kevinflo

You can easily do this today, just start a mastodon instance and restrict the signups. I run a > 100 user instance on just a $10 digital ocean VPS. I'm seeing small tight-knit community instances popping up all over the place. You can tweak the settings or or even add customizations from forks that cater more to a siloed instance.

I'm shocked by the comments of those here that don't see why something like this must exist and don't see that there is tremendous financial upside for whoever cracks this. Employee equity can generate unbelievable amounts of wealth as well as unbelievable tax consequences/missed opportunities. The deck is mostly stacked against employees, and you're on your own navigating treacherous waters with little information. A strong company in this space can protect employees and ultimately advocate for them and improve the landscape. Or it can augment the deck being stacked in favor of the investors etc. depending on how things shake out for the winners in this space.

Over the years I've tried a leap, gesture, HON exposure, aeron, and embody... and after all of it still find I vastly prefer a $70 Ikea Millberget to all of them https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00331707/ - the cheap material starts to flake after about 2 yrs of use so I'll just buy one every two years I guess.

I guess the lesson is that every body is different and you gotta find what works for you

The hon is pretty good, but the way the back tilts isn't super comfortable to me, and also the arm rests are a very hard plastic. I put padding on the top of the arms, but then the height of the padding combined with the fact that you can't lower the arm rests quite enough means that they sit a bit too high for me.

Nitpicking, and for the price it's not bad

I 100% agree with the author on this. VR in its current iteration is clearly not suitable for this in any way, but down the line the fundamentals of VR align perfectly with some of the pain points of remote collaboration. With all current collaboration tools the parties are still bridging the gap of working in different places. In VR, everyone is inhabiting the same virtual space. It's just completely different. Practically, all things switch from n representations to 1 representation. Psychologically we register the interactions completely differently because the parties are saying things not in their room with a video displaying them in your room. They're saying things next to you, to the person sitting across from you, while turning and walking away. The fidelity of interactions (and in turn the interpersonal bonds and memories you form) is just an order of magnitude higher.

If hardware is good enough for this to be a practicality, we may be working in AR 100% of the time anyways, and depending on if you want to be remotely present with others, you just swap out your real environment for a shared virtual one. In that dream scenario, the glasses or whatever are high enough res anyways you'd rather use them to make virtual dynamic user interfaces than stare at a static 2d monitor.

It's going to be a long, long, long time before any of this happens but I'm guessing these are the kind of far-off things the author was implying.

Facebook deemphasizing clickbait content reliably hurts their metrics. YouTube deemphasizing extremist videos reliably hurts their metrics. This metrics-driven product development was totally understandable (and I even tried to do it) up until a few years ago when we simply got too good at it and it ripped the world apart precisely along the seams where the human brain has bugs that cause these things to increase metrics.

Email prefill replies are a silly and relatively harmless example to make this case, but the point is every last button on every product we use is caked in this and we're realizing too late that metrics identifying what humans want often does not coincide with what humans want being good.

People may not say no as often, but one no can be very powerful. It's harder to say no. Billions of people nudged towards saying yes is not nothing.

I was just as entrenched but am about a year into a gradual transition. Signed up with another email provider with an address @ a domain I own, transferred my entire mail history, forwarded all incoming gmail emails to new provider, updated all public facing contact @s to new address, switched mostly to open source email clients, all new accounts are made @ the new address, old ones stay @ the old one. It's not perfect and it's not trivial but it's 100% worth it.

I'm a layman, but to my knowledge navigating a digital environment and a real one are the same minus some steps of the process. A self-driving car recreates a digital reality via sensors with as little delay and fidelity loss as possible, then navigates a digital car within that rapidly constructed virtual reality. It then signals back to the real car to navigate the real car exactly how it would navigate the digital one given its immediate digital environment. Since many of the hard problems lie with the navigation in the digital space, removing the sensors-to-digital part of it by training with video games still nets a lot of valuable learnings that can be brought right back into real-world applications. Also, learning in a fully digital environment allows this part of the learning to be done without the spatial/time constraints of reality.

