Glitchvid

@Glitchvid@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord co-founder and CEO Jason Citron is stepping down⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Granted they’re not the growing and bustling places they used to be, but there are still both niche and “lifestyle” forums that are alive and stable. Other than this place, one of the latter is where I spend most of my online socializing time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord co-founder and CEO Jason Citron is stepping down⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Standards as in parts of the spec, as you said in the original reply:

  the new MatrixRTC spec Which is a fork of the WebRTC protocol and another “standard” on top of the REST HTTP protocol.

  I should have been more specific with my language, it is federated, but specifically messages (events) are a distributed DAG, and I find the Matrix protocol overly generic for a replacement for something specific like Discord.

  The end goal of Matrix is to be a ubiquitous messaging layer for synchronising arbitrary data between sets of people, devices and services

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord co-founder and CEO Jason Citron is stepping down⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Matrix has moved very very slowly and I’m concerned it’ll have the same fate as XMPP, where it’s a bunch of very complicated standards, with maybe one compliant implementation that nobody wants to work on.

  I also don’t think it’s a particularly good protocol design for a Discord replacement, it’s not federated it’s a distributed message protocol, which is an order of magnitude more complicated and intensive than potential alternatives.

  That said, many non-perfect things have achieved widespread success, so I’m at least hopeful that Matrix/Element are able to catch on in a wider capacity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord co-founder and CEO Jason Citron is stepping down⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  As someone who runs a Mumble server (and has for over a decade) – it’s really not a replacement for the user experience that is Discord.

  People want a unified UI, the ability to create communities with some amount of customization, embedded/live content, plus voice and video so they can chill and play games together. Mumble is just voice, and while it’s a very good implementation of that, it’s not even in the same user space as Discord.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Social Network That Can't Sell Out: Understanding Mastodon vs. Bluesky⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s “the algorithm”, people basically just want to be force-fed “content” – look how successful TikTok is, largely because it has an algorithm that very quickly narrows down user habits and provides endless distraction.

  Mastodon and fediverse alternatives by comparison have very simple feeds and ways to surface content, it simple doesn’t “hook” people the same way, and that’s competition.

  On one hand we should probably be doing away with “the algorithm” for reasons not enumerated here for brevity, but on the other hand maybe the fediverse should build something to accommodate this demand, otherwise the non-fedi sites will.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TLS Certificate Lifetimes Will Officially Reduce to 47 Days⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There can be theoretical audit or blame issues , since you’re not “paying” then how does the company pass the buck (SLA contracts) if something fucks up with LE.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TLS Certificate Lifetimes Will Officially Reduce to 47 Days⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Ironically the shortening of cert lengths has pushed me to automated systems and away from the traditional paid trust providers.
  I used to roll a 1-year cert for my CDN, and manually buy renewals and go through the process of signing and uploading the new ones, it wasn’t particularly onerous, but then they moved to I think either 3 or 6 months max signing, which was the point where I just automated it with Let’s Encrypt.

  I’m in general not a fan of how we do root of trust on the web, I much prefer had DANE caught on, where I can pin a cert at the DNS level that is secured with DNSSEC and is trusted through IANA and the root zone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey Call For Abolition Of All Intellectual Property Laws, Arguing There Are 'Much Greater Models To Pay Creators'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  IP law need overhauling, but these are the last people (aside from Disney et al) I’d trust to draft the new ones.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China has stopped exporting rare earths to everyone, not just the U.S., cutting off critical materials for tech, autos, aerospace, and defense⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The US manages to store 1.5B tons of cheese it doesn’t do anything with, I think China can handle constructing some warehouse to hold what it digs up from the ground.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Python Performance: Why 'if not list' is 2x Faster Than Using len()⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  if not x then … end is very common in Lua for similar purposes, very rarely do you see hard nil comparisons or calls to typeof (last time I did was for a serializer).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NVIDIA Makes PhysX & Flow GPU Code Open-Source.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If only, this is “modern” PhysX, we’d need the source to the original Agea PhysX 2.X branch to fix it properly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI crawlers cause Wikimedia Commons bandwidth demands to surge 50%.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The amount of stupid AI scraping behavior I see even on my small websites is ridiculous, they’ll endlessly pound identical pages as fast as possible over an entire week, apparently not even checking if the contents changed. Probably some vibe coded shit that barely functions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Automatically Crack Safes With This Autodialer⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Man this reminds me of the lockers we had in middle school that used dial locks, cheap masterlock jobbies that despite having notches between the major numbers, just being within 2 of the actual number would register.
  Plus it felt like they’d slip internally so if you dialed too quickly (because class starts in 3 minutes at the other end of the building) you’d have to start all over.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Power is not energy: why the difference matters [Technology Connections]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, electric motors are what I notice the most. Be it on washers/dryers, garbage disposals (which range from 1/3, 1/2, 3/4, 1HP) and more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Musk 'Pressured' Reddit CEO to Silence DOGE Critics, Leaving Moderators Outraged: Report.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Reddit is becoming such a shit hole anyway, the site barely functions on mobile browser now, half the time it has API errors or fails to load.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Further hampered by the Steam “discussions” that are an incredibly unmoderated cesspit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If they were a small or free service I wouldn’t have much issue, but they do charge, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that they at least attempt to scrape the wider web.

