• 7 Posts
  • 76 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I honestly find it worrying that someone would think it’s some sort of deeply ingrained human trait when it’s clearly not culturally universal (eg. small hunter-gatherer tribes wouldn’t exist otherwise) and not present through all of history.

    I think “growth” is a strong signal for people to put faith and trust into something. And that these emotions have influenced our behaviour for a long time.

    Why did the Roman empire keep expanding? What made them want more? I’m not a historian nor an anthropologist (far from either!). But this feels like “line go up” behaviour. What would it mean for those in power to communicate that some part of the empire was receding? Even if, overall, the empire was objectivetly huge relative to other organised groups?

    One thing I think about is there could be eroding confidence and trust of those in power by colleagues and the general population. If people lose faith, the powerful lose power; they lose ability to influence behaviour. Growth is obsessed over because it’s a means to capture influence over the means of production (and capture profit).

    The line has to go up because the current economic system demands it has to go up

    What about outside of economics? Even metrics on https://fedidb.org: shrinking numbers are coloured red. Growing numbers green. Green = good, red = bad.

    Another thought. The other day I was at a cricket match. Grand final. Because the home team was losing, the stadium started to empty. It wasn’t about enjoying the individual balls/plays. Supporters were not satisfied with coming second (an amazing achievement, much “profit”!), it needed to be more.

    To stretch this shitty metaphor further, when the supporters (investors?) lost confidence in their ability to deliver more, they just abandoned the entire match (enterprise?) altogether!

    Again: I’m not stating anything here as fact. I’m just absolutely dumbfounded as to why “line go up” is, as you say, such an obsession. I hear you when you say that it’s a consequence of how the modern economy works. That makes sense. I guess I wonder what would happen if we snapped our fingers and we could start again. I wonder what the economy system would look like. Would we still be obsessed with growth?


  • Gotcha. I had a feeling something around how Mastodon doesn’t support ActivityPub Groups (yet?) would be where things are going on. Congrats on piefed, by the way. I’ll start studying the codebase now as I’m keen to understand how server-to-server communication works more deeply than I do now. Sending Announce(?) and fetching stuff from other servers…

    When I look at the ActivityPub Note object (via curl -H 'Accept: application/activity+json https://hachyderm.io/@otl/111887721960075860) I see:

    {
        "@context": [
            "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
            {
                "ostatus": "http://ostatus.org#",
                "atomUri": "ostatus:atomUri",
                "inReplyToAtomUri": "ostatus:inReplyToAtomUri",
                "conversation": "ostatus:conversation",
                "sensitive": "as:sensitive",
                "toot": "http://joinmastodon.org/ns#",
                "votersCount": "toot:votersCount"
            }
        ],
        "id": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860",
        "type": "Note",
        "summary": null,
        "inReplyTo": "https://ttrpg.network/comment/4965852",
        "published": "2024-02-07T01:59:08Z",
        "url": "https://hachyderm.io/@otl/111887721960075860",
        "attributedTo": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl",
        "to": [
            "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
        ],
        "cc": [
            "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/followers",
            "https://ttrpg.network/u/Neato",
            "https://lemmy.world/u/ForgottenFlux"
        ],
        "sensitive": false,
        "atomUri": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860",
        "inReplyToAtomUri": "https://ttrpg.network/comment/4965852",
        "conversation": "tag:hachyderm.io,2024-02-06:objectId=123754186:objectType=Conversation",
        "content": "<p><span class=\"h-card\" translate=\"no\"><a href=\"https://ttrpg.network/u/Neato\" class=\"u-url mention\">@<span>Neato</span></a></span> <span class=\"h-card\" translate=\"no\"><a href=\"https://lemmy.world/u/ForgottenFlux\" class=\"u-url mention\">@<span>ForgottenFlux</span></a></span>  I totally get how you feel. One use-case I think of is machine-generated image alt-text. These are often not added to images. But with image-to-text ML models, visually-impaired people could hear a descriptions of images that before were never annotated.</p>",
        "contentMap": {
            "en": "<p><span class=\"h-card\" translate=\"no\"><a href=\"https://ttrpg.network/u/Neato\" class=\"u-url mention\">@<span>Neato</span></a></span> <span class=\"h-card\" translate=\"no\"><a href=\"https://lemmy.world/u/ForgottenFlux\" class=\"u-url mention\">@<span>ForgottenFlux</span></a></span>  I totally get how you feel. One use-case I think of is machine-generated image alt-text. These are often not added to images. But with image-to-text ML models, visually-impaired people could hear a descriptions of images that before were never annotated.</p>"
        },
        "attachment": [],
        "tag": [
            {
                "type": "Mention",
                "href": "https://ttrpg.network/u/Neato",
                "name": "@Neato@ttrpg.network"
            },
            {
                "type": "Mention",
                "href": "https://lemmy.world/u/ForgottenFlux",
                "name": "@ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world"
            }
        ],
        "replies": {
            "id": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860/replies",
            "type": "Collection",
            "first": {
                "type": "CollectionPage",
                "next": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860/replies?only_other_accounts=true&page=true",
                "partOf": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860/replies",
                "items": []
            }
        }
    }
    

