jrm4

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."

Exactly. My journey is similar, probably because I've never had to code for a living. I started learning Vim. I dedicated 2 years to Emacs + Org-Mode.

And eventually I left. I've come to realize (for me) anything that can't do CUA keybinding easily and well, usually out of the box, is useless to me because I use other software.

So now I'm riding this weird middle space between Vim and Geany mostly because I haven't had time to dig into making something different. But I'm just about 100% certain that I'll be able to make a perfect-for-me bespoke text editor very soon, thanks to AI. I know it would have been possible in Emacs, I just didn't have the time.

I don't believe your last sentence at all -- especially if we're talking about "bespoke software for individuals."

I strongly predict it will be trivial.

But the thing is -- will it be?

Which is to say, let's take two extremes. The "vim" way vs. the ultra-Emacs way, right? The thing is, it will soon become trivially easy to modify your own "text editing environment," and by you I mean everyone?

The more I read this, the more I'm strongly predicting a resurgence in this sort of individualization.

As op, yeah I'm actually with you on this.

And at the very least, 2FA should be a much more "openly open standard." Which is to say, just do TOTP everywhere, let people have their initial generating key and be done with it.

I generate mine from my computer when I can, but I'm surrounded by all this magic that implies that something different is going on, e.g. the Duo system which I'm forced to use by my job and doesn't make this sort of thing easy, if possible at all.

So, in my head, once I heard the idea, I started thinking of something WAY different, and maybe its worth considering. I was thinking something like a combination "security question," "captcha" and "secondary identifier" (whatever the thing that google et al do when they tell you to match the picture on your phone to complete the login)

I don't know, something like "name the fruits that correspond to your first school colors" or similar

This feels like the "wrong" direction today with the advent of AI? Just seems like in the realm of "bending yourself to the tool vs bending the tool to yourself," it's the LATTER that's about to get a whole lot easier, if it isn't already.

So, sure, there are probably things you can learn, but e.g. I'm much more about "I think it should be THIS way so how do I make it do that."

I don't think "efficency" is at all the point? At all?

It's safety, reliability, and human understanding -- and like OOP, for example, are often directly at odds with "efficiency."

But -- I think, only because of the friction of having to read and parse what they did, which, to me could greatly be alleviated by AI itself.

Put differently -- for those who'd like to share, yes, give me your locally implemented idosyncraticness with a little AI to help explain to me what's going on, and I feel like that's a sweet spot between "AI do the thing" and "give me raw code"

Your first statement is good advice, but is factually WRONG. Stuff does go away.

We know this from the other side of it, stuff that we WANTED to keep, but couldn't. Google deleting blogs, people not maintaining their own personal media records, etc.

Now. What is a good forward GIVEN THAT we do know that stuff CAN go away? My gut is that a good balance of "making personal stuff available to people who want to see it again" vs. "surveillance state" could make use of the unreliability of "the net." And that ATProto's "perfection" isn't all that helpful.

The completeness AND the reliability!

Consider that a muddy, "oh a bunch of different servers downloaded this guys history, but it's different on one from the other" could be ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE SAFER from a surveillance perspective.

I think there's a massive difference between "some might be capturing" and "reliable, e.g. hashed records"

Again, there may be some VALUE in the fact that "some might be capturing" WOULD BE inherently unreliable. The ability to "muddy the record" could make some SAFER.

Your last point is one that I used to be very strongly favor of, and today?

Nooooooooooo. No. No. No.

It's not going to happen and we shouldn't even consider it. Seriously. This thing we are doing here, which is "connecting people to each other," those forces for MANY will be far more powerful than "let me stop and think about the fact that this is forever." I just don't think we are wired for it, we're wired for a world in which we can just talk?

I think it's better to try to engineer some specific counter to "everything is recorded all the time" (or, as in here, not try to usher it into existence even more) than to try to say "welp, everything is recorded all the time, better get used to it."

The more I read and consider Bluesky and this protocol, the more pointless -- and perhaps DANGEROUS -- I find the idea.

It really feels like no one is addressing the elephant in the room of; okay, someone who makes something like this is interested in "decentralized" or otherwise bottom-up ish levels of control.

Good goal. But then, when you build something like this, you're actually helping build a perfect decentralized surveillance record.

This why I say that most of Mastodon's limitations and bugs in this regard (by leaving everything to the "servers") are actually features. The ability to forget and delete et al is actually important, and this makes that HARDER.

I'm just kind of like, JUST DO MASTODONS MODEL, like email. It's better and the kinks are more well thought about and/or solved.

I'm optimistic, actually.

One sort of "big-picture" idea that I've seen that I think is generally useful is kind of like this: For a VERY long time, Linux was kind of a joke for most.

