Marco Rogers

https://social.polotek.net/@polotek

Web developer, movie buff, and pretty much the best guy you know. Married to
@operaqueenie

website: https://marcorogers.com/
github: https://github.com/polotek
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcorogers/
Personal website: https://polotek.net/

Public Key

npub1pk75jpjz8jgu7tjn4et353u56qyk9ajd2y69j92pvaglhfcwlg5qkly877

NIP-05 Address

polotek_at_social.polotek.net@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsqm02fqepreyw09ef6u4c6g72dqztz7ex4zdzez4qkw50m5u8052qqjt92e

Author Public Key

npub1pk75jpjz8jgu7tjn4et353u56qyk9ajd2y69j92pvaglhfcwlg5qkly877

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Last Notes

2024-07-26 19:08:11

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Amen.
https://cdn.masto.host/socialpoloteknet/media_attachments/files/112/854/360/939/640/144/original/c2ef959c289add16.png

2024-07-07 19:06:47

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what are the actual economics behind charging so much for access to academic research? Who gets the money? I mean we know it's not the authors.

2024-07-04 18:05:16

I gotta say, I am 100% sold on the "boost carousel" innovation in @npub1lce…6aaz. Just that little bit of separation allows boosted posts to still be useful without taking up more space than they should from original posts. It's great, and all other social media UIs should steal it immediately.

2024-07-04 02:41:59

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It's also fascinating to look at the actions that an administrator can take in response to one of their users being reported. Your administrator clicks a button and nobody ever sees you again.
I think the Admin of a social media instance should have that power to moderate bad actors. But I also think this should be made really clear to users. And it underscores my belief that mastodon users should know their instance Admins and have a real connection to them.
https://cdn.masto.host/socialpoloteknet/media_attachments/files/112/725/912/244/456/286/original/e8d05850fec36018.png

2024-07-04 02:34:20

Almost every time I talk explicitly about white supremacy on mastodon, I get reported. I can't tell if it's an automated thing. It usually doesn't come with much reasoning or commentary. It just lists some of my posts that they find objectionable.
It's fascinating to see these things as both the individual being reported and the administrator of my instance. I can't tell how much visibility I would have if I were not the administrator.
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/112175742244851139

2024-07-03 23:20:21

When I left twitter I sort of wanted to get away from being "that guy who talks about white supremacy a lot". But I guess that was wishful thinking. It's not that I wanna be talking about it. It's hard to escape. Because once you learn how to actually see white supremacy, it sort of becomes necessary to engage with it in order to understand what's happening around us.

2024-07-03 19:55:11

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I appreciate this kind of self-reflection. Are you able to share what kind of issues you've been shifting on?

2024-06-30 18:47:10

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Paul I think it's nice that you want to defend your work. But it would be better if you started from a place of acknowledging that what we see in front of us doesn't exactly convey a commitment to user friendliness.
Maybe you can explain more about who works in these things in the project and how you try to improve user-facing experiencing.

2024-06-30 17:59:33

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yeah this is fair. I definitely think the text could be way better.

2024-06-30 17:23:39

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or maybe I'm mussing something about what your expectations are. Maybe all I should say is that I don't expect third party APIs to return error text that is suitable for end users.

2024-06-30 17:22:18

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maybe my brain is just irreparably broken. But this feels like a reasonable error to say "there's already a record here". It's just not meant to be displayed directly to users. I think error translation is always something the user of a tool needs to be responsible for.

2024-06-25 19:34:26

Quick thought. I wonder to what extent this is a phenomenon of the social media era. I feel like it used to make sense for apps to know who their customer was. But now we live in a world where the measure of success is just how many users you have as an undifferentiated number. Regardless of who those users are or whether they are actually being successful with your platform. So every app converges to "this app is designed for whoever wants to pay us money".
https://toot.majorshouse.com/@majorlinux/112678898222874747

2024-06-24 22:16:03

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It's not that I like making predictions just so I can be right. I've spent the last 5 years trying to accelerate us to this point. But it turns out my estimates are too good. So here we are.
https://cdn.masto.host/socialpoloteknet/media_attachments/files/112/673/905/723/996/008/original/a2c9e88d2fe8a9e3.png

2024-06-24 22:08:36

Welp.
https://indieweb.social/@johnallsopp/112673744963591306

2024-06-24 20:32:37

https://xoxo.zone/@fraying/112672436042122595
https://cdn.masto.host/socialpoloteknet/media_attachments/files/112/673/499/051/660/120/original/c01b28218d8e1ec3.png