  Building their own database seems the prudent thing long-term, I don’t doubt they could shore up coverage over Bing. They don’t have to replace the other indexes wholesale, just supplement it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  They have smallweb and news indexing, but other than that AFAICT they rely completely on other providers. Which is a shame, Google allows submitting sites for indexing and notifies if they can’t.

  Running a scraper doesn’t need to cover everything since they have access to other indexes, but they really should be developing that ability instead of relying on Bing and other providers to provide good results, or results at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Small web always returns 0 results for anything that isn’t extremely broad, unfortunately.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been using Kagi for the last year+.

  Personally, I wish they’d tone down the AI stuff that ruined Google, but at least you can turn most of it off.

  Their results are okay, a little better than Bing, but obviously they’re limited by their existing index providers, I wish they’d run their own spiders and crawl for their own data, since I think Bing fails on a lot of coverage of obscure websites.

  In general I find the weighting of modern indexes to be subpar, though the SEO industry has made it a hard problem to tackle, I wish more small websites and forums were higher ranked, and AI slop significantly de rated.

  TW: Self harm

  Also not a huge fan of the company and a lot of it’s ardent customers, who heavily protested a suicide prevention popup if you used it to searched for how to kill yourself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Matrix is probably something worth looking at, at least from an intellectual standpoint, for you. It uses shared message state and a DAG, plus some fancy perfect forward secrecy (using Signal’s Double Ratchet algorithm), which is at least interesting. There’s also Tox (chat/protocol) if you want totally distributed chat.

  Personally, I really like distributed models from a theoretical standpoint; but for end-user applications they pose very difficult constraints, we live in a world with ⪅50% publicly routed IP for one, they fundamentally require immense data replication, latency in peer-finding, bandwidth constraints, and ultimately sub-par UX. I thought IPFS with a way to pay nodes to pin content was a really neat idea, but hasn’t caught on, for example. Not to discourage you, if you think it’s workable then have at it, but I think it at least explains the current state of things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I do think the other home server implementations gaining parity (production-ready) with the reference home server would go a long way. I haven’t run a home server but I’ve heard from those that have that it really has a hard time scaling. (Though this serves as impetus to give it a try over spring break)

  Which brings me to the caveats of the protocol, I personally don’t think the design is ideal, it’s more described as a distributed message bus, what I’ve read of the spec it’s over engineered, it made good decisions wrt using modern web technologies (JSON, WebRTC), but it didn’t scope itself to the particular task.

  That said, I haven’t written a federated protocol, and they have. But if I was going to, I’d really want to look at Discord and see how to copy a lot of that model, but break parts of it out to facilitate federation:

  I originally wrote a huge hypothetical design here that I speculated would fare better, but honestly the specifics become less relevant, point is that the shared state of rooms is a real challenge, and one out of scope for just a federated instant messaging system, and I’m no longer certain it’s viable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I really wish Matrix had been more successful, but it has some pretty core problems that prevented it from gaining more traction.

  It fell into the same trap as XMPP, though perhaps even worse, with a focus more on its protocol and specification than a single unified product vision. The reference server implementation is slow, and using a language not optimal for its purpose, with alternative server implementations left incomplete and unsupported. It took a long time for them to figure out voice and video and for it to work well, and the “user flow” still isn’t at Discord levels.

  I’ve rooted for Matrix for a long time, but as a former XMPP evangelist, to me the writing on the wall says it isn’t suited for success either. I’d love to be wrong, but I don’t see a way through.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kevin Rose officially relaunching Digg.com⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  No thanks, people hop from centralized platform to centralized platform thinking things will be different.

  Consolidated power, especially when fully captured by market forces, will always enshitify, the only out is federation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rust is Eating JavaScript⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Rust By Example is very good for showing the ropes in a very practical way, that’s how I got up and running with it.

  Secondly is the O’Reilly book Programming Rust, which is probably closer to what you want, it explains the actual technical details of much of the language, and to me seems written for an audience that already knows programming. Lastly would be Rust for Rustaceans by No Starch Press, if you actually do want to pursue Rust further, as it discusses very, very in detail the systems of the language, and how they can be used to make something so powerful like Serde.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rust is Eating JavaScript⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe give it a try; it’s my favorite language to write programs in now, it has an extremely good standard library, and for everything else there’s a mass of high quality crates, its build system is actually competent and makes compiling on Windows or Linux trivial, plus many, many more quality of life features.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The hardest working font in Manhattan – Aresluna⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What a wonderfully enchanting exploration of Gorton.

  I’ve had a soft spot for Gordon Modified for a long time, I use Signature Plastics keycaps on almost all my keyboards, with its wonderful rounded characters . There’s just something about it, easy on the eyes, immediately legible at even small scales, it’s a comfort font.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  At what level? I get a student email from my college (outlook based) as do the professors, though communication is primarily through Canvas. So that’s what I see most often in that context.

  I think a lot of people have Gmail incidentally for things like YouTube and other Google account stuff, very few people know you can even bring your own mail.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I still see lots of different emails out there, outlook/hotmail is still huge, yahoo occasionally, icloud in the US.

  Among my techy friend circle all of us have either our own self hosted mail, a ‘privacy’ company email, or something in the middle.

  All to say, I don’t think it’s that uphill of a battle for the very large percentage of Internet users to accept the way federation works.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Regardless if it was the plan, it’s the result.

  I can’t stand what it has become, especially when some of the most problematic subs have massive influence over the rest of the site, like wsb.