rottingleaf

@rottingleaf@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox is fine. The people running it are not⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I dunno, Firefox of 3.0 times was the shit. It itself was the browser that should be, more welcoming to customization than Windows of the time was to porn winlockers. They also had XULRunner for alternative ideas. Gecko was the FOSS browser engine that various alternative “nice” MacOS and Linux browsers used.

  Though between 2004 and 2008 only four years passed. Less than between Windows 2000 and Vista (let’s ignore XP as a more glossy consumer version of 2000).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Holy sh*t: Jack Dorsey just Announced Bitchat(A secure, decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging app for iOS and macOS that works over Bluetooth mesh networks) Licensed Under Public Domain.⁩ ⁨⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Just realized that could be read as “bit chicks”, which would explain such a name choice for an IRC client in the times when there actually were some bit chicks on popular IRC channels.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Holy sh*t: Jack Dorsey just Announced Bitchat(A secure, decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging app for iOS and macOS that works over Bluetooth mesh networks) Licensed Under Public Domain.⁩ ⁨⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, I didn’t think you were, just shared … In any case under Linuxulator with Linux JRE it swears a lot, but seems to work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Former and current Microsofties react to the latest layoffs⁩ ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  If wanting or receptive to some advice …

  I have done this in the past, but I unfortunately also have BAD and sometimes abruptly drop habits, including useful ones, because they start feeling insincere. Hard to explain.

  This is a very precious reminder, cause the former just means that one has to start again and again.

  For their benefit and the role that they in company structures, it is one approach that pays out for some.

  It’s also (hence why I’ve touched upon conditions) similar to the advice of “want to do something at all, do it badly”, sometimes given to people with those involving executive dysfunction.

  Unfortunately for us, and humanity at-large, there’s also a statistically-significant increase in the incidence of anti-social personality disorder in those who pursue such positions, compared to the population average.

  Yes, I’ve had a pleasure (not really) of meeting such people.

  Anyway, if their common worldview is that we all live on some kind of ruins of a fallen empire, and they are going to be nobles of that society, that doesn’t account for universal machines still being universal, and the technologies they rely upon being just as applicable the other way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Holy sh*t: Jack Dorsey just Announced Bitchat(A secure, decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging app for iOS and macOS that works over Bluetooth mesh networks) Licensed Under Public Domain.⁩ ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I actually liked the way this particular thing works, I’ve visited the repository and it’s much like a real version of my toy of two months. (Except my toy doesn’t work for anything real)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Holy sh*t: Jack Dorsey just Announced Bitchat(A secure, decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging app for iOS and macOS that works over Bluetooth mesh networks) Licensed Under Public Domain.⁩ ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  My mobile stuff is on Android, but Briar desktop (despite being a Java application?..) swears at “unknown OS FreeBSD” and doesn’t run.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Holy sh*t: Jack Dorsey just Announced Bitchat(A secure, decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging app for iOS and macOS that works over Bluetooth mesh networks) Licensed Under Public Domain.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I really like this despite using nothing Apple.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Holy sh*t: Jack Dorsey just Announced Bitchat(A secure, decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging app for iOS and macOS that works over Bluetooth mesh networks) Licensed Under Public Domain.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  From the description it seems to be rather clean. And perhaps not to be limited to Apple for too long.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Holy sh*t: Jack Dorsey just Announced Bitchat(A secure, decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging app for iOS and macOS that works over Bluetooth mesh networks) Licensed Under Public Domain.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  “IRC vibes” -> maybe intended, see BitchX.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Former and current Microsofties react to the latest layoffs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  If there’s anything I’ve learned in my life, it’s that I’m stupider than most. Maybe wiser at the same time, because being so stupid you evolve some wisdom or perish. Maybe.

  (Except I’m not sure it’s wisdom that I’ve learned the girls I was too shy to talk to 5 years ago and last week live in the same building, same entrance, and yet I don’t know how to talk to them, and I feel as if that day 5 years ago was closer to my infancy than today to my death. Autistic things are sometimes truly depressing.)