2024-06-22 19:15:34

There are more than a couple of non-white men on this list. But in general, the point stands.
I'm not sure I have a lot to say about it. My impression is that in the last few years, tech has also succumbed to being driven by The Creator Economy. And the most reliable YouTube and Twitch audiences are overwhelmingly male.
https://tane.codes/@tanepiper/112661564903910373

2024-06-20 17:47:46

This is a comprehensive history of the rise and fall of Austen Allred and Lambda School. Even if you know parts of it, I promise you don't know all of it.
https://www.sandofsky.com/lambda-school/

2024-06-19 03:12:04

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it was never the bargain! It’s some completely made up, self-serving bs. Nobody made a “bargain” with every other bozo on the planet just by signing up for an app.

2024-06-14 23:49:41

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I guess I want to close by stating my biases. I'm a web guy. I've been bullish on the web for 20+ years, and I will continue to be. I think it is an extremely capable and unique platform for delivering software. And it has only gotten better over time while retaining an incredible level of backwards compatibility. The underlying tools we have are dope now. But our current framework layer is working against the grain instead of embracing the platform.

2024-06-14 23:35:05

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On a more personal note, this is frustrating to me because I think it's a big part of why we're seeing the web stagnate so much. I still run into lots of devs who are creative and enthusiastic about building cool things. They just can't. They are trying and failing because the tools being recommended to them are just not approachable enough. And at the same time, they're being convinced that learning fundamentals is a waste of time because it's so different from what everybody is talking about.

2024-06-14 23:30:04

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What's even worse is that I believe a lot of this energy is wasted. People that are learning the current tech ecosystem are absolutely not learning web fundamentals. They are too abstracted away. And when the stack changes again, these folks are going to be at a serious disadvantage when they have to adapt away from what they learned. It's a deep disservice to people's professional careers, and it's going to cause a lot of heartache later.

2024-06-14 23:28:05

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This has been brewing in my head for a long time. The frontend ecosystem is kind of broken right now. And it's frustrating to me for a few different reasons. New developers are having an extremely hard time learning enough skills to be gainfully employed. They are drowning in this complex garbage and feeling really disheartened. As a result, companies are finding it more difficult to do basic hiring. The bar is so high just to get a regular dev job. And everybody loses.

2024-06-14 23:21:02

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I couldn't speak this candidly about this stuff when I held a management role. People can't help but question my motivations and whatever agenda I may be pushing. Either that or I get into a lot of trouble with my internal team because they think I'm talking about them. But this is just what I've seen play out after doing this for 20+ years. And I feel like we need to be able to speak plainly.

2024-06-14 23:18:46

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And if you're an engineer, you will be able to retain much higher market value over time if you dig into and understand core web technologies. I was here before react, and I'll be here after it dies. You may trade some job marketability today. But it does a lot more for career longevity than trying to learn every new thing that gets popular. And you see how quickly they discarded us when the market turned anyway. Knowing certain tech won't save you from those realities.

2024-06-14 23:13:43

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Let's be clear, I'm not suggesting this is strictly better and the answer to all of your problems. I'm suggesting this as an intentional business tradeoff that I think provides more value and is less costly in the long run. I believe if you stick closer to core web technologies, you'll be better able to hire capable engineers in the future without them convincing you they can't do work without rewriting millions of lines of code.

2024-06-14 23:11:30

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I always have to start with the cynical take. It's just how I am. But I do want to talk about what I think should be happening instead.
Companies that want to reduce the cost of their frontend tech becoming obsoleted so often should be looking to get back to fundamentals. Your teams should be working closer to the web platform with a lot less complex abstractions. We need to relearn what the web is capable of and go back to that.

2024-06-14 23:07:53

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I also wanna give a piece of candid advice to engineers who are searching for jobs. If you feel strongly about what framework you want to use, please make that a criteria for your job search. Please stop walking into teams and derailing everything by trying to convince them to switch from framework X to your framework of choice. It's really annoying and tremendously costly.

2024-06-14 23:05:29

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Product teams that are smart are getting off the treadmill. Whatever framework you currently have, start investing in getting to know it deeply. Learn the tools until they are not an impediment to your progress. That's the only option. Replacing it with a shiny new tool is a trap.