But I realized that, it being 1% of desktops was still VITALLY IMPORTANT, even when it was never huge -- it provided enough "background pressure" for mainstream things to not screw up overly badly.

I see e.g. "homelabs" and "self-hosting" as doing that right now. And, again, given that Linux won :) -- we will see.

So, for better or worse, it's an "IT for Professionals" class, and I'm not "teaching coding" per se.

It's more a big picture view of everything tech related that I see as important to be aware of, as well as filling in some blanks. Most of my students get "straight up programming" in other classes. So I actually have always done "here is Bash scripting and what it's good for." And I definitely teach "the controversy," e.g. This AINT what you want for big and professional, but also, knowledge of bash (and similar) is a very useful "swiss army knife."

YUP. Old timer here. I remember like having e.g. my Apple II, and somewhat later Stallman saying, e.g. "they're going to be able to reach into your device and burn your ebooks."

And I distinctly remember thinking how absolutely out of his mind PARANOID this man was. Because, you know, books and all are just files. And in what possible universe could you and would you build in the possibility of some other remote person having the ability to hack into the device that's IN YOUR HANDS and do something crazy like that?

oh.

Weirdly, I couldn't disagree more.

By focusing strictly on software, we can argue that Stallman mostly won, and I think the mistake would be conflating software freedom with freedom freedom.

Freedom freedom will ALWAYS be hard, no matter what. People who want to take it away will use whatever tools are there to do it. Stallman et al saw that it was special to put guardrails around the very specific notion of "we have general purpose machines that can run any software, the ability to run ANY software must be protected."

And that, today, is overwhelmingly more true than false. You, or groups, can get a computer, hook it to the internet, and run whatever you want. Like "Linux," that doesn't GUARANTEE perfection, but it's an essential step.

AKA, I shudder to think what would have happened if Microsoft had developed AI in house.

AI assisted coding (and broader idea exploration) is 100% bringing me joy in this way.

I don't code for a living in any way, but I teach IT. And for years and years I've had little script ideas and tasks (e.g. music organization) that worked decently, but also life got in the way and I have that thing where I want it to work just right etc, and now that the pipeline is orders of magnitude shorter, man this stuff is FUN for me again.

Stallman was right?

Seriously, I like these ideas a lot. But/and also, the GNU Manifesto strikes me as ultimately "extremely similar but perhaps clearer," with the added bonus of having arguable "real life teeth," given that it was the inspiration for the GPL.

Cue somewhat understandable, yet still perhaps annoying, discussions of "Stallman the person."

Nice. You're exactly nailing what I'm working towards already. I'm programming with gemini for now and have no problem there, but the home use case I found for local Ollama was "taking a billion old bookmarks and tagging them." Am looking forward to pointing ollama at more personal stuff.

Whenever I see threads like this, I think its related but I'll be honest, my networking understanding might be limited.

I use Tinc as a daily driver (for personal things) and have yet to come up with a new equivalent, given that I probably should. Does Vxlan help here?

First of all

Everything2 is still around? whoooa, totally forgot about that. Gotta definitely get back into that. That seems like one of those great anti-modern-social-media ideas that the kids might like to learn about.

I respect this choice, but also I feel like one might need to respect that it may end up not being particularly "externally" valuable.

Which is to say, if it's a thing you love spending your time on and it tickles your brain in that way, go for it, whatever it is.

But (and still first takeaways) if the goal is "making good and useful software," today one has to be at least open to the possibility that "not using AI" will be like an accountant not using a calculator.

I'll take this further and I'm not sure if I've seen it anywhere, but I feel like humor is an absolutely necessary component to any philosophy or life practice in this direction.

In a way, this is an idea that to me, rises above perhaps the specifics of all of these isms. People from Dave Chappelle to Kurt Vonnegut really get this.

Aha. This, ideally, is a job for local only. Ollama et al.

Now, of course, it is in question as to whether my little graphics card can reasonably compare to a bigger cloud thing (and for me presently a very genuine question) but that really should be the gold standard here.

Black person here, and I too am finding this thread confusing.

Adams here was doing one of two things, either being blatantly racist or (perhaps the more generous, and perhaps more likely) being extremely bad at comedy?

It is of course "possible" to comedically play around with "what team am I on," but you have to be good at it or you look like -- if not racist -- a completely oblivious weirdo, and he was obviously one of the two here?

But, come on, a WHOLE OTHER LEVEL of "controversy."

Plasma criticism was pointed and deliberate and grownup. Windows 8, less so.

This really does feel like a job for auto-complete -slash- Generative ai tools.

Could?

I'll go a bit further.

I am 100% certain they will.