  People of this kind I’ve heard of seem very energetic. They may not always do the smartest thing, but they do it all the way in. Maybe that’s what’s wise.

  Though then why be a corporate executive. Doesn’t seem anything desirable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11 has finally overtaken Windows 10 as the most used desktop OS⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Different version, probably.

  I think the way to approach this is creating a PR that a simple (plenty of people autologin on Windows) functionality is hard to find. It’s also very valuable feedback for the developers, they usually have sort of tunnel vision and see completely different things as terribly important for users, while some really important (and maybe easy to do) just skip because in their skewed view it’s not pressing.

  That could be replaced with proper QA and lots of focus groups and so on, but we live in 2025, nobody does things properly anymore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Former and current Microsofties react to the latest layoffs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I swear, such stories seem as if all these bosses really expected to become some sort of Soviet directors. There’s no way they can expect this shit to work in a market economy.

  Maybe they really believe into that “replace everyone with AI” thing.

  Then we’ll see evolution at work.

  I don’t know why I feel that urge to compare what happens with western societies today to USSR. Probably has similarities with the moment when Soviet space dream found its’ model’s ceiling of capability.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI agents wrong ~70% of time: Carnegie Mellon study⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Pretending. That’s expected to happen when they are not hard pressed to provide the actual service.

  To press them anti-monopoly (first of all) laws and market (first of all) mechanisms and gossip were once used.

  Never underestimate the role of gossip. The modern web took out the gossip, which is why all this shit started overflowing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI agents wrong ~70% of time: Carnegie Mellon study⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s because they look like “talking machines” from various sci-fi. Normies feel as if they are touching the very edge of the progress. The rest of our life and the Internet kinda don’t give that feeling anymore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11 has finally overtaken Windows 10 as the most used desktop OS⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not a RedHat fan (actually very explicitly not a fan), but frankly Fedora with Gnome seems as problematic as Windows at worst, and very easy to install.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11 has finally overtaken Windows 10 as the most used desktop OS⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  What’s even the difference? Same shit, a bit JS added.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Prime Reasons to Avoid Amazon⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  As someone from Russia, we have Ozon and Wildberries and Yandex and Mail.ru, neither of which exists in all business niches of Amazon, but in the overlapping ones seem close.

  It’s not that they are really bad, but I don’t like monopolies.

  I think for all of these - marketplaces with delivery, social networks, cloud hosting, - there has to emerge some standard, some global system. Similar to the Internet or maybe to the postal service. Something has to be done, because these unfortunately work in a way encouraging monopoly.

  Even when I was almost unconditionally ancap, infrastructure was a special case (and it still is for most ancaps, theoretically unconditional private property applies to hypothetical things fully created by a person, and for territory, infrastructure, discovered ideas it’s closer to the other extreme). These things are infrastructure.

  In the Internet one person can host their stuff on one hosting, another on another, and their email on different providers, but they’ll be able to interact. A buyer on Ozon and a seller on Amazon are not.

  That’s because email and web hosting require only the Internet the functioning system to exist. A social network requires more (if we want it to be interoperable and global),

  I think the missing part to make such a standard is automated payments in the Internet. The platforms’ inner management of resources is hidden from us, but for a global system computing and storage resources are necessary, and they are neither provided by governments nor pooled by enthusiasts, it’s impractical to rely on pure altruism for such. And to have a global system with monetary encouragement of providing infrastructure means that we need payment for resources as simple and general as how we pay for landline or Internet service. ISP’s no longer provide shell accounts and web hosting, but even when they did, this wasn’t quite the thing.

  The platforms emerged because it’s bothersome to pay for infrastructure and maintain it, there’s not even a straightforward way. You need a humongous service with plenty of computing, someone should pay for it.

  So - there was Usenet at some point solving a lot of the similar problems, except, of course, a news server would store lots and lots of stuff for each hierarchy. But that wasn’t reimagined for the new things we do in the Internet.

