Possibly a Dog / is on Nostr

I've got a few other masto accounts but this one is beige.

I was a hot shit coder in Silicon Alley during Web 1.0 and Silicon Valley during Web 2.0, but now I'm back in Vermont doing boring unemployed post-autistic-burnout stuff. (At least I hope it's post!) I think this account will be for fun and politics and occasional shitposts. My autistics.life account will be more personal and reflective.

I like #linguistics #physics #dnd #cooking #science #chickens #dogs #politics

Last Notes

2025-03-19 17:23:47

Half of the posts on this network are scolding people to add alt text to the other half
#Mastodon

2024-11-26 23:18:06

“The fact that AI can't do your job, but that your boss can be convinced to fire you and replace you [or otherwise unfairly oppress you] with the AI that can't do your job, [thus *punishing* individual workers for algorithmic decisions or other events outside their control,] is the central fact of the 21st century labor market.”
Another excellent non-fiction horror story from @nprofile…qz4x :
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/26/hawtch-hawtch/#you-treasure-what-you-measure

2024-11-25 15:37:36

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
Great long technical (but accessible, in plain language) take on the #BlueSky vs #fediverse / #Mastodon #decentralization debate that I posted about a few weeks ago. Too many gems to summarize here; if you have ten minutes to skim it, or an hour to go deeper, it’s worth your time.

2024-11-10 22:52:04

the Confederacy *and* the Fascists *and* the Russians *and* the bloated plutocrats *and* the Joker and his squad of macho incel henchmen, all our great enemies of history united for an epic final battle and it turned out that the Democratic Party *were not* the Justice League we needed

2024-11-07 19:12:49

This is the future of all apps, forever, now. #AI
https://media.beige.party/media_attachments/files/113/443/255/412/199/507/original/8da8b7621f16c241.png
https://media.beige.party/media_attachments/files/113/443/257/226/058/516/original/c8d3e29a0706bab9.png

2024-11-01 17:32:34

Big Tech is anti-technology.
Musk and Zuck are anti-creative: their “next big thing”s are boring parodies lifted from 25-year-old cyberpunk dystopian fiction.
Monopolies are anti-innovation.
Predictive/generative #AI is inherently conservative: its best idea of the future is a statistical average of the past.
_Frankenstein_, the first science fiction novel, is a Luddite parable. And we are all Luddites now (or should be).
This podcast is kinda long and kinda brutal but highly engaging and enraging and **optimistic** (really!), and everyone who can should listen to it, the sooner the better.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/139-better-offline-150284547/episode/enzittification-with-cory-doctorow-brian-203193589/
#AI #enshittification #tech

2024-10-25 12:07:37

So, you know how Facebook is a corporation with a lot of spread-out servers that talk to a centralized database and algorithm that controls and manages all your posts, opaquely, for profit.
And so is Xwitter. And so is LinkedIn. And so is TikTok.
And so is BlueSky. 😲
BlueSky's big claim is that they're "decentralized" with "no algorithm". And yeah, technically, ironically, everything's an algorithm, but I'm not well-actuallying that word. Their current default feed algorithm is not The Algorithm; it lets you see all the posts from all your friends and that's great. It also lets you block at will, and won't shove spam on your feed, or shadow-ban your friends' political posts. It's not evil (yet). It's fine.
But. It's not decentralized. #BlueSky is a centralized corporate app, running a theoretically-decentralized network protocol that currently has only one (1) active node on the network: BlueSky. The other minor members of the ATP network are just piggybacking on BlueSky's 13 million captive users for auth and reach.
It (allegedly?) uses #ATProtocol to pass messages between its edge nodes. But all its central features are still centralized, and the protocol allows "reach" to be centrally managed separately from "speech" (to enable centralized blocking, and goosing and filtering in various feeds), and the protocol isn't even fully implemented as designed.
For example, ATP allows for "DID"s for identity portability, so if you later want to switch to a hypothetical GreenSky competitor, you won't lose your followers and blocklist and post history.
But the actual BlueSky app does not implement DIDs. It's called "did-placeholder" on their github. It's a stub. It's TBD. It's not a feature, it's a feature request.
And guess who just bought a seat on BlueSky's board with a $15M Series A round? That's right, a crypto vulture named Blockchain Capital.
Their general partner Kinjal Shah -- whose cryptocurrency-fueled career has careened from Bitcoin to NFTs to DAOs to VC -- is now on the BlueSky board, and methinks the press release doth protest too much when it defensively claims, with just a pinky promise, "the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.)."
Go ahead and enjoy BlueSky. It's better than Facebook. It's easier than Mastodon. It's sassier than TikTok. It's not motherfucking Xitter. But it's not decentralized.
links:
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/bluesky-now-owned-by-crypto-grifters/
https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a
https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc