grumbel

Might be correct for reasonably narrow definitions of language and thought, but it falls a bit short in considering the extended mind thesis. A whole lot of our thinking happens with pen&paper, their digital successor or other items out there in the world. We don't solve complex problems in our head alone, we solve them by interacting iteratively with the real world, and that in turn often involves some kind of language, even if it's just us reading our own scribbles.

Another issue is that a lot of tasks in the modern world are rooted in language, law or philosophy is in large part just word games, you won't be able to get far thinking about them without language, as those concept don't have any direct correlate that you could experience by other means.

Overall I do agree that there are plenty of problems we can solve without language, but the type of problems that can and can't be solve without language would need some further delineation.

> This is just not happening anywhere around me.

Don't worry about where AI is today, worry about where it will be in 5-10 years. AI is brand new bleeding edge technology right now, and adaption always takes time, especially when the integration with IDEs and such is even more bleeding edge than the underlying AI systems themselves.

And speaking about the future, I wouldn't just worry about it replacing the programmer, I'd worry about it replacing the program. The future we are heading into might be one where the AI is your OS. If you need an app to do something, you can just make it up on the spot, a lot of classic programs will no longer need to exist.

ESP32, STM32 or Pico can be found for $2-3.

The problem wasn't that FTP got deprecated, but that we never got a proper successor. With FTP you could browse a directory tree like it was a real file system. With HTTP you can't, it has no concept of a directory. rsync is the closest thing to a real successor, but no Web browser support that either.

I feel modern game design as the exact opposite problem: It's all show and no substance. It looks spectacular on video, but it doesn't feel spectacular when you play it, since it's non-interactive script driven gameplay, barely more interactive than a cutscene.

A bit of juice is fine and necessary, but the moment your juice starts to look like interactive gameplay, but isn't, it went way to far and just becomes noise. I rather have some less spectacular debris I can interact with, then just a particle system filling the screen with non-interactive nonsense.

TotalBiscuit was ranting about it ages ago[1]. 2kliksphilip also has numerous videos[2] on the lack of interactive physics in modern games.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOHyD49DaeA

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxQW2GL64U0

Once up on a time social media was called Usenet and worked offline in a dedicated client with a standard protocol. You only went online to download and send messages, but could then go offline and read them in an app of your choice.

Web2.0 discarded the protocol approach and turned your computer into a thin client that does little more than render webapps that require you to be permanently online.

If I'd wanted my user account tied to a server controlled by somebody else, I'd just use Twitter. Mastodon isn't solving any problems here.

The beauty of Nostr is that it turns the server into a dumb relay, the server controls and owns nothing and you can replace it with another one at anytime or broadcast to multiple at once to begin with. The user is in full control and everything is held together by public-key crypto.

It's also due to browser not doing anything useful with the additional tags, if I use <article>, <section> or <div> doesn't make any difference, my browser doesn't use that to generate a TOC or let me open an <article> in a new Tab. Even the, in theory, incredible useful <time> tag seems to be completely invisible to my browser and many other potentialy useful tags don't exist in the first place (e.g. <unit> would be useful).

The most annoying part is that the type checking exists outside the regular runtime. I constantly run into situation where the type checker is happy, but the thing explodes at runtime or the type checker keeps complaining about working code. And different type checkers will even complain about different things regularly too. It's a whole lot of work making every part of the system happy and the result still feels extremely brittle.

> In my opinion is the most innovative way of communicating that I've seen in the last 20 years.

The sad irony of this is that this is really not all that innovative, it's just reinventing the 45 year old Usenet with public-crypto. The server-independence was present in Usenet right from the start, that's why Dejanews/GoogleGroups could exist, and why Usenet wasn't provided by a specific server, but by your ISP. The modern Internet has completely regressed in that regard, getting rid of protocol specific clients, and moving everything to the browser and HTTP that don't allow that kind of distribution, that's why Nostr feels fresh again.

The fundamental difference is that with Mastodon, or any Fediverse service, the server still has full control over the user. It's basically no different from regular Facebook or Twitter, just with some optional federation on top that can be switched off at any time (and often is).

On Nostr the server is just a dumb relay, it controls and owns nothing. User identities are proper public key pairs. If a relay goes evil, you can just use another one or use multiple at once to begin with, since the location of the messages is irrelevant, everything is held together by public keys.

You are probably browsing with zoom, that seems to screw up the up rendering and makes the background and text look different. It should be just black&white random pixel noise for both background and foreground, without motion the text becomes invisible, as it blends with the background.

The Oculus Go was discontinued June 2020, the shop was locked down for any further updates or new games December 2020, that's just six months apart. They did "support" it with security updates until 2022, but it's pretty dead when no new games can be sold.

That was the promise with the original Rift, not the Quest. The Quest2 required a Facebook account from day one and never worked with an Oculus account, unlike Quest1. They relaxed the requirement in 2022 to only require a Meta account and converted all old accounts to Meta accounts later on (and if you didn't login to 'ok' that change they deleted your account completely including all the games).

If you created the account early in the Quest2's life, or hit the wrong button in the UI, your Meta account will end up linked to your Facebook account.

