jrm4

You fundamentally misunderstand the value of friction. The digital hoop-jumping, as you call it, is a very very useful signal for motivation.

As a college instructor, one issue I find fascinating is the idea that I'm supposed to care strongly about this.

I do not. This is your problem, companies. Now, I am aware that I have to give out grades and so I walk through the motions of doing this to the extent expected. But my goal is to instruct and teach all students to the best of my abilities to try to get them all to be as educated/useful to society as possible. Sure, you can have my little assessment at the end if you like, but I work for the students, not for the companies.

How does this compare to Tinc?

I'm aware of how old Tinc is, but I've yet to find anything compelling enough to get me to switch. Tinc is a little annoying to set up, but once it's going I literally forget about it.

Thats kind of wild, mostly because -- presuming it's correct, what bot is saying is actually valuable here?

This is the first I'm hearing of this pi-agent thing and HOW DO PEOPLE TECH DECIDE TO NAME THINGS?

Seriously. Is creator not aware that "pi" absolutely invokes the name of another very important thing? sigh.

The continued existence and general usability of one browser not owned and/or controlled by one of the huge kabillion dollar companies is an obvious example here.

What I'm saying here is that it's utterly naive to expect Mozilla to remain "pure" given what it is up against. I think there's room for criticism like yours, but also seems like, big picture, a lot of anti-Mozilla stuff is perspective-free whining.

Yeah, so is the internet. So what?

It doesn't have to beat it to "be winning" for purposes of "accomplishing the mission."

This is exactly as goofy as saying "Linux is only 3% of the desktop therefore it is a loser."

Yeah, comments like this miss the boat entirely

Again.

THE SCALE OF MONEY.

I get that its convenience for the other company, sure.

But, like, what would you have them do? Explain what you guys would do better?

Ah yes, Mozilla, that organization that has no record whatsoever fighting companies with the highest ever investment numbers; like who do they think they are?

Interesting idea (confession, I can't get to the article)

Regardless, I live in a place that, according to the magazines and blogs, has a very high level of crime. I don't actually believe it does.

One sort of confirmation of this. One study I saw was counting crimes that happened here per population -- but the college students were not counted in the population; and this was a time where yeah, e.g. college students stealing each others TV's and or getting in fights etc, was prevalent.

This strikes me as extreme cope from the other end. There may be some truth to that, but it also kind of reminds me of "how can you possibly create a new kind of tractor unless you know exactly how to build a combustion engine yourself?"

What do you think I'm trying to do, precisely?

I'd agree, if my goal was "to be a great and complete coder."

I don't. I want just enough to build cool things.

Now, that's just me.

That being said, I'd also venture to say that your attitude here might be a tad dinosaurish. I like it too, but also, know that to a large extent, especially in the market -- this "quality" that you're striving for here may just not happen.

Oh, it's a mech suit with an annoying Jarvis personality that you have to reason with, for sure :)

Not quite shell -- but obligatory: I've been using http://zim-wiki.org for now .. decades? As my main driver for most everything in my life, including my personal and teaching website, custom template I made.

jrm4.com

I like this analogy along with the idea that "it's not an autonomous robot, it's a mech suit."

Here's the thing -- I don't care about "getting stronger." I want to make things, and now I can make bigger things WAY faster because I have a mech suit.

edit: and to stretch the analogy, I don't believe much is lost "intellectually" by my use of a mech suit, as long as I observe carefully. Me doing things by hand is probably overrated.

I feel like the vast majority of articles on this are little more than the following:

"AI can be good -- very good -- at building parts. For now, it's very bad at the big picture."

Yes, very good point sure. I (as a Black not-right-wing person) have huge problems with the whole "The Bad Place" thing (long story short, Black folks that I generally agree with politically are absolutely horribly ban-heavy and way too power-trippy on moderation.)

This continues to confirm for me that there's nothing particularly valuable about ATProto, and that some of the percieved "flaws" in models like Mastodon's model are features just as much as bugs.

Honestly, this is making me go further in the other direction, can we just do "twitter but owned by a trust" or something?

So I agree with you that they should work like email -- but I've always said that Mastodon is better because it is like email; aka the power is in the nodes.

What do you think is wrong about Mastodon? Genuinely curious because I also am super skeptical that ATProto brings anything that we really need.

I absolutely fail to see the problem and I think the whole "best to stick to built in linux commands" is an utterly dinosaur-esque take that can, and will, and should, go extinct in the age of AI-assisted coding.

Honestly, this should give hope for people worried about it. Not the fact that it was done, but the fact that the New York Times immediately posts about it. That's about the best you can ask for now that this tech is ubiquitous and not going back in the can.

I think this deserves a reframing: Docker is perhaps the greatest success story involving a massively invested tech company.

We got an amazing durable essential piece of software from someone investing billions of dollars.

Now, the fact that they didn't get their money back, well, who cares? Not me, it wasn't my money.

Sucks for them, maybe -- but that's far better than enshittification for everyone.

Interesting. I've been critical on "decentralized" for other types of communication (e.g. ATProto/Bluesky) because it seems to forget that "forgetting is sometimes good."

But this seems excellent for code, a thing that (to the extent you can or should be) is mostly apolitical.

Good. Good good good. More of this.

I feel like if e.g. Hypercard had lived, this would be a more defacto mode of doing things.

Yes, and that is why it "won" even though there are pretty good arguments for 8, 12, 16 and so on.

Measuring things is "for humans."

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What precisely is "better" about that?

It's more predictable over -- some things that you don't know how they're going to scale?

Again, the general thrust of "imperial" is better -- base your units on "utility of the most people using them the most for real life things"

Do whatever you want for distances between stars, but no, walking off a room in "feet" can't be beat.

Obligatory "what it's based on doesn't matter."

Like programming languages and UIs, it's what and how people use them. Imperial tends to be better because it's more "evolutionary."