  For twiddling and various kinds of power abuse to be impossible they should be technically impossible in the system. So:

  1. Various functions of platforms should be decomposed into different pooled untrusted services (to pool anything you have to design for untrusted) in the Internet. Pooling can be done the way similar to bittorrent trackers - a service comes online, announces itself and repeats that regularly. A client needing a service requests a few trackers and picks a few services from the results. Services might be, say, storage (anything, like FTP servers even), computation (submit bytecode, receive result, or something like that), indexing (a search engine, returning results in standard machine-processable format), notification (like NOSTR relays). Maybe trade for resources can be a separate type of service. And user identity caching.

  2. It should be possible to provide a paid service and pay for that service, easily enough, like MMORPG scripted marketplaces - a setting like “buy no more than 2G of storage, by price no more than N per K, stop if remaining money less than K”. Or same for selling on a service you host.

  3. The history of platforms in the last 20 years shows us that the Internet is for the machines. The user representation should be in a local application, and the logic combining those non-application-specific services should work on the client machine. Say, aggregating results of a few indexing services, or aggregating trade offerings from a few trade services, or online users from among friends from a few notification services.

  Shit, I wrote this again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Prime Reasons to Avoid Amazon⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I would dream of coming up with a solution to existence of such monopolies, which is not exactly the same.

  In any case, no. I suppose you are simply incapable of understanding it, but no, not everyone wants to be the biggest turd in the room. There are people who want there to not be turds in human habitats outside of intended compartments and environments.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Prime Reasons to Avoid Amazon⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The only reason you need - it’s a monopoly. Fuck its all.

  And I also hate with passion that 5 years ago you’d need AWS in your CV.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘I blame Facebook’: Aaron Sorkin is writing a Social Network sequel for the post-Zuckerberg era⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  What I’m speaking about is that it should be impossible to do some things. If it’s possible, they will be done, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

  To solve the problem of twiddled social media (and moderation used to assert dominance) we need a decentralized system of 90s Web reimagined, and Fediverse doesn’t deliver it - if Facebook and Reddit are feudal states, then Fediverse is a confederation of smaller feudal entities.

  A post, a person, a community, a reaction and a change (by moderator or by the user) should be global entities (with global identifiers, so that the object by id of #0000001a2b3c4d6e7f890 would be the same object today or 10 years later on every server storing it) replicated over a network of servers similarly to Usenet (and to an IRC network, but in an IRC network servers are trusted, so it’s not a good example for a global system).

  Really bad posts (or those by persons with history of posting such) should be banned on server level by everyone. The rest should be moderated by moderator reactions\changes of certain type.

  Ideally, for pooling of resources and resilience, servers would be separated by types into storage nodes (I think the name says it, FTP servers can do the job, but no need to be limited by it), index nodes (scraping many storage nodes, giving out results in structured format fit for any user representation, say, as a sequence of posts in one community, or like a list of communities found by tag, or … , and possibly being connected into one DHT for Kademlia-like search, since no single index node will have everything), and (like in torrents?) tracker nodes for these and for identities, I think torrent-like announce-retrieve service is enough - to return a list of storage nodes storing, say, a specified partition (subspace of identifiers of objects, to make looking for something at least possibly efficient), or return a list of index nodes, or return a bunch of certificates and keys for an identity (should be somehow cryptographically connected to the global identifier of a person). So when a storage nodes comes online, it announces itself to a bunch of such trackers, similarly with index nodes, similarly with a user. One can also have a NOSTR-like service for real-time notifications by users.

  This way you’d have a global untrusted pooled infrastructure, allowing to replace many platforms. With common data, identities, services. Objects in storage and index services can be, say, in a format including a set of tags and then the body. So a specific application needing to show only data related to it would just search on index services and display only objects with tags of, say, “holo_ns:talk.bullshit.starwars” and “holo_t:post”, like a sequence of posts with ability to comment, or maybe it would search objects with tags “holo_name:My 1999-like Star Wars holopage” and “holo_t:page” and display the links like search results in Google, and then clicking on that you’d see something presented like a webpage, except links would lead to global identifiers (or tag expressions interpreted by the particular application, who knows).