    So I’m assuming an Announce was posted to the shared inboxes at lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and ttrpg.network… hmm… I better start reading!




  • Growth might be impossible, but a steady and “boring” amount of profit should still be possible selling plain-ole-dishwashers. Yet … for some reason, we don’t see that.

    God yes this bothers and fascinates me.

    Instead companies throw everything into growth and we get the retarded bluetooth enabled dishwasher problem everywhere, and I’d like toknow more about why.

    I think it’s alluded to in the article:

    They found a way to make consumers spend more money on dishwashing. The line goes up, for one more year. But it’s not enough. It has to go up every year.

    Digging deeper: why must the line go up? Pesonally I see it as a deeply emotional, human thing.

    When you read those annual financial reports from big companies, they will do anything to make sure things look rosy. Bullshit terms like “negative growth” are used because “loss” or “shrink” sound bad. So what if it sounds bad?

    Confidence. Trust. It’s emotional. These are deep in our psyche. It’s how governments get elected, contracts are won, and investments are made. It’s what makes us human. If that line goes down… will it go back up? What’s going to happen? Alarm bells! Uncertaintly. Anxiety. People abandon you. Money, power, influence fades. You could find yourself replaced by the up-and-coming who “show promise”.

    Our social emotional species has hundreds of thousands of years (millions?) of years of this stuff hardwired into us. Trust let us cooperate beyond our own individual or family interests. Would we be human otherwise? (I found the article Behavioural Modernity interesting).


  • Not sure it’s capitalism per se. Perhaps rampant waste. Criticism of capitalism could include monopoly formation; massive tech companies buy small ones (obtain more capital = more control over production = more profit).

    There’s despair over everyone, big & small, resolving the same recreated problems. Kelley doesn’t talk about breaking Microsoft up (i.e. redistributing their capital). He implies he’d be ok for Microsoft to maintain its market position if it just fixed some damn bugs.






  • Oh wow thanks! :) One program syncs my home Mastodon timeline, with all replies, to a Maildir. Dovecot serves that over IMAP. Sending involves a custom SMTP server which reads the mail message and creates a post from it.

    For Mastodon it was all about converting statuses (toots? Posts?) into RFC 5322 messages. Using the status’ ID as Message-Id in the message header is handy. Mail clients do the heavy lifting of rendering threads thankfully!





  • Unfortunately for those who have those values, not all paid positions involve acting on those values.

    Random brain dump incoming…

    Most businesses pay money to solve problems so they can make more money. You can solve their problems - but not in the way that you may be thinking.

    This is a generalisation that is not strictly true, but I say it to illustrate a different way of thinking: Businesses do not undertake penetration testing because they want more secure software. They do pentesting so they can stay in business in the face of compliance and bad actors.

    To find a job, you want to start learning what people pay for. People pay contractors to come in and fix things, then leave again (politically easier, sometimes cheaper). People pay sotfware developers to develop features (to sell more stuff).

    Start looking up job titles and see which ones interest you (DevOps, frontend dev, backend dev, embedded…). Don’t get too stuck on the titles themselves. It’s just to narrow down what kinds of business problems you find interesting.

    Other random questions:

    • What specific projects are you interested in?
    • What types of problems do you like solving?
    • Do you like digging in and finding those tricky bugs that have been bothering people for years?
    • Do you like trying out new frameworks which let you think about the system differently?
    • Would you rather implement a database or GUI toolbox?

    Once you’re deep in the belly of the beast, you’ll find ways to exercise those values. It’s hard to know in advance what this will look like.


  • Ah yes! That is a great trick that kept me going doing software dev professionally.

    Instead of trying to get the system I was working with to interact correctly with some shit enterprise system, I would find common protocols (or related protocols) and implement that well. Then I would discover more specifically where the shit enterprise system was behaving badly, and point to something politically neutral (like an IETF RFC) to help get us out of a rut.

    It made debugging so much easier. Those specifications and open-source implementations have had much more engineering talent put in them than what I was usually dealing with.