You might be able to unlink the Facebook account from your Meta account at https://accountscenter.meta.com/accounts, though I don't know if you can still reach the page.

> AI is a competitor.

AI isn't competition for Google, AI is technology. Not only is Google using AI themselves, they are pretty damn near the top of the AI game.

It's also questionable how this is relevant for past crimes of Google. It's completely hypothetical speculation about the future. Could an AI company rise and dethrone classic Google? Yeah. Could Google themselves be the AI company that does it? Probably, especially when they can continue due abuse their monopoly across multiple fields.

There is also the issue that current AI companies are still just bleeding money, none of them have figured out how to make money.

> There is not entity "Mastodon" that could decide anything.

mastodon.social is a server, if you have an account on there, they can delete it. If you don't have an account there, they can still block you by defederating whatever server you are on. This is no different from Twitter and Co. Simply put, look at this from an angle when it goes wrong, not when they go right.

> It's just a technical, UI problem, which anybody can solve, as it's free software.

No, that's a fundamental problem with how the data is organized and distributed. Without cryptographic signatures and unique message-ids, you are slave to the server, even if you get the data out of the server, there is no way to get it up on another. To see how broken the situation is just look at the URLs:

- https://feddit.org/post/18147843 - https://lemmy.zip/post/47572103

Can you tell that both are referring to the same post? Can you find the feddit.org post on lemmy.zip when feddit.org goes down? This is not a simple "we'll implement that later"-feature, but a fundamental oversight in how data and control gets handled in the Fediverse. That it violates European law, that explicitly exists to empower the user, ain't helping.

> This is why you need free software btw

Free Software is completely irrelevant here. This is about protocols, data ownership and control, areas that no Free Software license even touches on. It's somewhat ironic that GDPR got there first with actual law, while the Free Software world still completely fails to address those issues, despite them being around for 20 years.

> You can pay anybody in the free market to do your repairs or set up a Mastodon (or web) server for you.

Which is worthless, since the value is in the users and their connections, which are under the control of whoever is running the popular instances, not me.

> You can't freely move between them.

I can freely switch between facebook.com or x.com in my browser just fine.

> Once you leave them, you loose all your followers and specific features.

Yes, that's just the same on the Fediverse. When feddit.de went down, where did my data go? My feddit.de account doesn't work on other servers. feddit.org was recreated from scratch and everybody had to move over manually. Account migration requires two cooperating servers, which you don't have if one of them is down permanently.

> This is not even funny. Twitter promotes nazi content according to the latest investigations.

As said "On the Fediverse thought-policing is getting sold as a feature."

> This achieves your goal, doesn't it?

Running a server isn't practical for average people. It's also nothing new, people could do since the dawn of the Internet, they don't need a Fediverse for that.

> You can freely move between the islands.

I can freely move between Facebook and Twitter too. Again, not seeing what the Fediverse is doing here for me. The Fediverse does not prevent walled gardens, the federation is an optional server-provided feature that can be switched off any time they want. You can't even move your data from one server to the other unless both servers cooperate.

And Lemmy specifically isn't even GDPR compliant, there is no way to export my comments in the UI. There are also other huge issues such as message-ids being tied to the server, so you can't even resolve a URL from one server with another (something Usenet did better 40 years ago, which is why I can still find old post today).

> Mastodon achieves a similar

If Mastodon decides to run ads and enshittify, it's just like Twitter again. There is nothing to prevent that, outside of being small and unpopular.

> Decentralization obviously doesn't on its own protect anything from the governments, but it helps.

I am not worried about the government, I am worried about overzealous mods and server admins, who are already running rampant on the Fediverse and the Fediverse provides no infrastructure to help me here. That's an area where I much prefer Twitter and Co., they are pretty hands-off with moderation as long as you don't violate the law. On the Fediverse thought-policing is getting sold as a feature.

> Is everybody nice to each other on the Internet?

For most part, yes. ISPs still carry traffic as is and don't just block random hosts because they don't like them. This is however slowly changing in Europe due to ever increasing censorship and age verification. The Great Firewall of China hasn't been nice either. And Claudflare has also become rather annoying with its constant never ending CAPTCHAs.

> On Mastodon, disagreements lead to independent islands not federating with each other, which is fine, too.

How is that different from Twitter, Facebook or any other centralized service? All of them are just independent island that don't federate with each other. If that's ok, what problem is federation solving exactly?

To me the goal of decentralization is "Get rid of the middle man between me and my audience". Federation ain't doing that, it puts far too much control in the hands of the server.

> They just don't know that decentralized platforms offer long-term solution.

The crux is that most "decentralized" platforms don't offer long-term solution either. The whole concept of Federation only works as long as everybody is nice to each other, once that stops happening or bus-factor kicks in, you are back to all the problems of centralization and lock-in, since everybody is a user on a server they don't control. It's really no different from early Twitter or Reddit days when everything was nice and open until it suddenly wasn't.

Platforms that are actually build for true decentralization, where the user owns everything and the server owns nothing (public key crypto + dumb relay servers), are still extremely rare. Nostr is one that seems to be on the right track, but that's about the only one I can think of.

