laurex

People are convinced that the only way to get attention is by participating in the technofeudal social networks. The problem is that "attention" is not that useful for making change. Until we realize that more intimacy and some level of friction is a feature when it comes to actual power building and organizing, we're going to keep seeing both the lack of control over access to the social networks as well as the continual 'people share and nothing happens' effects of using ad-driven platforms for organizing.

God forbid...? Our technology has led us to compartmentalize information exchange and relational interaction. We just don't have time for the latter. But in text, tone and context are often lost, and it is also less accessible to type for many people. I'm interested in what it looks like when we normalize the actual friction of being in relationship, not just prioitize the "time savings" to recipients of communication by boiling it down to the information conveyed only by the words.

Could you do a p2p connection via browser that would still send the message to the person's "inbox"? I suppose not everyone even has an on-device mail client anymore though.

I'm excited to see communities of developers working to build things that are meaningful and matter to regular people, which ATProto seems to have more of than some other ecosystems in decent tech land. And where else could you attend an awesome workshop on "Hospicing Social Media?"

It's very helpful to understand energy density to evaluate what a shift to renewables actually entails or what is even possible. Vaclav Smil is a good source or for a less dense version Nate Hagens has podcasts about it.

This is such a misunderstanding of what "community" means through the lens of technology. These tools are not designed to help people have relationships, and the Google vs. Facebook distinction is quite apt in that both are scale-oriented and relationships are in service of the ends of the business. We're using the word "community" to obfuscate the weird way the technology and its owners attempt to mediate relationships.

I love tldraw and am excited to see the many ways the project goes, thanks!

Given that most commenters do not seem to have read the article perhaps the headline could be more explicit about 'MRIs find "abnormalities" but they seem to have no relationship to actual health problems"

I'm excited for a future where the technologist is like the tailor in their community. Scaling software has created a host of 'product traps' and there is no need for that for the vast number of activities people do aided by technology.

Especially protocols that allow us to get out of the services entirely! (local first, peer-to-peer). This is the frontier tech I'm interested in right now, not AI (though they might be eventually compatible).

This argument might have made sense when property rights were assumed to trump all other concerns, but at this point, that isn't logical. We live in a world where "owning" everything has led to complete lack of responsibility for the effects of corporate behaviours serving short-term profit while all living systems are paying the price. At some point we need to introduce more tension between property rights and common welfare if we plan to make it through the next century.

While I have had some good experiences with CC, I do use at least double the tokens and probably more like 5x going through fixes / debugging from its initial efforts. I don't think this is always bad, because it helps me to understand some of the more complicated interactions of existing and new code and improves documentation, but it's irritating when it runs out of usage allotments when it has broken something. There are some small things it never has managed to fix that I have to figure out myself, but again, I learn from that. Mapping out a data structure in advance and creating a plan before immediately coding can also help, but at least in our project, sometimes it just takes an incorrect approach and so I don't just let it go off and do things willy-nilly. I can't at all imaging having an agent free to maintain the code at this point, despite the past 2 weeks' hype cycles.

Remember the old days when journalists would be excommunicated for plagarism and/or making things up? Some of those folks must be like "I was just too early..."

For a deeper dive, Douglas Rushkoff wrote about this in Survival of the Richest https://rushkoff.com/books/survival-of-the-richest-escape-fa...

How many OSS projects do devrel on Discord? (and please, let this moment be when it ends!) Feels like instead of indicting these projects and companies we need to actually invest resources in the design research and UX necessary to get FOSS tools to be truly competitive. Hint to developers: it's not feature parity, it's making the important features really good.

The Taiwan experiments were pretty interesting! for example https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/27/taiwan-civic-h...

If you consider "privacy" to be 'a giant corporation tracks every bit of possible information about you and everyone else'?

There are many Discord 'alternatives' but what if instead of trying to replace it with something that (kind of) works the same way, we actually got down to JTBD and first principles? To me, Discord is a hot mess, UX-wise. I've been working on this problem for years and it's so interesting what we think we "need" versus the anti-patterns many of the features come with. Considering holding some UX-focused hackathons to imagine better approaches, look at folk technology dot org.

Every post I selected returned a page not found or just got stuck loading so...

And this very news site's settings are "Data processing by advertising providers including personalised advertising with profiling - Consent required for free use," funnily enough

I’m interested in a new kind of license which I’m calling “relational source” - not about money or whether a product is commercial but instead if there’s an actual person who wants to use the code with some kind of AGPL-esque mechanism to ensure no mindless ingestion- perhaps this would never work but it’s also breaking the spirit of everything I love about OSS to have AI erasing the contributions of the people who put their time into doing the work.

The AA program is at least as informed by anarchy as it is by Christianity. Interesting history there.

We have ceded a lot of good-for-our-brains—and-wellbeing in order to be where other people are without friction. It’s a bit of a chicken or an egg situation that has created gravity wells in cesspools.

This is just a note to say Aaron Kambietz is great. [buy the book https://www.homeworldremastered.com/artbook/]

Playing the... angel's advocate...

There's no reason why a subscription model could not also be used to subsidize people who can not pay, other than that companies are structured to extract as much as possible (by law, if they are public).

There are good network effect arguments about why this strategy can be effective, not simply 'altruistic.'

Ads simply make the extraction happen across the board, except that the ad model somewhat privileges technical users who know how to circumvent ads.

Recommend this deep dive article to understand some of these issues: https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/

Instagram copied Snapchat Stories, which I think is close to what you are talking about...