2024-06-14 23:03:02

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If your product is still around in 5 years, you're doing great and you should feel successful. But guess what? Whatever framework you choose will be obsolete in 5 years. That's just how the frontend community has been operating, and I don't expect it to change soon. Even the popular frameworks that are still around are completely different. Because change is the name of the game. So they're gonna rewrite their shit too and just give it a new version number.

2024-06-14 23:00:45

A lot of frontend teams are very convinced that rewriting their frontend will lead to the promised land. And I am the bearer of bad tidings.
If you are building a product that you hope has longevity, your frontend framework is the least interesting technical decision for you to make. And all of the time you spend arguing about it is wasted energy.
I will die on this hill.

2024-06-12 18:35:06

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We also took for granted the legal structures that prevent this sort of thing. Any technical restrictions are mostly to create a precedent. There's nothing to stop a malicious actor from creating a real twitter account and paying for access to the API. However, twitter as a corporate entity has the ability to pursue legal action against people who violate it's terms. And that's a bigger deterrent than people realize.

2024-06-12 18:33:01

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When we look at the fediverse though, most projects start from a place where the protocol has very few technical restrictions on reading data. Sure you have to login to mastodon, but creating an account is trivial. There's no corporation to require a real email address or anything like that. Sure you can "block" people. But as soon as you dig into ActivityPub, you learn that federated instances will happily forward your data to anybody they please.

2024-06-12 18:30:20

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People don't talk about it this way, but it was such a shocker to me when Elon Musk started charging egregious amounts for access to the twitter API. Not just because it's gross. But because it effectively made it so people can no longer exfiltrate their data from twitter. Most people still report that they have never succeeded at requesting their data archive. At one point I had a mind to use the API to approximate a data archive export. But now it's being held hostage.

2024-06-12 18:27:59

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Erin hits on something that I've been trying to put my finger on.
"Given how frequently protocol behaviors act as ethical markers ('if you *can* do it, it's fine')"
It occurs to me that this is another way that the fediverse is starting out fundamentally differently than centralized platforms. Putting technical limitations on the protocol or API is one of the primary ways that companies create their "walled gardens".

2024-06-12 18:24:52

This is exactly what I've been asking about. I just do it in a much more antagonistic way. 😁
FWIW, my impression is that people use "scraping" to signal intent more than any sort of technical action. Scraping means "they didn't ask permission".
https://mas.to/@kissane/112605002686353554

2024-06-04 15:34:12

I wrote up a bunch of the lessons I learned while trying to get the official mastodon image running in docker. It ended up being quite long. Sorry.
I think the audience for this post is mostly the mastodon devs. Maybe they can help answer why some of this stuff is the way it is. But if you're a person who is interested in errata around docker, rails and mastodon, it's for you too!
https://polotek.net/posts/local-mastodon-in-docker/

2024-05-30 19:31:17

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What are some high level questions people have about how mastodon works? Maybe I can use those for guidance as I explore. I'll share any answers I'm able to uncover.

2024-05-30 19:29:11

I'm looking at mastodon some more today and probably tomorrow. On our last episode, we reached a milestone of getting a local mastodon build up and running using docker. The docker part is important, because my goal is to get *two* local instances running and have them talk to each other. I'm thinking that's the easiest way for me to be able to inspect the ActivityPub protocol more directly.

2024-05-18 20:47:26

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one thing I know is a problem is retries that build up in sidekiq. Sidekiq will retry jobs basically forever. And when server disappear, their jobs sit in the retry queue failing indefinitely. I'm sure larger instances with infra teams do some cleanup hear. But how are smaller instances supposed to learn about this?

2024-05-18 20:12:45

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so the thing that has me thinking about this is I was using activitypub.academy to view some logs. I did a follow to my server and it showed that my server continually sent duplicate "Accept" messages back. I can't tell if that's an issue with my server or with the academy. Because I can't see my logs.

2024-05-17 00:02:35

That part.
https://hachyderm.io/@evacide/112452473407557731

2024-04-02 19:29:01

That's right. It's sort of the core issue in educating people about LLMs. They don't "sometimes hallucinate". They always hallucinate. By design.
But I also think we should graduate from saying they "just" make things up. They have a sophisticated inner model that means they're more likely to hallucinate towards things that seem correct when read by humans. And studying how they are able to do that is actually interesting.
https://mastodon.social/@GeePawHill/112203183163246574