  The user applications for that common infrastructure can be different at the same time. Some like Facebook, some like ICQ, some like a web browser, some like a newsreader.

  (Star Wars is not a random reference, my whole habit of imagining tech stuff is from trying to imagine a science fiction world of the future, so yeah, this may seem like passive dreaming and it is.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sleeping beauty bitcoin wallets wake up after 14 years to the tune of $2 billion⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  If he made the Silk Road mostly to kickstart BTC, after buying a pile of BTC, and then waited till now to sell it - then he’s kinda smart.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft to Lay Off About 9,000 Employees⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  they think they can replace with AI vibe coding etc

  The way Microsoft products feel they really can.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sleeping beauty bitcoin wallets wake up after 14 years to the tune of $2 billion⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, it’s interesting for sure, in 2011 I think I hadn’t even heard of BTC yet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘I blame Facebook’: Aaron Sorkin is writing a Social Network sequel for the post-Zuckerberg era⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The mod ego problem will exist as long as there’s moderation, unfortunately.

  It was present in the web even before it was expelled from heaven.

  But it’s not necessary to remove all moderation, just global identifiers of posts and many different “moderating projections” of the same collection of data can be enough to change the climate for most of the users. Not moderation itself really matters - the ability to dominate, to shut someone’s mouth matters. If the only way you see a post is without such at all - then maybe it’s too rude. If it’s removed on the instance level on most of instances - then maybe it’s something really nasty that shouldn’t be seen. But if in some projection it’s visible and in some not - then we’ve solved this particular problem.

  In such a hypothetical system.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘I blame Facebook’: Aaron Sorkin is writing a Social Network sequel for the post-Zuckerberg era⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  tuning its algorithm to promote the most divisive material possible. Because that is what will increase engagement

  But at the same time in every case I described on Lemmy an experience not maximizing engagement by maximizing conflict, I was downvoted to hell’s basement. Despite two of three modern social media experience models being too aimed for that, that’d be Facebook-like and Reddit-like, excluding Twitter-like (which is unfortunately vulnerable to bots). I mean, there’s less conflict on fucking imageboards, those were at some point considered among most toxic places in the interwebs.

  (Something-something Usenet-like namespaces instead of existing communities tied to instances, something-something identities too not tied to instances and being cryptographic, something-something subjective moderation (subscribing to moderation authorities you choose, would feel similar to joining a group, one can even have in the UI a few combinations of the same namespace and a few different moderation authorities for it), something-something a bigger role of client-side moderation (ignoring in the UI those people you don’t like). Ideally what really gets removed and not propagated to anyone would be stuff like calls for mass murders, stolen credentials, gore, real rape and CP. The “posting to a namespace versus posting to an owned community” dichotomy is important. The latter causes a “capture the field” reaction from humans.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google hit with $314m fine for collecting data from idle Android phones without permission⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s 1/85 of the watch that Ramzan Kadyrov’s son sported on his wedding.

  Or one can just compare it to the share of Google’s profits in California.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft 'exits' Pakistan after 25 years (post by Jawwad Rehman, who established and led Microsoft’s Pakistan subsidiary.)⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You mean leave Microsoft live? A strange thought.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft 'exits' Pakistan after 25 years (post by Jawwad Rehman, who established and led Microsoft’s Pakistan subsidiary.)⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d really prefer India on my side, not being Sunni and all that

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I require nothing more⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d prefer wooden floor.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I require nothing more⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Especially the column in the middle, just cover it with wood and add various hooks, a transformer table (closed normally, open when you want to sip tea without display glow near you) and maybe something to make the space less open while sleeping. I dunno, a cloth instead of a wall.

  And if this doesn’t have a window, maybe not too good.