This (or something like it) is always the top thread. I wish this was something the frontend community cheered about, not lamented. Those 200MB of node modules are developers ad-hoc cobbling together an alternative to xcode and android studio, except entirely modular and where we have complete control. Serious application development for the open web is hamstrung by limitations and definitely in an awkward growth phase, but it's marching towards a possible future of competing with native mobile apps and the two companies to which they're entirely beholden. To me, 200MB of tooling is not a sign of cruft, but of steady and imperfect progress.

Edit: and for the record, xcode is a 13.8GB install

I tried to do the same during a bout of extended international travel. I popped out the fi sim once to try a super cheap local unlimited data sim (some countries are great for this), only to find out afterwards that it killed the fi pairing, and that re-pairing is not possible while abroad (tried VPNs etc., no dice). Your only method to get paired again is to either fly to the states (Hawaii), or to ship the phone to someone in the states and have them ship it back. Ended up having to go months without my main cell service, although months later it did somehow pair again while I was in Japan.

Keep in mind that you'd be just as out of luck if you wanted to switch phones while traveling, like if your primary was lost or stolen. For that reason, I canceled fi immediately upon returning to the states and strongly caution anyone I know against fi for extended travel.

You should definitely check out https://pixelfed.org/ (with https://pixelfed.social/ being a good example instance)

It's not youtube. It's not facebook. It's not twitter. You can write this article about any company these days.

It's a deeper fundamental devil's cocktail of monetized attention + modern (intensely and immediately metrics driven) product development + our buggy brains. Any company who wants to make money from the attention of human beings will find the same extraordinarily rapid pull to extremism. That's what we click. Our brains love these extreme things. The companies are just molding themselves to our brains in real time.

So much of public discourse these last few years has been pulled towards these most base human bugs. Fear of the "other", violence, tragedy, banal comedy, sexual deviancy, cute shiny this or that, inspirational platitudes. Even worse, the content production itself is now being hooked up directly to the metrics creating a machine learning feedback loop spinning out of control.

Any company who wants to fight against this needs to sign up for public, immediate, and painful metrics hits. We saw this happen so directly with facebook last quarter. These problems are so fundamental that if one company tries to fight against it and turn back the dials, another won't and the company attempting integrity will flat out start to lose. Our best shot is to create completely different incentive structures. In the current overarching architecture of media and technology, this hell is the clear winner.

I've found myself so annoyed with the touch bar I used this great disabler https://github.com/LumingYin/TouchBarDisabler

Conveniently, it maps key combos like ctrl+1 to make the screen dimmer it ctrl+2 to make the screen brighter. Definitely would prefer real keys though if they made a 15 inch with them.

I've seen it pointed out before though that it would fall back to just the BSD license and others countered saying that was definitely not the case. It seems to be yet another fundamental thing about this that isn't clear or agreed upon at all. Still, your point is important and I hope people read it and consider it.

Also by "license" I meant the "BSD + Patents license" as the Facebook writeup put it.

Good point. Just switched it to rdom-open (first thing that popped in my head lol)

https://github.com/kevinflo/react-open at least to play around with for my own purposes. I forget what the state of things even was back in .11

I love love love love love react as a technology, but this is just awful. I believe any developer not on Facebook's payroll still contributing to React or React native at this point has a moral obligation to stop. I personally feel like such a fool for not taking all this seriously before the ASF gave me a wakeup call. React is a trojan horse into the open source community that Facebook purposely and maliciously steered over time to deepen their war chest. Maybe that's an overblown take, but they had a perfect opportunity here to prove me wrong and they didn't. The defensive cover they present here feels so paper thin.

Even if we paint all of their actions in the most favorable possible light, and even if the clause is a paper tiger as some have claimed, it doesn't matter. This is not how open source should work. We should not have to debate for years if a project's license is radioactive. Especially individual devs like myself who just want to use a great tool. We should be able to just use it, because it's open and that's what open means. This is so much worse than closed. It's closed masquerading as open.

We've had an excellent experience with http://cloudinary.com/ for pretty much what you describe.

Yes, but on a serious note the difference in potential upside between investing in this vs. a traditional restaurant chain is like that between investing in Amazon vs. a traditional book store chain. If you can find a way for the business model to work it is operating in a way where the inventory and distribution are handled in fundamentally different ways than in the past.