Completely the wrong way around. We are heading into a future where everything will be touched by AI in some way, be it things like Photoshop Generative Fill, spell check, subtitles, face filters, upscaling, translation or just good old algorithmic recommendations. Even many smartphones already run AI over every photo they make.

Doing it in a HTTP header is furthermore extremely lossly, files get copy around and that header ain't coming with them. It's not a practical place to put that info, especially when we have Exif inside the images themselves.

The proper way to handle this is mark authentic content and keeping a trail of how it was edited, since that's the rare thing you might to highlight in a sea of slop, https://contentauthenticity.org/ is trying to do that.

> all the handwavy "engineering" is better done with more data.

How long until that gets more reliable than a simple database? How long until it can execute code faster than a CPU running a program?

A lot of the stuff humans accomplish is through technology, not due to growing a bigger brain. Even something seemingly basic like a math equation benefits drastically from being written down with pen&paper instead of being juggled in the human brain itself (see Extended mind thesis). And when it comes to something like running a 3D engine, there is pretty much no hope of doing it with just your brain.

Maybe we will get AIs smart enough that they can write their own tools, but for that to happen, we still need the infrastructure that allows them writing the tools in the first place. The way they can access Python is a start, but there is still a lack of persistence that lets them keep their accomplishments for future runs, be it in the form of a digital notepad or dynamic updating of weights.

Cyc[0] tried for 40 years to make handwritten semantic rules a thing, but still don't have much to show for. Humans just aren't good or fast at writing down the rather fuzzy semantics of the real world into a computer readable format.

With RDF specially, there was also the issue of "WTF is this good for?". Semantic Web sounds lofty in theory, but was there ever even a clear plan on how the UI would look like? How would I explore all that semantic data if it ever came into existence? How would it deal with link rot?

And much like with RSS, I think a big failure of RDF is that it's some weird thing outside the Web, instead of just some addition HTML tags to enrich existing documents. If there is a failure, it's that. Even today, a lot of basic semantic tags are missing from HTML, we finally got <date> in 2011, but we still have nothing for names, cities, units, books[1], movie, gps coordinates and a lot of other stuff we use daily.

Another big failure is that HTML has become a read-only format, the idea that one uses HTML as a source format to publish documents seems to have been completely abandoned. HTML is just a UI language for Web apps nowadays, Markdown, LaTeX or whatever is what one uses to write content.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

1. <a href="urn:isbn:..."> exists, but browsers don't support it natively

> Flakes are a great example, I still have no idea what a flake is

A package that fully specifies its dependencies (via flake.nix/flake.lock) instead of depending on whatever the user has in their Nix channels. You enable them via:

    nix.settings.experimental-features = [ "nix-command" "flakes" ];

And then forget about "nix-channel", "nix-env" and all the old ways of doing stuff, the new "nix" command is much easier to understand and much closer to what guix is doing.

The fun part with flakes is that they turn git repositories into full packages, meaning you can do stuff like:

   nix run github:user/project?ref=v0.2.0rc1

or use other git repositories directly as dependencies.

That flakes are still marked as experimental is annoying, but they have been working fine for well over three years.

Guix is a reimagining of the concepts of Nix with Guile/Scheme instead of the Nix language, so they are very similar in overall feel, but differ in the details (e.g. GNU Shepherd vs systemd).

As for learning curve, I find Nix substantially easier, since the language is much simpler (JSON-like with lazy-functions) and doesn't need all that weirdness that result from using Scheme as configuration language (lots of quoting, module system, etc.)

> there is more freedom of speech in most EU countries than in the USA

A quick look at Steam says otherwise. All the games that credit cards companies pressured to get removed from Steam, were already long gone in Germany. Because that's the level of government censorship that is completely normal in Germany.

The only reason why one might get the idea that Germany ain't so bad is because Germany doesn't do (much) Internet censorship, so we have access to the much less censored outside world. If German law would apply worldwide half the Internet would be wiped out.

With shared_ptr you completely lose track who actually owns an object or when it will get destructed. It encourages sloppy programming and makes code much harder to read and reason about.

Unlike most languages that have ref-counting build in, shared_ptr also doesn't provide anything to deal with cyclic dependencies, so you can end up with memory leaks.

The most important reason however is simply that you don't need it like 99% of the time, unique_ptr provides enough functionality to work just fine as a shared_ptr replacement in most situations. And in the rare cases where you really need a shared_ptr, you can just convert a unique_ptr into one.

Numerous countries are debating the creation of a digital currency:

EU: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...

UK: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/the-digital-pound

US: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF11471

Use projection mapping, instead of lighting the photo uniformly, use a projector and project a copy of the image onto the photo, thus you get detailed control over how much light the parts of the image receive.

Alternatively, use transparent film and a bright backlight.

It's a blockchain, so you can keep permanent record of what a person is doing and when and where they got caught violating the rules. It won't stop the infractions from happening at first, but it will make it very easy to avoid them happening again. And if this gets widespread, people might think twice before risking their blockchain personhood certificate.

In the AI driven future we are heading into, telling the difference between AI-bot and human might become a valuable good.