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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yeah I in general think that Graber is very good at giving good answers in interviews!

    Honestly even if bluesky does become enshittyfied, which is a very real possibility, the work they’ve done on AT proto so far will probably be extremely useful for whoever takes a crack at a more decentralized internet next. There are a lot of clearly smart and passionate people who are given space to research and experiment with different ways of doing things and I think that’s both very valuable and interesting



  • So first of, the part of my comment that you quoted doesn’t make sense because what I’m saying is that bluesky theoretically allows for decentralized relays but it’s impractical in practice. Your analogy doesn’t really apply to that.

    I do think that it’s misleading to call bluesky decentralized today (at least without any caveats). The goal of the project however is to eventually create a more meaningfully decentralized social network and they have tangible plans for moving in that direction so I think it’s unfair to dismiss this aspect of bluesky completely.


  • I think that it’s fair to want the interviewer to ask more critical questions and in general be more precise with their phrasing but

    repeat that PR talking point

    is a very cynical and uncharitable take on bluesky and decentralization. Cynical takes aren’t necessarily wrong but they’re not necessarily correct either.

    The AT protocol is by its own account an ongoing project with problems that still need be solved before it is able to provide a social network with all the properties that they’re interested in.

    I don’t think that it’s accurate to say that bluesky is “completely” centralized (it is less centralized than most social media) as much as it’s de-facto centralized. One reason for this is that it’s prohibitively expensive to self-host relays. This is something that the AT protocol devs have plans for addressing, so it’s possible that this de-facto centralization is a temporary stage in the evolution of bluesky and AT proto.

    It is of course possible that they are lying or that they will be unsuccessful despite best intentions but taking for granted that it’s just a “PR talking point” is, once again, very cynical in a way that I don’t think is completely motivated.








  • Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

    It depends a lot on the game, but in my experience not always. Running games straight from steam works really well with a small number of exceptions, but a lot of the sometimes weird tools for patching exe:s and so on that some games use can sometimes be a pain to get running. Not necessarily impossible but yeah this is a reason for why I still keep around my windows installation for dual booting.



  • I don’t know that it’s the “algorithms”: a lot of people just use their following feed on twitter and although it changed a while back that was the default feed on bluesky for a long time. I think that there is a fairly large portion of bluesky users who mostly just look at following and still don’t really like mastodon.

    Imo, a big reason why bluesky has been a more successful twitter competitor than mastodon is cultural: mastodon has been around for years before musk bought twitter, and a big selling point was that it wasn’t like twitter, for example that its “less toxic”. A large part of mastodons userbase never liked pre-musk twitter that much and will tell you of for acting like you would there. Bluesky on the other hand has a large portion of users who liked pre-musk twitter and are happy to follow pretty similar social norms as they did in pre-musk twitter.

    This is to some extent reflected in the functions of the different sites as well, for example you can’t quote retweet on mastodon which iirc is deliberate because qrt dunking is “toxic”. Bluesky has quote retweets (although they allow you to untag yourself from a qrt).





  • This article uses the term “parsing” in a non-standard way - it’s not just about transforming text into structured data, it’s about transforming more general data in to more specific data. For example, you could have a function that “parses” valid dates into valid shipping dates, which returns an error if the input date is in the past for instance and returns a valid_shipping_date type. This type would likely be identical to a normal date, but it would carry extra semantic meaning and would help you to leverage the type checker to make sure that this check actually gets performed.

    Doing this would arguably be a bit overzealous, maybe it makes more sense to just parse strings into valid dates and merely validate that they also make sense as shipping dates. Still, any validation can be transformed into a “parse” by simply adding extra type-level information to the validation.