is actually part of the community, esp. when actual European projects in the space (e.g. Mastodon, Codeberg etc.) exist and do absolutely _none_ of this kind of stuff.

For Europe, that's privacy and vague sense of European nationalism. For queer people, it's something to do with trust & safety. It's like someone who isn't part of any of those communities tries to reinvent what they care about from first principles.

Clean energy is cheaper & better, esp. the solar + batteries combination. Mass timber housing is just plain better than using concrete for everything. EVs are more fun to drive, and fast, electric transit allows you to work or research on your commute instead of having to actively steer a car. Linux is nicer to use and won't enshittify in the future.

The fact that all of these are great for the climate is awesome, but we don't need to make that argument the main reason/pull factor anymore.

The biggest takeaway of the failed climate movement of the late 2010s and early 2020s IMHO is that trying to regulate consumption fundamentally just doesn't work & is politically toxic. Instead of trying to get everyone to reduce their electricity use, we should be pushing for China-style mass renewable installations for example. Instead of trying to be NIMBYs about density, we should push for mass timber high-rises.

@dalias I don't know if I agree with this. Machine translation can never replace human translation for so many reasons, accountability probably being the biggest one. But for the cases where you speak both languages fluently - in my case, that's German, English and French - it's miles and miles ahead of anything pre-LLM. Biases are still there, yes, but if you're translating your own stuff into different languages (I mostly use it to speed up localization) it's very easy to spot

I feel like a broken record but I do actually think that there are at least three use cases for LLMs that are genuinely useful: Machine translation for most languages that's much better than anything before it, individualized language assistance while you're learning a new one and correction (which makes sense, it's essentially autocomplete!), and tool calling with natural language. Is there any money in those things? Hell no, open models already do that. Will this lead to "AGI"? Absolutely not.

Will I be buying a Framework next? I was seriously considering it for quite a while, but this has given me a bit of a pause. DHH etc. are not on that sponsorship list (anymore?), and at least personally I don't think there is much harm in sponsoring the people behind hyprland be they bad at governance or not. We'll see what happens next I guess. They are officially on the GNOME donations page now fwiw, and they do contribute more there than to hyprland which is great to see.

Glad to see Framework also supporting other Linux desktops now. Honestly, I think after the CEOs statement and this new level of transparency, I think it's all fine now: https://frame.work/bg/en/blog/framework-sponsorships

The only form of moderation on modern social media that seems to actually be working is the decentralized one that the Fediverse uses. I used to think that it's a thing that needs fixing or that it might genuinely be unfixable, but seeing how US-centric the alternatives are and how they fall in line on every single issue, even on stuff like age verification, is crazy. The Fediverse way of doing it might lead to drama too, but wow does it scale better than the alternative.