I felt oddly vindicated when he mentioned Ticketfly specifically... It irked me too that they don't allow guest checkout, so in making http://showboarder.com I put in the extra thought/effort to make it an option.

That said, having implemented this I can see why many services don't. It's an entire other case to consider when thinking about security, user experience, etc. and for many it could definitely be more trouble than it's worth. It's just a question of values if you make it a priority or not.

I disagree with almost all of your comments about SC2. All of the things you mentioned (no lan, no clans, allowing blord/infestor to go on too long, etc.) are just red herrings for the greater factors at play that kept SC2 from exploding. It was instead that the landscape of both SC2 and gaming as a whole changed.

As far as your complaints about westerners not winning anymore, that's proof that the game is good, not bad. Westerners lost in BW as well. All it shows is that the winner of the game accurately reflects which player is more skilled. Korea has a decade and a half of infrastructure and training behind their SC2 players. This makes their players more skilled and makes them win. The period where westerners were winning consistently was just a blip on the history of SC before 1) KESPA players switched to SC2 and raised the bar for KESPA players, ESF players, and westerners alike and westerners couldn't keep up 2) before the game was figured out. It would attract more viewers if other nations could compete with Korea, but for that to occur either the game would have to be unfair or westerners would have to actually be as good as Koreans.

Finally, gaming as a whole changed. SC2 came out four years ago, before the rise of MOBAs. Honestly, MOBAs are just better suited to mass audiences as far as esports is concerned. SC2 is an brutal, unforgiving, extremely difficult 1v1 game. MOBAs are free-to-play team games. In SC2 you are a commander of units. In MOBAs you play a single actual character with a personality and style you can identify with. Life's lings have personality, yes. As do MarineKing's marines. But Insec's Lee Sin? Madlife's Thresh? Those are actual characters people can latch onto. League/dota also generate many more highlightable moments, whereas SC2 is more of a tug-of-war.

SC2 is falling into its rightful place among esports... as tennis. A difficult 1v1 game. MOBAs are football. I'll keep watching SC2 because I love it and it's a beautiful game. It's a better game than it ever has been, and the amazingness of recent tournaments is a testament to that. I just don't expect it to explode any time soon.

Also, while not achieving the cultural status it did during wings of liberty, SC2 is at least maintaining its audience if not slowly growing. That's more than most games 4+ years in. I don't blame the slowing of this growth on the game, or on blizzard. It's just that the times have changed.

In playing around with dokku for use on my VPS I just generally got the impression that it wasn't ready to be used in production. I repeatedly ran into snags or bugs, but so many steps had been automagically taken care of by dokku that I oftentimes didn't even know where to begin to look to try to resolve them. If something like dokku is going to do these things automatically it needs to do so much more reliably, otherwise it's worse than nothing at all.

I do believe dokku (or something else like it) will be the go-to in the future, but I think that's a ways off yet.

I'd love to see the same structure analyzed again by a marxist or something instead of Friedman. Instead of focusing on the pencil getting made by this almost unfathomably complex concert of global labor, you can focus on the few bourgeoise actually profiting from it and how all of these disparate groups of laborers are almost invisibly caught in/exploited by the web. Not that I think either is the whole story, it would just be fun to listen to in the same way that this was.

This is a five minute video that does a really good job of explaining just that http://youtu.be/MN2jDtRNuCI

I feel like this post would benefit from a succinct description of what the product is either in the title or on the linked page.

Some time in the not so distant future we'll think that it was silly that in 2014 the majority of development was done locally.

It wasn't meant to imply harassment. A stream raid is just what they call it when one streamer tosses to another at the end of their broadcast.

I'm looking through the ToS and I don't see anything against it. If you know the section that mentions it could you please point me to it? Also I see streamers toss to other streamers at the end of their broadcasts all the time with similar effect.

Plus the whole reason I did this is because I think there needs to be a way to introduce viewers to these streamers that go unnoticed. I think the effect of this is wholly positive.

Seems like an awesome project, but at first visit to that site I had absolutely no idea what replicant was. If you're involved with the project or that site, it might be helpful to put a short (one sentence) description of what replicant is somewhere on the front page. Also, sorry if it is there and I'm just missing it.

Bleeding money and being in acquisition talks are not mutually exclusive.