rook

I thought the era of scaling was over. We’re in the era of ??? now. Presumably profit comes later.

I’m aware he isn’t there now, but it bears remembering that he was there at the beginning when these goals were being shaped, and as we have seen with twitter there’s nothing to stop him coming back, even if nostr is his new best friend for now.

I read that posts on BlueSky are permanently stored in a blockchain,

So, this is complex and hard to find concrete information on, but:

1. Bluesky use a merkle tree based things. Don’t call em blockchain… that’s the sort of thing cryptocurrency boosters want so as to present their technologies are useful.
2. Posts are stored in a merkle search tree, but attachments are stored separately. Attached blobs (like images) can be (and are) deleted independently of the tree nodes which reference them.
3. The merkle trees are independent and can be modified without having to rewrite the whole history of every post on bluesky, because there isn’t one central official ledger of all posts.

From bluesky’s own (non technical) blurb on the subject,

it takes a bit longer for the text content of a post to be fully deleted in storage. The text content is stored in a non-readable form, but it is possible to query the data via the API. We will periodically perform back-end deletes to entirely wipe this data.

The merkle trees are per-user, which makes history-modifying operations like rebasing practical… this facility apparently landed last summer, eg. Intention to remove repository history. Flagging tree nodes as deleted, and then actually destroying them in a series of later operations (rebase, then garbage collection) would explain the front end respecting deletions but lower-level protocols showing older state for a little while.

no Gen 1 crypto

Just one more gen, bro. I swear it will fulfil all the promises this time.

Interesting post and corresponding mastodon thread on the non-decentralised-ness of bluesky by cwebber.

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

https://social.coop/@cwebber/113527462572885698

The author is keen about this particular “vision statement”:

Preparing for the organization as a future adversary.

The assumption being, stuff gets enshittified and how might you guard your product against the future stupid and awful whims of management and investors?

Of course, they don’t consider that it cuts both ways, and Jack Dorsey’s personal grumbles about Twitter. The risk from his point of view was the company he founded doing evil unthinkable things like, uh, banning nazis. He’s keen for that sort of thing to never happen again on his platforms.

It’s a long read, but a good one (though not a nice one).

• learn about how all the people who actually make decisions in c++ world are complete assholes!
• liking go (the programming language) correlated with brain damage!
• in c++ world, it is ok to throw an arbitrary number of highly competent non-bros out of the window in order to keep a bro on board, even if said bro drugged and raped a minor!
• the c++ module system is like a gunshot wound to the ass!
• c++ leadership is delusional about memory safety!
• even more assholes!

Someone on mastodon (can’t remember who right now) joked that they were expecting the c++ committee to publicly support trump, in the hopes he would retract the usg memory safety requirements. I can now believe that they might have considered that, and are probably hoping he’ll come down in their favour now that he’s coming in.

Just take the same approach that mathstodon does with their latex formatting, to wit: just barf the probably-human-unreadable format strings out over activity pub, and shrug when people complain because what else are you gonna do?

It isn’t like inline images work any better over activitypub in general (and even markdown/html is tricky, in the face of various mediocre mastodon client apps, some of which I use) and doing server-side conversion of latex (or whatever)to mathml is a nonstarter because of it will just be filtered out by clients anyway as unsupported and possibly malicious.

The least bad option might be something like asciimath (which can be prettyprinted via mathjax client javascript in the web view of the site) as its raw form is less awful to read than latex, and so would be more suited to viewing via activitypub or in a lemmy app.

I wonder what proportion of awful.systems users view it via the web interface.

Everyone and their dog uses mathjax or katex to render math client-side these days. I’m not gonna say that it would be trivial, but it also shouldn’t require you to get elbow-deep in lemmy’s own post-formatting code.

Unfortunately, there’s no obvious prior art that can be stolen here, and there’s only one slightly confused feature request in the lemmy-ui repo, so someone is going to have to nail all the bits together themselves.

The austin allegro was far ahead of its time.

big walmart is watching you.

https://old.reddit.com/r/walmart/comments/1gqphel/body_cameras_for_front_end/

is this creating a potential surplus of computing power in all devices

Haha, no. Flat UI was done for reasons of fashion, not efficiency. UI will always expand to consume the available memory and compute, regardless of how boring it looks. Exhibit A: Electron!

He will say what he thinks needs to be said, and the forced-birthers understand this. They haven’t defeated abortion yet and aren’t going to split their efforts, but they will continue to put pressure on ivf in the meantime. Remember, they weren’t always anti-abortion, and didn’t switch to it overnight! Their current position that life begins at conception necessarily conflicts with current ivf practises, and they’ll say they don’t disapprove of ivf in principle, and they might even have a friend who’s getting ivf, but talk is cheap and they’ll absolutely oppose any legislation that tries to guarantee access to it. Which is precisely what is happening.

They can sell out to someone else instead? Amazon seems to want to be an AI company, for example, and their current offering isn’t great even by the relaxed standards of LLMs.